Dr. Semmel's Monthly Update
January 2025
Each year, the Trumbull Public Schools develop a District Improvement Plan (DIP) to guide our work for the coming school year. The DIP is developed by our Professional Learning Community (PLC) that includes administrators and teachers throughout the entire district. These goals are also reviewed by the Board of Education and approved at the July BOE meeting. I shared these goals with everyone in my July 2024 newsletter. Each year we also provide a Midyear Update and End of Year Update on the progress we made on each of the goals. For your reading pleasure, I provide you with our Midyear Update. From my perspective, we continue to focus on our priority areas and we are seeing excellent outcomes. The success of our school district is a direct result of the synergies created when the staff, parents, and community have a common goal. While everything may not be perfect, we strive each and every day to provide a high-quality education of which we can all be proud.
I would like to provide information regarding both the 2024-2025 budget and the 2025-2026 budget. If you would like to help, you can reach out to your State elected officials and ask that they use your State tax dollars to support local education.
2024-2025 Budget
On Thursday, January 16, in conjunction with our Business Administrator, Paul Hendrickson, we froze our current budget. We started the school year concerned that the “Public Benefits” portion of our electricity bills would be a problem. Extrapolating from our current bills, we see that we may be over budget by over $250,000 because of this one item. In addition, we recently learned that our Excess Cost Reimbursement (ECR) from the State will only be 59.9%. The link provides a good explanation of how ECR works in the State. As a district, we typically expect about 72% reimbursement for ECR, but during the 2024-2025 budget process we saw the writing on the wall and reduced our expectation to a 67% reimbursement rate. The 59.9% rate means that we can expect about $227,000 less than budgeted. Finally, we have experienced significant increases in the cost to educate and transport our students who are outplaced. Increases of 7% to 10.8% far outstripped our expected increases. Given all of these unexpected costs, we had no choice but to freeze the budget and manage our expenses to end the year.
I have made it clear to my team that the budget freeze should not impact the day-to-day teaching and learning for our students. Students and staff will have all the supplies they need, and they should not see any interruption in the exceptional teaching and learning that we expect in Trumbull.
2025-2026 Budget
I presented my budget to the Board of Education prior to winter break and provided two formal presentations at Board of Education meetings on January 7 and January 9. I anticipate the BOE will review and finalize their budget on February 4. We have a number of budget related links on our website, but I listed them below for your review as well.
