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01/11/2021 11:00 PMMadison Public Schools (MPS) last week revealed its initial budget request for fiscal year 2021-’22 to the Board of Education (BOE), starting at a 1.94 overall increase, or $1.14 million over last year.
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Craig Cooke, who is overseeing his first budget in Madison after being hired by MPS last fall, presented the initial operation requests alongside other district staff. Capital requests for larger infrastructure projects will be presented to the Capital Improvement Program (CIP) Committee in the coming weeks.
Among the areas of increase in this year’s school budget are special education costs and technology while health insurance and debt service are both down.
Cooke emphasized the district was cognizant of the economic hardships and uncertainty around the pandemic, saying that MPS is putting off all non-essential requests this budget cycle.
“We certainly recognized that this is a difficult financial time for the town. There’s not really an opportunity to hear to ask for things that could be deferred, so the needs put before you are really that—they are needs...of an immediate nature,” he said.
Among the drivers of increases in the budget are changes at the state level for certain special education responsibilities, according to Director of Special Education Liz Battaglia. The district is having to take on a high percentage of costs around outplaced “high cost students,” she said, along with a change that requires disabled students to receive services through the age of 22 instead of 21.
All special education costs, including personnel and student services, are up 4.99 percent, or about $548,000.
Four students at Daniel Hand High School will receive another year of services due to this change, Battaglia said. Total costs for external placements for MPS students is set at about $468,701. The district is asking for an additional $307,091 for tuition for external placements, up 14.35 percent over last year to about $2.45 million.
New technology costs, many of which are directly related to changes around the pandemic, amount to a 0.39 percent increase over last year. Included in this is a new technology position to deal with tech support, according to Art Sickle, along with $35,000 for classroom software and hardware, including Chromebook maintenance, Google G-Suite upgrades, and Zoom subscriptions.
MPS is also financing new smartboard-type devices for every single core classroom at around $117,000 a year over five years, which Sickle said is an overdue upgrade allowing greater participation by students.
These include 65 inch flat-panel displays along with webcams and perhaps “enhanced sound,” according to Sickle.
Sickle said that a lot of the practices and infrastructure developed during the pandemic will continue to be important even as school returns to normal.
“I think Zoom is going to be around for the long haul,” he said
MPS is also asking for a new full-time technology position at about $47,000 a year to deal with more than 1,000 new devices the district now uses. Currently the district only has three full-time people and one student worker handling IT support at its six locations, according to Sickle.
Other increases include a continuation of building substitutes—workers who come in every day and step into classrooms as needed rather than only being called for teacher absences—and two security specialists at the town’s two elementary schools.
Those positions, which both grew out of the pandemic, will cost around $114,000.
Human Resources Director Heather Dobson also emphasized that returning to a per-diem model for substitute teachers would be essentially not be viable next year considering how much has changed in 2020.
“Because we’ve lost our basically larger sub pool, we think it would be very difficult to regain that number of daily subs for the start of next school year,” she said.
On the positive side, the district is looking at a significant savings in health insurance of about $222,000. Finance Director Stacy Nobitz said the cost of insurance “fluctuates” based on larger trends and individual claims, and called the decrease a big positive for the district.
“It says a lot about our workforce,” she said.
Another request for next year is a specialized learning lab that would take place at the end of the summer for special education students. Gail Dahling-Hench said that data has shown many students are falling behind academically during the pandemic, and also suffering from things like “math anxiety,” which affects around 20 percent of students. That program would cost around $30,000 and is additionally dependent staffing, including possibly working with UConn interns.
“We’re excited about this proposal. We think it’s definitely reasonable in terms of cost and hopefully will have a high degree of impact in helping kids that need our support,” she said.