School District Unveils $122.1M Budget

This is the first article in a two-part series.

Talk of a tax levy cap, restructuring, class sizes and a lack of line-by-line copies of the proposed 2012-13 school budget monopolized the Long Beach School District’s unveiling of the document’s initial draft at the Long Beach Library on Tuesday.

In front of a packed auditorium, Superintendent David Weiss and Chief Operating Officer Michael DeVito gave a PowerPoint presentation of the $122.1 million budget that represents a 2.9 percent, or $3.5 million, increase from the current spending plan.

Starting this year school districts face a state mandated 2 percent cap on the tax levy, the amount of money to be raised by taxes, but exemptions are permitted for districts previously committed to financing capital projects. This gives Long Beach a 5.2 percent tax levy cap, since the proposed budget’s 3.9 percent tax levy increase reflects the principal owed on a $98 million bond that the community approved in 2009 to fund a district-wide preservation project to upgrade schools and facilities. For the second consecutive year, the district’s operating costs represent a 0 percent increase.

“What we’re asking the taxpayers to pay for additionally is just the principal that we have to pay on the bond,” DeVito said.

The district was able to use reserve funds in order to generate a zero percent increase to the tax levy in the current 2011-12 budget, DeVito said, but was unable to do that with the new budget. As it did last year, the district will allocate about $3 million from its fund balance, or savings account, to offset the tax levy increase. 

Moreover, the district projects it will receive about $18.8 million in state aid, a $2.3 increase from the current budget, and other revenues sources amount to a projected $7 million, an approximately $118,000 increase, which includes tuition from Island Park students at Long Beach High School.

Both DeVito and Weiss said that through restructuring and other factors, including slightly lower enrollment and consolidating services, the district was able to make cuts while maintaining all existing programs and services. They highlighted the budget’s funding for the preservation plan, support services, technology integration, and a continued focus on college and career readiness standards. “That’s the driving force of our academic curriculum,” Weiss said about the latter.

The district anticipates an above-average number of retirements this year and will use this to implement its restructuring measures, as well as reduce full-time and part-time staff, substitute teachers, and administrators. “The reductions are spread K through 12,” said Weiss.

The only way to manage an operating budget with zero expenses was to cut staff, Weiss noted, and that while services will remain intact they will be administered differently. “That will take a lot of work on the part of the other administrators,” he added.  

Before the microphone was opened to the community for comments, some school board trustees sounded a cautionary note about the nation’s ongoing recession and its impact locally.

Board President Dr. Dennis Ryan said that, in his 35 years working in the district, he had not seen such difficult economic times, noting that Baldwin just closed two elementary schools. “I suspect many of you are here tonight because you got word that this is a time unlike other times in terms of cuts and terms of fiscal realities,” he said.

He and fellow Trustee Patrick Gallagher encouraged the audience to attend budget meetings and to voice their concerns in order to help the board understand better what is most important to the community. 

Trustee Roy Lester, a bankruptcy and foreclosure defense attorney, said he still has clients who are losing their homes everyday, and now banks aren’t interested in taking them because they can’t afford the tax burden. He said that while he’s encouraged by parts of the new budget, other parts signal a disturbing trend: “We can’t keep taking money from our reserves and our fund balance in order to balance our budget,” Lester said. “It’s just not going to be sustainable.”

Part two of this series, which will include the community’s comments on the proposed budget, will be posted on Monday.