The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
$31.2M budget includes staff cuts
CANASTOTA, N.Y. >> Voters in the Canastota Central School District had a chance to weigh in on the district’s proposed $31.2 million budget Tuesday night.
The proposed budget for the 2019-20 school year is a 3.29 percent increase over the 2018-19 budget with a proposed tax levy increase of 3.42 percent — 1.19 percent below the tax levy limit calculated by the state.
Among changes to the coming school year is the elimination of a number of faculty positions.
“The reductions are based on enrollment declines and on our income,” Interim Superintendent Dr. Kathleen Davis said.
State aid has been flat for a number of school
districts in New York state for the past few years, including the Canastota School District. Positions that are being cut include one administrator, five aides and 15 teachers. Among those, Interim School Business Leader Patrica Service said three aides were up for retirement and eight teachers were either up for retirement or leaving the district.
“We can only increase the tax levy by so much,” Service said. “If you look at the budget, our health insurance went up by 8 percent. That’s a $300,000 increase. In order to continue our benefits and programs, we looked at everyone’s schedule.”
One resident asked the board about the cuts to the faculty and said she didn’t see a “crisis in the budget” that would warrant so many cuts.
Davis said the budget was built with the reductions in mind and if all the positions were added back in, the budget would be around $1 million greater.
Service said teachers will be picking up additional duties, such as from the retiring attendance secretary.
Service agreed it is difficult to budget with increasing costs the school has no control over, such as fuel, electricity, heat, employee benefits and payroll.
“We have a dedicated staff,” Service said. “It is hard to reduce staff and it’s not taken lightly. The board of education has been discussing this since December. A lot of research, thought and involvement went into the decision.”
“It was a difficult decision,” Davis said. “I’m proud of our staff and what they’ve done here and how well they work with the children. It’s always difficult to make cuts, but we have to make sure we can meet payroll, pay our bills, provide programming for our children and be cognizant of our taxpayer’s needs as well.”
Across the board, the school is looking to budget $2.89 million for administrative costs, $23.4 million for programcosts and $4.88 million for capital costs.
The school district is also looking to purchase three 65-passenger buses, replacing aging buses that will be either sold or traded in. The cost would be around $300,000, with 90 percent cost being covered by the state.
Service said Canastota is an extremely state aid dependent school district, with 51 percent of the school’s revenue coming from New York. Service said around $15 million of the school’s $31 million budget is coming from the state.
Reserve funds and a $1.4 million surplus from the 2018-19 budget will be used to offset the cost of the 2019-20 budget.
Another resident said he heard the high school would be losing a physical education teacher and wanted to knowwhat was going to happen to the class size.
“Right now, we’re building schedule and based on projections with the existing staff we’ll have, we are not looking to increase class size,” Davis said. “So our student to teacher ratio should be the same.”
The budget vote takes place on Tuesday, May 21 from noon to 9 p.m. at Roberts Street Elementary auditorium and SouthSide School gymnasium. Three board of education members are up for election.
“The budget is solid, ref lective of student needs and cognizant of staying in the tax cap,” Davis said. “I used to work here in the ‘ 90s and it’s always taken good care of the children here. We appreciate everything our taxpayers, our staff and our board of education has been to be supportive of the budget process.”