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SHREWSBURY, Mass. – The Shrewsbury School Committee will hold a public hearing on the Fiscal Year 2013 budget at their meeting on Wednesday.
In the preliminary budget presented last month, Superintendent of Schools Joseph Sawyer identified a $5.4 million budget gap and said layoffs may be needed to close the gap.
"About 80 percent of our budget is staffing, so to make any substantial reductions will require job loss," Sawyer said in his initial presentation. "We're hard at work to minimize damage to programming or loss of personnel, but given size of the gap it is very likely we'll have to do that."
The budget gap has since been cut in half, thanks to an additional appropriation in the Town Manager's initial budget.
Morgado increased the school department budget by 5.2 percent, or $2.4 million, to bring the total to $49,590,816.
This money is to help fill in for the school's loss of federal stimulus funding and circuit breaker revenues, according to Morgado.
The school administration intends to make its official recommendation for the FY13 budget at the March 14 School Committee meeting.
The public hearing, set to start at 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, also invites residents who are interested in expressing their opinion on school choice. The meeting itself starts at 7 p.m. The School Committee is required to vote, one way or another, on school choice every year.
