- Jane Ryan Elementary school in Trumbull has approved $121M as yearly budget plan for current year.
- Superintendent says that the budget is still not enough and shall lead to several cost-cutting measures to be taken.
Jane Ryan Elementary school has unanimously passed $121 million budget proposal for 2023-24. This budget is almost $800,000 less than what Superintendent Martin Semmel had requested last month. Semmel had claimed that the budget was “lean” so this applies the recently passed budget to be skinny.
He says that the school hasn’t finalized a contract with the town’s transportation vendor thus cautioning the board. He further states that the budget is act of balancing between the desire to lower the budget hike and impact on staff, activities and other stuff due to cost cutting.
“But we do believe we can reduce our budget by $814,496, given that pending bus contract,” he said. He also confirms that the budget wouldn’t lead to serious cuts to programming and other resources but it wouldn’t be advisable to take new initiative.
“We did not budget for late school start or elementary world language, or a full science of literacy expansive materials, which I think we’ve heard can be $500,000 to $700,000,” he said. “We weren’t able to go bringing down kindergarten sizes back to 20. Middle school electives, weren’t able to add them or eliminate the band fees.”
Superintendent says that it would have incurred few cost-cutting measures such as reducing staff, cutting extracurriculars and changes in class sizes and sports participation fees if the budget was cut down even more.
He furthers states that four positions have been eliminated from the budget proposal while four others as requested by Sammel in January were added thus creating a zero-net effect on staff percentage.
“We’re proud of where we’ve come, we’re proud of where we’re at at this point coming out of the pandemic,” Semmel said.
Semmel said he was proud of what the district would accomplish with the current budget and concluded positively despite the lower budget disappointment.
