Special Town Meeting to vote on funds for teachers contract
By Ken Powers Community Reporter

Westborough - The Finance Advisory Committee voted, 8-0-1, Oct. 6 to support the School Committee-sponsored Article 15 at the upcoming special Town Meeting. Article 15 would provide the funding for the recently negotiated contract between Westborough's teachers and the School Committee. The special Town Meeting will be Monday Oct. 20 beginning at 7 p.m. in the High School auditorium.

The Finance Advisory Committee's vote came after it had met for 30 minutes with School Committee Chair Craig Harris and Superintendent Anne Towle.

The Finance Advisory Committee, which had also met Sept. 29 with Harris and Dan Hendricks, the school district's director of business and administration, asked the School Committee and the school administration to return Oct. 6 because it had posed questions at the Sept. 29 meeting that Harris and Hendricks said needed to be researched before they felt comfortable answering.

Specifically, those questions dealt with the exact breakdown of where the $1.49 million for the additional cost of salaries would come from, and the vague nature of some of the language of the contract, which made some members of the committee uneasy.

Harris explained to the Finance Advisory Committee that the School Committee will ask the Town Meeting audience to approve Article 15 in a two-tiered manner.

First, it will ask for the approval to transfer of $216,957 from the fiscal year (FY) 2009 insurance budget for FY 2008 School Department salaries and wages.

Then it will ask for the approval to transfer $88,392 for the FY 2009 insurance budget, raise and appropriate $184,136, and transfer the sum of $1 million from the town's Overlay Surplus for FY 2009 School Department salaries and wages.

At the Sept. 29 meeting of the Finance Advisory Committee, Harris and Hendricks, members of the committee wondered why the School Department wasn't paying for the salary increase out of its own budget and why the recently-agreed-to contract stated that it was contingent upon "Town Meeting approval of the funding."

"The [Finance Advisory Committee] request that we find the money in our budget to pay the increase because of the contract completely

" caught us by surprise," Harris said. "We were very clear last spring leading up to and at Town Meeting that we had not allocated any money in the FY 2009 budget in the event the contract dispute was settled. We were very up-front about that."

Towle explained to the Finance Advisory Committee that if the School Committee were required to incur the cost of the salary increase, it would have to eliminate 22 positions.

As for the language in the contract, School Committee member Stephen Doret, who authored the wording, explained that he did so to make it clear to the residents and voters that it is up to them to approve the move.

"We negotiate the contract, but ultimately it's up to the town to approve or not approve what we put before them," Doret said. "It's essential that the contract is worded that way because of the open style of government which we employ in this town. For that to work, the contract had to be worded the way it was."