By Melanie Petrucci, Senior Community Reporter
Shrewsbury – The School Committee unanimously voted to adopt budget priorities and guidelines for fiscal year 2021 at its Oct. 30 meeting. The “Priorities and Guidelines” document was discussed at their previous meeting at which School Committee members Dale Magee and Lynsey Heffernan presented an overview.
Patrick Collins, assistant superintendent, remarked that the priorities and guidelines is a “statement piece” by the School Committee to the larger community and it’s also designed to provide guidance to the superintendent of schools and administration.
“The assumptions that we are operating under is that due to space constraints that it will be voted sometime in the future that there will be no new school choice seats in the upcoming school year as well,” Collins stated.
The priorities and guidelines contain a status quo budget, but also future goals and additional resources that are needed.
“We are trying to be prudent with our resources and signal to the community the fact that the tax base isn’t the only place we are looking for resources,” Magee said. “We are also signaling that we are looking for better ways to inform the public regarding our budgeting process and what the budget looks like.”
Heffernan added that they also were sharing assumptions that goes into creating the budget with the community.
“In our suggestions for the budgetary priorities is that we don’t lose sight of the work that was done in the last school year by the Collins Center thinking about our central office and the district as well and the stressors,” she said.