WESTBROOK – A sometimes tense preliminary budget session between the Westbrook City Council and School Committee last week might have set the tone for the next several weeks as both panels struggle with how to keep taxes level in the face of a $2.2 million school funding gap.

Last year, after prolonged sessions, a last-minute scramble to close an even larger gap of $3.7 million ended with an approved $30.7 million school budget that cut six teachers and seven support staff, and raised the property tax rate 37 cents per $1,000 of valuation.

Exact figures of what a new budget looks like for the municipal side are not yet available. But School Superintendent Marc Gousse said the working education budget adds up to $31.6 million, an increase of $745,000.

Not surprisingly, the school district again took center stage at the Feb. 15 workshop.

The discussion heated up when Councilor John O’Hara accused School Committee Chairman Ed Symbol of not cutting enough from the district’s budget, even though Symbol said it already calls for eliminating approximately 21 positions, or 10 percent of the district’s workforce.

“That’s not sharp enough,” O’Hara said.

Symbol, in response, acknowledged that the district has a long way to go toward shrinking the budget gap, which may actually grow in the face of new figures showing a greater-than-anticipated loss of state funding for the 2012-2013 school year.

But, he said, while he knew it was unreasonable to allow a seven-figure budget gap to be handed off to the public in the form of a tax hike, it was equally unreasonable to ask the district to swallow the entire gap all by itself.

“It’s not going to be zero,” he said, referring to the dollar amount that taxpayers will ultimately have to bear. “It can’t be, because that’s when you’re devastating the school district.”

City Council President Brendan Rielly noted that the recession has led to cuts in funding on both sides of the city’s budget for the past several years, and that for budgets to continue shrinking, there is no longer any such thing as a painless cut.

“There’s a limit to how much (fat) you can cut,” Rielly said.

Gousse said his proposed budget includes an anticipated cut of 34 full- and part-time positions, along with the addition of 13 new positions, including a second assistant principal at the high school and a new assistant principal at the middle school. In total, Gousse said, the proposed budget calls for a net loss of 21 positions, which includes 13 full- and part-time teaching positions.

The proposed budget also factors in the closure of Prides Corner Elementary School, a plan that would include a reconfiguration of the district’s remaining three elementary schools to teach K-4 and send fifth-graders to the middle school. The School Committee has voted in favor of the closure on first reading, and is expected to confirm the closure at its next meeting, which will save the district more than half a million dollars.

But despite those cuts, the district is still struggling with a gap caused by more drops in state and federal funding. During the workshop, more details emerged about how the state calculated Westbrook’s funding level. According to figures released in January, the district will be losing more than $600,000 in state funding for the 2012-2013 school year.

Jeremy Ray, the district’s director of operations, said this week that school officials expected a loss in funds, but they only anticipated a $240,000 loss. The $600,000 figure, he said, was a bit of a shock.

Ray said the loss is due to what he called a “perfect storm” of several factors, including a change in the law regarding staff benefits, which used to allow for a “credit” from the state. That credit, Ray said, has shrunk in Westbrook by about $138,000.

Ray said the other “big piece” of the lost funding is the district’s special education and vocational center budgets. Both have dropped due to cost-saving measures such as the Sebago Educational Alliance, which continues to save the district thousands of dollars every year by, among other things, not sending special-needs students to far-flung locations for schooling.

The ironic flip side of that, Ray said, is that the state calculates how much it gives a district based in part on how much it spends. The argument, Ray said, is that if a district spends less, it is perceived as needing less.

“By being thrifty at times, it can hurt you,” he said.

At the workshop, Ray said he would be working with the state during the coming weeks to make sure the state is basing its allocation on the correct information. There is a chance, Ray said, that Westbrook may be able to get some of that lost funding back, but he is not optimistic.

“We’d be very lucky to pick up an extra $200,000, and that’s if everything goes in our favor,” Ray said.

Even if that happens, the district would still be struggling, as the budget gap now is already $2.2 million. A big part of that, according to Gousse, is the loss of some $588,000 in federal money from the Education Jobs Program, under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.

That money, which became available late in the last budget season, will not be available for the 2012-2013 budget, Gousse said, and the district was anticipating that.

“We knew we’d be facing a cliff this year, and that cliff has arrived,” Gousse said.

The gap also includes about $1 million in staff salary increases mandated by the most recent collective bargaining agreements.

The 2011-2012 budget came after initial speculations showed more than 70 jobs would be cut, and school officials stressed that it was unclear how many jobs would ultimately be cut in the new budget. But since the previous budget passed in June 2011, school officials have warned that layoffs would be likely this time, as well.

The 2012-2013 school budget will go to the School Committee’s finance committee in March, and will go before the full School Committee in April. The public will vote on the final budget proposal in a referendum on June 5.

On the city side of the budget, City Administrator Jerre Bryant said early numbers indicated a much smaller gap and much smaller potential position cuts.

“Relatively speaking, we’re in great shape,” he said.

This week, Bryant said municipal officials are looking at cutting anywhere from four to six positions, but hoped to keep the tax rate flat from the municipal budget.

Bryant also stressed the work-in-progress state of the proposed budget, and when asked if he could accomplish a zero percent increase, Bryant said, “It’s going to be tough.”