May 8, 2012

Friends,

As I know you are well aware, the school department has received its FY ’13 allocation from the Town, a 2% increase. While this increase is much appreciated, it is not what we had hoped for as it still presents the school department with the task of reducing its expenditures by over $2.7M (compared to last year plus inflation) in order to keep essentially the same programming. This will not be easy. The NK School Committee will meet tonight, May 8, 2012, to consider my proposal on how to make these reductions. As I make this proposal, there are unresolved issues, namely our additional projected State Aid ($581K) and the concessions we expect to receive (over $1M) once our Education Support Personnel (ESP) negotiations are complete. We expect these items to be known to us in mid to late June. If and once these items come in as expected, we will then be able to restore over $1.6M of programming to our FY ’13 budget. You can see a copy of my proposal on the NKSD web page (www.nksd.net) or by clicking here. Once again, my proposal is tiered and color coded: the green area is approximately $1.2M worth of cuts, much of which will be difficult in and of itself.

The red area includes deeper cuts that will have to be made if the State Aid and ESP concessions are not realized. The School Committee meeting starts at 7pm at the high school.
As always, I welcome your comments, questions, and ideas.

Respectfully,

Phil Auger, Ph.D.
Superintendent of North Kingstown Public Schools