The Portland school district plans to use savings from grant-funded programs and vacancies to pay for a $500,000 contract with an accounting firm that will resolve payroll issues with the state’s public retirement system.

Issues with the district’s payments into MainePERS are a holdover from the payroll crisis at Portland Public Schools in the fall of 2022, when employees weren’t paid or were paid incorrectly. Superintendent Ryan Scallon told the board about plans for a one-year contract with accounting firm BerryDunn at its Oct. 1 meeting.

He said resolving the MainePERS issues have been labor-intensive and time-consuming for district staff, creating a need for an outside contractor to handle the issue. But at the board’s Oct. 15 meeting, Scallon chose to delay a vote on the contract, saying he wanted to wait until after the board had heard a finance presentation, among other things. The cost of the contract is not in the district’s annual budget.

During that finance committee meeting Monday night, Senior Executive Director of Finance Helene DiBartolomeo told board members the district is on track with its budget for the fiscal year, and even under budget in some categories. DiBartolomeo said she was asked to provide reasonable assurance that the district could absorb that cost of the $500,000 BerryDunn contract.

To do that, she said, the district would use $150,000 in savings from its “system administration” budget, from two programs that were budgeted for but ultimately paid with grants. The remaining $350,000 will come from the “regular instruction” budget – the district’s largest category of spending – which has savings because of staff vacancies.

“We have some savings through vacancies, because we’re backfilling those with either temp or substitute positions, which overall will provide us a cost savings,” DiBartolomeo said. She also explained that the district created its budget based on average pay, but due to attrition, the actual cost of salaries has been slightly lower.

The state requires district budgets to be split into specific categories, and districts are able to move up to 5% of funding from one category to another. DiBartolomeo said this plan would only move about 0.6% from the regular instruction category.

“So with those three items, we are able to maintain the funding on the instructional level while also being able to transfer our budget in order to bring in that contract for $500,000,” DiBartolomeo said.

Scallon responded to a question from committee Chair Sarah Brydon about whether those vacancies are affecting student experience.

“Any vacancy is one that we want to be filling,” he said. “And so we’re going to sit down with our assistant superintendents and our principals and just talk about how we can potentially leverage some of the savings and still operate within our budget to serve students.”

He also said a new contract with educational technicians approved last week will hopefully lead to filling those vacancies soon.