Hello Calais:

I wanted folks to be aware that our School Board meeting tomorrow evening at 6:15pm is now REMOTE only due to impending bad weather. Our subsequent meeting, April 10, will take place at Calais Elementary School and include a presentation on Social & Emotional Learning at CES (as we have done at each school in turn throughout the year)

Tomorrow's remote meeting will still be very interesting and important. We will have a presentation by district administration on progress with our Strategic Plan and possible district Reconfiguration simulations. And we will re-visit our proposed '24-''25 Budget.

On Town Meeting Day voters declined to approve our first Board-approved budget which included an increase in education spending of 16%. At our last meeting we requested that administration provide three possible alternative budgets with smaller increases in spending of 6%, 8% and 10%. Tomorrow evening, the administration will present those three options in greater detail, to illustrate the implications for district students, staff. The Board intends to adopt one of these budgets tomorrow night but could potentially wait until April 10.

While we know that a majority of voters want us to reduce spending, we also know that that none of these options represent what our district administrators (whose professional judgment I respect greatly) initially recommended. These cuts will impact many, many students, families and workers in our schools. This year we have no easy tradeoffs. It's also important to remember that spending does not translate directly to tax rates and the tax rates are challenging to predict in a normal year, impossible this year. I am sure that other board members, like me, are coming into this meeting knowing that we need to show voters a meaningful reduction in our spending increase...only later will we know what this yields in terms of a tax rate for Calais and other district property owners.

Please consider attending our meeting. 6:15pm Wednesday April 3 at the following link: https://tinyurl.com/24w98mhs. The meeting agenda, a budget memo by the Superintendent and other resources like the packet of materials we Board members receive in advance of the meeting are all available at our district website: https://www.wcuusd.org/school-board

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