CORNISH — With over a dozen more students attending Cornish Elementary School than a year ago, voters barely blinked before unanimously endorsing a 7.6% tax increase and 4% operating budget increase on Saturday.
About 50 residents in the school’s gymnasium completed the school district’s annual meeting in barely 45 minutes. Near the end, the only person who initially called out a vote of “no” to the $3.78 million budget, which is up less than $150,000 from last year’s appropriation, quickly retracted.
While school officials expect the increase to cost taxpayers 7.6% more — amounting to an additional $268 on a $250,000 house — enrollment at the elementary school is up 15%, much of it attributable to the school’s adoption of full-time kindergarten.
At the end of the 2018-19 academic year last June, the elementary school was teaching 94 students in kindergarten through grade 8. This year, school board member Alexys Wilbur told voters, 108 are attending classes, including 13 pre-kindergartners, 14 kindergartners and 17 first graders.
“We had an enrollment of 78 five years ago,” Wilbur recalled. “That’s a significant increase in a small amount of time.”
Whereas a year ago the school district added a full-time teacher to keep pace with the boom in elementary enrollment, the budget for 2020-2021 calls for hiring a teacher to teach Spanish three days a week, officials said.
In all, the school district will spend a little more than $1.2 million — an increase of about $100,000 — to teach that elementary-school student body, and $779,000 to send Cornish’s 50-plus students to out-of-town high schools, some $25,000 less than this year.
School officials said that much of the added spending in the elementary school comes from a $60,000 increase in teacher salaries, the majority of that total from raises in the current teacher contract. School Board Chairman Justin Ranney added that Cornish also is moving a guidance counselor from part-time duty to full-time, leading to double-digit-percentage increases in the department’s salary and employee-benefits budgets.
Special-education services for K-12, meanwhile, will cost more than $356,000, almost $90,000 more than school officials expect to spend this year.
The School Board also budgeted $11,000 more for the salary of the principal. Ranney said that with an ongoing search for a replacement for current principal Brandon Feid, “we’re trying to be as competitive as we can within the area.”
In Australian balloting Saturday, all incumbents were running unopposed for elected positions in the school district. Alexys Wilbur and Melissa Drye were seeking new terms of three years each on the school board, and those seeking reelection to one-year terms were district clerk Merrilynn Bourne, moderator Daniel Poor and treasurer Carleah Meenagh.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727- 3304.
Correction
Leo Edward, who attended the annual School District meeting with his mother Lauren and met some new faces for the first time, is a month old. An earlier version of a photo caption with this story gave an incorrect age for Leo, whose mother is a teacher at Cornish Elementary School.