AMHERST - Administrators have restored a full-time position to the middle school world language program that had been among proposed cuts aimed at closing a $1.4 million gap in the Amherst Pelham Regional School budget.
But they warned that the three words to keep in mind about any of the scenarios proposed so far are "early, dynamic and ever-changing."
Municipal and school officials have yet to receive estimates of how much state aid to expect as well as amounts of federal stimulus funds targeted to special education and other programs.
They are working with figures that could be several hundred thousand or even a million dollars higher and lower than the final totals, Robert Detweiler, the school district's finance chief, told the Regional School Committee Tuesday.
"It's almost an exercise in patience to build any kind of budget in this environment," Detweiler said. "We're going to be waiting a few more months, I think."
In the meantime, Glenda Cresto, the middle school principal, said students would be encouraged to sign up for their first, second and third choices of world languages when they register for courses March 23. Middle school administrators will decide which languages to offer based on the results.
It had been announced previously that proposed cuts to the middle school would eliminate all language instruction except for Chinese in seventh grade, while eighth-graders would be limited to French, Spanish and Latin. Currently 167 students at the middle school take Spanish, 145 take French, 56 take Latin, 43 Chinese, 20 German and 17 Russian.
All 17 families with a child in the Russian program have contacted him to urge him not to support cutting Russian, in the past few weeks, School Committee member Andrew Churchill said. Every student who has taken Russian for the past 20 years contacted him as well, he said.
Cresto, whose voice faltered when she spoke of how painful it has been to make cuts, said she was influenced by something that Alberto Rodriguez, who is expected to be the next superintendent, told her during his visit to Amherst. It was that "if you cut anything completely, it takes about 10 years to bring it back," Cresto said.
Mary Carey can be reached at mary.carey@att.net.