Enrollment projections are “a critical piece of budget development,” Bedford Schools Finance Director Julie Kirrane told the School Committee on Tuesday.
And even with all of the uncertainty engendered by the response to the pandemic, she said, “we have worked through a solid projection.”
“We looked at our exits to private schools, and moves out of state, in state. We looked at the past five years of cohort movement grade to grade and created a projection we feel comfortable with,” she outlined. “It is not overly influenced by the experience of this year. We anticipate some rebounding in the earlier grades. That’s the basis of our budget planning.”
Kirrane didn’t present any specific numbers, and explained later in the week that “typically this is part of the superintendent’s budget proposal that is coming out on Dec. 22.”
She added, “Like communities all over the commonwealth, enrollment is down this year, by 79 students in Bedford. And the one-year enrollment projection we are working with assumes a return to more normal enrollment levels.”
The finance director told the School Committee that projections are important because they ensure “that resources are targeted where the students are.”
“The first couple of phases of the budget are developing like a typical year, with the focus on getting the kids back,” Kirrane said. “The phases that we are entering now are when we have to look into various scenarios. We are at the more challenging part of the budget development process.”
That process now involves some degree of “guesswork and difficulty” because of the pandemic. “We cannot bank on a lot of the things that worked well in prior years.”
Superintendent of Schools Philip Conrad commented that the budget preparation “has been very collaborative so far.” The focus, he said, should be on “how we get our needs met, and maybe defer our wants for a year.”
Kirrane mentioned that administrators “are very prudent with their dollars and people are working with us very well. Plenty of program administrators have come in under level funding.”
School Committee Chair Dan Brosgol endorsed the multi-pronged planning approach: continue the current hybrid model, or a return to “normal: for elementary grades, back in their classrooms while middle and high school students remain on hybrid. “Those are the broad strokes of the scenarios we are going to hear about for all of January.”
Also at Tuesday’s meeting, the committee approved one-year postponements of two high-school field trips, one to the Galapagos Islands and the other to Sicily and Greece. They had been scheduled for February 2021.
Mike Rosenberg can be reached at [email protected], or 781-983-1763
Click this link to learn more about The Bedford Citizen’s first community reporter.
Loading ...
