With Budget Looming, School Board Maintains Leadership

The Board of Education will be staying the course in the lead-up to what promises to be another lean budget year. On Monday, the three officers of the board were unanimously elected to serve another term.

Chairman Don O'Day, vice chairman James Marpe and secretary Faith Taylor will keep their positions for at least one more year.

"[This means] all the board members are comfortable with the leadership structure and comfortable with the fact that we work together as a team and there was no need to make any change," O'Day said in an interview.

O'Day, a finance executive who has worked in the field for 30 years, has been on the board since 2005. He has been chairman since 2009.

He said that the chief responsibilities of chairman include setting the agenda, running the meeting, and perhaps most importantly, defending the budget to the town's funding bodies.

School administrators set the budget, but the Board of Education wields the power to modify the budget, which normally comes in at more than $90 million each year. After that, they might be told by the Board of Finance or Representative Town Meeting to reduce the budget.

With the financial meltdown of 2008, the last two years have been more contested than usual.

On Dec. 6, the Board of Finance will have a joint meeting with the school board and members from the Representative Town Meeting to set fiscal guidelines. The Board of Finance pushed for a flat budget increase in the past two years, but they ultimately had to whittle down the school board's request further in order to keep taxes low.

After that meeting, the first draft of the budget will be established by school administrators.

O'Day said that the maintaining the quality of the schools in light of financial uncertainty is his goal.

"[I hope]  get a fair appropriation from the funding bodies for the coming school year in order to maintain what we have built and what we deliver," he said.