I would like to bring the Gorham community up to speed on a few things currently going on in the Gorham Schools. First, and foremost, I wanted to make sure that everyone knew that we are just now beginning the long journey of developing our proposed FY 18 Budget. We have had two budget meetings thus far with the School Committee where the administrative team has reviewed what is currently contained within the proposed FY 18 Budget.

This is just the beginning of the process, however, and we have three more public budget workshop meetings left before we will ask the School Committee to approve a budget in early April. For those of you who might have missed the first two budget workshops, you can view them by going to the Town of Gorham’s website. If you would like to attend any of the upcoming budget workshop meetings, they are open to the public and will occur on Monday, March 6, 13, and 27, at 7 p.m. at the Central Office Conference Room.

Once a proposed budget is approved by the School Committee in early April, I will spend considerable time getting information out to the public as to what the implications of the proposed budget are. The proposed budget will then be brought to the Town Council and discussed during a joint budget workshop scheduled for May 16.

Following this meeting, the Town Council will then vote on the proposed budget, along with the overall Town budget on Tuesday, June 6, which will then set up the final public referendum vote scheduled for June 13.

Just in case you haven’t noticed it yet – the Gorham Schools has a new website. Be sure to check it out here. We are excited that our new website is much more student-focused and easy to navigate. Special thanks to Dennis Crowe, technology director in Gorham, and several of his staff for their hard work in making this new website a reality.

Many of you may be wondering about snow days. It certainly has been a fun winter for those and we’re not done yet I’m sure. At this point, we have used all five of the snow days we have built into the calendar. If we only use those five, our last day of school for all students would still be June 15. Something tells me, however, that this is likely not to happen and if that’s the case you will need to extend the last day of school one day for each additional school day we use between now and a hopefully close-by spring.

Once we get through the month of March and into early April, and I feel secure that we’re likely not to have any additional snow days, I’ll make public what our last day will be.

For those of you who are interested in keeping up with our Proficiency Based Learning (PBL) work, I have published the fourth in my PBL blog series online. Please be sure to read up on the most recent decisions that have been made on our implementation plans here.

Finally, I wanted to make sure folks knew that we have several big district-wide committees working right now on some pretty big topics. I am working on adding pages to our website that will allow you to follow the work of these committees so stay tuned. The Committees are:

Gorham High School Building Committee & Athletic Capital Campaign Committee – these groups are focused on addressing our ever increasing problem of increasing enrollments at our high school that is already over capacity (was built for 750 students, we now have 850 students in it, and are expecting more over the next few years).

School Day Committee – this group is investigating whether or not we should look at later start times for our grades 6-12 students while also researching a possible need to extend the school day slightly since we currently have the shortest school day when compared to other nearby school systems.

K-5 Reconfiguration Study Committee – this group is investigating what we can do in terms of possible reconfigurations to address increasing class sizes and enrollments at our three K-5 schools.

Strategic Planning Committee – this group is working to create a more detailed short and long range plan for helping to make our new mission and vision a reality for our students. This strategic plan will outline specific goals, action steps, and timelines for this work over the next 3-5 years.

As always if you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please feel free to reach out to me at heather.perry@ gorhamschools.org.