An unprecedented influx of 18 new students arrived this year in the Wainscott Common School District, a tiny school that educates kids in kindergarten through third grade and pays tuition to send older children to nearby districts.
All 18 of those new students, some with special education needs, are in grades four and up, leading to sharply rising tuition costs. Because of that, Wainscott is facing an anticipated budget deficit of about $902,000 this year, as well as a projected increase in next year’s budget of about 43 percent.
“We have to do two things: Fund the deficit from this year, and build those numbers into next year. It’s a double hit,” David Eagan, the school board president, said in an interview this week. “I would hope that the school board, which has been a really good, consistent board for a number of years now, has built up enough credibility with the community to know that this is not something we’re doing in any kind of discretionary fashion at all.”
The budget hits come just as a new work-force housing development is being planned on Route 114 within the borders of the Wainscott district — a project that has the potential to bring even more kids into the school. That topic has struck a chord with the hamlet’s Citizens Advisory Committee, which debated the budget and enrollment issues for hours on Saturday.
The district has performed residency checks to affirm that all 18 students are truly Wainscott residents, said Deborah Haab, the district’s superintendent and principal. “Even for a larger district, it would be a financial strain,” she said. “We have some contingency available, but not to the magnitude of what we experienced this year.”
The district is looking at a tentative budget plan for the 2023-24 school year of about $5.938 million, which includes a year-over-year increase of $1.8 million. On average, the district spends 28.5 percent of its budget on expenses at the schoolhouse, while 61 percent goes to tuition for older students to other schools.
The budget has yet to be set in stone; the district has another week and a half to shore up its numbers ahead of the budget vote, which is May 16. There will be a separate ballot proposition requesting $900,000 more in tax money to address the deficit.
“I can understand why people are going to be concerned,” Mr. Eagan said. “Not everyone here is a second or third homeowner who is probably not even aware that they pay school taxes.”
Aside from three recent years in which the district proposed — and passed — an over-the-tax cap school budget, the tax trend in Wainscott has often headed in the downward direction. In 2013, a state audit slammed the district for holding on to budget surpluses in excess of the “4 percent rule,” which states districts cannot keep more than 4 percent of a prior year’s budget as surplus money (known as the “unassigned fund balance”). After that audit, Wainscott consistently spent down its fund balance by applying it to offset tax increases.
Had the district been allowed to hold on to more of that surplus money, Mr. Eagan said, it may not have faced as severe a deficit.
During the Citizens Advisory Committee meeting on Saturday, Mr. Eagan and Ms. Haab explained their predicament to the community, and publicly presented their own analysis of the 50-unit complex — with a total, at the moment, of 100 bedrooms — proposed for Route 114.
All of the district’s current students live in 72 of the hamlet’s houses, or about 1.6 students per household. Applied to the 50 proposed housing units, that translates into 80 students, as compared to the projection of 35 to 39 students by the East Hampton Town working group tasked with planning the Route 114 housing project.
That’s about a 69-percent increase in the population of children. If they were all to be of primary-school age, the current 4,200-square-foot schoolhouse, with an official capacity of 24 students, would not be able to handle the increase. This year alone, the district had to convert the school library into another classroom to create separate classes for second and third grade.
If the in-house student population grows beyond 34, Wainscott is facing the possibility of cutting one or more of its grade levels — meaning even more tuition to other schools — or building a bigger schoolhouse, meaning even more tax money. There is also the possibility that it would have to become an “administrative district,” in which all students are sent to other schools.
“The very real prospect of this impact upon [the] Wainscott community and the district should force the town to reconsider the disproportionate impact” on the hamlet and its taxpayers, the school district said in its analysis.
Lori Anne Czepiel, a committee member, suggested “changing the school district boundaries,” which would be a possibility, albeit a complicated one, as long as the districts receiving more students are geographically contiguous. Other members suggested the town put a cap on the number of school-age children at the Route 114 housing complex.
District officials and committee members objected to the hamlet’s lack of meaningful representation on the Route 114 Working Group. “It feels a little bit like one more ‘stick Wainscott,’ which seems to be happening rather constantly these days,” said Barry Raebeck, a committee member.
Another member, Barry Frankel, said, “I ask the town to consider, at what point do we start destroying more than we’re creating? And I think that the impact of the school, of losing the school, we’re not going to build another school. Becoming an administrative district . . . must be placed into the equation of the risk.”
“I don’t want my kids to go to an overcrowded school,” said Melanie Hayward, a community member who has two children, one of them a current Wainscott student. “I really don’t want to see them in a temporary trailer classroom on that amazing, beautiful, historic property we have in Wainscott. I really don’t want my taxes to go up, either, but I think that there are ways to navigate this.”
The conversation, said Carolyn Logan Gluck, the committee chairwoman, is “a sign of how much people really care about the school and the housing crisis, that they want to try and struggle to wrap their minds around how to reach for some sort of balance.”
The overall tone on Saturday differed from the dialogue nearly 10 years ago, when the town proposed a 48-unit housing development on Stephen Hand’s Path, also in the Wainscott School District. That project was eventually scrapped in the face of mounting opposition from the school district and others in the community. Since then, the housing shortage on the South Fork has reached a crisis point, and attitudes toward work-force housing projects have shifted dramatically.
East Hampton Town Councilwoman Sylvia Overby, who serves as the town board’s liaison to the committee, said that “this is part of what happens; it’s not unique just to Wainscott to have to pay tuition, and these things fluctuate, back and forth, year after year.”