Port Washington school officials announced Thursday that they will not need to pierce the state-mandated tax cap in the 2016-17 budget.
“Certainly there was a change that took place,” Assistant Superintendent Mary Callahan said at the meeting held in the Paul D. Shrieber High School Auditorium.
The Port Washington School District received an additional $437,000 this year after the elimination of the Gap Elimination Adjustment by the state Legislature in last week’s state budget vote.
The Gap Elimination Adjustment was first introduced in 2010 to cover a huge budget deficit at public school’s expense. It’s purpose was to help the state fill its revenue shortfall.
“Number one when the state finally gave us their budget, which for the first time in all my years of doing budgeting turned out to be a significant amount of money,” Callahan said. “I do come from a cynical point of view because I was around doing this job in a year when the State of New York, in the middle of the year came back to school districts and told them that they’d have to give back aid in the amount of millions and million of dollars which caused schools districts to have to cut programs. So when we were hearing that there was the potential for the Gap Elimination Act to be totally eliminated, it’s my responsibility for me to be conservative, to look out for the long term interest of the district. So up until we had something in writing showing us the exact number that we were getting we had been working with the projections that were published in January, which were significantly lower.”
Port Washington school officials announced on Feb. 23 that they are considering a tax hike that exceeded a projected 0.85 tax cap to accommodate the district’s growing student enrollment.
Officials said on Thursday that the current enrollment in the district is 5,449 students — an increase of more than 100 from the 2015-16 school year.
Officials said they need to spend more than $1.2 million on new hires to accommodate the increase in student enrollment without increasing class sizes.
Officials said the district budgeted $26,583 per student in the 2015-16 school year, which is what the board expects the district to spend for the 2016-17 budget.
“This can fluctuate from year to year obviously depending upon whether your enrollment is going up or down,” Callahan said. “Whether or not you’ve had larger increases in budget because you’ve increased staffing because you’ve had capital expenditures, debt service that will add to your cost per pupil.”
Superintendent of Schools Kathleen A. Mooney said the school board is seeking to add four elementary teachers, three ESL teachers, one bilingual teacher, and one business teacher at a cost of $827,199.
“We are requesting the five elementary sections, four of which need to be funded,” Mooney said. One of the sections as a result of reducing the pep teachers from three teachers to two teachers. The three ELA teachers that are mandated one will be at the elementary level, one at Weber and one at Shreiber. We must have a position in place for the possibility of a larger kindergarten class. We’re not 100 percent certain that we will hire that position but we must have planned for that position”
Port Washington school officials said are also seeking to increase security by hiring more security guards.
Officials said the cost of an additional security aid will be at $30,000 for an overall increase in security expenses at $120,000.
“Administration presented the board with a budget that was within the levy limit, but also includes a good portion of the staffing,” Mooney said. “We did discuss how that was accomplished because we did reduce increases in other codes.”
“Once the Board of Education realized there was an opportunity with the additional state aid to review all the specific staffing we tried to develop a plan,” Callahan said, adding that after review the board decided to leave cuts in the cost of supplies, such as paper, ink, furniture were to find $400,000 in savings to match the amount received in state aid.
“And the board contribution of another $400,000 to make up what you may remember from our February discussion of $1.2 million in staffing,” Callahan said. “So that’s the overarching way we moved froward very quickly in the past 36 hours.”
