The Portland school board voted 8-0 Tuesday with member Ben Grant abstaining to approve a $143.9 million budget for the 2023-24 school year.
The spending plan passed Tuesday is around $2.5 million greater than the interim superintendents’ original proposal, largely because of an unexpected $3.6 million increase in state funding that came mid-budget process after the state found an error in its original funding allocation formula.
The proposal includes funds to expand the district’s pre-Kindergarten program, support special education students and its large and increasing multilingual student population, strengthen its finance and human resources departments and pay debt service.
The budget was amended Tuesday night after the district confirmed Monday that its health insurance costs would be around $400,000 lower than anticipated. The board voted to use that money, along with the $3.6 million in unanticipated state funding, to lower the school portion of the tax rate and to move positions that have been funded with one-time COVID money back into the local budget to make them more sustainable over time, thus saving the COVID money for programming in summer 2024.
Next year’s budget is about $11 million – 8.1 percent – higher than this year’s total of $133.1 million.
The proposal would increase the school district’s portion of the city tax rate by 6 percent. The increase would add $159 to the annual tax bill for the owner of a $375,000 home, the median home value in Portland.
Now that the school board has approved the budget, it will go to the city’s finance committee for review and then to the full City Council for a vote on May 15. A proposal to remove the City Council’s authority over the school budget failed at the ballot box last fall.
The finance committee has in the past asked that the district decrease its spending proposal, but at least in recent years it has been approved without significant alterations. If the council approves, the proposal will go to city voters for final approval on June 13.
Although the budget is significantly higher than last year’s, the district says it expects money to be tight this year as it grapples with inflation, increased salary and benefit costs, rising costs of programs for special education and multilingual students, the impending loss of one-time federal pandemic funds that must be used by fall 2024, and the costs of improving its human resources and finance departments after failing to pay hundreds of its 1,500 employees accurately, on time or at all last fall.
“We are accomplishing some great goals but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done that is not fully resourced in this budget,” said co-interim superintendent Melea Nalli.
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