BRUNSWICK — Facing an estimated $3 million decrease in revenue for the 2012-13 operating budget, the Brunswick School Department will turn to the public before crafting a spending plan that Superintendent Paul Perzanoski said would “leave nothing untouched.”

On Thursday morning, the district’s budget committee met to outline topics that will be covered during a Feb. 29 forum that budget committee chairman Rich Ellis said would aim to gauge community priorities before the beginning of a school budget process that will continue through early April.

“We’re trying to accommodate public input before we get to the point where we say, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’” Ellis said. “We want to make sure that we’re considering public input prior to setting the budget.”

Ellis added that the Feb. 29 meeting will look at priorities in specific areas in which the school department provides instruction.

“We’re going to look at the budget from a program standpoint, in more concrete terms,” Ellis said.

Those areas include:

• — Grades K-5
• — Grades 6-8
• — Grades 9-12
• — Special/Alternative Education
• — Facilities
• — Extracurricular activities
• — Other

District business manager Jim Oikle said scheduling public comments first on the Feb. 29 agenda will not change the overall process of developing the budget, “but where you enter the game.”

“We’re starting with public input to find out what we want and then we’ll begin to price that out,” Oikle said Thursday.

Following estimates released last week that project Brunswick would lose $1.24 million in state aid for the 2102-13 school year, Ellis said he is still seeking more information about how the cuts were determined. On Thursday, he expressed frustration that the state has not continued progress toward funding 55 percent of education costs as mandated by Maine voters in a June 2004 referendum.

“They’re not meeting that and I’d like to know when can I expect them to step up on that,” Ellis said.

State government’s failure to implement the 55 percent mandate creates uncertainty for school districts, a circumstance that makes education planning difficult, Ellis said.

State subsidy formula fluctuations in the opposite direction can be just as difficult for planning, Ellis said, as in the case of Regional School Unit 1 — serving Arrowsic, Bath, Phippsburg, West Bath and Woolwich — where state aid was projected to increase by $1.4 million.

“This variability is creating a nightmare for municipalities,” Ellis said. “What kind of long-range planning can you do if you’re on the upside or the downside of state funding?”

Finding community priorities and necessities for education will be a key local focus in moving forward to draft a budget, Ellis said.

The public forum will take place at 6 p.m. Feb. 29 in the town council chambers at Brunswick Station, 16 Station Ave.

dfishell@timesrecord.com