By MAUREEN DOHERTY
LYNNFIELD — Shoring up school security and moving the town’s preschool program into the Summer Street School are the two major capital expenditures in the School Department’s anticipated FY’16 budget.
The School Department also remains committed to supporting ongoing technology initiatives, which this year will include a request for additional staffing, according to Superintendent of Schools Jane Tremblay, who added that the district is also facing “challenges” in its special education budget in the coming year.
The priorities of her first budget as the leader of the town’s school district were unveiled during the recent budget summit, held annually with all town department heads each December to kick off the budget season.
The dollar figures attached to these initiatives are not due to be submitted to the town until Jan. 30. The School Committee, Board of Selectmen and Finance Committee will each hold public hearings on the budget prior to annual Town Meeting on April 27.
Safety first
“Our number one responsibility outside of educating our students is making sure that they have a safe learning environment, not just for the students but the for the teachers. And we do have some work to do in this area,” Tremblay said.
“We don’t have cameras everywhere that we should have them. We don’t have monitors in all of our front offices and we don’t have any cameras currently on any of the fields that we just put in,” she said, adding that these upgrades would be “one-time costs.”
One move, multiple benefits
Multiple benefits will result from the one-time expense of moving the preschool from space it shares with the Senior Center on Salem Street back into the Summer Street School. These benefits will extend beyond students and school staff, Tremblay said.
It was always the intent to have the preschool housed in the elementary school, she said, recalling that renovations completed at the Summer Street School about 12 years ago included space for two preschool classrooms.
“It would be in the best interest of the students and also for the teachers that serve the students to be in one big professional learning community,” Tremblay said. At the Dec. 9 School Committee meeting, it was revealed that housing the preschool off-site meant a lack of on-site administrative oversight for the two teachers and their paraprofessionals as well as having no school nurse available on-site. Access to a nurse is considered important in any school setting, but even moreso for the integrated preschool, which serves a mix of students with special needs as well as typically-developing students.
Additionally, the various therapists who provide OT, PT, speech and behavioral services to the students must travel from the schools to this site.
Tremblay said the plan to move the preschool out of the Senior Center would allow the district to move its central office for school administration out of Town Hall and into that space. This would free up space at Town Hall for other uses.
“Tom Geary and the women who work in his office, along with my office, would move down there,” Tremblay said. The Middle School would also gain “some much-needed space for tutoring” because her plan includes moving some staff who provide services district-wide out of LMS. And lastly, it would allow the School Department to “give the Senior Center back a little bit of space,” she said, since the central office staff would not need all of the current preschool space. “We are really seeing that as a win-win for everyone,” Tremblay said.
SPED budget to rise
Tremblay said the district remains “on target” with its current fiscal year budget despite some unexpected expenses in the SPED budget.
“We have had some unexpected challenges in our special education budget, but by tightening up our belts in some other areas we are going to be okay” for the remainder of the current fiscal year, Tremblay believes.
SPED expenses are the wildcard in any school district’s budget because new services may be required at any time during the year after the budget is established. Preliminarily, it appears that in FY’16, SPED expenses will increase, Tremblay said.
“As you know the past couple of years we have enjoyed some great savings with special education. Unfortunately, I was not sitting at the table then and I just need you to know that will not be case this year because of the challenges that we have had this year,” Tremblay said.
New positions
Tremblay said in the FY’16 budget the district will also be looking to fund “a couple of new positions to support some of our current programming that is growing.” More specifically, the district’s technology initiatives will require “some additional support” for staffing, she said.