MIDDLETOWN — The School Committee last night shaved roughly $78,000 from its current-year budget plan by eliminating the freshman football and baseball teams, three part-time teaching assistants and one school bus.

The school board — absent members William R. Coogan and Edward K. Draper — made the cuts after finding nowhere else to turn, member Theresa M. Silveira Spengler said.

“We didn’t have a lot of options,” Spengler said at last night’s meeting. “We went through this with a fine-tooth comb. Every single part of the school system has been impacted by these budget cuts. It was difficult to look at freshmen sports… There was nothing else to take from. It’s very disheartening.”

Budget cuts are becoming “a more arduous task every year,” chairman Michael F. Crowley Jr. said.

Students who would ordinarily play on the freshmen-only teams can try out for junior varsity squads or play in Pop Warner and other community leagues, Schools Supt. Rosemarie K. Kraeger said.

The school system was able to cut one bus from its fleet by consolidating routes and adding more students to the other bus runs. The move won’t impact the route times, Kraeger said.

Although cutting the bus saved $50,000, that savings was offset by a jump in transportation costs in the district’s contract with First Student Inc.

All told, the reductions bring the School Department closer to balancing its budget against the $93,000 cut the Town Council made to the schools’ spending proposal last month. The school board has until its Oct. 16 meeting to find the additional $15,000 in cuts.

Kraeger said it will be difficult to find the remaining money, particularly if more teachers are needed to handle unexpected growth in enrollment.

The school district’s enrollment has decreased by 491 since 2000, mostly because of departing military families as the Navy’s presence on Aquidneck Island has diminished. The school district last spring was projecting enrollment to drop by another 72 students this school year, to 2,343. But class sizes are now at maximum levels, Kraeger warned, so even a handful of new students will make a difference.

The school district has so far recalled only about five of the 16 positions it eliminated for this school year.

The district, while coping with declining education aid and the state’s 5-percent cap on tax levy increases, has faced three straight years of budget cuts. Last year, the district cut 19 positions.

The schools avoided a more significant cut to this year’s budget when the Town Council backed off a proposed $186,000 cut to education spending. Residents and school officials had warned that a cut of that size would jeopardize all-day kindergarten, middle school sports and a school nurse.

School administrators have already reduced the budget by reconfiguring the administrative office — consolidating three technology-related positions into two jobs with lower salaries, and promoting technology director Linda Savastano to assistant superintendent, a vacant position — and by reducing life insurance costs, vocational education tuitions and mentoring stipends for teachers, among other things.

mwims@projo.com