Dover moves up budget timeline to prevent unnecessary teacher layoff notifications

DOVER – The annual budget timeline has left some educators wondering, year after year, if they’ll have a job at the end of the school year, but that is about to change.

The City Council unanimously voted Wednesday to move the budget process up by a few months, so the budget process would start in November and December across all the city departments and the school district.

The City Council met with School Board leaders in a July workshop to brainstorm ways to improve the budget process. The consensus between the city and district was simple: the process needs to start earlier.

Deputy Mayor Dennis Shanahan said that while there might be some growing pains in this upcoming budget season with the new changes, he expects that it will put the city and district in much better shape for the fiscal year to come.

“In talking about some of the issues in the budget-making process that we seem to face every year, one of the key things that seems to create challenges is the timing,”  Shanahan said. “This way we'll be able to make decisions in time to get out of the path for the school district leaders to make theirs.”

For the school district, moving the budget adoption to an earlier date would help school leaders advertise new positions earlier in the year and help eliminate budget uncertainty for district staff.

District Superintendent William Harbron said he was glad to see the motion pass.

“It will help prevent us from having to RIF (Reduction in Force notifications) people unnecessarily,” Harbron said. “If that budget is adopted earlier, we know what we have to work with. If we have to replace employees retiring or leaving the district, it gives us a much earlier start than we’ve had in years.”

This helps eliminate the budget bottleneck and urgency in April, which is when the district has to decide what staff contracts it can afford to renew or positions it needs to fill or eliminate. Last year, 21 educators received RIF notifications stating that they may not be asked to return the following year because district leaders didn't know how much money would be in the budget for 2022-23. To meet the tax cap, major cuts would have had to be made. While this year the teachers that received RIFs were all brought back, this change in deadline would ideally prevent this situation.

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School administrators would submit the district's budget to the School Board in December with the intent of adoption by Jan. 15 before it is presented to the city manager and City Council by Feb. 15, City Manager Michael Joyal said. The city would then follow its typical process with workshops and public hearings. The final budget would be adopted by April 15, weeks earlier than the past, according to Joyal.

This article originally appeared on Fosters Daily Democrat: Dover NH changes budget process to avoid unnecessary layoff notices