The East Williston School Board will present a proposed budget of $51.44 million for the 2011-12 school year, a 1.9 percent increase from the current $50.48 million budget, with a 3.56 percent tax levy increase.
Faced with shrinking state aid and spiraling state-mandated pension and health care costs, East Williston Superintendent of Schools Lorna Lewis cited wage freezes accepted by district teachers, clerical staff, and administrators as the prime factor that enabled the board to maintain the low year-to-year increase.
“In a year when we’re challenged by new state aid cuts, we were able to keep our budget increase under 2 percent because we had wage freezes,” Lewis said at the board’s final budget hearing on Monday night.
In early March, the East Williston board negotiated a new four-year contract with district teachers that includes a wage freeze in the first year of the contract and an average 1.1 percent annual increase over the subsequent three years of the deal. Four-year pacts with district administrators and clerical staff unveiled in late April include wage freezes in the first year of their respective contracts, with 1.3 percent and 1.4 percent increases, respectively, over the duration of those deals.
State aid for the district will decrease from $2.41 million this year to $2.28 million next year, a loss of $125,219.
During her part of the budget presentation, East Williston Assistant Superintendent for Business Jacqueline Fitzpatrick said the district also would incur a county sewer tax of approximately $48,500 based on the district’s water consumption in the 2009-10 school year, despite the fact that its schools have no sewer system. She also said that the district would pay special education costs of $107,246 – with the promise of reimbursement from the state – and noted that the district has yet to be reimbursed for $27,508 of its MTA tax of $91,380 from 2009-10.
“These three things have nothing to do with running the school district,” a visibly annoyed Board president Mark Kamberg said.
Board vice president Robert Freier said that when state Assemblywoman Michelle Schimel and state Sen. Jack Martins appeared at school board meetings last month, he didn’t really feel that they had clarified anything about the financial obligations the state puts on the school district.
“They kind of say bits and pieces of what they’re doing without saying what’s going on. This is a tax,” Freier said about the special education funds that he said the school district will “supposedly” get back.
Lewis said that the combined loss of state aid, the sewer and MTA taxes and the special education cost represents approximately 0.7 percent of the total budget.
“That’s a huge loss in where our budget is going,” Lewis said.
She noted that the proposed 1.9 percent budget increase is the lowest year-to-year increase in the school district’s budget in the last 20 years.
Fitzpatrick said that the tax levy would actually be higher, at 4.67 percent, under a contingency budget of $51.44 million – and increase of 1.44 percent – if the budget is defeated because of financial factors that come into play in a contingency situation.
“The board was very aware of this during the budget process,” Kamberg said.
Resident Michael Gugliemo asked why the annual increases to the Employee Retirement System and the Teachers Retirement system were increasing by 30 percent and 39.47 percent, respectively.
Kamberg said the reason is that those increases are controlled by the state and noted that the increases are based on a five-year rolling average of investment returns for those respective pension funds.
“No one’s paid into the system in the last 10 years. That’s what’s wrong with the system,” said Lewis, who added that school superintendents have offered to make the 3 percent pension contributions they had formerly made before the state government ended those contribution requirements in 2000.
“There’s no way to wrestle around it. It’s the way of the system,” Board member David Keefe said.
The proposed 2011-12 budget has not experienced a repeat of last year when there was an active anti-budget campaign mounted by a group of residents who anonymously mailed flyers to district voters exhorting them to vote against the budget. That budget passed by only 34 votes.
But Kamberg, who is running unopposed for his board seat, declined to make any prediction on the outcome of this year’s budget vote.
“We are in harsh economic times,” he said. “You hope that the voters have the tools they need to understand the budget process.”
Voting for East Williston district residents will be held on May 17 in The Wheatley School gymnasium from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
