January 10, 2025
Dear Families,
I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and 2025 is starting out strong for you. On Monday night we had a school board meeting and finalized the budget for the 25-26 school year. After a large budget increase last year this year, we were able to keep the increase to 0.16%. Many line items have gone down, but tuition and building expenses are the areas that are up. We will be graduating 5 seniors from Milford this year but moving up 17 students to Milford Middle School. The tuition increase is $137,000 just in that one line. We have had to work hard to make cuts in other areas to help offset that large increase.
Back in 2010 the district created a capital reserve fund (savings account) named “Unanticipated Tuition Reserve Fund”. The original purpose of this fund was to have money to pay for tuition for students that moved into town over the summer or transferred from private school and wanted to go to Milford Middle or High School. We were hoping to use some funds in this account to help offset the large tuition increase this year, but because it is only for unanticipated students moving into town we aren’t able to access that money to help the taxpayers. We have a warrant article asking for permission to change the name and purpose of this capital reserve. We want to change it to the “Tuition Capital Reserve” so that we can access the money to help the next 3 years as we will continue to have a large increase in the tuition line due to the larger class sizes moving from MES to Milford Middle School. Currently we have $154,000 in there and the board is planning to use $80,000 to reduce the burden on taxpayers, but they can only do that if the article passes by a 2/3rds majority. This is a very important article to get passed. So I ask you to please vote yes on Article 4 and encourage other taxpayers to do the same. This will not cost you money but it will help us save you money. If this doesn’t pass, the $154,000 sits in the bank awaiting a large unanticipated influx of middle and high school students moving into Mason (very unlikely).
Article 5 also is related to Article 4. Article 5 is asking for permission to put $80,000 into the Tuition Reserve (as long as the name and purpose change pass) at the end of the year if we have any money left over on June 30th. Again tuition is going up the next 3 years so anything we can do to help offset these increases will be very helpful when it comes to your tax bills.
We have three seats open on the school board. District treasurer position is open as well as 2 school board members each for a 3 year term. If you are interested or know anyone that is interested in running for school board the window to sign up opens on January 22nd, and goes until Jan 31st at 5pm. You can sign up here at the school and Miss Heidi can assist you in the process. If you would like more information about the role of a school board member please reach out, I would be happy to tell you more about it.
The next meeting we will be having about the budget is February 1, 2025 at 9 am in the multipurpose room. This is the deliberative session. This is a time that the school board will share information on the budget and can answer any questions you may have. I encourage you to attend to learn more about the budget. You can find more budget information on the website under the school board tab. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.
We have some fun events coming up! We will be having our “someone special” dance on Friday, February 7th. The theme this year is sock hop/50’s attire! So get your poodle skirts and bowling shirts ready! More information about the dance will be coming next week!
In March we will also be introducing One Book, One School. We have done this previously where all the grades in the school read the same book and then when the book is finished we have a whole school celebration. This year we have decided to send the books home and have families read the book together with their child(ren). Then we will have our family night event to celebrate the completion of the book on Thursday, April 24th. More information will be coming about this as well but please mark your calendar for April 24th and be ready to do some reading with you kiddos!
I wanted to thank everyone that donated to our fundraiser for the hurricane victims. We were able to raise and donate $1012.42! Please keep those in California in your thoughts while they deal with these horrible wildfires. I will take our freezing cold weather over that any day.
Stay warm and pray for snow! We need to be able to go sledding at recess again.
Kristen