About 100 attend budget hearing to express concerns, ask questions about annual budget

by Dan McClelland

About 100 school district residents- many of them parents of school-age children here- came out to the high school auditorium Monday for the school board’s budget hearing. It was one of the biggest crowds in years at a budget hearing.

Normally budget hearings here draw a handful of residents at most.

School officials obviously expected a larger than normal sized crowd so wisely moved their normal meeting place in the Michelle LaMere library to the much larger auditorium in the face of the controversial budget with its large 8.75% tax levy increase in prospect.

Much of the information presented that evening by Superintendent of Schools Russ Bartlett, who hosted the meeting, was contained in the district’s budget newsletter distributed in recent weeks. Much of that information is carried in a story this week.

“Thank you for coming,” he told the crowd, “whether you are a for sure yes vote or sure no vote or I haven’t decided yet vote. I appreciate and respect your presence here this evening.”

He said there was a lot of information to share with them that evening. “There’s a lot of information floating around and not all of it’s accurate. I’m going to do my best to present things in a straight forward understandable way!” he promised the crowd.

He invited everyone to ask their questions as his presentation went along, especially if they didn’t understand something he said. “So please ask!”

He said the information he would present was based on people hearing about the budget for the first time. Admitting the budget is somewhat complex he admitted that he and the new BOCES business manager, Jessica Rivers, have been living this budget proposal 24/7 for a while, “and there’s still things in it we have to clarify for each other every so often.”

He said that while not all of the budget is that complicated there is one critical thing to understand where the 8.75% tax levy increase comes from or where the allowed 9.18% tax cap comes from.

“That’s the capital tax levy...that’s the building project you voted on in October.” He said the project approved by voters addresses many “health and safety issues.”

“We have a building we are sitting in tonight that is almost 100 years old and L.P. Quinn was built in 1970, “so that’s old too.”

He said too the building project adds safety vestibules with modern communications systems in each of the buildings.

“I hate that we have to have these...but it’s the world we live in! Safety must be among our most important concerns, so those are things we have to do now!”

He said the building project amounts to roughly $20 million.

“Going into next year and budgeting for the first year of that building project next year” adds over one million dollars to the district’s annual expenditures. “That’s roughly five percent of our budget.”

“So out of our $20 million to $21 million budget, over $1 million is factored in from the building project. So when you look at a 9.18% tax levy increase that the state will allow (in the tax cap), the building project that voters approved last year accounts for five percent of it.”

The first question came from Jerry Seleni of Stetson Road who asked Mr. Bartlett who he was. The superintendent apologized for not introducing himself at the start, quipping: “I thought everyone knew who I was.”

The Rev. David Boyea told the top school official that he assumed the million dollars was the annual payment on the building project, and Mr. Bartlett said it was and would be for about the next 17 years.

Board Vice President Jason Rolley, sitting in the back row, asked Mr. Bartlett to explain how much the annual building payment would generate in state aid in coming years.

Mr. Bartlett said the building aid payments come back to the district over a period of years. He said that building aid to this district is approximately 78% of building costs.

“You have to spend the money first and then the state education department reimburses you for 78% of that over time.”

Lisa St. Pierre asked him how long it will take for the state to reimburse the district for that project and the superintendent estimated it will take five to seven years.

Mr. Bartlett then continued his presentation. “So the proposed budget for 2024-25 is $21.92 million- that’s $464,943 or 2.08% less than this year’s budget. So there’s actually a decrease in spending next year!”

What he didn’t say, however, is that the new school budget proposed is lower than the current budget of $22.38 million in large part because of the departure of the $1 million the district received this year in federal COVID aid, which dries up in September.

“The bottom line, however, is that for every property here assessed at $100,000 the new budget” will cause its taxes to increase this coming year by $137.

He said the passage of the building project last fall represented about half of that increased amount.

His presentation then moved on to what he called “frequently asked” questions.

The first question: “$21.9 million seems like a large budget for a school district that only graduates about 50 kids?”

“It does seem like a lot,” he admitted and then presented some information from across the state that showed the budgets of every school district in New York State within student populations of 25 or less of Tupper Lake’s student body.

“I don’t love that we spend almost the least” of the 30 schools in the comparison. Tupper Lake was third from the bottom in spending.

“But it makes me appreciate the heck out of our staff that does what they must do” with nearly the least amount of resources in the state.

He said among the schools in this BOCES region Tupper Lake ranks in the bottom three with Chateaugay and Brushton-Moira. “So I don’t think we are over spending. Our budget at $21.92 million is a lot of money...it’s a lot, but it’s what it costs to do our job!”

He said he didn’t include Long Long, because it’s an outlier because of its uniquely small size. “Their expenditure per student is almost over $51,000 compared with Tupper’s at $19,897.”

He said the two schools- Chateaugay and Brushton-Moira- that join Tupper Lake at the bottom of the per pupil spending chart are both increasing their budget substantially this year “so the next time you see this list we’ll be at the very bottom.”

“My point here is we are not overspending! We’re not reaching for the stars...we’re not trying to buy our way out of anything as far as educating our kids!”

“We’re doing what we can with what we have!”

One resident asked about if family-income rates figure into the budget picture, and in particular in comparison with communities like Lake Placid.

“I will tell you that the incomes in Lake Placid are not much different from ours,” the superintendent told him. “Ours are actually a little bit more,” as many workers in Lake Placid work in the service industry, which traditionally pays lower wages or are part-time.

That question prompted him to explain foundation aid, which is one of the basic state education department’s aid to districts each year.

Typically districts were never to get less foundation aid than the previous year, under a save harmless arrangement. However, this year the Governor said the save harmless arrangement would be abandoned. It was later restored for one more year by the legislature, but it is expected to be eliminated for good after this school year, he told the crowd.

He said the approximately $140,000 in foundation aid Tupper stood to lose earlier this year was later restored by state lawmakers in the budget agreement, with the understanding it will disappear next year.

He said the district could have used the $140,000 to bring back one of the teachers who are being cut this year. They didn’t use it that way, however, because they knew the money would disappear next year. The money has just been added to the fund balance for now, he noted.

“You probably heard Mr. (Dan) Bower or I use the term ‘fiscal cliff’ a thousand times since 2020-21. We knew what was coming from the federal government on COVID aid would be around $1 million (per year) and at the end of four years it would be gone. That’s one of the biggest losses of revenue in our budget this year.”

The loss of $1 million in COVID money caused the need for the district going forward to eliminate 16 to 17 teacher positions. Twelve of those, however, were directly associated with the education loss programs taught during the four years of COVID, where in some cases retired teachers were brought back to teach them. Answering a question from the Free Press publisher, he noted the actual faculty losses in the district’s regular teaching program for this coming year were five- including one art teacher and one music teacher.

Of the 16 or 17 positions that had to be eliminated, “I only had to have that awful conversation with about five people,” he lamented.

He said most of the other positions were lost to resignations and retirements and by not filling positions since “we knew this cliff was coming.”

“Here’s the biggest question I hear: ‘The budget is going down, so why are my taxes going up?’”

“There are a number of reasons. Start by looking at the bottom line. Here’s my PTSD about the 2021-22 budget vote. We asked for what I thought was a small, modest budget increase of 3.01%. -But it passed by only eight votes! That close vote told me that this community is not willing to look at a particularly large increase! So when it got to the next school year, and we looked at what the tax levy increase could be based on what the tax cap was set at, we looked at some of our fund balance and said we could use some of that to keep the tax levy down. There were two things that happened. If we used the fund balance again this year where are the revenues coming from next year? It wouldn’t be coming, we knew that.

“When you don’t go to the full extent of the tax levy allowed in a tax cap, you are not collecting all the money the state says you should be collecting. So there’s a double whammy in terms of a loss of revenue.”

“School funding goes in cycles. It’s been my experience over the past 15 years I’ve been paying close attention to it, that in state and federal election cycles all of a sudden there’s money for education where there wasn’t before. Our hope was we might hit one of those (revenue) bubbles that comes around periodically, and we’ll be able to put several hundred thousand dollars back in our fund balance. That hasn’t happened. I have to take ownership of that. Because of my own reservations about asking too much from the community, probably had a little bit to do where we are today!”

He said too the tax levy increase proposed also reflects the cost of “everything” going up today. He said “we have to buy all those things that every household has to buy today.”

“We have to buy fuel for our buses to get kids to school. We have to buy food to feed kids breakfasts and lunches. We have to heat our buildings. Everywhere there’s an increase in costs, we’re feeling those same increases as all of you!”

“Therefore we need a little more money to cover our costs this coming year.”

The Rev. Boyea asked about district revenues: how much comes from state aid and how much from taxpayers.

With help from Mrs. Rivers, the superintendent said that $10.6 million of the $21.92 million budget proposed will come from New York State and the balance from local taxpayers in the three towns in the district.

In answer to another question, he said state aid is based on a multi-faceted formula, which includes the number of students to be educated and their daily attendance.

In another question, Jerry Seleni said he thought that the COVID money was supposed to be spent on improvements within the district. “Did you take that money and hire a bunch of employees?”

Mr. Bartlett said “a million regulations” came with the federal COVID money for what the money was supposed to be used for. The majority of it was used on ‘stop learning loss’ programs!”

He said in addition to the programs to help students educationally, there was social and emotional help provided some of the students who were suffering.

Jessica Rivers said that before any of that COVID money could ever be spent, many forms had to be submitted to the state education department for permission how the district could spend it.

Mr. Bartlett said a number of retired teachers were hired back to teach these special programs, because most of their benefits were already being paid by the district. “And what we were getting from the retirees were people with hundreds of years of teaching experience.”

“Of the COVID money were there funds used to employ people who probably should have been paid through the general budget?” the Free Press publisher asked him.

“Here’s how I’ll answer that because it is not a cut and dried situation.

“One of our COVID hirees was Fran Fortune as an additional resource nurse, because we needed another person to do the testing that was required “and a thousand different things that had to do with the pandemic.”

“We knew the COVID money was going to run out, yet we hoped we could keep that position, but we didn’t know, but let’s keep it mind that it’s there.”

“That happened a lot here,” as we hoped to keep some of those employees on after COVID.”

He noted too that in most school districts there is a constant flow of people in and out of the district, moving on, retiring, etc., and so its always nice to have a replacement for those people in the wings.

Mr. McClelland had another question: “Jessica Rivers and Jamie O’Dell who now are the district’s business managers presented two scenarios to you in recent months. They were a budget with a 4.5% tax levy increase in prospect and another forecasting 9%. Why did the board go with the 9% one?”

“I’ll speak for the board for a minute and then they can speak afterwards,” Mr. Bartlett told him.

“You remember when I said one of the things that got us intp this hole was not reaching the full amount of the tax cap each year. The state tax cap formula said you should be allowed to raise your taxes to the full amount allowed.” He said if a district needs to raise its taxes by five percent and only raises it two percent, “the state is not making up the difference the next year! You just now lost three percent of your income!”

He said that lost income carries forward too into the next fiscal year.

“If you don’t levy to the full tax cap you are going to have to make cuts somewhere down the road!”

There were a number of other clarification questions asked by Jessica Cole and others that evening.

Mr. Bartlett promised that if the vote Tuesday fails, the board and he and Mrs. Rivers will sit down and decide what could be cut in a second budget that would be presented to voters next month.