2011-2012 Proposed Budget

The demand from Albany requiring school districts to tighten their belts has not been lost on Sayville.

In fact, over the years, Sayville School District has consistently taken action to bring our education costs down by presenting lean budgets for community vote.

• Last year, to control costs, Sayville Administrators, Teachers and Unaffiliated/ Confidential Staff took a half-year wage freeze for both the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years, resulting in budgetary savings of over $2 million in salary and fringe benefit costs. 

 

• Through reductions in administration and staffing, our current salary costs for the 2010-11 school year are less than the prior year.

 

• Our district’s building-aid ratio on the already ‘approved’ construction projects is 68% on every dollar. This kind of spending on improvements that are highly reimbursable generates the biggest bang for the buck. 

 

• Our consolidated services with BOCES for transportation, instructional support, and Special Ed services have also been reimbursed through State Aid thus far.

 

• Despite Governor Cuomo’s negative generalizations, Sayville has used its reserves every school year in a fiscally responsible way that reduced budgetary costs and stabilized the tax rate.

Also, this reserve helps the district in other ways. Since school districts begin their fiscal year in July, but do not receive revenues from the State until December, districts are forced to borrow funds for the first half of the academic year through Tax Anticipation Notes (TAN). Because Sayville has been balancing the needs of the district and the tax levy with its reserve funds, our district borrows less and borrows later, thus significantly reducing our annual interest costs! 

The bottomline: spending down the district’s reserves will significantly impact the tax burden in the future. It is a SHORT-TERM fix to a bigger problem.

Coming into this new 2011-2012 budget process with such a lean past budget, however, also means there is very little extra to cut on the spending side this year. Even last year, our budget challenges did not arise from the spending side, but rather, from the revenue side, because the promise of federal and state aid was drastically reduced.

Since 73% of our school district budget involves expenses over which we have no control—and due to a state legislative decision made in 2000 on how employee pensions are funded—Sayville is now forced to reduce spending which will affect staff and programs. Fortunately, the staffing reductions we have made thus far during the budget process are due to a decrease in student enrollment. However, to reduce the tax-rate increase to only 4% requires cutting an additional $2 million from the budget, drastically affecting our programs, while only marginally decreasing the weekly cost to the taxpayer by $5.

What the Sayville community needs to consider is whether this difference of $5 more a week for the average taxpayer is worth keeping our excellent programs intact.

After listening to so many Sayville residents express their views at the Community Forum in February, the Sayville Board of Education will be adopting a Proposed Budget that will reflect new cost-cutting measures that will yield a 3.87% increase on the spending plan and a 7.39% tax-rate increase. Toward the end of this process, we will have a budget that preserves the integrity of our instructional and support programs at a cost the taxpayers can afford! (Please go to www.sayville.k12.ny.us for a complete listing of meeting dates and updated 2011-12 Budget information. Click on Business Office link.) Details will also appear in the next Budget Brochure publication being mailed to all residents.

Even though Sayville originally expected to sustain a $4 million decrease in State Aid, the most recent revisions to the State Budget have restored less than $400,000 in School Aid to Sayville, still leaving Sayville Schools with a deficit in State Aid of $3.8 million, along with reduced funding for BOCES special and shared services.

For many years, Sayville School District’s excellent programs, funded by state and federal aid as well as local tax levies, enabled all our students an equal right to compete well in academics, the arts, and athletics. Our programs opened more doors of opportunity in higher learning for our graduates, made our real estate desirable, and helped our local economy grow; and in each of these prior years, Sayville residents have shown their support by passing the budgets, for which we have been most grateful.