By ALEX COSTELLO
The 1.8 percent increase from the 2008-09 budget of about $30.7 million, is tempered by a series of small cuts, like $6,000 to business office supplies, $20,000 to textbooks, and $186,042 to employee benefits.
"It’s a very frugal budget," said Price after the meeting. "We built a budget knowing the economic times, trying to respond to everyone’s concern.
"On the other hand, we have not eliminated any programs for kids. We are maintaining our programs."
The budget held the line in many places, showing no increase from last year. Interscholastic activities, which includes equipment, supplies and salaries for coaches, remained at $114,833.
The biggest increase to the budget was an additional $393,000 for special education, bringing special education costs -- most of which are state mandated -- to $4.3 million for 2009-10. The district has 40 students enrolled at special facilities or in BOCES programs for severe disabilities, which costs nearly $2.2 million, or about half the total special education budget.
The largest overall decrease in the budget was to employee benefits. Money going into the retirement funds for teachers, and all employees social security and health insurance took cuts of almost $186,000. Part of the decrease came from lower costs for the district's health insurance, and part of it came from reductions in staff.
Lincoln Orens Middle School will have 1.5 fewer teachers for the 2009-10 year because of lower student enrollment. According to Price, the district is able to lay off half a teacher by reducing an existing full-time position to part-time.
"We’ve reduced teachers in the elementary school over the past few years because of lower enrollments, and now some of that is feeding into the middle school as well," Price said. "And so this is not cutting programs, this is just there aren’t as many kids, so we’re not going to keep people on just to keep them on."
Michael Hastava, the vice president of the Board of Education, stressed that when making the budget, it's always the children that come first.
"We always look to make sure the kids have the programs they need first," said Hastava. "And then it’s always a shuffle to try and strike a balance between the rest of the workings of the school. Everything else sort of falls into place, but always, always priority number one is programming to the kids.
"If we had to do some cuts, we would always touch that last, if at all," he added.
The teacher layoffs are juxtaposed by two new positions created for the upcoming year: a Director of Curriculum Development, a new administrative position, and an elementary school foreign language teacher, part of the new Foreign Language in Elementary Schools (FLES) program the district hopes to implement if the proposed budget passes.
"[The Director of Curriculum Development] will be overseeing things such as curriculum mapping, our data analysis program and our technology program," said Price, of the position which has a salary budgeted at $120,000. It will also be the director's responsibility, according to Price, to oversee the implementation of any new or modified curriculum elements the state releases.
If the budget does not pass, Price said the district will not hire a new teacher or start the FLES program.
Despite an $84,000 drop in salaries because of the 1.5 teacher layoff in the middle school, salaries for the district's 61 teachers went up almost $73,000 to $7.5 million. The biggest single salary increase went to Dr. Rosemary Bovino, the current deputy superintendent who is replacing Price as superintendent next year. Her salary as superintendent is budgeted at $210,000, an increase of almost $23,000 from her current salary of nearly $187,000, and more than $2,000 above Price's current salary. Bovino's replacement deputy superintendent's salary is budgeted at $120,000, which is $66,934 less than the position's 2008-09 salary.
Price, who along with Bovino, formulates the budget for the district, said he was proud that they had such a small increase this year while making many cuts and keeping programs stable. It's a feat Price said might be increasingly tough to replicate because of losses to retirement investment portfolios, which the district has to fund because of contractual pension obligations.
Price fears that, with the economic downturn, the money the district invested in the retirement systems will be down and they will need to pay in more during future years to make up the this year's loss.
"So we’re watching that stuff very carefully," said Price.
The Board of Education will go over the revenue portion of the budget on April 6 and the community gets to vote on the budget on May 19.
"I would hope the community is going to be supportive of it," Hastava said. "Because the budget is more than just the increases that they say. It’s the programs that we’re offering, it’s the cuts that we’ve made to trim the budget down to this."
Comments about this story? ACostello@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 207.
