The Cape Elizabeth School Board received bad news about educational funding from both the federal and state level at a brief business meeting on Tuesday evening.
First, Interim Superintendent Bob Lyman informed the board of the proposed $108,000 reduction in funding from state Department of Education.
Cape Elizabeth will also lose $30,300 in federal Title I funds, which is grant money to be used to help students struggling in reading and math. Because it is grant money, Lyman said, the amount is not included in the regular budget.
The Title I funds are dependent on the poverty level in a community, which the federal government said has dropped from 7 percent to 4 percent in Cape Elizabeth over the last year. The poverty level is determined by the free and reduced hot lunch count in the district, according to Lyman.
Currently, Cape uses the $89,000 it receives in Title I funds from the federal government to pay for three half-time Reading Recovery teachers at Pond Cove Elementary School. The $30,300 reduction in funding would essentially mean one of those positions could no longer be funded. However, Lyman said, it is not likely that a reading recovery teacher would lose a job because there is still an unfilled position for a half-time kindergarten teacher.
The Reading Recovery position at Pond Cove Elementary School is a half-time job working exclusively with struggling first graders, but the three teachers at Pond Cove are also employed as half-time reading support staff for the entire school. Working with those positions and the vacant half-time kindergarten position, Lyman outlined two options available to the School Board.
First, they could take one of the half-time Reading Recovery positions and use that half-time position in kindergarten, or they could take away a half-time reading support position and move them to the half-time kindergarten position.
The central network of Reading Recovery teacher trainers and continuing career development already suffered cuts in state funding, and is now at risk at the district level. According to Pond Cove Principal Tom Eismeier, each Reading Recovery teacher teaches 16 students per year. Cutting out the funding “makes no sense to me,” Lyman said.
School Board member Rebecca Millett said she would prefer keeping the three Reading Recovery positions intact and use a half-time reading support position to fill the kindergarten vacancy. The reading support could potentially be filled with volunteers, she said.
Lyman said a third option could be to look for more money somewhere in the budget, but after scouring the school budget to get it below the 3.3 percent cap, he said, “it’s just not there.”
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