The Regional School Unit 5 administration has come up with a plan to allow the school district to absorb $138,000 in cuts to its state funding.

At a meeting of the RSU 5 Board of Directors on Jan. 9, Superintendent Shannon Welsh and Director of Finance Kelly Wentworth presented a report detailing how the RSU would be dealing with the curtailment in state funding.

“We really tried to look at funds that are far away from kids (when coming up with cuts),” Welsh said.

“We collaborated to come up with a plan that shared (the cuts) across the district evenly,” Wentworth said.

The cuts that the school administration identified came in the areas of tuition savings, a total of $33,000; $24,700 from the school’s accounts for books, equipment, postage and supplies; $20,000 from professional services; $13,400 from athletics; $10,000 from the capital project reserve account; $27,000 in cuts to curriculum materials and slightly more than $10,000 from the district’s contingency fund.

The cuts to state money comes as a result of Gov. Paul LePage’s executive order on Dec. 27 to reduce state spending. LePage ordered a $35.5 million cut in spending in an effort to balance the state’s fiscal 2013 budget. The cuts enacted by LePage include a total of $12.58 million in reductions to general purpose aid to state schools. The cuts were made necessary by a Maine law that requires the state produce a balanced budget by the end of each fiscal year, which is June 30.

According to information released by the state Department of Education, the $5.2 million in state aid to Regional School Unit 5, which serves Freeport, Pownal and Durham, will be reduced by slightly more than $138,000. The cut is a small percentage of the $24.9 million 2012-2013 school budget passed by voters in June.

Welsh said that most of the money identified had not yet been spent, and in some cases it was money that had been budgeted, but was no longer needed.

That was the case with the $33,000 in the tuition account. Welsh said that money is what the district would have paid in tuitions for Durham students who were still eligible to attend Brunswick High School to do so.

However, a lower-than-expected number of students chose to attend school outside of the district, which reduced the amount of money that was necessary for tuition.

“We anticipated Durham students going to Brunswick, but more of the kids went to Freeport High or Region 10 Technical High School,” Welsh said.

In the case of the cuts to the athletic budget, once again, it was money that the school district had budgeted, but no longer needed to spend.

Welsh explained that because of the student population of the high school, the district had budgeted for so-called “first teams” to be fielded, along with varsity and junior varsity teams, in such sports as soccer and basketball.

“Not enough kids went out (for those teams), so we funded varsity and junior varsity teams, but we didn’t need a first team,” Welsh said, adding that no teams were being cut out of the budget, as the first teams were not going to be fielded even before the curtailment.

As for the reductions to the curriculum materials, Welsh said that RSU 5 had intended to purchase a new science curriculum, but purchase has been delayed at least a year, she said.

The money reduced from the account for books and supplies was not generally for textbooks, Welsh said, most of that money was taken from accounts intended for smaller book purchases to help build up classroom libraries, as well as supplies such as copy paper. In fact, she added, despite the reductions, the district was able to keep money in the budget intended to purchase some new reading materials for students.

“We don’t have enough non-fiction reading materials for kids,” she said.

RSU 5 had also been trying to establish a reserve account for larger capital projects, Welsh said. But once the state curtailments came through, the school district was forced to use that $10,000 in the account to help make up the shortfall. The downside of that is that the schools no longer have a reserve account to help offset the cost of a future major project, Welsh said, but using that money allowed the school to keep more for classroom materials.

“That limited what we took out of books and supplies,” she said. “I’m hopeful this will get us through the year.”