LAKEVILLE — Superintendent Alan Strauss said that his proposed budget for the Freetown Lakeville School District would mean the district would keep all of its employees, but only barely.

“I will be about as direct as I can be: there is nowhere else to go and if we need to cut this budget down more… it’s going to mean people. We will lose positions,” said Strauss.

At the Wednesday Feb. 14 school committee meeting, Strauss presented a proposed $45 million fiscal year 2025 budget for the Freetown Lakeville School District. Strauss’ proposal calls for increasing the school budget by 3.79% from fiscal year 2024.

Lakeville and Freetown will each absorb a different portion of the budget increase, according to Strauss’ presentation. Lakeville’s contribution will increase by 6.63% from $16.4 million in fiscal year 2024 to $17.5 million in fiscal year 2025. Freetown’s contribution will increase by 4.78% from $13.1 million in fiscal year 2024 to $13.7 million in fiscal year 2025.

Lakeville’s “percentage of the total amount is higher than Freetown’s because they have more students,” Strauss explained. “Therefore they’re going to give us a little bit more.”

One driver of the budget is the increasing costs of health insurance. Interim Director of Finance and Operations Deirdre Farrell Welch said that health insurance costs are estimated to increase by 8% for current employees and 10% for retired employees in fiscal year 2025.

Strauss said that, excluding charter schools, the school district “has the ninth lowest per pupil expenditure” in Massachusetts.

A feature of the fiscal year 2025 budget, Strauss said, is that it would make permanent the math intervention teacher positions that the district had created during the pandemic and had funded using money the federal government made available during the pandemic.

“That money eventually runs out and it runs out this year,” Strauss said. The teachers “are vital for our students who have some learning gaps, who may be behind in a particular area…. They have done an exceptional job,” he added.