Groton - The superintendent of schools said Monday that the district will save enough in health care costs and other measures to run the school system in 2012-13 with the same amount of money as it is doing in the current fiscal year.

The no-increase plan could be offset, though, by a request for more than $1 million to prepare two middle schools to receive students from the town's third middle school, which is scheduled to close this June.

Superintendent of Schools Paul J. Kadri went public with a $72,645,500 budget recommendation during a joint meeting of the Town Council's Committee of the Whole and the Board of Education.

"Health care costs have gone down even more this year," Kadri said in a brief interview before the meeting. "It's down $1,500 per person. That's where most of the savings come."

He said the school district, which is self-insured, was able to take about $1.4 million from its nearly $3 million health care reserve fund.

Kadri said the budget does not call for any reductions in staff other than by attrition and the departure of staff that was hired temporarily in anticipation of the consolidation.

"All of our educational programs will continue," he said. "Funding for our literacy programs, curriculum writing and the extracurricular programs in the middle schools are all in place."

Kadri said starting with no increase allows the school board and the council to focus on more positive matters rather than jostling to come an agreement on a bottom line, and then hoping the Representative Town Meeting doesn't change it. Towns are not allowed to reduce a district's funding from one year to the next.

"We think this puts the board and council in a good place to start to do some strategic thinking," Kadri said. "I wanted our budget off the table so it would not be distraction to that. Now we can start looking at ways that as a community, we can increase revenues."

During the meeting with the Town Council, the school district's manager of buildings and facilities, Wes Greenleaf, gave what he described as very tentative estimates for upgrading West Side and Cutler middle schools to receive students from Fitch Middle.

Greenleaf said the adjustment could cost as much as $1.3 million depending on what the district can do for itself, how much it pays for temporary classrooms and how much of the project gets reimbursed by the state.

c.potter@theday.com