Belmont Superintendent of Schools Dr. George Entwistle is confident that the fiscal year 2012 budget he has been developing in partnership with the district's Leadership Council is the "best way" to reach the bottom line amount set by the Warrant Committee last year.

But Entwistle warns that reaching that number would come at a cost to the district and its students.

"People need to pay attention to what the budget process is now," he said during a budget development presentation Tuesday, Jan. 4 to the Belmont School Committee held at the Chenery Middle School.

"People will be surprised at what it will take to get to this level and we are moving to the tipping point for our schools. (The) Available Revenue (budget) will not sufficiently supply what we need to give our students," Entwistle stated.

Nevertheless, Entwistle and the Leadership Council – made up of senior school staff, administrators and the six district principals – are currently putting the final touches on the proposed fiscal '12 budget after working on it for the past several months.

Although the work will be ongoing, on Jan. 11 he will formally present the Available Funds Budget to the School Committee and the same Available Funds Budget and a Level Service Budget, as requested, to the Warrant Committee on Jan. 12.

On Nov. 10, 2010, the Warrant Committee set the school department an Available Revenue budget target of $40,565,083.

School Committee Chairwoman Ann Rittenburg said the committee would now launch into the budget season in earnest. With the process now in the New Year, she said, it is time to gear up for a number of consecutive months for the hardest work the committee does.

"We will be fully engaged in that process all the way up to budget approval at the annual Town Meeting in April," she said.

After the Tuesday meeting, she explained Town Meeting votes on the entire town budget – includes the schools - but members only have the authority to review and approve the bottom-line figure of the School Department budget, not the way in which those dollars are allocated within the School Department's budget.

Budget process "in very good shape"

 "We're in very good shape and feel comfortable about the budget development process and results," Entwistle told the School Committee Tuesday night.

Work session highlights of the Leadership Council, he explained, included revisiting the Belmont Public School's goals and priorities, applying what worked last year as well as what might have worked better, examining "non-negotiables," affirming level-service requirements and examining systems and structures.

In addition to examining systems, structures and programs, the Leadership Council also targeted reductions district wide needed to reach the available revenue budget bottom line that included:

• modifying systems and structures,
• curtailing expenditures and implementing efficiencies,
• eliminating anything that does not directly correspond to the school system's core mission,
• reducing employee benefit costs and
• reducing both professional and non-professional costs.

"The budget that will be presented next week includes all of these," he said. "It was a tremendous amount of very concentrated, high-level work with a logical analysis of how to get to the right number.

In the next few days, Entwistle said, he and Interim Assistant Superintendent Janice G. Darias will be fine-tuning accuracies in the proposed budget and making sure the right components are in the right places. 

"We will be presenting a succinct, understandable view of the budget decisions," he said.

Member Dan Scharfman questioned one of the items termed "non-essential" highlighted in the work session and asked if elimination of such would affect the school department's ability to meet its district imposed mandate.

"We are getting dangerously close to not meeting our mandates," Entwistle said.

"We are moving to the tipping point for our schools and running out of tricks and fixes that we can be creative and innovative about. We begin to hit a wall when trying to avoid making cuts into core pieces and we haven't been able to avoid that," he warned.

If the mandate is defined as making an Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) that the state's secondary education department requires each school to meet, said Rittenburg, it may very well be compromised already.

"Cuts to the system seriously hamper our ability to do that (make AYP) in all sub-groups for all students," she said.

"One of the biggest challenges of the School Committee is communicating that to the community so that people know what is at stake," said Rittenburg.

The budget public hearing is scheduled for March 15 and possible budget adoption by the School Committee could occur on either March 22 or March 29.