School District Mulls Cost Cuts, Awaits Cuomo’s Budget Announcement

With months of speculation over possible elementary school building closings, program cuts, transportation adjustments and more in the past, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal announcement Tuesday will provide clarity on the direction the district needs to move in to collapse its deficit.

“We need the governor to tell us if there’s a cap, we need the governor to give us our state aid number – those are the two missing parts that we have, we don’t have our revenue side,” said Smithtown Central School District Board of Education member Neil Carlin. “We know our expense side, we don’t know our revenue side.”

During his campaign, Cuomo has stated he wants to limit annual tax-levy increases by imposing a cap at 2 percent or the inflation rate, whichever percentage is less, and education is an area where economic aid will be cut. This proposal by the governor has left the Smithtown Central School District in a position to make tough decisions.

Smithtown Central School District Superintendent Edward Ehmann said the tax levy decision should be left to the school district and the community.

“A district should have the ability to say we want to pass a four percent tax levy budget because we don’t want to close schools, we don’t want to do this,” he said. “If the governor were to impose a tax cap on communities that defeat a budget then I really don’t have a problem with that … that to me is reasonable.”

Talks of school building closings have caused commotion at board meetings, amongst cutback discussions in other areas, but Carlin said these talks were necessary.

“We need to know what everything costs in case the revenue side gets taken out and now we have to cut $2.5-3 million,” he said. “What do you do if you haven’t thought about it or planned for it or know what everything costs? We don’t know what’s going to happen but we have to know, we have to think, we have to be on top of it.”

Carlin said all the discussion on cuts prior to Tuesday resulted in no concrete plans.

“You can’t close a school without feasibility, knowing what the ramifications are, who gets impacted, where the kids are going to go, where the busses are, so we have to run that,” he said. “There’s no imminent plan, the driver is going to be Feb. 1.”