The Gloucester Community Arts Charter School took a $94,128 hit last month, on top of cuts the school made in its fiscal 2012 budget last year.
But school officials Thursday pegged the net funding loss around $20,000, after an uptick in federal and state grants.
The cut came after the state altered the charter's per-student funding from $11,800 to $11,200, Executive Director Tony Blackman confirmed Thursday.
On the whole, Blackman said, the school has dealt with around $400,000 in cuts during this, its second, year. It has, however, managed to maintain its full academic and arts programs despite the changes.
The school is also, as the Times reported Tuesday, committed to moving forward and adding two grades next year, filling out its chartered mandate for kindergarten through grade eight classes. Blackman says that the facility can house the new grades.
"We have not had any reduction in programs at the school," Blackman said during a Board of Trustees finance committee meeting Wednesday night. A recording of the meeting was provided to the Times.
The charter school not only adds kindergarten and first grade next year, but will also graduate its first class of 22 eighth-graders this June.
Blackman expects a better outlook for the school in the 2012-2013 school year, and figures on an enrollment of 200 students, though he reiterated those projections are preliminary.
The school can fit that projected enrollment, he said, by re-configuring classrooms.
In doing that, the school loses its dedicated music room. That room, said Blackman, will become an eighth-grade classroom, while music will be taught along with theater and physical education in what is now the gymnasium.
Blackman said Thursday he's not expecting the school to expand beyond that capacity until at least the 2013-2014 school year.
Despite the projected increase in students, the school has lost a few teachers since the start of this school year, Blackman confirmed.
The charter school began the year with a teaching staff of 18, including special education teachers and arts instructors. That total is now about 16, he said.
Blackman said an English teacher and mathematics teacher for grades six and seven, a teacher fro grades two and three, and the school's music instructor all left in the last few months. Blackman said the school shifted a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher to the second- and third-grade spot after another fourth- and fifth-grade teacher returned from maternity leave.
Two substitutes are filling the music instructor's spot until the school hires a new full-time instructor, he said. The public but independent school's classes all operate under a multi-age learning format.
To handle the other two losses, the school has placed all of its sixth- and seventh-grade math and science classes under the care of a sixth- and seventh-grade mathematics teacher and a seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher.
"Instead of four sections for 57 kids, we have three sections," Blackman said.
The State Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had not provided staffing numbers to the Times as of press time Thursday. James Caviston, chairman of the Board of Trustees, could not be reached for comment on this story.
Blackman said the school will, on top of the kindergarten and first-grade teachers, add a Spanish language and dance instructor in the coming year.
The school took a $200,000 budget cut at the start of this school year after its actual enrollment, while doubling last year's numbers, reached just 135 students, compared to a projected 196, and staffers took a voluntary 5 percent cut in pay at that time.
A first-year teacher at the charter school makes about $34,000, Blackman said.
Steven Fletcher may be contacted at 1-978-283-7000 x3455, or sfletcher@gloucestertimes.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevengdt.
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