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Dr. David Hopson |
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April 28, 2008 This week, Gateway hosted an all towns budget meeting entitled “Trends, Projections and Concerns from the Past, Present and Future”. The figures presented at this meeting were based upon Department of Revenue financial information that is available to everyone on the Internet. I opted to use this source as it presents unbiased information, is standardized across all seven towns, and accounts for all changes within each fiscal year. The information was used for a financial history of from Fiscal Year 2003 to 2007, which was then used to make projections through Fiscal Year 2014. The presentation shared on April 30th is available for public review on the district’s website (www.grsd.org). As there is much information packed into the presentation, I’ll only be able to touch upon the highlights. The first highlight covers the actual local budget expenditures from 2003 to 2007, comparing the 7 district towns in total, the Gateway District, and vocational costs. Analyzing this information showed that the total educational costs to the towns increased by an average of 5.6% per year during this time, that the district assessments by Gateway increased by an average of 4.9% per year and the town budgets excluding education increased by an average of 6.6% per year. As an aside, the overall Gateway budget only increased by an average of 0.5% per year during this time; town assessments were higher due to the massive cutbacks in state funding. Projecting the Gateway budget out until 2014 was an interesting and frightening proposition. For purposes of projections I used a 4.5% basic budget increase that requires a constant reduction of services over the next five years. To ensure a level services scenario (where each year the services provided would remain the same from year to year) we would need to project out a budget based upon an increase of 5.5 to 6.0%--something that doesn’t appear possible given the district’s financial resources and the inability of the state to increase educational aid. It is interesting to note that next year’s budget request would be nearly 3 million dollars above our actual request if the budget had gone up at 4.5% since 2003 and nearly 6 million dollars more if the school budget had increased in line with town budgets during the same time period! To determine potential shortfalls in future Gateway budgets, and given the town’s financial constraints, projections for 2009 to 2014 were made using the current percentage of education support from town budgets. I also had to project different scenarios for state aid—one following the past two years where the state has increased our educational aid by $50 per student while not decreasing support due to a decreasing student enrollment; the second scenario used the average decreases over the last several years to project future decreases in state aid. Under our ‘best case’ scenario, we would have to make even more cuts beyond the reduction in services required with 4.5% budget. These additional reductions would average nearly $700,000 per year. Using the past several years ‘historical’ decreases, the district would have to cut an average of $1,700,000 per year beyond the reduction in services required by holding budget increases to 4.5%. It became apparent that there are three basic choices that we face over the next five years—take up an ever-increasing amount of local resources to support education, drastically reduce educational resources, or have the state support education at a higher level than it currently does. Both the first and last scenarios seem less plausible than that of reducing educational resources, which leads to the next question: at what point will the state waive penalties for consolidating schools so that we can continue to offer an educationally viable program to all students? In reality, future projections are always less accurate than past history. I’d venture to guess that there will be a combination of factors occurring that will somewhat mitigate the impact on our students provided that we act together. We all need to ensure that the state understands the fiscal plight of smaller, rural schools by constantly talking to our legislatures; we need to maintain students in-district and entice more from out of district; we need to increase our local tax base; we need the state to pick up more of the cost of special education students; the state needs to fully fund the Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program to reimburse towns for property taxes lost on state owned property; and we need to ensure that the state allows us to consider consolidation of schools without worrying about economic sanctions. If we can move forward marginally on each of these issues, the negative impact on the schools and our towns will be minimized. If not, we can look forward to the types of devastating reductions we endured just a few years ago. School and town officials alone can’t effectively move all these pieces forward; rather it will take a concerted effort by everyone in our seven towns to truly make progress in ensuring we continue to have effective schools for our children. ### |
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