FARMINGTON – SAD 9 board members and the superintendent will meet with Farmington selectmen Tuesday to discuss factors impacting the 2005-06 school budget, according to the selectmen’s agenda.
Superintendent Michael Cormier said Friday that the budget is still in draft form and not yet ready for publication. He said the state’s new funding formula will be a gain for the district of $556,000 next year and $1.1 million in two years.
School board members are also about to embark on an evaluation of a long-range plan adopted in 2001.
According to an executive summary distributed to members at their last meeting, the initial document was broken out into eight objectives and 252 initiatives. Of those initiatives, 154 were subsets of the eight objectives and of those, 45 percent have been completed with 26 percent in partial stages of completion. Objectives were:
• Acquire and retain human resources
• Improve student programs
• Acquire monetary and material resources
• Invest in infrastructure
• Support student preparedness
• Expand professional development
• Develop quality assurance
• Communicate vision and progress
Initiatives were assigned to various members of the committee that included administrative personnel, faculty, staff, community members, town managers, school board members and representatives from local educational agencies.
Some of the goals the district has accomplished include:
• Hiring more trained guidance counselors
• Establishing full-day kindergarten
• Improving salaries for all staff
• Establishing foreign language programs in the elementary schools
• Establishing after-school and extended school year programs for grades 3 to 12
• Expanding fine-arts instruction
• Renovating the middle school
• Developing intervention strategies to catch students who might otherwise “fall through the cracks”
• Achieving an increase in high school graduates accepted to post-secondary institutions
Not all initiatives were viable, though, and had to abandoned for the present time.
Under the objective of student preparedness, a goal was to provide free lunch and breakfast to all students and improvement of the hot lunch program. According to the updated plan, this would cost the district more than $3,700 daily and exceed $651,000 annually. This project was considered unfeasible given the current economic climate, the report stated.
The board will be discussing the plan at a future meeting.
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