Saugus takes inventory of school budget

SAUGUS — Pola Andrews, the school district’s e xecutive director of finance and administration, met with School Committee Chairman Vincent Serino, School Committee member Ryan Fisher, and Superintendent Michael Hashem to discuss the fiscal year 2024 budget at a Finance Subcommittee meeting Tuesday.

As of June 30, the FY24 budget of $31,607,625 was spent “exactly to the penny,” Andrews said, which left the budget at $0.

The budget for the Veterans Early Learning Center was one of the line items in a budget packet presented at the meeting.

“You’re going to see a deficit of $31,712 and you’re going to be like, ‘Oh gosh, how the heck did that happen? Why are we over?’” Andrews said. “That’s your preschool fund.”

Andrews said that after she came before the subcommittee at the end of June for the final budget entry, bills for the district started coming in.

“This year, what really came in was again, as always, utilities,” Andrews said.

“That ($31,712) ensures that your preschool program is not in deficit,” she added. “It technically never will be in deficit because you collect the deposits and carry those over.”

Andrews explained that the $31,712 is due, in part, to various contracts increasing, as well as class-size challenges.

“You plan a class with 15 students… two move… Well, now, the class is 13. You can’t cut the teacher, you can’t combine (the classes). You can’t make it 28 in a different class. So, those are some of the challenges in preschool,” Andrews said.

Andrews said that that deficit is “something I can live with” because if it carries over, there will be time to fix it.

She made a cheat sheet for attendees to view, showing the items on the budget that are in deficit.

“Some of them are so small,” Andrews said.

She noted some particularly small deficits of $10.10 and $16.33 for the line items of graduation expenses and educational supplies, respectively.

Andrews explained that these small deficits often occur in certain situations, such as when people forget to account for shipping when making purchases.

“So, that’s the important thing is, we’re talking about deficit. It equals out to zero, at the end,” Andrews said. “One line item went over something else, so the offset…”

“It stays balanced,” Hashem interjected.

“There’s a lot of districts right now that are completely underwater,” Fisher said. “And we’re like, literally, we have one line that’s a little high, one line that’s a little low — (it) washes out in the end.”

Fisher thanked Andrews, saying that many other school districts are not having these sorts of discussions.

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