AUBURN — The School Committee has established the timeline for developing the 2025-26 fiscal year budget, Superintendent Susan Dorris said Wednesday.

“Believe it or not, next Monday, our budget development module goes live,” she said at Wednesday’s committee meeting.

Administrators are set to build their budgets considering fixed costs and expected increases for the next year before presenting it to the School Committee, Dorris said. “We have the possibility of a budget workshop in November for you to go over class sizes, ratios and increasing cost items. And then in December, the City Council holds preliminary budget discussions,” she added.

“We’ll be finalizing our budget in April. And May is (for) the School Committee and the City Council approval of our budget,” Dorris said. “Then, the referendum will be in June.”

In other action, the district will be adding two school bus drivers to its transportation roster, Business Manager Amanda Couture said, increasing the district’s total to 18.

The department is staffed with “16 contracted bus drivers, 11 van drivers, and five aides, plus one mechanic,” she said. “We have one spare bus driver and one spare van driver who can also act as an aide.”

The newly hired drivers will come onboard soon, Couture said.

“We’ve hired two new drivers who will begin the training to earn their commercial driver’s license with a school bus endorsement through the (Bureau of Motor Vehicles). We have one other current van driver who is also working to complete this bus driver training in the next few weeks.”

In the meantime, the School Department has contracted with Northeast Charter for additional bus runs, should buses become overcrowded.

Online forms might replace phone calls and emails for transportation requests next year.

“Going forward, research is in the works to implement software to assign bus runs for the 2025-26 school year. There’s also discussions about having a form for parents and staff to fill out online for transportation requests rather than phone calls and emails,” Couture said.

Ward 1 committee member Korin McGuigan raised the recent concerns about overcrowded buses.

“I know that there was some overcrowding on the buses and I need to bring that forward,” she said. “When there’s overcrowding on a bus, let’s say it happens right away, the driver says, ‘oh dear, here we are, we don’t have enough space,’ what happens then?” McGuigan said.

“The first thing they do is try to get them all seated,” Transportation Director David Fontaine said.