The School Committee directed Superintendent Stan Sawyer to come up with a reorganization plan for the school administration last week.

The vote in favor of the reorganization came after the School Committee had worked through one of two pages of cuts proposed by the school Finance Committee. School Committee Chairman Colleen Hilton made the motion to direct the administration to reorganize.

The School Committee won’t take up the budget again until May 11.

“I think we need to find some more substantial cuts, and I think the superintendent is the best one to do that,” said Hilton.

This means the School Committee will not resume their budget deliberations until then. The committee will be holding a regular meeting on April 27, but the budget is not expected to be on the agenda for that meeting.

Hilton said she made the motion because she wanted Sawyer to come up with some significant savings rather than going through the budget line-by-line. She said the School Committee wants to make some significant reductions to the budget.

“We’re prepared to do that, and we’ve directed (Sawyer) to do that,” she said.

Ever since Mayor Bruce Chuluda declared that he wanted both the city and school budgets to come in at flat spending levels, Hilton said the School Committee and the school administration have been working on ways to make some reductions and her action at the last meeting is part of that effort. “We’ve been in a process of organizational design,” she said. “This budget crunch is nothing new, so we’ve been methodically planning to make changes. There are some changes that are not in place, but we’ve been working together and strategizing to make those changes.”

Hilton would not comment on any specific changes being planned. “There will be changes at the administrative level,” she said.

Sawyer was not available for comment for this story.

While Sawyer is working under the council’s edict to come up with a reorganization plan, the School Committee did make some cuts to the $27 million school budget at their meeting.

Taking a recommendation from Finance Committee Chairman Mary Hall, the committee voted to cut $96,000 from the budget. At the meeting, Sawyer told the committee that all of the cuts recommended by the Finance Committee were acceptable to the administration, and those cuts were approved without any debate. Hall said the cuts in question were smaller miscellaneous items, and any significant cuts would be presented to the full committee for approval.

Following that vote, the committee began debating items that the Finance Committee had set aside to be revisited by the full School Committee. The committee made several additional cuts in the budget during the meeting.

Those included a cut of $30,000 that was earmarked to purchase laptop computers for sixth-grade teachers, $2,454 from the School Committee’s member stipend and travel budget and $68 from the Pride’s Corner School Budget that was earmarked for the purchase of kidney-shaped tables. The school will still be getting the tables, but at a lower price. In addition to the cuts, the committee added $10,000 back into the art budget for the purchase of additional consumable art supplies district wide.

The School Committee is scheduled to resume its discussion of the 2005-2006 school budget at a meeting on May 11 at 7 p.m. in room 114 of Westbrook High School.

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