The Meridian Public School District’s proposed budget received a hearing at the Meridian High School Multi-Purpose Building Monday evening, with a vote for final approval from the district’s Board of Trustees scheduled for Monday, June 26.

District officials presented several facets of the proposed budget, which they said will operate with a significant decrease in Title 1 funding.

According to a report from the district, the total proposed 2017-18 expenditures add up to $60,416,978.06, with 49.3 percent of the proposed budget “allocated for instructional purposes.” That’s the largest portion of the proposed budget. Last school year’s proposed expenditures totaled $65,036,399.

The district’s report notes that the proposed budget allows for “needed capital improvements. The proposed budget also includes yearly step increases, in line with the state scale, for teachers.

Student enrollment is projected at 5,535, resulting in a per pupil expenditure of $10,102.34.

During the budget hearing on Monday, Kelli Speed, director of federal programs for the school district, noted a 22 percent decrease in Title 1 funding for the coming school year. Despite that decrease, she said after the hearing, the district will add eight academic coaches, replacing four district-level instructional specialists.

John Taylor, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said the district-level instructional specialists had received administrative-level salaries. The academic coaches, he said, will receive salaries on a certified teacher scale, which are less than those administrative salaries. 

“By forgoing those (salaries), we were able to afford certified staff to do the same job, expanded,” Taylor said after the hearing.

Taylor said the academic coaches will be assigned to specific buildings, unlike the district-level instructional specialists who were housed centrally and who went out to schools on assignment.

Speed said other cuts helped to absorb the federal reductions the district faces for the coming school year.

“We made some very strategic cuts,” Speed said.

Taylor said some software programming, for instance, was eliminated.

“There were supplemental resources that did not lend themselves to student achievement or student growth,” Taylor said.

And those resources, he said, would be eliminated for the coming school year.