Brunswick public schools and Regional School Unit 1 will receive significant bumps in state funding after a massive Maine Department of Education miscalculation discovered last week underfunded dozens of school districts by $42 million.
Brunswick schools will receive an additional $836,933 in state funding, while RSU 1 will receive an additional $488,000. It was welcome news for local school superintendents dealing with rising budgets due to factors like inflation and rising enrollment.
The Brunswick School Board last month cut about $1 million from its proposed budget by slashing some proposed teaching positions to deal with increased enrollment, among other measures, to bring a projected 10% tax hike down to 6.6%. The increase in state funding and an increase in taxable valuation will bring that increase down to 4.79%, according to schools Superintendent Phil Potenziano.
“The Brunswick School Department has worked hard to look at efficiencies in our district, and this is excellent news for the school district and the local taxpayers,” Potenziano said in a statement.
The funding may have come too late for the Brunswick School Board to make any changes to its budget, as it adopted a fiscal plan March 22 that will be presented to the town council April 13. Potenziano said he doesn’t anticipate the board will amend its budget plan.
RSU 1 school officials, however, just started their budget process last week and have time to make changes before they finalize their budget plan May 1. The school board is holding public hearings on the budget April 10 and 24.
“We are in the beginning stages of our budget process with some moving parts,” RSU 1 Superintendent Patrick Manuel said in an email. “We will have updated figures at the April 10 meeting for the board to discuss/consider.”
RSU 1 board members said they want to prioritize social workers in the face of a “youth mental-health crisis.” The initial budget includes about $400,000 for four social workers who are paid for with federal American Rescue Plan funds that were distributed during the coronavirus pandemic. Those funds expire next year, and the school district Board of Directors discussed possibly moving one of those positions into the portion of the budget paid for with local money.
A total of 168 school districts across the state will get more funding due to the miscalculation, according to the Portland Press Herald. Portland will receive about $3.6 million more, and Scarborough and South Portland will each receive about $1.5 million more.
The error involved incorrect data used to calculate allocations that were sent to school districts in January, according to the state Department of Education. The error was the result of “a duplicative data entry in the algorithm that generates the funding estimates in the reports,” department spokesperson Marcus Mrowka said.
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