On Tuesday, school districts around New York state will ask voters to approve their budgets. Amid ongoing negotiations between the governor and the state Legislature about the state’s overall budget, schools are in a tough position.
According to Bob Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, there's no way next week's school budget votes will be truly reflective of the state's education budget.
"It's already too late," he said.
School districts had to have their ballots finalized weeks ago. At this point, there's no way to change them regardless of whether the state approves a budget before Tuesday. As a result, Lowry said the districts are left with a simple choice.
"Are they optimistic or cautious?" he wondered.
That, according to Dave Albert, chief communications and marketing officer for the state School Boards Association, is a high-stakes question.
"School districts really only have three revenue sources. They have local sources, which come from property taxes; they have state sources; and they have federal sources," Albert said. "But, of those three, federal sources are really a small amount, only about 7%, leaving state and local sources as really the primary revenue sources for schools. When you don't know how much you're going to get in state aid, it makes it difficult to budget."
This year, a lot of the uncertainty boils down to the question of whether districts will receive a 1% or 2% increase in what's known as foundation aid, which covers general-purpose operating costs. An early version of Gov. Kathy Hochul's state budget proposal called for a 1% increase. When districts heard about that, Bob Lowry's phone started ringing.
"Within days, we were hearing from superintendents, 'Our increases in health insurance costs would exceed the value of the 1% increase in foundation aid,'" Lowry said.
Basically, they told him, rising healthcare premiums meant a 1% increase was effectively a 0% increase. The current version of the state budget seems likely to land closer to a 2% increase. But even then, Albert said, margins are tight enough that schools are having to weigh tough cuts to programs like extra academic help for struggling students, electives, and Advanced Placement classes.
"Those programs are particularly vulnerable right now because schools would have to continue those programs, probably at local taxpayers' expense," Albert said.
There is no worse feeling for a superintendent than cutting a program or eliminating a position that could have been saved if the district had known how much money it had to work with. Whether or not the state budget, which was due April 1, passes before next week's school budget votes, those are choices districts have already had to make.
Both Albert and Lowry said appropriating funds for the state's basic operating costs has gotten increasingly political.
"It has become more common in recent years for governors to try and address policy issues through the budget," Lowry said.
This year, disagreement on issues like deadlines for the state's climate law, auto insurance reforms, changes to the state's environmental review process for housing construction, and immigrant protections have become sticking points in negotiations. Albert said lawmakers increasingly view budget season as an opportunity to force conversations about thorny issues, even if those issues don't have much to do with how and where the state spends taxpayer money.
"It's really an opportunity where everybody's sitting at the table — the state has to have a state budget, so it's an opportunity to raise some of these issues that are important to either one house of legislature or to the governor," Albert said. "So it is an opportunity to just at least raise the issue and see if there's an appetite to have a discussion about it."
Despite all this, Lowry anticipates most school districts will pass their proposed budgets next week. Districts often levy additional taxes to cover anticipated gaps in state funding, and as long as those tax hikes aren't above the legal cap, voters overwhelmingly tend to go along with them.
"Typically, we're up around 97% of budgets passing, and most of the ones that fail are districts that seek an override of the tax cap," Lowry said. "And even among those, I'd say typically, around 60% pass on the first vote."
This year, of course, with the soaring price of gas and the loss of federal subsidies for healthcare coverage, costs are going up for a lot of people. Lowry said he hasn't heard anything to suggest voters might be more hesitant to support school budgets that require tax hikes.
"The pass rates have been kind of resiliently high, no matter what's been going on in the economy or in the news generally," Lowry said. "And [I] haven't really heard anything to suggest that this year would be different."
And even if districts have already had to decide whether they're optimistic or cautious, Albert said there's reason to believe the state will ultimately get them more foundation aid for the upcoming year.
"I think generally speaking, both the governor and the legislature always want to do the best they can for schools," Albert said.
