$15.57M SAD 46 budget to be brought to the public

RCVS Assistant Principal Dyer appointed as principal 

DEXTER — A proposed 2021-22 SAD 46 budget totaling a little less than $15,575,500 will be brought to district residents in Dexter, Exeter, Garland and Ripley later this month for the first portion of a two-part process.

The annual district budget meeting will start at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, May 26, in the Ridge View Community School gymnasium, and the figure approved that evening will be moved to a budget validation referendum vote in the four towns on Tuesday, June 8.

The two dates were approved during a monthly school board meeting on May 5 at Ridge View.

“There’s an increase of 1.21 percent in the total budget,” Superintendent Kevin Jordan said. The current spending plan is $15,389,287, and a 1.21 percent increase of approximately $186,210 would equal $15,575,497.

“The total taxpayer budget, there is no increase at all,” Jordan said. Between local required monies, the local option, food service, local only debt service and adult education, the four SAD 4 communities have a 2020-21 combined assessment of $3,269,495.

Jordan said there are subtle changes to the individual assessments with Dexter’s down slightly and the other three towns seeing small increases.

The current assessments are $1,955,119 for Dexter, $570,618 for Exeter, $442,830 for Garland and $300,926 for Ripley.

“The budget committee has worked really hard on this since January,” the superintendent said in thanking group members for their efforts.

As part of the proposed budget, the school board approved SAD 46’s share of the Piscataquis Valley Adult Education Cooperative expenses for 2021-22. 

“This is a budget that is worked on and moved forward by the PVAEC committee,” Jordan said. “The adult ed budget has no change, it’s flat funded from this year.”

Currently SAD 46 contributes $68,185 toward the approximate $412,000 that is proportionally shared among PVAEC member school districts.

In other business, the directors approved the nomination of Ridge View Assistant Principal Jessica Dyer as principal with a contract to run from July 1 through June 30, 2023 at a salary of $84,000.

Dyer came to the school in 2014 for her first administrative position. 

She graduated from Keene State College in New Hampshire in 1997 with a bachelor of science degree  in elementary education. She received her masters of education in educational leadership from the University of Maine in 2013.

After starting her career in education as a kindergarten teacher at Palmyra Consolidated School in 1997, Dyer taught pre-kindergarten and then first grade at the Hartland Consolidated School from 1998 to 2014.

In his report, Dexter Regional High School Principal Stephen Bell said students are adjusting to the post-April vacation return of five days of in-person classes. 

“The reopening, we’re a week and a half into this and it seems to be going well,” Bell said. He said concerns about having enough classroom space to follow health and safety protocols have been mitigated but some pupils have been noticeably fatigued by the switch to five days in the building from the previous system of two cohorts attending on different days.

“We did welcome our sixth through eighth grades to a five-day school week,” Dyer said. “I talked to the teachers and every day it seems to be getting better but we have some work to do,” she added, as these students also are a bit fatigued by the post-vacation switch.

Full-time remote learners will continue with this method of instruction through the end of the school year. Students in kindergarten through fifth grade have been attending in-person classes Monday through Friday.