MADAWASKA, Maine — It’s early in the 2015-2016 Madawaska School Department budget process, but Superintendent Ginette Albert already is worried.
Albert said preliminary numbers shared with her board Monday show the school department needs to find nearly $500,000 in cuts to the proposed budget on top of $339,000 she already has identified.
Madawaska is looking at a proposed $6.2 million FY 2015-2016 school budget, down from last year’s $6.5 million, Albert said Tuesday.
The loss of $453,440 in education funding from the state is placing a huge burden on Madawaska, she said, coupled with increases to retirement contributions, insurance costs and maintenance expenses.
“That’s a big cut,” Albert said, referring to the state’s reduction in subsidies to the school district, mostly because of declining enrollments.
According to Albert, she will be looking to cut where she can but expects to ask taxpayers to make up the difference.
The district has carried a balance forward for a cummulative total of $2.6 million spread over the past five years to help offset local taxpayer contributions to the school budget. Those reserves now are nearly depleted, with only about $50,000 left to bring forward.
“I have no reserves left,” Albert said. “We are broke. Thank God I froze the budget last year.”
Madawaska is hardly alone facing a budget crunch as the current fiscal year winds down and districts around the state, from Veazie to Brewer to Rockland to Topsham, grapple with reduced state revenue, increased costs and unfunded state mandates.
Albert said she already has cut three positions this year, and all options are on the table.
Among them is a long-range plan to consolidate Madawaska and School Administrative District 33 high school classes in the St. John Valley Technical Center building in Frenchville, Albert said.
“We have had a good conversation with SAD 33,” Albert said. “When you look at our numbers, I think the time has come to seriously look at consolidation.”
There are 234 students at the Madawaska High School and 120 at Wisdom High School in SAD 33.
Before there could be any consolidation of the two, however, major construction and expansion would have to take place at the technology center, according to SAD 33 Superintendent Fern Desjardins.
“It would be contingent on a lot of things,” Desjardins said Wednesday morning. “We would need to get funding to expand at the tech center.”
The center accommodates about 100 juniors and seniors from SAD 33, Madawaska and SAD 27 in Fort Kent, who attend vocational classes there half a day.
The center lacks a cafeteria, gymnasium, outdoor playing fields or space to accommodate full day classes, Desjardins said.
“There is no way we could do this on our own,” she said. “The state has a construction protocol, and we are not even on the list.”
For its part, Desjardins said she has just started pulling her own budget figures together and is optimistic her district will enter the next year fiscally sound.
“We have taken our biggest cut ever from the state, but we have been downsizing along the way,” she said. “Financially, we are doing OK.”
Back in Madawaska, Albert said she is meeting with her board May 6 and hopes to generate more cost saving ideas.
“They are going through the budget, line by line,” she said. “We are going to have a candid conversation with the voters of Madawaska. Either they support education or they don’t.”
