Technology Highlights Foxborough Schools Proposed Budget of $29.3M

As May's Town Meeting approaches, school officials have reviewed and discussed the proposed $29.3 million FY14 budget for Foxborough Public Schools.

The proposed total of $29,338,877 will see an increase of $1,173,144 (4.17 percent) over the FY13 budget of $28,165,733.

Foxborough Patch recently sat down with Foxborough Schools Superintendent Debbie Spinelli and School Business Administrator Bill Yukna to discuss what the drivers behind this year's budget are, what is left out of the budget and what administrators are hoping the proposed budget will accomplish.

“We want to maintain our high level of services to students in Foxborough," Spinelli said. “This basically is a level-service budget where we maintain all our programs and services with one or two tweaks this year.”

According to Spinelli, one of those tweaks is the continued use of educational technology.

New to the school budget will be the addition of a district-wide Mobile Technology/Database Specialist who will manage expanded school and district data and the deployment of new mobile technology tools such as iPads for students with disabilities and other innovative technologies.

Another position, a Technology Integration Specialist, will also be added district-wide.

"We have one person now that travels in all five schools. So this is somebody who is a trained teacher and trained in technology and they basically work with the teachers about how to integrate technology effectively into their classroom instruction and how to help students use technology effectively," Spinelli said.

"We have in our budget a second postion proposed so that if we could have a two school, three school split we'd get better service," she said. "As technology is exploding you can’t keep the department the same size so that’s what we’re doing."

The budget will also add funds to take on the increased costs of technology software support and the increased costs of network services such as fees and licenses for the use of technology.

“There’s a lot more of what’s happened over the last few years with the push on technology. The iPad initiatives, the wireless initiatives, all these things really are creating more licensing fees that we have to pay in order to stay current with it,” Yukna said.

Other drivers in the budget include an increase in the cost of professional development, the hiring of a new educational assistant in the special education department and replacement of equipment in the music department.

Professional development for teachers and administrators will be focused on technology, the educator evaluation system and realigning to common core standards, Spinelli said.

“We have increased cost for professional development, so we want teachers to be trained to teach AP (Advanced Placement) courses. So that, believe it or not, is quite expensive so we had to add some to increase professional development costs for that,” Yukna said.

The addition of one educational assistant position in the special education department is included in the budget.

“Obviously our special ed. program like any district fluctuates based on the actual kids within the program. So in this particular budget, based on what we know for next year we need to add one more ed. assistant for an individual program,” Yukna said.

The district's award-winning music department will look to see some of its aging equipment replaced, as well.

“They try to do it in big chunks, which I think is hard for any town to absorb, and that is with our music program, which obviously I think we get very high ratings for,” Yukna said.

“But, equipment is equipment and it only has a certain life. And instead of just trying to go out every 10 years and say you’re going to replace half the band, it makes more sense to put a dedicated few thousand dollars every year towards replacing the older items and moving forward,” he said.

After explaining what made it into the budget they discussed what was left out.

One of the main components left out of the budget was eliminating fee-based full-day kindergarten classes. Kindergarten will continue to remain free for half-day students and a fee will be charged for full-day students.

“That’s the only thing in Foxborough that is fee based," Spinelli said. "We don’t have athletic fees, we don’t have transportation fees, we don’t have fees for extracurricular or parking or anything. But we do have to run a fee-based full-day kindergarten program because we don’t have the money to go forward and provide free universal,” she said.

"It would probably cost us about $250,000 to go free universal and obviously we're not there yet," said Spinelli.

With Town Meeting slated for May 13, Spinelli said she feels comfortable with the budget they have put forward to the town.

“We have put a lot of work into ‘Where do we really spend the money?’ and ‘Where do we really need to spend the money?,’" she said.

“We want to budget to reflect where we really need to support the teaching and learning process and maybe even consider some other parts of the budget that maybe we don’t need anymore that we can reallocate. So we have been trying to be really responsible,” Spinelli said.