12-03-2025
Preston school board approves budget with 6.5% increase
Preston — The Board of Education voted Monday to approve the proposed 2025-26 school budget of $16.02 million.
The plan still requires approval by the Board of Finance, and town voters at a referendum.
While presenting the budget to the school board Monday, Superintendent of Schools Roy Seitsinger explained the $988,542, or 6.5%, increase over the current $15.03 budget, is mostly the results of fixed costs, or increases out of the district's control, including contractually obligated raises and benefits for staff and administrators, and rising costs for special education and secondary tuition.
The tuition is needed to pay for district students to attend Norwich Free Academy, or North Stonington or Griswold high schools. Those do not include technical schools, which Seitsinger said the district doesn't pay tuition for.
Increases to staffs' salaries and benefits account for 41.5% of the total budget increase. Special education costs account for 23.6% while secondary tuition costs account for 20.8% of the increase.
Meanwhile, the proposal calls for no new programs and staff has not been reduced.
Seitsinger said the only new staff changes contributing to the increase are a half-time bus driver, and stipends for coaches that resulted from adding three new sports teams this year.
Because the state has not yet decided how much school districts will receive in state aid, the town, which currently receives about $3.5 million, will have to wait for an update. Seitsinger said if more aid comes to the town before the school board's March 27 budget presentation to the Board of Finance, the funding will be used to lower the budget increase.
Meanwhile, he said the school board will try to pare down" the budget before then.
On Monday, the majority of the school board agreed the budget was not extravagant and had little room for further cuts. Before Monday, administrators and the school board's finance committee had examined an initial proposal and cut $341,679. Cuts included reducing a full-time bus driver to half time, and eliminating about $50,000 to clean dust off the girders in the schools' gyms.
Five members voted in favor of the spending plan, while Republican member Courtney Ennis, who said she didn't want to vote on a budget she had only had two days to look at, and still had questions about, abstained.
Democrat board member Michael Hinton, a member of the board's finance committee, described the budget as "unfortunately realistic," and considerate of "a challenging period in our history."
"The expectation that it's going to be further cut is an incredibly terrifying one for me," Hinton added. "Because the cut, as I've already characterized, I think is already down to the bone. To go further is going to be impacting service to students."
"There's not a lot of wiggle room I'm getting," Republican member Nicole Serra had agreed.
Hinton said should more significant cuts need to be made, they would have to come from non-tenured teachers, or school programs.
"And there aren't many programs, he said.
