Dear Parent, Guardians, and Friends,

I thought that I would try to use our list serve again, since we are gaining users every day. We still are far from reaching our goal for the number of subscribers, so we would appreciate your help by telling your friends to sign-up as soon as they can.

Today’s announcements have a variety of purposes. First, there is an attachment regarding school safety throughout the District. You may have already received it through “home delivery” or seen it imbedded in your school newsletter, but I thought I’d include it. It is a MS Word attachment, so I am interested to know how many of you were not able to open it. This will let me know if sending attachments is a feasible practice.

While I am on the subject of e-mail correspondence, we have begun to make a sincere effort to find ways to save money. One way is to reduce the use of copy machines and copy paper. We realize that the way we have configured our instructional materials requires the use of much copy paper, but we are looking at ways reduce use and abuse. More importantly, however, we will continue to expand our digital correspondence both internally and externally. The building principals have decided to begin posting newsletters on the district’s web site under their individual school links. Therefore, it is important that parents begin the change process of using their home or workplace computers to learn about school news. Signing up for the list serve will become increasingly more important. One of our monetary goals is to save enough money to keep one teaching position. (See below about the budget.) Your cooperation and assistance will be vital in helping us reach this goal.

Regarding the budget, some of you may have read that both towns have asked us to keep the assessment increase at or below 2.5%. I could use the rest of this message to explain how we reach each town’s assessment, but you would probably fall asleep before you reached the end of the explanation. Instead, I will just say that meeting this assessment goal will require spending less than this year in the areas which we can control: supplies, materials, textbooks, etc. Additionally, we will have to reduce staff and maybe even programs. In the coming weeks I will be making budget presentations to the School Committee and to the towns’ finance boards. We will hold a public hearing on the budget on March 13 th at 7:00 pm at the Thornton W. Burgess Middle School. This presentation will be recorded and then broadcast by Wilbraham Public Access. I am hopeful that I can convince both towns to allow us some leeway and to help support our current staffing levels and programs. I am also hopeful that our State aid will increase to a level that would avoid large scale reductions. The next two months will be an interesting time.

The local newspapers continue to follow the progress of the Minnechaug Building Project. For the most part we have been following the new MSBA school construction guidelines and preparing the required materials to complete our application. The new regulations have changed the process dramatically. The State will take a much more active role in the process and they will be involved almost from the beginning. The State will dictate what direction we take with Minnechaug and then they decide if they will support the project. In short, if they feel we should renovate the school, then that will be our direction. On the other hand, if they decide in the long run that a new school is the better route, then we will be asked to support a new school. There will be votes in both towns to accept or reject the State’s contribution. There will be no option to downsize or reduce the project. The option will simply be take our offer or leave it to someone else. Stay tuned for more information. This will also be an interesting process.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’d be interested in hearing your feedback regarding this new form of communication for the District.

Sincerely,
Paul C. Gagliarducci, Ed.D.
Superintendent of Schools