Full day kindergarten and our foundation budget

As plans are being formulated to implement full day kindergarten for the Dartmouth schools, I was concerned that the town would not be able to afford the increased amount of local contribution due to an increase in the foundation budget. Adding 260 students will increase our school department foundation enrollment and therefore the school department budget by over $1 million.
The town is not in a position to add that kind of expenditure without requiring cuts in other areas.
As it turns out, we would not have that big an increase in required school spending. Here is why. The state has decided that Dartmouth has a target state Chapter 70 aid percentage of 17-1/2 percent. But we were already way above that percentage, so the state has been phasing in the reduction in state aid. If you are not interested in the mechanics of this reduction, skip to the next paragraph.

There is a formula for the reduction of aid every year. The formula takes the prior year required spending and adds one or two percent to the total in order to reduce the state aid percentage over several years. If the difference between the target percentage and the actual percentage is more than 10%, 2% is assessed. Under 10%, 1 percent is added. Dartmouth is under 10% so 1% additional is added each year. This added amount is independent of the foundation budget which does not enter into the calculation for required local contribution. I uploaded a page from the worksheet here (MS EXCEL format) that illustrates the calculation. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) spreadsheet can be accessed here (MS EXCEL format). I did not upload the entire sheet as it is a large file and takes up too much space on my server account. If you are not interested in the mechanics of this calculation, skip to the next paragraph, but if you look at the spreadsheet page, our required local contribution is shown on line 28) in the right hand column. Line 28) is derived from adding lines 15) 22) and 27). As you can see, the increase is independent of the foundation budget, line 8). An increase in our foundation budget increases the percentage of the shortfall on line 21), but doesn't accelerate incremental spending on line 22). If you are interested on reading further about school spending, look to this post and this and this one.
What the net result of all the calculations show ...

... is that although required school spending will grow to a higher value over time (in fact, nearly $1 million more), the yearly costs will not grow more than the incremental adder that progresses Dartmouth toward that goal. In short, we will end up at higher required school spending 10 years from now, but the yearly increase won't be $1 million all at once. It is more like $280,000 each year. That is good news. The town could implement a full day kindergarten and not have a whopping big increase.
Having said that, there remains the unfortunate fact that the required school spending increases over time will take a greater and greater percentage of the town's budget and cannot be sustained. Mr. Lynam has pointed that out for some time. That is another problem for another time.