Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School officials have discovered more than $160,000 in budget shortfalls for the coming fiscal year, but taxpayers won’t be on the hook for the increases.

Employee insurance costs have risen more sharply, leading the school committee to transfer $82,000 from the school’s excess and deficiency fund in order to avoid a higher assessment to Island taxpayers.

The school also is facing a separate $82,000 budget shortfall in state funding through Chapter 70, the state’s main program for financial aid to schools, principal Sara Dingledy said at Monday’s school committee meeting.

“While Chapter 70 [aid] has gone up significantly, we were a little bit overexcited about how much it would go up,” said Ms. Dingledy, who vowed to make up the difference within the existing budget by paring textbooks and supplies and refraining from a planned increase in positions for the world languages, business and computer science departments.

The school committee previously certified the $25 million budget in January, before insurer Cape Cod Municipal Health Group informed officials of an unprecedented rate increase, school finance manager Suzanne Cioffi said.  

“If you look at the trends for the past few years, one year they needed a zero increase for health insurance, then they’re around a 3 or 4 per cent,” Ms. Cioffi said.

“This year, they increased health by 8 per cent, so that really explains the jump … it was unanticipated,” Ms. Cioffi said. 

The excess and deficiency fund holds taxpayer-approved monies that were not completely expended in the fiscal year for which they were intended.

The bond market, where the high school will need to borrow millions of dollars for construction, considers excess and deficiency funds an asset.

The state of Massachusetts recently certified the high school’s excess and deficiency fund at $1.38 million, school finance director Mark Friedman told the committee at its monthly meeting Monday night.

Using the fund to offset the insurance hike will spare town taxpayers from an increased high school budget for fiscal year 2025, which begins July 1.

Also Monday, committee members discussed the school’s legal costs, which include more than $21,000 for an immigration attorney who assisted with the hiring of four teachers from Brazil, a first for the school.

Ms. Dingledy said she expects the process to be somewhat less expensive in future years, as the high school continues to sponsor Brazilian teachers.

“I feel like now we have a bit more organizational knowledge,” she said.

“The problem is, we have to wait until our budget is certified [by town voters] to post positions, and then there’s a really short window [for] people to go through that legal process,” she said. “So I think some of the expense is trying to accelerate it through that short window.”