EAST LONGMEADOW – On April 23 the East Longmeadow School Committee met and discussed the budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2019, which comes in at an increase of 2.85 percent from FY 2018’s budget.

“What we look to do every day but certainly as we prepared our budget for FY19 is to make sure that what we’re doing in our classrooms and throughout the district is preparing students today in East Longmeadow to participate in the global community, and that means that they’re reaching out beyond classroom walls,” Superintendent of East Longmeadow Public Schools Gordon Smith said.

Smith began the slideshow presentation by sharing the East Longmeadow Public Schools SMART goals and how they continue to focus on equipping students with 21st century skills.  These goals include critical thinking, problem solving, collaborating, communicating effectively in a written and oral format and integrating technology as a tool to support the other goals.

Over the course of the last nine years in regard to budget increases, Smith shared that the schools have averaged out their increases for each year to roughly two percent.

Continuing on, Smith showed a graph to the School Committee of per-pupil spending for Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative (LPVEC) schools. The graph shared per-pupil spending in the Agawam, Ludlow, Longmeadow, Hampden-Wilbraham, STG Regional and West Springfield School Districts in comparison to the East Longmeadow School District.  Out of the seven districts listed, East Longmeadow is ranked sixth for spending, coming in at $14,883 per pupil for FY17. The Agawam School District spends the most out of all seven districts, coming in at $15,931 per pupil. Smith shared that the state average for FY17 in per pupil cost is $15,956.  East Longmeadow comes in $1,048 less than the state average.

In addition to the per-pupil spending, Smith Shared comparison data with the LPVEC schools for English Language Arts (ELA) and Math achievement on the Next Generation MCAS.  While he did not specify which schools belonged to which statistics, the East Longmeadow Public Schools tested well, coming in just a few points shy of second out of the seven schools.

When asked by a School Committee member which schools tested highest and second highest, Smith said that he would keep their anonymity however the members could “probably guess who they were.”  An additional member chimed in, stating “Yeah, but one and two spend a lot more [per-pupil] than we do.”  Smith corrected, stating actually, five schools spend a lot more per-pupil than East Longmeadow does.

Smith continued with the presentation, sharing three goals for the FY19 budget. One, to maintain all current staff and programming that effectively supports student learning and growth. Goal two, to expand current student support services programming in intensive needs and social and emotional education and support. Finally, goal three is to expand curricular support for all areas through curriculum renewal process.

As for School Department budget priorities, Smith explained he wants to build on the district’s current success.  The first bullet point on this slide was to, “continue to reallocate existing funding to contracted services to allow each school to expand social and emotional education and support.”

Smith explained that last year the district was able to reallocate $60,000 to contracted services.

“Then, basically what we did is based on enrollment, each of the schools got a percentage of that $60,000 to use in ways that they’re starting to research as how they best support students that may need more specific support with social and emotional challenges,” Smith said.

He shared that since then, the High School has started a special education course that revolves around social skills and building basic life-skills.

“That was written over the summer in terms of the curriculum, and it’s being co-taught by a special educator and our adjustment councilor,” he explained.

In addition, Smith said the councilors are now reaching out to students who are experiencing some kind of challenge in getting to school consistently due to anxiety, family situations or whatever the case may be.

“We’re working on plans with those individuals and with their families to see how we can continue their education,” he said.

At the middle school level, he said they’ve brought in “life-mentors” for students who could benefit from someone working with them one-on-one to focus on organizational skills and setting goals.

“We’ve tried that with two hourly employees that will work till the end of the year and then we’ll evaluate and see how effective that was,” Smith said.

After sharing what the district has done with the reallocated funds over the last year, Smith explained that this year they’re looking to keep the $60,000, but increase it with an additional reallocated $40,000.  This would give the schools $100,000 to divide up amongst themselves to support this type of programming.

Continuing, Smith said he’d like to expand the intensive special needs program to East Longmeadow High School by hiring an intensive needs special educator.  In addition, they’re hoping to over the course of FY19 assist students and staff in expanding technology use in daily instruction and activity to “create and provide opportunities to learn and master new K-12 Digital Literacy and Computer Science standards.” With this, they hope to hire an instructional technology specialist.

Smith explained that the School Department would like to provide more support to the elementary music program.  He’d also like to support all curricular areas through the established curriculum renewal process, expand social and emotional education and support in grades six through eight by hiring a special education teacher with training in social and emotional education, as well as expanding the ability to provide students in grades three to five research-based and student-specific math interventions by hiring a math specialist.

All in all, the FY19 budget request comes to an increase of 2.85 percent over the previous fiscal year.

“Basically, you’re looking at a 2.85 percent request which takes the budget that this year is $29,195,201 and moves it to $30,028,201,” he said.

Assistant Superintendent for Business Pamela Blair closed, “The team of people that come together work very hard and are diligent and dedicated to not ask for more than truly what we need. We’re not being frivolous in any way and we’re trying to be very careful with taxpayers dollars, and we need to send that message out to the Town Council as well.”