The difference: a choice the district has made about how to use School Choice revenue.

 

First-year Superintendent Doug Dias made it clear from Day 1 of the budget process that he wants to end the district's unsustainable practice of relying on School Choice revenue for operating expenses.

 

School choice money — the funds received from out-of-district pupils who attend the K-6 school — and grants combine to make what is known as non-appropriated revenue.

 

Most of the district's funding comes from the appropriated side of the ledger, the appropriation it gives to the town and which must be approved at Tuesday's Annual Town Meeting.

 

The total FY17 budget approved by the School Committee on Wednesday night is about $6.45 million, an increase of $214,870 from FY16 — a 3.33 percent jump.

 

The biggest driver in the budget increase is a 14 percent spike health insurance, which accounts for a little more than half at $118,233, or 55 percent of the budget hike.

 

The town appropriation in the FY17 budget is $6.14 million, an increase of $366,529, or about 6.35 percent more than the town paid in FY16.

 

The non-appropriated portion of the budget actually goes down by $151,659 — from $680,370 in FY16 to $528,711 in the FY17 spending plan.

 

The increase in the town's appropriation less the increase in the total budget equals that $151,659.

 

The biggest change in the non-appropriated spending stems from a conscious decision by the district to shift operating expenses back into the appropriated budget and use the School Choice revenue to build up a depleted reserve.

 

While much of the debate swirling around the budget has focused on the change to the school's Side-By-Side preschool, the budget does make other small cuts — balancing sacrifices at the school with a request for more sacrifices from the town in order to make the school's operations more sustainable, administrators argue.

 

On Wednesday night, the district's budget director told the School Committee that WES had about $57,000 in the School Choice reserve and expected to need most of that to balance the books at the end of FY16.

 

"My objective between now and the end of the year is to make sure we get to the end of the year without any negative balances," Nancy Rauscher told the committee.

 

"When you say things are looking pretty good ... Is that OK in the sense we may be able to preserve the $57,000 or OK in that we won't go below zero?" School Committee Chairman Dan Caplinger asked Rauscher.

 

"The latter," Rauscher replied.

 

Rauscher said that the administration is trying to establish a practice of receiving School Choice funds one year and spending them the next — while keeping a healthy reserve for unanticipated overages. She also offered an explanation for how the district got to a place where it was relying on School Choice revenue to fund its operations.

 

"In 2007, 2008, 2009, I think the town started pushing back on the school to come in at a 2.5 percent [appropriated budget] increase," she said. "That's why the school started going into the reserve. I'm not saying it was a lack of oversight. It's a matter of that's what the reality was."

 

Rauscher said that a good practice is for a school to have 5 percent of its annual budget in reserve. With WES' annual budget currently around $6 million, a good target would be about $300,000, she said.

 

Dias' preliminary budget proposal sought to get the district to that target faster while seeking just a 4.6 percent increase in the appropriation to the town.

 

The cuts in that spending plan met with considerable resistance in the community — sending Dias back to the drawing board to draft subsequent budgets that both raised the "ask" of town taxpayers and dipped into the School Choice revenue in order to restore items that initially were cut.

 

In March, the town's Finance Committee recommended the town's approval of a $6.08 million town contribution to the FY17 budget that represented a 5.33 increase from FY16.

 

The School Committee will present a revised spending plan, which adds $58,424 to the town's contribution, to the Finance Committee on Monday.

 

In other business on Wednesday, the School Committee decided not to approve the proposed 2016-17 school calendar Dias presented, instead asking him to try to bring it into alignment with the already approved calendar for Mount Greylock Regional School.

 

The draft he showed the School Committee on Wednesday would have had WES pupils starting the school year on Thursday, Sept. 1. Mount Greylock is not scheduled to start school until after the Sept. 5 Labor Day holiday. The WES Committee members expressed a concern that families with children at both the elementary and junior-senior high school would be ill served by such an arrangement.

 

Fortunately, the new calendar need not wait until the committee's June meeting for approval. Because of its return to the Finance Committee on Monday, May 16, the School Committee scheduled a special meeting that evening at Town Hall, where it hopes to approve a revised calendar.

 

The School Committee also voted to raise the price of a school lunch from $2.50 to $2.75 starting in September.

 

The school had received communication from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education indicating that the department was dissatisfied with the $2.50 price because the commonwealth's reimbursement for children receiving a free lunch is currently $2.78, Rauscher explained.

 

"At WES, you're being reimbursed more than what you're charging," she said. "That's where the state has an issue."

 

The committee also finalized the contract its paraprofessional collective bargaining unit, the last of three three-year labor contracts it needed to negotiate this year.