HFCS Presents First Draft Of Budget

by Alex Brooks
The first draft of the Hoosick Falls School District budget was presented last week. Superintendent Ken Facin called the situation “challenging,” but he set a goal of developing a budget that does not exceed a 2% tax levy increase, with minimal impact on staffing and student programming. He said, “We have some work to do, but we will find a way to reach our goal.”
The budget as presented showed a tax levy increase of 8.19%, but no one expects it to stay that high. The Board’s intention is to work that down to 2% or less before it adopts a budget on April 19.
[private]State aid for operating expenses is expected to increase by 2.8%, which provides $216,180 additional dollars. But this figure is dwarfed by cost increases facing the District. The biggest and most obvious is contractually obligated pay increases for teachers. The increase in cost for teaching staff is shown in this budget as $588,000. This figure includes the cost of one additional teacher added this year, an AIS Math teacher.
Another sizeable increase is for increased assessments for teacher and staff retirement funds. The Employee Retirement System increased its assessment from 16.3% to 18.9%, and the Teacher Retirement System went from 11.11% to 11.84%. Overall this increases the District’s costs in this area by 14.6%, which is $200,871 additional dollars.
The third major area of increased cost is fuel oil for heating and diesel fuel for the buses. Together, these are expected to cost $130,000 more than this year, as the cost of oil is expected to go up quite a bit over the next year.
The District has taken a number of initiatives over the past year that reduce costs. The biggest of these is a contractually negotiated change in the District’s health insurance offerings. They formerly offered three choices of health plans, but in the new contract the most expensive of these is no longer offered so there are only two choices. Health insurance premium rate increases have not been determined for next year yet, but the estimate is that they will increase by 10%. This would have been an increased cost to the District of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but because of the change in health plans offered the District will be budgeting $221,348 less for health insurance premiums than they did for this year.
The District has also been able to make some staff reductions over the course of this year which will lower its costs for the upcoming year. A school monitor position was eliminated; a full time Speech teacher was retired and her duties covered by increasing a half time teacher to full time; a 6½ hour per day teaching assistant who retired was not replaced; two retiring school bus drivers were replaced by less senior drivers at lower rates of pay, and a retiring social studies teacher was replaced with a .8 full time equivalent teacher. Altogether these changes will save the District $155,000 in the upcoming budget year.
To get from this draft budget to the District’s goal of keeping the tax levy under 2% requires over a half million dollars of additional savings. Some of this may come from using  a larger fund balance from this year’s surplus funds. The District has not used this source of funds in the last four budgets, and Facin’s budget message said “It will need to be explored in this budget process.” Or perhaps the picture for State aid will improve in the next two months. Governor Cuomo has said that the bulk of the additional money would be going to high-needs districts, and the Hoosick Falls administrators are puzzled why this district is not considered part of that group. Pam Hatfield, School Business Administrator, said, “We feel as though we were shortchanged.”
However that may turn out, Superintendent Facin seemed very confident that the District will reach its budget goals this year one way or another. “The sky is not falling,” said Facin. “We’re going to get this done.”[/private]