Mountain View reviews budget proposals

BY TOM FONTANA
Correspondent

Four departmental budget proposals for the 2015-16 school year were offered to the Mountain View school board at its meeting on Monday night, April 13.

Gail Wnorowski, director of special services, presented a decrease in expenditures by about $105,000 from the 2014-15 school year budget. The largest decrease was $31,000 less for the item listed as ’emotional support,’ which provides funds for services outside the district.

“We have so much to offer here at Mountain View,” Wnorowski explained, “that there’s no point in sending students off campus.”

One increase in her budget was a proposed $22,000 for digital equipment and software.

The total proposed Special Services budget is $556,203, down from the $662,192 earmarked for the current school year.

High school principal Robert Presley offered no increase in the athletic department budget for the next school year, set at $102,000, the same as the 2014-15 budget. “We’ll come in well under that again,” he stated.

In fact, he listed a surplus of $63,280 in the current budget to be carried over into the next school year. “Transportation uses about one-third of the athletic budget,” he said.

District business manager Joseph Patchcoski also proposed a fairly “flat” budget for the next school year, indicating an increase of only about $15,000 over the current year.

He pointed out that general liability insurances is the largest expense, taking $59,500 out of the proposed $203,000 for 2015-16. “We also pay $30,000 to participate in Obamacare (Affordable Care Act),” Patchcoski told the board.

Karen Voigt, director of curriculum, proposed a 2015-16 budget of $158,345 for her department, up from $147,245, the current year’s budget. She explained that, although most of the budget is funded by grants for special programs, the increase is due to transportation costs for “staff development.”

As acting superintendent, Voigt presented a new design of the 2015-16 school calendar for the board’s approval. She noted that the graduation date for the class of 2016 is tentatively set as June 11, with June 1 indicated as the last day of classes. The intervening days, she stated, could be used to make-up for weather-related closings.

“Also, the Monday after Easter will not be touched,” she added. “School will be closed that day because there’s always low attendance by students and staff the day after Easter, and it ends up costing the district between $1,500 and $2,000 to keep fully staffed that day.”

District maintenance director Robert Taylor told the board that “we burned more wood this school year than ever before” to heat the two school buildings.

“We went through 1,581 tons of wood,” he said. “That’s the first time I know of since the district has used wood fuel that we broke 1,500 tons.”

He also stated that that amount of wood fuel would equal about 122,000 gallons of fuel oil, estimating the savings to the district of using wood over oil as approximately $300,000 for the school year.

Taylor also predicted that a water line leak between the two school buildings might be located under the lawn in front of the high school. “I noticed that the grass is a little greener in that area where it’s still very wet,” he explained, “and the deer seem to be gathering at that spot in the morning.”

The board honored four students for earning first place certificates in the NEIU #19 STEM Academy competition, a science and technology program for students in grades 6 to 8. They are Olivia Ainey, Kailey Bridgeman, Jacob Housel, Lena Penny.

Forty-three teams of students from school districts throughout the area participated in a competition to build projects out of K’NEX pieces. The projects were judged based on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics design principles.