As part of a packed week of FY13 budget hearings for the Sudbury Finance Committee (FinCom) in the run-up to the May 7 Town Meeting, members attended an annual joint session with their counterparts in Lincoln on Tuesday to discuss financials for their shared high school. The agenda consisted of a broad debate about how to fund long-term capital improvements and the rising cost of special education.

While the Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School building is still relatively new at eight years old, members from both committees expressed a desire to clearly understand, and have a plan to pay for, maintenance and improvement needs that will increase over time.

On the Lincoln side, FinCom Chair John Koenig explained that town officials are pushing to better integrate these costs into a comprehensive capital improvements plan for the town.

“There is a goal to develop a capital plan with a really long-term notion of what the needs will be 25 or so years out, and we’d like to try to get the high school included in that,” Koenig said.

Charles Woodard of the Sudbury FinCom explained that his committee was floating a related plan to merge the capital needs of the town’s three cost centers – L-S, Sudbury Public Schools, and the town itself – into one list to facilitate easier prioritization and budgetary planning across the board.

“We’re a long way from finalizing anything, but this idea is percolating up from a lot of sources,” he said.

Judy Belliveau, the high school’s director of finance and operations, shared a copy of a five-year capital plan for the school, which outlines a total of $2.9 million in needs for technology, maintenance vehicles, equipment, and facilities. Funding has not yet been allocated for most of these costs, and in the past, the school has only been able to pay for some of its highest priority capital improvements by using money from its operating budget or interest from a small stabilization fund.

In addition, L-S Principal and Superintendant Scott Carpenter, who was also in attendance, stressed that the five-year plan only calls for maintaining educational technology at a status-quo level. He explained that eventually the school’s entire data transmission backbone will need to be upgraded in order for L-S to continue to support student achievement in an increasingly digital world.

“We don’t have the infrastructure in place to accommodate every student coming in with their own laptop or tablet device, and this isn’t very far in our future,” Carpenter said. “We’re at that cusp where we need to start thinking long term.”

As challenging as funding capital improvements might be in a tight economy, Lincoln FinCom Chair Koenig said that paying for the ever-increasing costs of special education might prove even more complex.

If a public high school can’t meet the educational needs of a given student, it is required by law to fund out-placement in an appropriate setting, as well as transportation for that child to and from school. This year, according to Belliveau, L-S is paying $4.4 million in out-placement costs, as well as another $500,000 in transportation, for 64 students requiring special education services not available at the school. This proved to be a significant hurdle in balancing the FY12 budget last year, and costs are predicted to continue to rise.

Robert Jacobson of the Sudbury FinCom explained that the committee hopes to get a better handle on the scope of the issue so that it can start educating town residents about their choices and increase pressure on the state legislature to do more to help.

“I believe this is really a funding issue for the state … taxpayers through real estate taxes can’t keep up with this,” he said. “No one is looking to start a war between special and regular education; you’d want to address both.”

State Rep. Tom Conroy, who had attended the meeting to gain further insight into budgetary issues faced by school districts in his constituency, stated that he and his colleagues find themselves between a rock and hard place on this issue. Parents demand the best possible educational choices for their children, while both regular and special needs schools also appeal to the state as they struggle with tight budgets.

Conroy summarized that an important part of the solution will be for individual citizens and communities to increase the pressure on government to put education closer to the top of the list of the many competing priorities for funding. 

“We recognize that we haven’t funded these programs as originally intended and neither have the feds,” said Conroy. “These are kids – these are important people.”

Specifics of the proposed Sudbury budgets for FY13 can be found by clicking here.

A schedule of this week’s budgetary hearings can be found by clicking here.