The Bow School District is looking at a tax neutral budget for the fourth year in a row, but that might not be good enough for people who were expecting to see a decrease.
For the first time in 20 years, the district won’t have to pay the $578,702 bond payment for Bow High School, which has finally been paid off. At the same time, the district is expecting an increase of $521,346 in tuition from Dunbarton students attending the middle and high school. The two figures equal almost $1.1 million in positive cash flow.
The community’s desire to save money must be balanced against the overall needs of the school district, which includes more staffing, said superintendent Dean Cascadden.
“The Bow budget for 2017-18 is complicated and the full understanding of it will go beyond a simple look at proposed expenses,” Cascadden wrote in a memo.
As it stands, the superintendent’s drafted operating budget for 2017-18 is $27.4 million, a figure that includes about $111,000 of warrant articles and represents a 0.8 percent increase over this year’s budget, warrant articles included. If no changes are made to the proposed budget, the school tax rate would increase by .17 percent.
The majority of that budget is salaries for employees, a $14.6 million expense, and includes the request for a full-time kindergarten teacher, first grade teacher, and a fourth grade teacher at Bow Elementary School, and a humanities teacher at Bow High School. It also includes requests for nine part-time positions.
Cascadden said the need for more teachers is tied to historic class sizes at the elementary school. Those sizes are the result of the district’s implementation of full-day kindergarten in 2015, he said.
The last class of Dunbarton students will be integrated into the district, leading to an increase in tuition paid to the district, as well as 48 students from Hooksett and one from Deerfield. Non- Dunbarton students are expected to yield $302,374 in tuition, an increase of $62,8228 from last year.
The district is estimating 54 Dunbarton students will be at the middle school, each paying around $12,213, and 127 students will be at the high school, at $13,744 apiece.
Overall, Dunbarton students are expected to bring in $1.7 million worth of tuition, and the revenue is expected to increase by $521, 346, or 23.74 percent from this year’s budget.
The district is also expected to receive more money from the state’s Equitable Education grant through the Department of Education. The increase in enrollment will result in a $222,789 increase in grant money, based on the current law which requires the gradual phasing out of stabilization grants.
Some of that new cash flow is balanced by other factors. For example, insurance copays from teachers are expected to decrease by $223,995 due to changes made to the health insurance program during last year’s contract negotiations, said finance director Duane Ford. The change reduced insurance premiums, but also meant that the majority of district employees pay next to nothing towards health insurance.
The district will also no longer receive impact fees from the town, a loss of $128,634 that results from the paying off of the BHS bond.
All of these factors, Ford said, add up to a budget with a lot of moving parts.
“Each of these things in a vacuum can be pretty straight forward,” Ford said. “However, this year there are a lot of these types of major changes that are all coming together at once. This makes the explanation of the budget complicated in my mind. There have been years where there have been singular things occurring making the budget much easier to explain and present.”
SAU 67 will be having a budget hearing on Monday from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Bow High School library.