BREWER, Maine — Superintendent Cheri Towle is misleading residents by claiming that student enrollment has increased in the past school year by 130 new students, Brewer city leaders said.
The school district is asking for a budget hike of $1 million, based on 130 new students in the last school year — 74 of whom have special education needs, which require more funding, Towle has said.
But in the ED 279 student count report submitted to the state in April, the district actually reported a decrease in the student population. The student count for Oct. 1, 2016 was 1,678 and on April 1 it was 1,671.
The state’s ED 279 is a funding formula that uses student population data from the two mandated reporting dates, along with staff, student and teacher ratios and property valuations to determine how much money a school will receive.
“The numbers I see are inflated,” Assistant City Manager James Smith said Friday. “It’s actually down seven students. Where is this 130 students?”
Towle explained Monday that the 130 new students to Brewer that she cited are pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students who have enrolled in school for the first time, and 66 freshmen from sending districts that have school choice.
The students are new to the district, but they did not increase the total enrolled number.
“It is disingenuous and misleading,” Karen Fussell, the city’s finance director, said Friday. “For budget purposes, it is the net change in student population and the net burden on the school system that matters.”
The total number of students identified with special education needs within the district was 291 in October and increased to 319 in April, according to data provided to the city by Gretchen Gardner, business manager for the school department. From April 2016 to April 2017, there was an increase of 48 special ed students.
“There is a bump, but it’s not up 74,” Smith said.
Towle provided a grade-by-grade breakdown of the special education students enrolled within the school department as of Monday that showed 323 students and provided data that showed 69 students with special education needs have moved in this year but 33 have moved out “for a net increase of 36 students,” Gardner said.
The school department is asking for a $1 million increase in the local allocation, increasing the out of pocket costs for residents to nearly $8.17 million, and has primarily based its request on more students and greater special education needs.
The school’s budget adds new positions for support services or teaching, including a new science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, program, at a cost of $113,296, and American Sign Language class for $88,461, as well as lacrosse and volleyball.
“Whether the enrollment is up 130 at one of these two [student] count points in the year or up 10, we still need the majority of the 17 positions,” Gardner said Monday.
School cuts include eliminating a school resource officer for a savings of $47,000, and about $13,000 from sports and marketing.
Brewer Police Department leaders posted a message on their Facebook page saying the plan to remove the school resource officer at Brewer Community School is “regrettable and not ideal.”
“This will bring about some significant change to the SRO program and what we are able to do,” the post stated.
The city council Tuesday evening will review two combined school and city budgets — one that includes the $1 million increase for the school department that would result in an overall tax increase of around $1.77 per $1,000 of assessed value and a second one that would hold the school increase to $500,000 and would result in an overall tax increase of 98 cents per $1,000 in assessed value.
Brewer’s assessor has created a tax estimator available on the city’s website that residents and business owners can use to look up the potential tax increase with a tax rate of $23.29, the estimated rate if the school gets the $1 million increase in local funding.