HAVERHILL - Several School Committee members want to use a portion of the district's $1 million cash reserve to hire more teachers or teacher aides to reduce large classes in kindergarten through grade eight.
The debate at next Thursday's meeting is likely to focus on whether the district should hire additional teachers or less expensive teacher aides, how many are needed and which grades and schools need reinforcement most.
Teachers cost about $50,000 each a year, including pay and benefits, while aides cost about $20,000.
Enrollment figures released last week showed some of the largest class sizes in recent memory. Projections showed 23 to 26 kids per class in kindergarten through grade three and 27 to 30 kids in grades four through eight. Haverhill's school year started Tuesday.
School Committee member Joseph Bevilacqua said he favors hiring more teachers immediately, and he accused school officials of hiding information about the cash reserve that could be tapped to hire them.
Superintendent Raleigh Buchanan recently said there was only $300,000 in the reserve account, and that the money had to be saved for pay raises for teachers and other school workers currently negotiating new contracts.
But Mayor James Fiorentini sent an e-mail to School Committee members Aug. 25 correcting that information. The mayor said there is actually more than $1 million in the reserve - $443,000 being held for the pay raises and $600,000 to $800,000 in unbudgeted money that the district expects to receive later this year from the federal government.
The federal money is owed to the city as reimbursement for services provided by city schools to disabled students and students from low-income families. It is commonly referred to as "the Medicaid money."
"It would be extremely foolhardy to budget all our reserves," Fiorentini said in his e-mail to committee members. "I do believe, however, that we could afford to hire some additional teachers."
School Committee President Kerry Fitzgerald said the superintendent was right not to factor the Medicaid money into the school reserves because it has not yet arrived.
"There's no guarantee that money will come in or how much we will get, and we won't know until January," she said.
Nonetheless, Fitzgerald said she supports finding money somewhere in the budget to hire more teachers or aides to lower class sizes in grades one and two.
"Some of those grades have classes of 26 and 27 kids," she said. "That's not OK. We have to do something."
Bevilacqua said it is critical the committee know exactly how much is in the reserve account when it develops the annual budget each spring.
"The School Department wants to keep an open reserve that only they know about, so they can use it as they see fit," he said. "We should know about our reserves during budget time, so we can budget it for issues like class size."
School Committee member Scott Wood said he favors lowering class sizes, but wants to wait until the student population stabilizes before hiring new teachers or tapping cash reserves.
"Let's not have a knee-jerk reaction to public pressure and e-mails from parents (about large classes) until we see how the class-size numbers shake out after Labor Day," Wood said. "I want to wait and see exactly where more teachers are needed, if they are needed, rather than rush to spend our reserves."
Crowded classrooms are the result of an enrollment surge combined with fewer teachers, school officials have said. Thirty-four teaching positions were eliminated this past summer to bridge a budget gap of almost $4 million.
As of last week, 7,558 students had already enrolled for the school year that starts today. That's up from 7,389 students in Haverhill schools at the end of last year, according to information provided by Haverhill to the state Department of Education.
