Good evening -

Tomorrow night, Tuesday, the Finance Committee will present to the full school board the suggested 2015-2016 school budget. This meeting will be held at the Burlington High School cafeteria from 7pm to 9pm and I urge all of you to attend.

Where do we stand on the new budget? You approved a $67.4M budget this past Spring and we have run a deficit of $1.3M on top of this. We have been assured by Interim Superintendent Howard Smith along with Finance Director Nate Lavery that they have frozen discretionary spending in hopes of reeling this in by year end. This deficit is primarily due to a very poor past budget formulation process that simply didn't project costs very well. I'm not happy about it and we will put the controls in place that never let this happen again.

This means our actual 2014-2015 budget will be ~$68.8M (we don't have enough info to project the savings from the spending freeze). The original 2015-2016 estimate was ~$70.8M, a substantial increase. Dr Smith, Finance Director Lavery, and across-the-board school leadership considered the goals of the school board and returned with a $2M cut that took into account student and teacher needs and what is needed for their success. It's a brilliant piece of work that positions us to address test scores, children in need, and teacher training. This resulted in a 1.99% planned increase in expenditures over the approved (not "actual") 2014-2015 budget. The Finance Committee asked Dr. Smith to return with an additional cut and that has been achieved resulting in the 1.5% increase currently on the table.

My feelings are mixed on this. This Fall, our finance adviser reported on the history of deficit spending by this school district and board. Over the past ten years a total of $12 million dollars has been spent without your voter approval. Taking into account that the school budget rose from $33M to $67M in the same time frame, over 35% of this total 10-year budget increase was never approved to be spent by you. It is because of this that I pushed hard at the last finance committee meeting for a 0% increase.

Please attend the meeting tomorrow night and let us know how you feel about the proposed $1.5% expense increase.

Thank you - Mark Porter