The Gray-New Gloucester High School will not offer courses in American Sign Language next year because a retirement left the school without an ASL teacher and financial pressures left the district without the money to hire a new one.

Residents of the two towns voted Thursday in favor of a $35.4 million budget that, while roughly 6% higher than the prior year’s, includes limited staffing cuts. Following Thursday’s validation, the 2025-26 budget will be put to a districtwide referendum next month.

The budget eliminates 1.5 full-time staff positions: a full-time position in the language department and a part-time role in the music department.

Its cost-cutting measures also include eliminating five ed tech positions, which are currently unfilled, switching to a three-year vehicle lease-purchases instead of buying new buses and vans outright and a handful of smaller cuts, Superintendent Chanda Turner told those gathered.

“As we head toward being a 500-student school, four world language teachers is likely more than we reasonably need,” Turner told the crowd. “Clearly ASL is important to this district, and to me. … Our challenge is in hiring a teacher.”

The current ASL teacher, Kathryn Larson, announced her intention to retire three years ago, and the district has scrambled to find a replacement since, Turner wrote.

“After three years of all of us chasing every lead we could find, we have not been able to identify a single person who can give us any level of interest in a potential position,” Turner wrote in an emailed statement to the Press Herald.

Potential candidates, even those who showed interest in the position, reported having better opportunities available with their ASL fluency than what the district could offer, including higher salaries and more autonomy in their scheduling, Turner wrote. She added that, in light of proposed staff reductions, hiring a new ASL teacher would mean terminating another teacher in the language department to make room.

“I did not feel it was fair to staff or students to let a current teacher go, reassign other teachers to new locations, and let students build schedules with ASL when all the research and data was telling me it would be for (naught),” she wrote.

The district’s student population has been steadily decreasing for about a decade. Class cohorts typically include 110-120 students, down from 150-160 about 10 years ago, Turner wrote.

“As these larger groups of students have exited our schools over the last decade, we have been reducing staff to reflect that population change,” she wrote. “We have been proactively right-sizing our staff to match our decreasing student population.”

The school began offering ASL courses during the 2016-17 school year, expanding the program to accommodate a full-time teacher for the 2020-21 year, Turner wrote.

Residents and advocates for the local deaf community said the program is valuable for students and the broader community. Some point to the 2023 Lewiston mass shooting as an illustration of how important it is for people who are deaf and hard of hearing to have access to communication, particularly during emergencies.

Though no ASL courses will be offered at the high school next year, Turner wrote that the program itself has not been terminated, and the district aims to renew its search for an ASL teacher “when we have attrition in the World Language department.” If able to find someone, those courses would be restored.

In the meantime, students will be offered the opportunity to take ASL courses at a local college, for which a number of students have already signed up, she told the crowd.

Attendees voted on each of the budget’s 18 articles individually during the more than three-hour meeting. At several points, attendees motioned to amend and reduce the amount of individual articles. Proposed amendments that would increase any articles’ allotments were not permitted.

The group voted 85-74 to approve about $13.9 million for regular instruction, the first and largest article, without amendment. That figure reflects the staffing cuts in language in music.

Article 2, which earmarks about $7.4 million for special education, passed 89-62. Two different amendments that would have lowered that amount by hundreds of thousands of dollars narrowly failed to pass.

The remaining articles passed with comparatively little discussion.

All told, the proposal represents about a $2 million increase in the district’s operating budget. It is the product of a monthslong drafting process that began in November, Turner said.

For a median-value house in Gray, assessed at $476,000, the new budget represents about a $310 annual increase in property taxes, according to the district’s budget presentation. That figure is about $240 in New Gloucester, where the median house value is $250,000, according to the district. That figure does not include city taxes.