Proposed State Aid Cuts Make Budget Planning Tough for School Officials

The Rye and Blind Brook school districts are anticipating significant decreases in state aid for 2011-2012, leaving superintendents to grapple with decreased revenues and increased costs as they propose their budgets.

Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed a 8.75 percent decrease in funding to the Blind Brook-Rye Union Free District, which amounts to a slightly more than $200,000 cut in state aid.

Blind Brook Superintendent William Stark will propose the district's budget at Monday's Board of Education meeting. He said he anticipated funding decreases, but that Blind Brook hasn't been as hard hit as neighboring communities because the district's budget consisted of only about 6 percent in state aid this year.

While Gov. Cuomo has not proposed cuts in foundation aid, which is allotted to every school district in New York using a standard formula, his budget includes a gap elimination adjustment that comprises about one-third of Blind Brook's foundation aid.

In a news release, the governor's office explained that the gap elimination adjustment will account for $2.8 billion "through reductions in school aid on a progressive basis, accounting for each school district's wealth, student need, administrative efficiency and residential property tax burden."

Rye City School District Superintendent Edward Shine from both state funding and property taxes. He proposed using a $1.5 million surplus from the current school year to temporarily alleviate the district's financial situation without layoffs or program cuts.

The Executive Budget includes a 12-percent decrease to the Rye school district, which amounts to $360,000. The district anticipates that it will spend $200,000 on fulfilling requirements associated with the Race to the Top (RTTT) funding, though the state likely will not allot any of those federal funds to RCSD or Blind Brook.

Though Gov. Cuomo issued an Executive Order establishing a Mandate Relief Team to reduce mandate burdens on municipalities and school districts, Stark said that the RTTT requirements are going to cost Blind Brook "a great deal of time and a potentially unknown amount of money."

"These mandates just don't seem to be stopping," he said. "I'm always optimistic, but what disturbs me is that they prefer to add new mandates before they take away old ones."

The governor also has proposed instituting a similar competitive program to RTTT at the state level. Included in the $19.4 billion proposed school aid is $500 million for competitive grant programs.

Half of the grant money would be allotted "on a competitive basis to school districts that demonstrate significant improvement in their student performance outcomes." The other $250 million would be awarded to "school districts that undertake long-term structural changes which reduce costs and improve efficiency."

Stark said that a state-run school aid competition would likely not benefit high-performing districts like Blind Brook.

"I don't think it's a good idea," he explained. "This is another, as I understand it, RTTT initiative that's designed to reward students that are performing poorly on the basis of improvement by giving them more money."

"Our schools are top notch; if students are performing in the 97th percentile, it's very hard to show improvement along those lines."

He said that instead of giving monetary aid to districts solely for performance improvement, the state should say, "why don't we make you exemplars and take advantage of what you can do by helping out other districts that have trouble performing?"

Stark said the biggest obstacles in planning the 2011-2012 budget are high-cost factors like contributions to the state employee and teacher pension systems, health care costs and contractual salary increases.

"There's going to be reductions; there's no doubt about it," he said.

The situation is the similar for the Rye school district. Shine explained in his budget presentation that benefit costs comprise 78 percent of the proposal. Health insurance costs and retirement contributions are set to increase by more than $1.1 million during the 2011-2012 school year.