RSU 50 starts budget talks anew

STACYVILLE, Maine — Budget talks are about to begin anew for the RSU 50 school board. The group was scheduled to hold a budget workshop Tuesday evening at Southern Aroostook Community School as talks continue on the 2011-12 school budget after the fiscal document failed at the polls June 30.
    “I don’t anticipate any votes on the budget at that workshop,” said Interim Superintendent John Doe.
RSU 50 is faced with several options after the budget failed at the polls by a vote of 301-402. The board could opt to make cuts to the $9,267,716 spending package in hopes of gaining voter support or the group could chose to present the exact same budget with the hopes that it would pass a second vote.
“The board will be looking at different scenarios on how certain reductions would impact services,” Doe said. “I will come up with several scenarios for them to look at, probably in increments of $100,000 and show them [the board] what would be lost because of those cuts.”
He anticipates the group presenting a new budget to the public as early as the first week of August, with a potential validation of the new budget by the end of August. Normally, when a budget fails, a school district uses its most recent budget as a guide until a new document is approved. However, since this is the first year of the new RSU, there is no 2010-11 budget to fall back on. Therefore, until the new budget is approved, the district will be using the budget that failed at the polls as its template in the short term.
Board members also agreed to a new stipend for themselves, albeit not without a fair bit of discussion. Doe proposed using the same format that SAD 25 had used for its school board members of $10 per meeting, with the board chair earning $15. No mileage is included in a school board member’s stipend.
“For an RSU board the stipend has to be at least $10, but no more than $25 for each monthly meeting with an agenda,” Doe explained.
The vote on stipends was knotted at 7-7, according to Doe, forcing the group to use its weighted vote system to decide the matter. With the weighted vote, the measure passed 542-336.
In other agenda items, the board:
• Approved Holly Vining as business/finance manager; Patrice Turner as an elementary guidance counselor; Gail Glidden as food services director; Elaine Small as executive secretary to the superintendent; Doris Mooney as accounts payable clerk; and JoAn Bouchard as payroll clerk. According to Doe, all of these positions were reappointments to current employees.
• Named Paige Doble as a new math teacher at Southern Aroostook Community High School.
• Accepted a bid from F.A. Peabody Company of Houlton for the district’s insurance policy for 2011-12. Doe said the bid of $27,654 came in lower than anticipated.
• Approved the 2011-12 school calendar.  The first student day will be Aug. 31 and the final is set for June 8. There is no harvest recess. “It’s basically the same calendar we’ve always had,” Doe said.
• Set its monthly board meetings for the second Wednesday of each month at 6 p.m., starting in September. Previously, the board had been meeting on Tuesdays.