FARMINGTON — Community members and staff from Regional School Unit 9 crowded into the Mt. Blue Middle School cafeteria Thursday to comment on $577,000 cut from the $25.4 million draft budget for 2011-12.

The school board made it through two-thirds of the list of proposed cuts and increases recommended by the Budget Committee and district administrators. The discussion will continue at 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 12, at the school.

A number of Cascade Brook School parents attending Thursday’s meeting will have to return next week to question an administrative decision to reassign two teachers in the grades four to six school this fall; one to a new, sixth kindergarten class at the W. G. Mallett School created because of a jump in enrollment and the other to Cape Cod Hill School in New Sharon.

Comments made Thursday included a complaint from the support staff that furlough days as well as a pay freeze as a way to cut costs should be shared equally among all RSU 9 employees.

Some teachers objected to the plan to eliminate one of three heavily used math “interventionists” at the elementary schools who help raise math literacy and advise classroom teachers on better ways to teach math.

The program has been funded for two years with federal stimulus money, which has dried up.

In a discussion of cutting a soon-to-be vacant special education position at Mallett, special education teachers and Principal Tracy Williams spoke about the growing number of young children with significant special needs.

The proposed budget puts on a one-year hiatus a position left open by a retiring special education teacher, a move that could save the district $51,650.

That teacher worked in a district-wide, self-contained classroom program housed at Mallett that helps students with significant learning needs mainstream into the regular classroom.

The move would leave the school’s remaining three special education teachers to manage a burgeoning number of students that next year is expected to reach 83 in a school population of 450, up from 411 this year, special education teachers Marty Porter, Darcy Wilbur and Sabrina Beach told the board.

They asked that the fourth position be funded.

“We are facing a reduction in staff, but the needs are increasing,” Porter said. “There are way more students than we can serve.”

If the position is not filled, children with special needs from the outlying towns will have to return to their sending schools and the remaining three teachers would be left to work with an increase in the numbers of Farmington children with behavioral, emotional and other special needs.

Wilbur said the need in kindergarten right now is very high and that five students have autism, a developmental disorder that severely affects their ability to socially interact and communicate.

Williams said some children have made real gains through the Elementary Transition Program, but without a fourth special education teacher, services would be more difficult to provide.

“There are students with a high level of aggression, who are loud, yelling and often violent,” she said. “The situation has an impact on the whole school. I have a serious concern about the volatile nature in that kind of behavior. We need to look at this.”

Wilbur described some of the behaviors as “intense and severe.”

“If we can’t provide for them, they will still be here,” she said. “They are not going anywhere. We need to provide the support necessary for these students.”

At the start of the meeting, Director Claire Andrews of Farmington, who chairs the Budget Committee, said the committee and administrators looked for cuts that would make the best use of resources without cutting jobs and would keep teacher-pupil ratios as low as possible.

“We had everyone ‘shaking the tree,'” she said. “There is no fat. This budget is lean. There are only skeletal remains.”

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