Trying to fund more with less

Malverne School District proposes slight increase in 2020-21 budget

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With the Malverne School District’s budget increases getting smaller each year, district Superintendent Dr. James Hunderfund said it is difficult to fit everything that parents and administrators would like in the spending plan.

The district proposed a 2020-21 budget of just over $60 million, an increase of 2.88 percent, which officials hope will continue to support programs such as facility maintenance, its core curriculum and staff-development programs, and improving the use of technology in the classroom, among other initiatives.

At the Board of Education’s Feb. 11 budget presentation, one of the upgrades parents said they would like to see is a full-time social worker at Howard T. Herber Middle School. Parent Sherri Flournoy asked if the district had plans to make such a hire, which spurred a discussion between parents and board members. “You do realize that middle school is a transitional time,” Flournoy said. “I know that the district has been very vocal, and has done a lot of work around the socio-emotional aspect of our students, so we don’t want to leave our students without a social worker in the middle school.”

Steven Gilhuley, the assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction and educational services, said that while the district does not have a social worker at the middle school, Joseph Aquino, the high school’s social worker, visits the middle school every Tuesday.

“When you pull one from one area to compensate for another,” Flournoy said, “that’s when problems start to arise.”

Gilhuley explained that the middle school has a character development program, but acknowledged that it was outdated. Going forward, Gilhuley said, the district hoped to update it.

Hunderfund said that if it were possible, he would have a social worker on every floor of each building in the district. The problem, he said, is the small budgetary increase, which is below the district’s average over the past 18 years of 3.77 percent.

“Essentially, we’re trying to squeeze more and more under less and less of a budget increase,” Hunderfund said. “The new laws prevent the cap from being exceeded in almost every case,” he added, referring to the state tax levy of roughly 2 percent. “The problem is, if you put one more thing in, something else has to come out of the other end. We are [at] the point and time where we’re [between] a rock and the hard place.”

Christopher Caputo, the assistant superintendent for business, said that the district’s challenges include not only dealing with the state-mandated tax cap, but also with varying state aid and unfunded mandates such as Academic Intervention Services, which is intended to boost academic success for students who struggle to meet the needs of the state’s learning standards. Gilhuley added that the most challenging part of any budget is staff cuts. For faculty positions, the district projected that it would cut the equivalent of nearly two full-time faculty positions.

“When we look at the schedules and the numbers on the population, we try to minimize [cuts] as much as we can …,” Gilhuley said. “We don’t want anybody to lose their jobs. We’re just trying to piece things together to make the budget work. It’s a little early now, so as we get more money as this goes along, things start to come back.”

The board will hold its next budget forum on March 24 in the high school’s Performing Arts Center.