Community Corner
Board of Ed: Creative Budgeting May Avert Further Cuts
School board leaders praised financial maneuvering by city councilors that may help prevent further loss of staff.
Just a day after the Meriden City Council passed next year’s budget, which includes flat school spending for the second year in a row, school board leaders praised the hard work and creative financing maneuvers that may help the board avoid further cuts in positions.
“While the city gave a zero percent increase, they were able to do a couple of things for us,” School Superintendent Mark Benigni said at Tuesday night’s school board meeting.
Namely, the city was able to:
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- Reduce health care costs for school employees by $250,000 and allow the school board to use those savings in other areas.
- Put $250,000 in a contingency account in the event of special education outplacement cost overruns.
- Allow the school board to carry over surplus funds from this year.
- Pay for unemployment benefits for former school workers out of the city budget rather than the board of education budget, as City Manager Lawrence Kendzior’s original budget had proposed.
“That leaves us with $230,000 needed to make the budget work without further reductions,” Benigni told the board. These “creative arrangements” may help the school board to avoid further layoffs, but the loss of federal grant money will make it necessary to cut about 30 positions, Benigni pointed out.
He and Board of Education President Mark Hughes went on to praise the hard work of the school board’s Finance Committee and the city council.
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“In all my years on the board, I don’t think I’ve seen anybody spend as much time,” Hughes said of the City Council’s school board liaison Dante Bartolomeo. Hughes went on to say how impressed he was by the “genuine interest by members of city council to understand the intricacies of our budget.”
Board Secretary Robert Kosienski, however, said, “We should not be giving each other high fives for a zero percent growth in the budget.” While also praising the hard work done by the city council, he added that “it’s a sad statement” that Meriden has had a zero percent growth in education spending for multiple years.
