Saturday is the deadline for voters to get their ballots in the mail for New York state’s school board and school budget elections. There will be no in-person voting in the June 9 elections due to safety precautions because of the coronavirus pandemic.
All voting will be by mail. Under an executive order by Governor Andrew Cuomo, all voters are permitted to use the absentee ballot option to cast their votes. Schools, closed for months because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will not have polling places this year.
“It is all by absentee ballot,” said Robert Schneider, executive director of the New York State School Boards Association.
In an interview via Skype, Schneider says that means voters who don’t want to drop ballots off through a slot have to mail them by Saturday to get them to the schools in time for the deadline.
Because of the many disruptions in supply chains due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some districts had a shortage of envelopes to use to send out ballots to voters, but Schneider says they were able to find enough to send them out in time.
Perhaps an even bigger challenge facing schools is that districts presenting their proposed budgets to voters don’t really know how much money they will receive from the state.
New York faces a $13 billion deficit after revenues plummeted due to the economic shutdown in response to the pandemic. Cuomo has said repeatedly that if a fourth federal relief package does not include money for state and local governments $8 billion in cuts will need to be made.
“You’d be cutting schools 20%, local governments 20% and hospitals 20%”, Cuomo said on April 20th. “This is the worst time to do this.”
Democrats who lead the House of Representatives have approved a $3 trillion package that includes money to help states that were hit hard by the virus to balance their budgets. Republicans who lead the Senate say they want to pause the relief packages for a while to judge the results of the earlier measures.
Schneider says most schools are budgeting with little hard data.
“The word is uncertainty,” Schneider said. “We don’t know what’s going to happen and it’s very tough for our school districts to budget.”
Many districts are recommending staff and program reductions, or relying on attrition and early retirement incentives to cut costs. Others are dipping into reserve funds. Schneider says without a federal bail-out package the cuts are “going to fall on the backs of our students” and he predicts music, sports and language programs and advanced placement classes will be eliminated.
Schneider says most schools are not seeking increased revenues from property tax payers to make up for the potential shortfall from the state, and nearly all are staying within the 2% per year property tax cap.
To add to the uncertainty, schools are not even sure right now whether they will fully reopen in the fall. Schneider says districts are working with the Board of Regents and State Education Department on a task force to come up with plans that may include socially distanced learning at schools, staggered lunches and fewer seats in classrooms, and having children attend school on alternate weeks. He says there are still many unanswered questions.
“It all depends on the health and science and the data - can we open schools in September safely?” Schneider asks. “We’re not there yet.”
Schneider says the supplies needed for reopening, including hand sanitizer and personal protective equipment, as well as physical modifications to classrooms and school buses, will only add to schools’ expenses.
