Irregular Staff

KINGFIELD -- "That's the good news," said Superintendent Quenten Clark as he told school board members that this year's expenditure appeared to be on track last Thursday.

"The bad news is that the State is looking for a curtailment of about 10 percent. Education is a part of that and I believe it amounts to about $58 million across the State."

Clark said he expects that this means that the State will hold back one subsidy payment from this year's current MSAD #58 budget.

"That's $1,000 for Carrabassett Valley and it's $300,000 for us. We are going to be doing stuff like avoiding spending money for the rest of this year. That's $300,000 from this year's budget and all of you remember the struggle of the cuts this year to get the budget to where it was," Clark added.

Clark said that things are not going to happen like people would want them and teachers will not have supplies as they'd like.

Clark mentioned that this has become a crisis across the State and places like Augusta were considering closing schools according to reports he read.

He went on to say he expects things to get much worse the following year with State revenues such as excise tax and capital gains way down in a starving economy.

"I'm not going to worry about next year, but for this year we have to avoid spending anywhere we can avoid spending."

Clark said he appreciated the contributions that staff members were making like the janitors coming to him recently and telling him they could save money on the uniforms line item.

"I think we're going to save about $100,000 on oil this year. Of the $300,000, I think we have $100,000 taken care of," Clark added.

He was referring to the savings on oil as a result of an anticipated wood boiler being installed this season at Mt. Abram High School.

"I think it's going to be a long and crazy ride. I don't know what they're going to do next year… because I think it's going to be really, really bad. I've gone from thinking that we need to go back and look at our experience back in 1990-1991 to see what kind of programs can go. Now I think we need to go back at look at our experience from 1933."

We'll get through it, Clark said. "If you hear we're refusing to spend money - - we are refusing to spend money."