By Cindy J. Roth
The budget cuts eight positions from the district including a psychologist, high school guidance counselor, in school suspension teachers in the elementary and middle school, one elementary teacher, an academic intervention services elementary math teacher, a physical education teacher and the high school dean of students.
"There are some funding problems that we have," said district Superintendent Anthony Pecorale. "I didn't like having to cut the staff positions but there was no way I was going to present to this board a double digit tax increase."
The budget also streamlines classroom purchases like library chairs and surplus student desks and eliminated any repairs that were not absolutely necessary for the coming year.
Programs that will stay intact are the computer-assisted instruction, Saturday academy for eighth-graders, Regents assistance program, summer school and the Intel research program.
Residents at the district budget hearing on Tuesday night said they have seen for years the rise in taxes, but the performance of the students has not been improving at the same steady rate. Concerned parents and district residents, most who said they don't mind the tax increases as long as they see better student performance, argue that too little of the actual budget increase goes to programs.
"The district suffers from intellectual poverty," said Carl Arseth of the way the district is run and the fact that only about one-in-three students are graduating with Regents diplomas.
Unfunded or under funded state-mandated programs, health insurance, contractual salary increase and retirement fund contribution increases represent the majority of the 5.26 percent budget increase, with only 1.96 percent of the increase going to the programs component of the budget.
Others district residents argued that while they know its important to keep fixed costs down and possibly ask teachers to take on more of the burden by paying more into their health care plans, the district needs to offer teachers something more to stop the revolving turnover door.
"We can't be the bottom of the barrel when it comes to salaries and benefits," said Barbara Kelly Hoffacker. "We can't afford to have our staff drained off by other districts."
The district lost $222,000 in state aid this year, even with the Legislature's new budget that reallocated additional aid to school districts. Pecorale said he doesn't like the final budget, but that it was best he could come up with under the circumstances the district faced.
