LONGMEADOW – The School Committee voted unanimously at its Feb. 11 meeting to include free full-day kindergarten in the district’s fiscal year 2017 (FY17) budget at a cost $299,168 beyond what the town is offering the School Department.

Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations Thomas Mazza said the town’s originally proposed general fund request for the district was $808,832. The additional funds requested by the district brings the funding request to more than $1 million.

The additional funding would restore four Williams Middle School teaching positions, slated to be cut regardless of the School Committee’s decision on full-day kindergarten, and instrumental music instruction for grades 4 and 5, an anticipated casualty of the kindergarten budget addition, Mazza said.

However, a number of positions would be cut under the proposed budget.

“The total is roughly $720,000 that we’re reducing one way or another,” School Committee member Russell Dupere noted.

He explained the reductions would include a teaching position and a 0.6 full-time equivalent (FTE) special education teacher and a 0.5 FTE kindergarten assistant at Center Elementary School, three district special education assistants and two middle school library assistants. Some of these cuts are directly related to the addition of free full-day kindergarten, while others were proposed independent of the kindergarten option.

Dupere said he believes the district realistically could not ask the town for a level service budget because it is facing budget woes in FY17 as well.

Mazza previously said the town would have to work with a $627,000 deficit this upcoming fiscal year.

School Committee Chair Janet Robinson said the committee would work with town officials in order to balance the budget prior to the Annual Town Meeting.

If free full-day kindergarten were implemented in FY17, the district would likely see a $100,000 boost in Chapter 70 revenue, which could be given to the town to offset some of the costs for the free kindergarten program, School Committee member Kimberly King said.

School Committee Vice Chair Michael Clark said the committee hasn’t used the district’s budget as a “tool to talk about our aspirations.”

He added, “There’s always a political reality to what we can do and we may find ourselves in May facing that reality, but I think that we have to move forward in the manner that we are and communicate with the community about what we value. And that’s what this budget really does … For two years we’ve talked about free full-day kindergarten and we’ve incrementally gotten closer and I think that’s laudable.”

Clark said the budget the committee approved does not eliminate a section of teachers or increase class sizes.

He added there is a “very real possibility” that the committee wouldn’t get everything it is asking for in its budget if it were amended on the Town Meeting floor.

“We’ll have to make real policy decisions that affect real people,” he noted. “But the cost of not doing that now is far greater than facing that in May because I think the one thing the community is looking at us for is leadership.”

School Committee member John Fitzgerald, who participated in the meeting remotely, said the district has been “forced” by the Select Board to take “gradually more and more cuts” since he began serving on the committee in 2008.

“[The Select Board] usually euphemistically call [the cuts] a level service budget,” he added. “In fact, it has not been a level service budget and I’m happy to see that the [committee] has stood up for the principal responsibility – and that’s the students.”