Facing a dire budget situation, the School Committee and Superintendent Dr. Barry Rabinovitch will ask Town Meeting voters to approve Proposition 2 1/2 debt exclusions for new school buses, textbooks, and other needs.

The School Committee in January approved what officials called a "bare bones" budget totaling $27 million for next year, fiscal year 2013.

That figure is $1.8 million above what the district received this year, but is what officials say is needed to avoid drastic cuts in services.

Rabinovitch says the money is needed to close the "achievement gap" between Wareham's students and state averages.

The budget includes funds for additional teachers and other school staff members, textbooks, and technology.

The increase in the budget is also due to the loss of federal grant funding.

With the town and the school district both facing cuts to services without more funding, the School Committee is looking to taxpayers to help ease the burden.

"We know that the revenue doesn't exist for the towns and the schools to support the needs of the citizens," Swett said, "so it's either a reduction in services or more revenue, and both are painful in a different way."

Facing a March 9 deadline to get articles added to the April Town Meeting warrant, the School Committee Wednesday OK'd articles that ask voters to:

• Allow the town to borrow approximately $360,000 to replace five buses in the district's aging fleet. Twenty-five vehicles are 11 years old or older. Though the town's Transportation Action Committee is still determining whether the district should continue running its own busing operation or outsource to a private vendor, these five buses are needed immediately to replace old buses, officials said.
• Allow the town to borrow $111,000 to repair the roof of the Wareham High School gym.
• Authorize the town to borrow $341,000. Of that, $260,000 would be used to purchase textbooks for literacy at the elementary level and $81,000 would be used to replace outdated classroom technology.
• Authorize the town to borrow $575,000 to pay for a feasibility study for a building project at the Minot Forest Elementary School. The feasibility study is a necessary step in the Massachusetts School Building Authority process, which would reimburse the town for 60% or better of the total cost of the project.

A debt exclusion would raise property taxes for those specific projects for a set number of years. Because they will be presented to voters as four separate articles on which to vote, voters can approve any one of them, all of them, or none of them.

The total cost of all the debt exclusions, if approved, would cost the median taxpayer with a single-family home valued at $220,000 less than $100 in total, which would then be paid over a yet-to-be-determined number of years.

Swett said the chair of the Finance Committee suggested that the School Committee go about getting the funds it needs for textbooks and technology through the debt exclusions.

"It was felt that the taxpayers should pay for [the items] over the useful life of the items being purchased, rather than [pay] a one-time hit," Swett explained.

The School Committee's requests will now head to the Board of Selectmen, which will need to agree to add the articles to the warrant.

If they are added to the warrant and Town Meeting voters approve the requests, the debt exclusions will still have to go on an election ballot for further voter approval.

Though the School Committee has requested the $27 million budget, it is unclear how much school funding will be built into Town Administrator Mark Andrews' budget.

Even if the district is level-funded -- that is, given the same amount of money ($25 million) next year as it was this year -- cuts will still be necessary.

"We can't afford to cut anything," Rabinovitch said. "But if we don't have the funds, we have to be able to run [the school system] and do the best that we can with the funds that we have."

Administrators and School Committee members are already having discussions about what to do if the schools cannot get the requested funding.

Rabinovitch said Wednesday that a 10% cut to all major lines in the budget would be necessary. He estimated that the schools would lose approximately 25 staff members and that class sizes would increase from kindergarten up to grade 12.

The School Committee will host a joint meeting to address the fiscal year 2013 budget with the Board of Selectmen and Finance Committee on Thursday, March 8, at 8 p.m. in the Wareham Middle School auditorium.