The night after a public hearing on the proposed superintendent's budget, the Board of Education voted on Thursday, February 2, to approve its proposed spending plan for 2017-18 at $75,120,605, or a 1.98 percent increase from the current budget.For more information about the public hearing, see the February 3 print edition of The Newtown Bee.

The motion to approve the budget passed unanimously. Board Secretary Debbie Leidlein was not present for the meeting. Before the board voted on the budget it discussed and approved a number of changes to the superintendent's proposal.

Superintendent of Schools Joseph V. Erardi, Jr first presented his proposed budget to the board on Tuesday, January 3. As originally presented, the $74,996,756 spending proposal represented a 1.81 percent or a roughly $1.3 million increase over the 2016-17 budget, $73,665,065. The Board of Education has been inspecting and discussing the superintendent's requested operational plan at budget workshop meetings since that first presentation.

At the board's public hearing on February 1, district Director of Business Ron Bienkowski explained a number of technical adjustments were made since the original budget proposal was finalized on December 20 for the January 3 presentation. Those adjustments decreased the superintendent's requested operational plan to $74,951,908, or a 1.75 percent increase from the 2016-17 budget. Adjustments shared by Mr Bienkowski included a credit for energy use at the new Sandy Hook Elementary School, having two more months on which to base the energy use of the school buildings for future estimations, and new cost estimates for fuel due to market changes.

The school board began its meeting on February 2 by asking district administration a range of questions still lingering from the previous month of meetings.

After asking questions around the School Based Health Center at Newtown Middle School and proposed discontinuation of social worker positions at Reed Intermediate School and NMS near the start of the meeting, board member Rebekah Harriman-Stites later made a motion to add back the two social workers, one at each school. The two social worker positions, along with one at Sandy Hook Elementary School, have been funded by the School Emergency Response to Violence (SERV) grant. With the SERV grant ended, the positions were not continued for the next school year.

Dr Erardi said the decision to not continue the three social worker positions came after looking at reallocating support staff, and the district administration believed it was planning for adequate staffing with the discontinuation.

"The leadership team will never, ever, compromise safety," said Dr Erardi, adding that he was not opposed to adding the two positions to the proposed 2017-18 budget.

Ms Harriman-Stites's motion passed unanimously to add the NMS and Reed social workers to the budget for $139,697, which increased the projected budget proposal to a 1.93 percent increase from the current budget.

Board chair Keith Alexander said the motion represented, "What we considered, I think as a board, to be in the best interest of students."

The other motion that passed the board also came from Ms Harriman-Stites, who moved to add to a part-time grant funded position in the proposed budget to fund it to be a full-time position. The part-time grant specialist, Ms Harriman-Stites said, is funded by the Newtown-Sandy Hook Community Foundation for $25,000.

"The grant writer is currently only able to write grants related to Sandy Hook recovery, and I feel the district has far more needs than that. There are capitol needs, there are technology needs, there are programming needs... There are needs in our new theater. There are a lot of things we could be going for grant money for, and I speak as a professional grant writer," said Ms Harriman-Stites.

Mr Alexander and board vice chair Michelle Embree Ku both expressed some hesitation from the district not having proof that the grant writer position could supply further funding.

Dr Erardi said the grant writer is expected to double the $25,000 for the position in anticipated grants.

The motion added $35,000 to the proposed budget.

Board member John Vouros said he was encouraged that supporting the grant writer to be full-time could expose the district to new people and ideas.

The motion passed 5 to 1 with Mr Alexander voting against it.

With both motions approved, the proposed Board of Education 2017-18 spending plan included everything Dr Erardi proposed in his original motion with the three additional funded positions.

The school board voted unanimously to approve its proposed budget at $75,120,605 or a 1.98 increase from the current year.

The budget will now go before the Board of Finance and Legislative Council for further consideration.