PARIS — For the first time in more than seven years, the Oxford Hills School District is poised to meet the state’s minimum requirement on educational spending, after residents Thursday night overwhelmingly approved placing a $39.01 million budget on Tuesday’s ballot.
Approval means the school district’s budget is one vote away from being adopted for fiscal year 2017. Residents from eight towns will go to their polling stations June 14 for an up-or-down vote.
The proposed budget is 1.87 percent more than this fiscal year. Locally, residents are being asked to raise 1.17 percent more — about $19 million total — than the current fiscal year, which ends June 30.
Budget additions address overcrowding issues at Oxford Elementary School by creating a new fifth-grade teaching position at Otisfield Elementary School. Otisfield’s current fourth-grade class of 18 students will attend fifth grade in Otisfield next year, and to further ease overcrowding, the Otisfield Community School will return to a kindergarten-through-grade-six school over two years.
New spending plans call for three new educational technicians at the West Paris, Hebron and Harrison elementary schools, which do not have full-time principals. It also allocates $21,750 for Chromebook computers at Otisfield Elementary School.
Part of budget increases are mandated by the state, which sets the minimum amount each school district must spend on education. The complicated formula, known as Essential Programs and Services, or EPS, sets everything from student-to-teacher ratios, transportation and maintenance spending.
EPS mandates what each town must pay per student, a number based upon the state’s valuation of that town’s property. The state subsidizes part of the bill, and requires the district to raise the remainder through local taxes. In 2009, for example, the $36 million budget was supported by $20.17 million in state subsidies; this year the state is expected to appropriate $18.09 million, a $500,000 increase.
Two towns in the district — Harrison and Waterford — pay per pupil because the value of their property exceeds the cost to educate their students. As a result, neither receive state support and each town pays 100 percent of their students’ education.
For years, School Administrative District 17 officials spent less than the state mandated in an effort to lower residents’ tax bills. Now, for the first time in the better part of a decade, the district is asking voters to raise more than the minimum required by the state after a waiver granting them temporary exemption expired. Failure to ramp up spending to the state minimum would have resulted in a proportional reduction in state funding.
For the next fiscal year, the district had to raise $194,000; they asked taxpayers for $717,000. The increases will pay for programs like freshman sports, which had previously been covered by boosters, digitizing records and interest payments.
Another program will install GPS tracking in school buses, which will eventually alert parents when their child is nearing the bus stop.
According to SAD 17 Business Manager Cathy Fanjoy Coffee, the budget is still $194,866 shy of what the state recommends, a sum 92 percent of the school systems in the state meet or exceed.
Oxford, Hebron and West Paris will see the biggest year-to-year jump in what they will pay. Only Harrison will pay less.
“Every year the pie is sliced a little differently,” SAD 17 Superintendent Rick Colpitts said.
A full itemized breakdown of the budget can be found online at sad17.k12.me.us/budget_finance.
PARIS — Proposed assessments to School Administrative District 17 towns under the proposed 2016-17 budget and the percentage of increase or decrease from this fiscal year are:
• Harrison, $3.61 million, 6.35 percent decrease
• Hebron, $727,800, 4.6 percent increase
• Norway, $3.7 million, 3.02 percent increase
• Otisfield, $2.36 million, 1.99 percent increase
• Oxford, $3.68 million, 4.36 percent increase
• Paris, $2.95 million, 3.03 percent increase
• Waterford, $2 million, 0.47 percent increase
• West Paris, $834,996, 4.69 percent increase
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