The School Committee heard a rundown of 11 alterative plans for potential uses of one-time funds, such as excess and deficiency and ESSER grants, at its Wednesday, March 9 meeting.
Those senarios are:
• Scenario 1 — Half of full-day kindergarten, costs from E&D, with a 3.48 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 4.35 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 2.98 percent;
• Scenario 2 — All costs of full-day kindergarten, costs from E&D, with a 2.09 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 3.19 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 2.98 percent;
• Scenario 3 — No full-day kindergarten costs from E&D, with a 4.87 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 5.50 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 2.98 percent;
• Scenario 4 — Kindergarten, using $200,000 per year over four years from E&D, with a 4.12 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 4.88 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 2.98 percent;
• Scenario 5 — No full-day kindergarten (maintain half-day program with tuition-based, full-day K), a 2.09 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 3.19 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 1.98 percent;
• Scenario 6 — Full-day kindergarten, using no E&D with professional salaries funded from ESSER rolled into budget, a 6.92 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 7.2 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 3.94 percent;
• Scenario 7 — Full-day kindergarten, using $370,000 from E&D with professional salaries funded from ESSER rolled into budget, a 5.5 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 6.04 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 3.9 percent;
• Scenario 8 — Full-day kindergarten, using $370,000 from E&D with professional and paraprofessional salaries funded from ESSER 3 rolled into budget, a 6.19 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 6.59 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 4.25 percent;
• Scenario 9 — Full-day kindergarten, using $370,000 from E&D with BCDA and EL teacher salaries funded from ESSER rolled into budget, a 4.21 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 4.95 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 3.33 percent;
• Scenario 10 — Level service — A .57 percent increase assessment for Whitman and 1.94 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of .05 percent;
• Scenario 11 — Full-day kindergarten using no E&D and funding only BCDAs (behavior specialists) and ELs from ESSER, a 5.61 increase assessment for Whitman and 6.11 percent for Hanson. Overall budget increase of 3.33 percent.
Szymaniak recommended the School Committee adopt Scenario 3.
“We’re committed, through ESSER 3, to use some of that money for staffing,” Superintendent of Schools Jeff Szymaniak said. “How we use that is up to us, but I can’t buy things [with it].”
The rules of the grant require some of the money be used for professional staff, according to Szymaniak, stressing the coaches working on learning regression, behavior specialists and English Learner staff were needed after the pandemic.
“These two ELs wouldn’t have been needed in October this year,” he said. “Because we had a bubble come up, I need them.”
He doesn’t know if that enrollment bubble will go away and he can’t responsibly say those instructors should be put into the district budget because the need for them could go away in two years.
“We’ve seen an uptick in behaviors in all of our buildings,” he said. “ESSER money is perfect for this because it addresses what we’ve seen post-COVID. … ESSER money is for post-COVID people.”
Whitman Town Administrator Lincoln Heineman said the town could afford the 3.48 percent increase included in Scenario 1, but Hanson Town Administrator Lisa Green said her town could only afford a 3 percent increase.
The assessments, slated to be up for a certification vote at the March 17 meeting can always be reduced right up to Town Meetings, but cannot be increased.
Committee member Fred Small said he has received several calls on busing cost calculations and how much of the ESSER 3 funds would be used in Scenario 3. Szymaniak sat the $2.3 million in ESSER 3 was being looked at to pay for eight positions.
“It has to be COVID-related,” Szymaniak said. “We have to be ethical in using the funds.”
Chairman Christopher Howard said the new non-mandated busing formula proposed by Whitman residents John Galvin and Shawn Kain is still being looked at and savings projections could not be made at the moment.
“It helps the five-year [plan], it still could have an impact, but we’re not there yet,” Howard said.
Szymaniak also briefed the committee on his progress with his goals for the year, including a continued effort to institute a full-day kindergarten program in the district.
“No matter what happens out of School Committee as we move this budget forward, I think this is a topic that will continue if it doesn’t move forward,” Szymaniac said to the committee about his progress on goals for the year on March 6. “We’ll continue this discussion on early childhood education, which I think we have to start branching off to pre-K as well, looking at where we are as a district.”
The intervention program aimed at helping students regain any educational ground during the remote learning of the 2020 to 2021 period is also part of those goals.
That is being pursued via coaches at both at district as well as individual school level, according to Assistant Superintendent George Ferro, mentioning the positions that had been referred to as interventionists. They are now being steered toward co-teaching with classroom teachers.
At high school, the work to close gaps due to the pandemic are being addressed in intervention study halls as the district works to catch students up in real time as they also keep up in class with their peers.
The district will also be striving to present representative depictions of students in literature and history being taught.
Ferro noted that the MCAS exams include a verbal survey at the end for certain grades, asking, among other questions, whether students “read and see people in literature that look like you, or that look like your classmates.”
More than 40 percent of students at different grade levels have been answering that they do not.
“When we talk about equity, we have to start thinking about the characters that we teach [about] in literature, the books that we read, the authors that we look at, the gender of the people that we look at, to say, ‘is this representative of everybody in Whitman-Hanson,” Ferro said. “Those are the things Jeff is promoting … as this project moves forward.”
Szymaniak added that family and parental outreach is also being pursued and presented an informational slide program about full-day kindergarten that is viewable on the WHCA-TV’s YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m0UY_Vlld0].