7 thoughts on “Budget Information”

1. Question: Have these positions even been necessary? Is this just one of those “scare tactics” to make Rochester citizens concerned that their children will not be getting the help they need? Why would we have so many traveling teacher positions? And, why at such high salaries? We all know that special education positions are required to meet a certain ratio for every dollar we receive from the state, so with this said…..have we not needed these positions? If we can benefit from traveling educators, why not look into traveling principals positions? Maybe Mr. Hopkins could lend his time in this effort….is he really needed full time at the SAU building? Why would we even have a HR position at the SAU building???? Is he not able to manage this small staff? I say….we are ALL tightening our belts and getting the shaft from local, state and federal governments. So, Mr. Hopkins, I’m suprised that these are the only cuts you could come up with. I’ll bet if we had a public informational meeting we could come up with a few more. A meeting where all of the expenses were on display vs the intake of federal dollars as well as every dollar that comes from us citizens of Rochester………. What about educational dollars that come from the NH LOTTERY? Lets see a list of every dollar that comes in to our city and see where every dollar goes!!! I’m sure we could find a few more dollars to cut.

2. If the cost of Insurance is increasing, instead of cutting teachers and staff why don’t you pass the increase on and devide by the number of staff for the Rochester School system…that is what my employer did…Every year you guys go through this, our taxes go up our houses re-evaluated to accomodate the increase and what do we get? Nothing….Teachers get over worked and underpaid and our children are suffering for it….think out of the box people….

3. clearly these cuts were proposed to inflict as much pain on the the kids as possible so parents would once again decry cutting the budget at all…it’s refreshing to see some people don’t buy it anymore (or never did)…I have no doubt that we can be more creative than what has been presented, but the question is, will the school board (the people we elected) represent us (and our kids) or will they fail us again?

4. I will try to add some information based on the comments from above.

   The HR position is for the entire school district, not the SAU office.

   The elementary traveling staff members provide instruction, so elementary teachers get their required planning time. The proposal is to extend some Art, Music and PE times for students to meet the requirements.

   Health insurance is a big issue for all employers. Some private businesses have the option that Lori mentioned. Some private businesses don’t have that option. We don’t have that option at this time.

   I am sure there are positions on the list that will impact students. The list was not proposed to inflict as much pain as possible to gain parental support. I hope that we are able to reduce the positions on the list as much as possible.

   Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

5. The school department obviously is not the only department in Rochester that will be passing along the “allowed” increase in budget. Why is it not an option to just dig deep and just decrease budget? What if this were a private sector department and your boss said “Mike, we can not ask our boss to give us one more penny this year, we actually need to decrease spending by 10%” and your job is on the line. Would you be able to come up with some actual cuts for us taxpayers? I would suggest that the school dept., the fire dept, the water & sewer dept, the public works dept and the police dept all give us a stinking brake this year. Lets seriously act like you work for a BOSS (ie the citizens of Rochester NH) and give us a serious brake. These municipal heads could really gain a lot of respect from the citizens they serve by actually stopping this never ending…..year after year…..increase after increase in their budgets. I beg you, please understand that we can not afford another penny!!!

6. 80% of our budget is for staff. We needed to reduce the budget by 1.8 milllion dollars to get to the tax cap. The local tax dollars are not increasing this year, and did not increase last year. The reduction of 1.4 million dollars in staff is about 80% of the required budget reduction. We have reduced energy costs in recent years, the previous posts talked about the limits on our benefit reductions, and most of our budget in locked in via required obligations.
   Thank you for your ideas and thoughts.

7. What really needs to be considered more seriously is future negotiations…the past two RFT contracts (2002 & 2007) ranged from 8.2%-9.9% to 4.5%-4.7% respectively over the 3 years periods of the contracts…we obviously need to negotiate contracts that are far more reasonable and that reflect the ability of a taxpaying population that simply cannot afford these types of wage increases…I understand the need to be competitive to attract good teaching candidates, but if that is not balanced with a population that has experienced entire job sectors (job opportunities) dry up, then we are kidding ourselves if we think we can sustain those types of wages increases…with 67% of our school lunch program being subsidized by the federal government (not to mention the large amounts of title 1 money coming into the district), it is clear that Rochester is still a relatively “poor” community…if the only people who “get ahead” are local government workers, I’m not sure how that can be sustained?