Education
School District’s Five-Year Budget Projections Have Lots of Extremely Soft Numbers
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When the Board of Education discussed the five-year “financial projection” for school district spending and revenues on Tuesday, there was some disagreement about whether or not it would be better to reduce some of the guesses about future state aid, and whether or not to anticipate an expansion of the Early Learning Program for preschoolers. But what everyone discussing the projections appeared to accept (and nearly everyone stated it in one way or another) was that no one knows how much state aid Darien will get, if the town gets any aid at all. And no one knows exactly what kinds of programs or changes to programs that the school district will have in future years. There are also plenty of other unknowns in the budget: If more teachers retire than usual in any given year, that could lower personnel costs considerably as new teachers hired to replace them would likely be younger and get lower salaries. Personnel costs are about two-thirds of the entire district budget.