The Gloucester School Board met last Thursday in the T.C. Walker Education Center auditorium to approve a budget of $86,356,947 for fiscal year 2024.
This budget reflects a $350,000 difference from what the school board originally proposed to the Board of Supervisors. Dr. Walter Clemons, division superintendent, showed the board how it could make up that difference in the budget.
Clemons recommended that the Gifted Resource Teacher ($92,000), Safety Manager ($63,410), Public Information Officer (75,000), Behavioral Specialist ($111,400) and Environmental Testing Technician ($73,410) positions be removed from the budget to make up for the $350,000 gap. Removing these items will not impact anyone’s current employment. This equates to $415,220.
“So your budget would be balanced with a little bit of flexibility,” said Clemons. “Because we don’t know if you may need that for anything related to security, anything related to permanent building level subs.”
The General Assembly may reconvene at a later date with the possibility of the school district receiving additional funds.
During discussion, school board member Darren Post said that he would not support a budget that does not include a reading specialist for the middle schools, citing a decline in eighth grade writing assessment scores.
“I just think that you would be prudent at this point to wait and see when everything settles and take a look at your assessments from a holistic standpoint and not separate it out for one discipline to determine where you may want to go,” said Clemons. “You may decide at that point in time, we want to put some emphasis on a reading specialist. You may decide you want to put it on something else.”
Dr. Chuck Wagner, division assistant superintendent, mentioned that there is a dedicated reading intervention teacher at each middle school that is ESSER funded. Wagner also said that writing instruction is integrated with reading. This is the first school year with the ESSER-funded reading interventionists.
Post said that he would not support a budget that does not include additional resources for middle school reading.
“I agree with hiring teachers—totally, completely,” said board member Karen Espinoza. “I don’t want to take out the gifted teacher that we need. I definitely think we need the reading/writing [teacher], another one in each of the middle schools. However, we need to balance the budget tonight. And we need to make sure that we are not going to be in deficit. And we need to go ahead and get our contracts out to our teachers.”
“We each have something that we wanted that we’ve had to give up in order to make this balanced,” said board member Robin Rice.
Rice also highlighted the positives of the budget, including the alternative behavior program for the elementary schools and raises for staff.
The school board voted to adopt the budget, 5-1, with Post dissenting. The next regular monthly school board meeting will be held June 13 in the T.C. Walker Education Center auditorium.