NAPLES – After seeing their proposed budgets twice rejected by voters, School Administrative District 61 board members are going back to the drawing board to determine further cuts.

The full board met Tuesday night, and by Wednesday leadership had determined the schedule it will follow leading up to a third budget validation vote, now set for Tuesday, Aug. 16.

According to Superintendent Kathleen Beecher, who took over last week for the departing Patrick Phillips, the district’s leadership team will continue to meet this week to discuss ways to trim the budget. With marching orders given by the full board at the meeting Tuesday night, leadership will plug in updated enrollment figures – expected to be lower compared to when Phillips planned his budget almost four months ago – with an eye for cuts that do the least damage to students, Beecher said. Cuts to facilities, busing and technology will be the likely targets, she added.

As defeated by voters June 30, the district’s budget called for a 3 percent increase. In the last round of cuts, three positions or programs were cut, totaling over $268,000 in savings. Since a new fiscal year has started, Beecher said state law requires the school system to operate on the newly proposed budget, rather than the budget that ended June 30.

The most recent cost-cutting strategies will be presented to the full board at its next meeting, on Thursday, July 14, at 7 p.m. at the Lake Region Middle School. The public is invited to comment, as well.

On Monday, July 18, the full board will meet briefly at 7 p.m. at the central office to sign the revised budget warrant. The warrant will be presented tentatively on Tuesday, Aug. 9, during a district budget meeting at 6:30 p.m. at the Lake Region High School gymnasium. Similar to an annual town meeting, the public will be able to scour the budget line by line offering amendments at the Aug. 9 meeting, Beecher said. The finalized budget is then scheduled to go to referendum vote – known as a budget validation referendum – in each of the district’s four towns on Tuesday, Aug. 16.

It is highly unusual for residents to reject a school budget in Maine, and it’s even more unusual for them to vote it down twice. However, according to Casco resident Bob Levesque, who paid for a series of newspaper advertisements chiding school officials for presenting a budget with the state’s highest per pupil costs, school officials shouldn’t be surprised with the public’s reaction given the economy.

“From the very beginning, we’ve been advocating for a zero percent increase in the budget, not because we’re mean but because they’ve been spending too much of the taxpayers’ money and it’s got to stop,” Levesque, president of the Casco Tax Fairness Association, said Wednesday.

Levesque, 72, said the Lake Region district is proposing to spend in excess of $13,800 per student. His request of a zero increase would bring down to $13,400, or a total reduction of $666,000.

If the district can’t reduce its spending, Levesque said, the other alternative would be to review property assessments. Using existing home sales figures, he estimates Casco’s assessments should be slashed by about 20 percent to come in line with the housing market. Doing that, he said, would affect how the state calculates school subsidy, and reduce what local property owners would have to pay for local schools.

“The properties, at least in Casco, are assessed unrealistically high, which is penalizing the local taxpayer. Some towns around Maine have caught on to how the state (calculates subsidy) and they are gaming the system,” Levesque said. “So we either have to reduce our spending, or learn how to game the system too so we can bump up the state subsidy. It used to be the waterfront property owners who were the ones getting soaked. Now everyone is getting soaked.”

School board member Greg Smith, of Sebago, sees it differently than Levesque. He says the last budget validation vote, which failed by 16 votes on June 30, is “certainly no mandate” from the voting public, and argues that the two camps – “the tax camp” and “the education camp” as he described them – will be disenfranchised no matter how the board acts.

“I feel the communities are divided between those who feel strongly about education and those taxpayers who feel they’re getting a raw deal. So it’s a balancing act,” Smith said.

Smith also takes issue with how Levesque is calculating the district’s per pupil costs saying he is wrong to factor in the voter-approved high school and vocational center renovation project, approved in 2009.

“It’s great we have people out there like Mr. Levesque who are exercising their democratic right as a taxpayer, but with that said, some of his formulas are off and are not in line with the state’s numbers,” he said.

Smith said the $26.6 million budget is already a flat budget compared to last year’s if you don’t count the $700,000 debt service that must be paid this year for the renovations.

“If you take out that debt service, we are actually a little less than last year’s budget. So it’s a little unfair to call (this year’s budget) an increase when the voters approved this project and we are bound to pay.”