Peekskill Schools Adopt $78.4M Budget for May 21 Vote

Officials believe that the $78.4 million budget proposal adopted by the Peekskill school board Tuesday night won’t have a major impact on the district’s educational programming this year.

But with dwindling fund balance reserves and escalating costs for items like employer pension payments and health insurance, the challenges of maintaining the district’s educational program will become even bigger next year.

“This is the worst budget year that I’ve ever experienced and I have great concerns,” said Greg Sullivan, the district’s assistant superintendent for business, said Tuesday night.  

The $78,403,667 proposal adopted by the school board represents is $4,077,735, or 5.49 percent, more than this year’s budget.

 The tax levy would increase by about 3.43 percent to $37,431,286, which is within the state’s mandated property tax cap. Residents would see their tax rates increase by 3.66 percent.

The tax levy in the proposal would have been even higher, but the district decided to use $4,066,244 from its fund balance to lower the levy I the proposal. But this will leave the district with about $4 million in its fund balance to use next year.

“This is a concern to the district, because you can’t continue to do that,” Sullivan said. “But the superintendent indicated we are trying to limit the damage done to cuts in staff and continue programs.”

Sullivan said at the current pace, the district’s fund balance by exhausted by the start of the 2015-2016 school year. 

“My hope is, and we’re starting to see that, is a reduction and the elimination in what we see in the GEA, because that’s really about all of the $3 million that we’ll be losing this year,” said James Willis, superintendent of Peekskill schools.

The GEA, or Gap Elimination Adjustment is a formula used by the state to help close its budget deficit through reductions in the amout of school aid distributed to public schools.

Board Trustee Tuesday McDonald said discussion on the district’s fund balance need to begin even earlier in the budget process.

“You can’t wait until this budget season to start talking about these things,” McDonald said.

Board President Joseph Urbanowicz agreed.

“I think we need to involve the community and discuss with the community and others to see how we’re going to address it,” Urbanowicz said.

Other details that were revealed about the budget proposal include:

• The elementary school librarian position is being eliminated. The district currently has one librarian serving all three of its elementary schools. Classroom teachers will now be responsible for developing all the lesson plans involving the library.

• Four high school foreign language teaching positions are being cut. The district believes it will be able to better maximize its foreign language program by working with the Putnam-Northern Westchester BOCES and developing a distance learning program.

• The district is eliminating its director of reading position. The position was budgeted for in this year's budget, but wasn’t filled.

• There are five teacher retirements scheduled this year. The district plans to replace four of those teachers and use the saving from one of the vacancies to help fund additional BOCES technical and career programming.

• The district’s building secretaries will be required to take a one-month furlough and only work 11 months out of the year.

A public hearing on the budget is scheduled for May 7. A public budget vote is scheduled for May 21.