SCARBOROUGH – Faced with the 898-643 rejection of its $38.86 million budget at the polls May 14, the Scarborough Board of Education last Thursday voted 4-2 to reduce its spending plan by $54,000.

The school board also approved a list detailing further cuts that could be put in place to reach the Town Council’s stated goal of a 3 percent spending increase from this year’s budget. That would mean carving $391,400 from the budget rejected by voters, which had amounted to a 4.1 percent hike.

The Town Council was scheduled to conduct a first reading of the new school budget on Wednesday, after The Current’s deadline, in front of a June 5 public hearing and a new public vote June 11.

The size of the budget has been an issue between the council, which has argued for additional cuts throughout the process, and the school board, which asked voters to call the budget “too low” on May 14. In fact, school board members Kelly Murphy and Donna Beeley opposed the 0.13 percent cut made last week.

“I know the cuts presented tonight are the least painful, but I will support no further reductions in the school budget,” said Murphy.

“We did not submit a wants budget, we submitted a needs budget,” said Beeley, noting that the proposal sent to voters had trimmed nearly $3 million from the original budget draft prepared by Superintendent George Entwistle.

The new budget will go before the Town Council at a special meeting, to begin at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 29. The council will then conduct a public hearing and final vote on Wednesday, June 5, at which time it could order additional cuts. A do-over of the school budget validation vote is anticipated for Tuesday, June 11.

However, the school board is publicly urging parents and other supporters of its budget to attend the May 29 council meeting, rather than wait until the June 5 public hearing to speak out.

“May 29 is the critical date,” said Chris Caiazzo, chairman of the school board finance committee. “June 5, I think, is going to be too late because they [town councilors] are going to vote that night and unless we burn the town hall down I don’t think that [public hearing comment] is going to stop them from voting.”

According to Judy Roy, who leads the council’s finance committee, the predominant mood among her peers is to hold the school budget to a 3 percent annual spending increase, counting the school’s food service program.

On Thursday, the school board approved a list of additional cuts on top of the $54,000 it adopted. Prepared at Roy’s request, the list groups cuts in five tiers of roughly $100,000 each. It is intended to give councilors an idea of what line items will be affected by any further reductions they might order to the bottom line.

Those rollbacks include eliminating arts and music instruction at the primary schools, an “across-the-board” shave to athletic and after-school activities, and the loss of up to six positions, before the presumed council goal – deemed by Entwistle to be “fairly random” – is met.

“The only way we are going to avoid what’s laid out here is, the parents have to participate,” said Caiazzo. “We’ve done everything we can possibly do as a board, trust me, out front and behind the scenes.

“We’re faced with a very serious dilemma right now,” said Caiazzo. “This isn’t crying wolf. They’re chewing on our leg. There’s a wolf there. You need to get the shotgun. You need to come help.

“We cannot stress enough the need for parents to participate,” said Caiazzo, speaking directly to the community television cameras. “This is your game now. It’s up to you. If you don’t get involved, the rest of your child’s life could be at jeopardy.”

That comment echoed many on the school board, as well as the three residents who attended Thursday’s special school board meeting, who faulted parents for not turning out in numbers large enough to stem the rising tide of senior citizens and beachfront property owners, two groups reportedly riled by spiraling tax bills.

“The lack of parental participation in this process is devastating to me,” said Murphy. “The cuts that are going to happen are huge and no one is paying attention. It’s just incredibly frustrating.”

Although a record for a year in which the school validation vote was the only item on the ballot, the 1,541-person turnout for the May 14 referendum equated to just 10 percent of Scarborough’s registered voters, according to Town Clerk Tody Justice.

“Hopefully this process has opened eyes of parents in town,” said Windsor Pines Drive resident Jodi Shea.

Shea then suggested parents vote down the budget as too low on June 11, even though 60.8 percent of the May 14 turnout – more than actually voted against the school budget – checked a ballot box calling it too high.

“I get that I should vote yes and get what we can get,” said Shea, “but the fighter in me, the parent in me, says we can’t keep cutting the school budget. Our kids are paying the price. It [the tax increase] amounts to $20 a month. Don’t go out to dinner one night.”

However, a majority of the Town Council has said the May 14 vote is a signal that Scarborough residents have reached the end of the ability to sacrifice for the sake of school salaries and benefits, due for a $2.58 million, 9.25 percent, boost in the proposed budget. Freshman Councilor Ed Blaise has pointedly observed that property taxes in town have shot up 22.6 percent in the past four years.

“It really doesn’t have anything to do with the school budget,” he said on Wednesday, noting that spending hikes coupled with reductions in revenue promise a 7.9 percent tax hike. “People voted because their taxes are too high. I think we have to agree, that’s really what they were telling us. The real question is, what do we feel is a reasonable increase in taxes for the townspeople to accept?”

At the May 22 meeting of the Town Council Finance Committee, Blaise drove a stake in the ground at a 4 percent increase in taxes. That would mean carving out $2 million, an amount Blaise said should be divvied on a 60/40 split, taking $1.2 million from the school department and $800,000 from the municipal budget.

Roy, the chairwoman of the committee, however, would have none of it.

“At this point in the proceedings we are not asked to readdress the town budget,” she said. “That’s why we have a town council. If we put the town budget out to the public the same kind of thing [a no vote] might happen.”

“You can’t take $1 million out of the school and think you’d even have a school left at that point,” said Councilor Jessica Holbrook, who has otherwise supported holding a hard fiscal line of school spending.

Still, Blaise said the $391,400 cut allegedly championed by most town councilors is laughable, as it would only reduce the looming tax increase from 7.9 percent to 7.1 percent.

“That’s kind of an insult to the intelligence of the voters,” he said. “They did not turn this thing down because of eight-tenths of 1 percent.”

What voters have got in the $54,000 cut approved by the school board is a $20,000 scheduled software upgrade to the school’s K-12 library system, said by Entwistle to be “at the end of its life and failing.” According to school board Chairwoman Christine Massengill, the system’s bar code scanner no longer marks materials as checked out in the library database.

“If you can’t do that, you really have no way to operate the library,” she said.

Other cuts include $24,000 in stipends and support of clubs and after-school activities at the high school and middle school particularly to drama and music programs, as well as $10,000 set aside to begin a “quality assurance” program targeting instruction and curriculum improvements.