Getting a five-month head start, the North Colonie School District held a community budget forum on Monday, Oct. 18, for the 2010-2011 school year, where around 45 members of the district came to express their opinion of what direction the district should head in.
In a two-hour long forum, Superintendent Joseph Corr took to the first portion to share the general information on what the budget looks like for the year. The district put forth a proposed $91,150,000 budget for the 2010-2011 school year and a property tax rate of 3.9 percent.
Corr went through a list of reasons as to why the budget looks the way it does as he discussed the amount of state and federal funding the district would receive, why the tax rate looks the way it does and what the future may hold for its reserves.
He discussed the tardiness of the New York State 2010-2011 as it was 125 days late when it was adopted on Aug. 3, with a 2.4 percent spending increase, totaling at $136 billion. He expressed some frustration over some of the federal funding the district received, which was a decrease of over $3 million for the 2009-2010 school year to over $1 million this fiscal year, more specifically the Race to the Top Funding.
I think it’s not a betrayal or revealing to say this was crafted very quickly and a lot of details have yet to be announced, he said, after making a Yankees versus Red Sox joke referring to New York placing second to first place Massachusetts.
With the state being awarded $696 million in federal funding, meant to help out with staff development, curriculum development and data tracking system improvements, North Colonie will receive $51, 922 that must be spent over a four year period.
`We have an allocation of $13,000 a year,` said Corr. `Not a substantial allocation and far from being a game changer in terms of the budget situation.`
He added that the district can’t even spend 25 percent the first year, being restricted to only being able to spend 15 percent, which amounts to $7,800 and that it had been codified into education law for schools to use the funding.
Corr did call the Education Jobs Fund Program that was passed in September `good news`, but added that the district is still not sure of what strings may be attached to the funding. With $607 million awarded to the state, North Colonie will be receiving $1,019,934. The fund was meant to retain education jobs for the fiscal year, according to Corr.
After the presentation, community members we split into five different groups where they were asked questions on what they thought of the presentation, where they could find some common ground, what they disagreed on and what they would like to be done in the future to inform them of the progress being made with the budget.
Representatives from Capital Region BOCES reported back to all of those in attendance what they experienced in their groups after an hour’s worth of deliberation. Many of them found that residents were happy about the quality of education provided by the North Colonie School district for such low property taxes. What many disagreed on was about what should be cut, wanting more transparency in the contacting process and didn’t agree on employee salaries that increase from $39,822,550 to $43,010,169 from 2010-2010 through the 2013-2014 budget season.
Corr said the increase in salary is due to a step increase that is provided to public employees each year.
One Colonie resident, who has a 10 year old attending Maple Wood Elementary School, Chris Sevinsky, said he believes the current economic crisis is a short one that should be addressed through security measures such as increases in tax levies or in utilizing reserves for the short term in order to not disable important parts of the education system.
`People have this sort of mental breaking point around tax rate increases,` he said. `So, if you say it’s 3.9 percent, then everyone’s OK. But if you go to 4.1 percent and they just go nuts. I think that was one place I may have had a little bit of disagreement with everyone else in the group.`
He added that he was very happy with the format of the forum and said there should be several more, that or `as much as people can tolerate.`
North Colonie Communications Specialist Stephen King said he was very pleased at how the forum went, adding that it was a bit different from what the district has done in the past.
`The format that was done in the past was we would have budget forums and we would have presentations made on a certain issue and then the community would ask questions and get into a little back and forth debate on some of the issues,` said King. `This time around we presented some of the issues ahead of time and be able to have smaller group discussions and really have our community members discuss what’s important to them. Then in turn, that feedback will help the district shape our budget in the future.`
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