East Lyme — The Board of Education will hold a public hearing on Superintendent Jeffrey Newton's proposed $51.98 million budget for next academic year.

The hearing will be held at 6 p.m. Monday at East Lyme High School.

The proposed budget is 5.57%, or about $2.7 million, higher than this year’s $49 million spending plan and covers, according to Newton, increases in salaries and benefits, the hiring of new teachers and advancements in information security infrastructure and equipment.

The town plans to borrow $926,000 so the school system can finance purchases of laptops and updates to the middle and high schools' wireless internet infrastructure. The district, according to its finance director, Maryanna Stevens, will pay back that money over a five-year period in roughly $200,000 increments. Stevens said the first payment has already been factored into next year’s proposed budget.

Newton said that half of the proposed IT costs would go toward upgrading infrastructure, which will include the addition of “several wireless access points,” or nodes, while the other half will go toward purchasing laptops for each fifth-grader next year. He couldn’t give an exact number as to how many fifth-graders there are in the district but said in subsequent years, students in other grades also will receive laptops as they are rolled out and included in the curriculum.

“We have major issues in our high school and middle school right now with access and getting devices onto wireless access points,” Newton said. “It can’t handle the number of devices we are trying to put into kids’ hands. So we are trying to address that.”

Newton said the district needs to hire new kindergarten and first grade teachers after seeing an increase in kindergarten students this year. He said a new kindergarten teacher was hired at Niantic Center School, bringing classes sizes down to within suggested guidelines, at an average of 16 students per class. However, kindergarten classes at Flanders and Lillie B. Haynes elementary schools are “well above” those guidelines, he said, at about 20 to 21 children per class.

The plan, Newton said, is to hire two new kindergarten teachers, one for each of those schools, to address incoming class sizes, and to hire an additional first grade teacher, as those classes soon will exceed the size guidelines, as well.

“This could be a trend we are seeing ... of more people moving into town and higher numbers of the grade levels that are to come,” Newton said. “But we just don’t know, that’s what we are wondering.”

Other hires Newton proposed include one high school social worker, one behavior analyst, a part-time global language teacher, one instructional technology manager and two elementary math coaches. A new full-time language teacher also likely will be switched from the middle school to the elementary school, he said. What he has proposed, however, could change based on what the board decides Monday.

Newton also explained that because the board needed to hire additional staff this past fall, including 10 instructional assistants, the district now must account for those additional salaries as part of next year’s budget, contributing about $318,000 to the overall hike.

He said though the district had not planned for that staffing as part of its budget last year, it was able to cover those costs through savings found in natural gas expenses, while other parts of the budget may be frozen.

The Board of Education has not yet seen a precise breakdown of the next year’s proposed $2.7 million increase, Newton said, and because of that he would not provide a breakdown to The Day. He said most of the increase comprises salaries and benefits.

m.biekert@theday.com