Waterford school board passes budget with one $18,700 cut

Proposed increase over last year’s plan at 3.1%

Waterford — The Board of Education took a leap of faith Thursday evening, making only one cut to the superintendent’s $47.3 million budget proposal and keeping the proposed increase over the current budget at more than 3 percent.

The school board’s members briefly discussed the threat of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s proposed cuts to state aid, yet only voted to cut about $18,700 representing the district’s membership in the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education.

The town’s Board of Finance will take on the $47,315,892 school spending proposal next month.

The school board’s approved budget would increase school spending by $1.4 million, a jump mostly driven by increases in staff salaries and benefits, health insurance, heating, energy and transportation costs and tuition for magnet schools and special education.

Only school board member Craig Merriman voted against the budget. He said after Thursday’s meeting that he would have liked to see a proposed increase of under 3 percent, given that threats to state aid likely will mean the school board will have to consider significant cuts from the town’s Board of Finance and Representative Town Meeting, the two boards that will take on the town’s spending plans in the coming months.

“I think we’re going to be back here talking about cuts,” Merriman said.

But the board’s other members took to heart Superintendent Thomas Giard’s warning that any cuts to

the budget beyond the CABE membership would mean layoffs.

“Reductions in this budget are going to affect personnel,” Giard told the board Thursday.

Board Chairwoman Jody Nazarchyk pointed to contractual increases in staff salaries and busing costs as the main drivers of the budget increase. Giard told the board Thursday that the amount the budget allocated to non-obligatory costs amounted to about 0.15 percent out of the 3.1 percent proposed increase over the 2017 budget.

“We really don’t have a choice,” Nazarchyk said.

Giard’s budget proposal this year included a number of savings measures, including the adoption of high-deductible health plans for staff and the implementation of the school board’s decision last year to end an agreement with New London to help fund pre-kindergarten students at the Friendship School.

He framed the spending increases as conservative in the face of uncertainty about the extent to which Malloy’s proposed dramatic cuts to state education funding will be approved by state legislators and passed on to Waterford.

Nazarchyk said she hopes the town’s other boards, which together whittled down Giard’s 2017 budget to a 1.14 percent increase over the previous fiscal year’s spending plan, would be gentler on the district.

“I’m just hoping this year, they’ll cut us some slack,” she said.