Each year school administration faces the major task of creating a school budget that will be accepted by the school budget committee, city council, and in the end the voters will make the final decision.

This year the school budget for Biddeford High School is down 0.24% from the last year, but because of a loss of federal funds due to an increase in the mil rate, the school is losing money which creates problems for Principal Jeremie Sirois.

“Essentially the state has determined that they were going to go up from 8.1% to 8.48% [mil rate] which creates a bigger discrepancy in our school funding,” said Sirois. “When we got our funding back from the state we were basically shorted 300 and … 20 thousand dollars from the previous year.”

With the loss of that much money it leaves it up to the taxpayers to pay higher taxes to make up for the loss of the $320,000.

“Now the local taxpayer needs to come up with that money, which in order to come up with that money it ends up being roughly $650,000 based on the tax hit,” Sirois said.

The school budget has three tiers of possible cuts, with tier one predicted to be the cuts in the final budget. In tier one the school will be cutting a English teacher and in tier three the school would have to cut a Social Sciences teacher.

“I can’t really talk about individual personnel, what I will say is that we are going to feel the effects, we are going to lose at least one staff member,” said Sirois. “We had an open science position, we already cut that so definitely two positions.”

The guaranteed loss of a teacher from the English department creates problems for English Department Head Bruce Brasier, who has to manage the amount of kids in each class to keep classes productive.

“I know the school is going to be smaller but the class sizes are really good right now, they are great sizes and I worry about that some, actually a lot,” said Brasier. “Just[there’s also] the personal aspect of it because the newest one [teacher] was a student of mine who I was pretty adamant about hiring because she was such a good student.”

The average class size for English classes this year is 19 students. Cutting just one teacher would make the other teachers workloads even greater than would be wanted by staff.

“One teacher every other day, teaching three flatout English classes that average 19, so six times 19, that is 54 kids being dispersed among x amount of teachers, it will increases class sizes,” said Brasier. “I’d much rather not be doing this [losing an English teacher] for sure.”

The loss of an English teacher is bad enough, but if the city council were to make the choice to cut all the way to the tier three cuts that the school would be forced to cut a social studies teacher, which would cause major problems for students and Social Studies Department Head Andrew Reddy.

“It would adversely affect students because class sizes would increase making classes more difficult to manage, and make students attending those classes feel as if they didn’t have some degree of at least a semblance of individual instruction,” said Reddy.  “It would make it that much more difficult and daunting for the teachers who are left.”

If the cuts did come to the point of losing a social studies teacher, it wouldn’t just be the increased class sizes that would be a problem for students, losing a social studies teacher would force the graduation requirement for social studies to be lowered, affecting how colleges look at Biddeford High School students.

“The number of social studies credits required for graduation would be reduced from three to two,” said Reddy. “Yeah without question it would affect students looking at college.”

Not only are classes being affected by the proposed budget, sports are also having money removed from their budgets. The two main sports losing money are swimming and football, who are in total losing $9,980.

“Thornton Academy would take our swimmers. They would still swim under our name, we just wouldn’t have to pay the pool expense and all that stuff,” said Sirois. “With football going to class B, many class B schools don’t have freshman programs, so you can drop an assistant coach from that. So the programs aren’t being cut they are just being modified.”

Some students, like Junior Michael Cantara don’t understand why the government has such a huge budget but leave schools the leftovers after they spend money on other departments.

“It doesn’t really make sense our country wants us to do good but they don’t help our schools at all,” said Cantara. “When it comes to our country needing us they tell the state to do what they can for school and put all their money into the military. It makes no sense.”

Other students like sophomore Alec Fechette don’t understand why the school is cutting so many teachers, but they agree with cutting money from sports if it helps in the long run.

“It’s not fair how they are cutting people and how certain departments are being cut from for unnecessary reasons,” said Fechette. “I can understand them cutting from sports budgets more if they cut less from teachers.”

In the end it’s not the principal, the staff, or the students who get to make the final decision: it all comes down to what the taxpayers agree to pay for the next school budget.