Time to tackle the North Country’s school budget crisis?
Voters go to the polls tomorrow to vote on their local school district budgets.
We have two stories this morning — one from Jonathan Brown and the other from Karen DeWitt in Albany — illustrating just how grim the situation has become.
Governor David Paterson wants to withhold $1.5 billion in payments to schools by several weeks.
Meanwhile, most school leaders in the North Country are busy laying off teachers, cutting costs, and raising taxes.
In an editorial over the weekend, the Glens Falls Post Star’s Ken Tingley argues that it’s time for school boards to wrestle with the systemic funding crisis schools now face.
The reality is that less state aid, not more, will be available a year from now. And if the Legislature ignores the fiscal realities, a financial calamity of epic proportions could occur.
Our school boards need talented, intelligent representatives of the community who are not only educators, but accountants and business people who know their way around budgets and spreadsheets.
They need to be tough and innovative to find a way thorough this crisis while maintaining high educational standards.
Sure, it would be nice to think the worst is over, but the numbers say different.
The Adirondack Daily Enterprise also ran a lead editorial over the weekend urging voters to pay close attention this election season.
This year, more than any other in recent memory, the affordability of our education system has been challenged. Our schools’ enrollment has been dropping drastically and isn’t yet showing signs of improvement.
The state government is in crisis and doesn’t look like it’s going to get better for some time. Unionized public employees, who have gained compensation and influence over the decades, are being targeted with demands to give some of it back.
Many – including us – say it’s time to look at consolidating districts’ administration to keep the impact on students to a minimum. These are tough times.
So what do you think? Do you plan to vote tomorrow? If so, is your local school district saying the right things about taxing and spending? How about your teachers? Are they making the right concessions?
Comments welcome.
The consolidation issue was brought up a few week back. From what I’ve been able to find out the best place in consolidation is in purchases- some sort of county wide purchase co-op for everyday consumables, fuels and foods might help costs. Consolidating whole districts runs the problem of busing- so you bus the kids 4-5-6 hours a day (I hate this idea) and send them to a few huge schools or keep the outlying schools open and try and trim costs some other way? Those few huge schools will mean construction and we all know nothing is cheap anymore. No easy answers there.
It has been my experience that the schools decide what they want/need and the budget is worked from that point. I’m not familiar with the system enough to know how much say the BoE has in the decisions of the schools, but you’d think there’d be a level of effort given to cutting costs. I haven’t seen that yet in my district.
Teachers make a decent living and that’s with the consideration of the education they need and the schedule, etc. It’s not something someone will get rich at, but you can certainly be comfortable. The union is the teachers biggest enemy in a way- the Union and teachers are going to have to learn the lesson most other unions have learned- the cash cow is dead! There will be costs passed onto the teachers just like every other field has borne. The question is how long until the teachers are faced with the realities and the union accepts the inevitable? Will they stick to their guns and become hated by the taxpayers or will they bend a little to reality?
Mandate relief is key. Teachers with 15 or 20 kids from 7:30 till 3:30 fine. but teachers with 3 students or one k-12 school with 350 students and 1 $100,000+ superintendent and a second K-12 school with 1200 students and 1 $100,000+ superitendent seems absurd. There must be cost cutting at the top.
Mandate relief, as Bob says, is key. Consolidating schools, in most North Country districts, especially in the Adirondacks, is not practical because of busing distances.
The overall problem for schools is to much tampering over the years with “Great” ideas. Most great ideas resulted in unfunded mandates, some from SED and some from the Feds.
We could start by getting rid of Special Education and Pre-School. The next thing you know will be someone coming up with the great idea for pre pre school.
Pete, why not consolidate Saranac Lake and Lake Placid. They are only 8 miles apart. Many kids come from much farther to go to SL? This should have been done years ago when it was first suggested. It didn’t happen then because some people (not too bright in my opinion) did not want to have to combine the sports teams. Please!
I don’t know about other towns but these are two of the largest up there.
There are problems in the private schools as well. In Brian’s upbeat assessment of SL he wrote for the ADE where he mentioned the “thriving” catholic school in SL, he forgot to note that there was only ONE child going into the 4th grade there next fall!
Much of this problem is related to state funding issues, but it is also due to an overall decline in the area that some people seem to overlook.
It’s notable that Tingley’s op-ed (much like his other op-eds and his paper’s editorials) are long on rhetoric and short on specifics. The fundamental problem is with the legislature and State Board of Ed who make the mandates and provide (or don’t) the funding, not with the school boards who merely react to said mandates and state funding. Mandates don’t disappear when state funding does. The fundamental problem is the whole structure of education funding. The Post-Star’s rhetoric is noble-sounding but ultimately empty because it merely tweaks around the egdes of a comprehensively broken system.
Similarly, both the daily Post-Star (print-only) and weekly Chronicle (no website) report that a several seats on local school boards garnered no candidates. With the regular battering (grandiose rhetoric but almost always devoid of specifics) these volunteers are taking from the local press in the cheap seats, I can’t imagine why there isn’t more interest in serving in such a glamorous position.
Consolidation does not mean you close schools.
It simply means you have one larger district with multiple schools in that district. You don’t need a superintendant, district staff, and several principles for 500 students. With consolidation in this manner you would simply consolidate your upper level administration and administrative staff.
President Kennedy from SUNY Canton proposed this solution some time ago for all of St. Lawrence County which could easily be one school district. Many schools have 500 kids in one senior class in one high school made up of 2000 kids, all handled by ONE principle.
One of the problems of consolidation is different schools have different teacher contracts. If districts get consolidate you can bet that the contract with the best pay and benefits will be the one that gets imposed.
Say 3 district consolidate: one has better pay, one better health insurance, and another more time off. All 3 will probably be enacted in consolidation. Consequently, costs could actually rise.
Everyone is so focused on the current financial crisis. Consolidate administration, but not schools. If our next crisis is energy related carting kids all over the north country does not make a whole lot of sense. We will smaller, neighborhood schools that are electronically connected.
Bob Gorman, the Watertown Daily times editor wrote an article 3 or 4 years ago about the consolidation of services issue in public school finance. In St’ LAwrence county, there are seventeen school districts, seventeen boards of education, seventeen superintendents, seventeen Teacher’s unions with seventeen separate contracts, seventeen service worker’s unions with seventeen separate contracts. That means 34 separate sets of negotiations, necessitating the services of a BOCES labor relations specialist and a NYSUT or CSEA representative. Bear in mind that every school is following the same set of academic requirements set forth by the NY State Board Of regents and the State Education Department. Essentially, each employee at all of these member districts is doing the same job. Now, let’s multiply this out across the state where there are over SEVEN-HUNDRED school districts. Speaking of duplication …
One of the real impediments to consolidation is the illusion of local control. The very first wall these discussions run into is the, “.. but what about our school colors and teams?” The discussion rarely goes any further. How about dusting off 3 or 4 regional high schools, and Pre-K – 8 operations in the local districts? Have a Superintendent at each of the regional high schools with principals at the k-8 schools. The laws for pupil transportation differ according to age. elementary age are not supposed to be on a bus for more than 30 minutes and high school age for not more than one hour, as I remember it.
I think there is fruitful room here for consolidation talks.
How about the Westport-Port Henry-Elizabethtown-Lewis-Willsboro districts?
Even if all the schools remain open, could they consolidate administration?
one superintendent, one bus department, one facilities manager, etc. — vs. four or five of those positions?
and perhaps ultimately there will come a time when the dwindling population of young people means tough choices about school closures.
it’s time to consider putting the management structures in place that can think about those changes.
one final thought: adirondack-north country folks like to think that their geography is uniquely convoluted and difficult.
but the new york city school district manages a far more complicated geographic, social, and political region — with 1.1 million students.
under this umbrella are local education councils that shape local school activities and priorities.
i’m not suggesting that that model is right for the north country, or even for counties within the north country — but there are approaches that have overcome barriers.
–brian, ncpr
Another area that needs review is the practice of what I call, Empire Building”. Do we really need to be doing such over-the-top school renovations? Artificial turf fields? Artificial surface tracks? Olympic-size swimming pools? A computer for every student, (which, by the way, requires the establishment of technical support positions and upgrading and replacing on an ongoing basis). It is the ambition for every superintendent to have on their resume that they have done at least one major renovation project, ( read: multi-million dollar). Why are we spending billions of dollars in this state for what amounts to mission support? The military would refer to this as “Mission Creep”. The core mission of a school should be the academic program, not building temples and empires so that we can say that our kids play football under the lights, in an NFL quality stadium. Did you hear the one about the school superintendent that retired and went to work for an architectural firm selling school renovation projects?
Of course who would want consolidation and who would drive consolidation? I don’t see it happening unless it is imposed from the outside.
Oh John! That’s the sacred cow no one wants to talk about. The school is a testament, an edifice, an altar to the administration. We don’t mention such things, just not done old boy!