Gorham residents will be asked Tuesday to approve the school district’s budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which includes a 9.05 percent increase in the school property tax rate.
The budget for the 2025 fiscal year (FY25) represents a nearly $3.5 million increase in expenditures over last year’s budget.
The School Committee approved this version of the budget in late April, and for the first time in nine years, the Town Council followed suit shortly thereafter without making any modifications, according to the Gorham Times.
Voters Tuesday will be asked whether or not they support moving forward with the $53.1 million school budget and its accompanying tax increase.
The 9.05 percent property tax hike included in this budget would translate to a $320 annual increase on a home assessed at $400,000, bringing the total education component of this hypothetical bill from $3,516 to $3,836.
Currently, the school property tax rate for Gorham residents is $8.79 per $1,000 of assessed property value, and the proposed FY25 budget would increase this to $9.59 per $1,000 of value.
Over the course of four budget workshops, town officials were able to reduce the budget’s spending increase over FY24 from 7.62 percent to 6.97 percent.
To accomplish this, it was decided — among other things — to reduce the district’s planned health insurance increase for employees from 10 percent down to just 3 percent.
The Gorham Times reported that the final version of the FY25 budget includes some new expenses, such as a multi-language teacher at the middle school to serve the district’s “growing number of enrolled multi-language students,” as well as an additional resource room teacher at the middle school and a half-time K-5 speech therapist.
Two years after having discontinued the highs school’s alternative education program, the district has now moved to include in the FY25 budget two alternative education teachers and one alternative education staff member for a new program serving roughly fifty students in grades 9-12, according to the Gorham Times.
Included on the revenue side of the FY25 budget is more than $24 million worth of state subsidies and $600,000 from the town’s Fund Balance, which represents an accumulation of unspent funds over the past several years.
According to the Portland Press Herald, Gorham Superintendent Heather Perry chose to include this $600,000 allocation in an effort to ease the burden on local property owners.
“The Gorham School Committee believes this budget is the lowest budget that can be approved while still providing the needed programming to operate our schools and to best serve the children of this community,” Superintendent Perry reportedly said in an email to the American Journal.
Both the Gorham School Committee and Town Council approved of the FY25 unanimously, with one member absent and one recused respectively.
Gorham residents are not the only ones who will be considering school budgets with notable property tax hikes when they go to the ballot box Tuesday.
Voters in Lewiston will be tasked with deciding on a school budget accompanied by a 13 percent school property tax increase, while residents of Portland will be voting on budget with a 6.6 percent school-side tax hike.
More than 65 percent of Lewiston residents who turned out to the polls in May voted to reject an earlier version of the school’s FY25 budget, prompting officials to make more than $1 million in additional cuts.
The Lewiston Sun Journal reported that “[Superintendent Jake] Langlais said he is not telling anyone how to vote but he is encouraging people to approve the budget if they support school resources for those in in need, education, summer programming, after school programming, sports, pathways for success, special education programming for high need students, making schools safer and maintaining instruction and support at its current level.”
[RELATED: Lewiston Voters to Decide on School Budget That Would Hike Property Taxes 13%]
Similarly in Portland, significant work was done to reduce the increase in expenses for FY25 while maintaining a level of services that the district feels is necessary for students to succeed.
Portland Public Schools explained in a press release that the district originally went into the budgeting process with the expectation of having a $19.4 million shortfall that would have required a 17.41 percent tax increase.
[RELATED: Portland City Council Unanimously Approves School Budget with 6.6% Tax Increase]
The school district goes on to say that they were able to reduce this imbalance through “strategic reductions and restructuring.”
The Portland Finance Committee came out in support of the school budget in late April, praising it as a “thoughtful budget” that is “as responsive as possible to the needs of our students, staff and families, while also keeping in mind the concerns of taxpayers.”
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="28590 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=28590">3 Comments
Education being the bedrock of civilization, & good for society as a whole, why aren’t we calling on the ppl who have money to burn to pay for it, instead of putting the burden on local residents, most of whom are just trying to have a roof over their heads? Try taxing stock market transactions, for example. Ban PRIVATE schools, so the rich have to send their kids to the same public schools as everyone else’s kids, & fund those schools accordingly. This isn’t rocket science.
South Portland had 900 people out of 22,000 vote to pass the bloated school budget.
About 500 voted no.
Our taxes will be going up another 6% despite promises every year that that’s it for a while.
Most of the hikes are going to ESL teachers and counselors.
And Jill, if you read the US News and World Report that Maine Wire reported on you’d see that Maine, despite throwing more and more money at the schools every year, has gone from one of the top school systems in the country to about dead last.
And rich people who send their kids to private schools still have to pay the taxes that fund the schools, so they in fact pay twice. If the public schools were any good, they wouldn’t have to send their kids to private.
Homeschoolers still pay the taxes too.
Definitely not getting a good return on our money. And Jill not everyone who goes to a private school are rich, why wouldn’t any parent want the best education for their children. We sacrificed to send our children to a private school, worth every vacation, dining out, new car etc we never took. The best alternative if possible is to homeschool your children anything to keep them out of the public school system.