Montville — Under pressure to reduce next year’s school budget and facing the threat of a $1 million cut by the Town Council’s Finance Committee, the school board will reconsider a contract with a private bus company at a meeting Monday.

Last week, school board Chairman Robert Mitchell said the board’s 4-3 May 16 decision not to hire an Illinois-based company to take over the town-run busing system was regrettable but would not be reversed.

But after hearing from school board members who said they wished to change their vote, and from Town Council members who say that, without the savings from the contract, they need to make cuts to the school budget, Mitchell has scheduled a special meeting Monday to allow the board members to re-take the vote.

All nine school board members, including two who were absent from the May 16 meeting, have said they plan to attend, Mitchell said.

Superintendent Brian Levesque touted the contract with Durham Transportation as a way to save the district money and join most of the state’s other school districts in outsourcing its busing.

It also would improve the busing system’s level of safety, he argued. The contract with Durham would have required the company to buy the school district’s fleet of buses and vans, and over five years buy 24 new buses to replace the old ones.

But the town’s bus drivers and mechanics, worried they would lose the health insurance benefits they receive under the union contract they negotiated with the school board, have pushed back.

At the May 16 meeting and in comments beforehand, they also posed concerns about drivers’ familiarity with individual students, and warned that the district would not be able to reverse the decision if privatizing proved too expensive.

The contract stipulates that Durham would offer positions to all of Montville's current bus drivers and mechanics. Durham also has promised an average 7 percent raise for the drivers and GPS equipment allowing parents to track their children's route to and from school.

The district would pay $2,033,824 to Durham in the first year of the five-year contract, which Levesque said represents at least $51,000 in savings in 2018 transportation spending.

Durham would pay the district $681,464 for its buses, vans and equipment, and would buy 24 new buses over the five-year contract to replace the older vehicles in the fleet.

The costs savings, plus the revenue from the sale of vehicle and equipment to Durham, would add up to approximately $1 million next year.

That happens to be the same amount the Finance Committee has said it needs to cut out of the town’s expenses for the 2018 fiscal year in order to keep the increase in the mill rate under the committee’s preferred ceiling of 1 mill.

That’s “pure coincidence,” Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Longton said Wednesday.

“It just so happens that the Board of Education has the opportunity in hand to do that themselves ... in a year that we have to lose a million dollars,” he said.

Mitchell said he planned to schedule the new vote even before the finance meeting, and that the board members’ desire to take another vote was more important to him than the pressure to cut that money out of the school budget.

At least one board member planned to rescind their vote on the bus contract at the board’s scheduled June 20 meeting, but a decision in favor of the bus contract at that meeting would not have left enough time before the July 1 start date of the contract — and the start of the district’s summer programming — for Durham to prepare.

If the contract passes in a vote at the Monday meeting, the company still would start on July 1 and would provide transportation for summer classes, he said.

Colleen Rix, a school board member who voted against the bus contract in May, said Wednesday she did not plan to change her vote.

“At some point you have to put your foot down, and say this is how we feel and we’re not going to change it because you’re going to take our money away,” she said.

Joseph Aquitante III, another board member who voted against the contract, said he was “fifty-fifty” on whether he would change his mind.

The two other people who voted ‘no’ in May, and the two people who were absent from the May meeting, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

m.shanahan@theday.com