The Concord school district is set to offer full-day kindergarten next year.
The school board on Monday unanimously adopted a $87.1 million spending plan for the 2018-19 school year that included expansion to full-day programming.
“I am so excited that we will ultimately move forward with full-day kindergarten next year, and to do it in the way that I think is fiscally responsible,” board President Jennifer Patterson said moments before the vote.
Concord has been seriously mulling the conversion from half-day programming since 2015. For several years, it’s been in the minority of districts, statewide and in the Capital area, not offering full-day kindergarten.
The issue has dominated the last two rounds of school board elections, and the district nearly moved forward last year before unexpected budget problems arose – most notably, a rushed conversion to natural gas after Concord Steam suddenly closed.
Next year will also be the first year new $1,100 per-pupil grants from the state for full-day programs come online. Concord expects $330,000 in additional aid from the state because of the change.
The full-day program in Concord will cost $1.1 million, according to administrators’ projections. Registration is already open at enroll.sau8.org.
In response to declining enrollments, administrations cut eight teaching positions districtwide in next year’s budget. The cuts, especially in the elementary grades, have been the subject of considerable pushback at the school board’s public hearings on the budget, with parents, students, and several teachers pleading with the school board for smaller classes.
The board ultimately stuck with the cuts after administrators told them they were aligned with the district’s longstanding practice of right-sizing as enrollments declined, and would remain in line with the district’s class-size guidelines. But board members did pledge to take a deep-dive into its class size policies over the coming year, with particular attention to special education students.
Superintendent Terri Forsten also told the board she was closely monitoring eight classes in the elementary schools where the district might go over its class size guidelines if just a handful of new children moved in. The board on Monday settled on putting four teachers in the superintendent’s “contingency” account – a reserve the district can tap if it needs to make hires not included in the budget.
The budget is expected to add 31 cents per $1,000 in assessed property value to the education tax rate next year, about $78 on a $250,000 home.
The school board could reopen the budget in October if it wants to make changes. It would need seven votes to do so.
The district still has four outstanding union contracts to negotiate with employees, including teachers. Administrators have said they’ve built assumptions into the adopted budget about how much those contracts will cost, and don’t anticipate needing to reopen the budget.
The board may also consider reopening the budget to add more money into its so-called stabilization fund – a reserve account it taps for major capital projects. School board member Nathan Fennessy told his fellow board members Monday he’d expected to discuss doing so now, but said it would make sense to watch if the city’s tax base would grow in the coming months. The current budget puts $800,000 into the fund, which right now has about $3.2 million in it. The district wants to grow that pot to about $8 million before it breaks ground on a new middle school in several years.
(Lola Duffort can be reached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)