Springs School District voters will be faced with a difficult choice on May 21 when they head to the polls for the annual budget vote.
They can vote Yes to support the district’s $37.8 million spending plan, which preserves all programs and services for children who continue to struggle academically and emotionally even after the end of the pandemic. Or, they could vote No to reject the budget, which proposes a tax-cap-busting 11.71-percent increase that would raise taxes by about $691 for an average Springs house with a market value of $1 million, according to the district.
“This is the realistic cost of what it will cost to operate your program for next year. . . . In order to maintain what you have, piercing the cap is the only way to move forward here,” Sam Schneider, the East Hampton School District’s assistant superintendent for business, told the school board on Tuesday. Mr. Schneider had stepped in to help out when Springs lost its own business administrator in the middle of budget discussions.
How did Springs get here? It’s a perfect storm of cost increases in nearly every area of the budget, including inflation in classroom supplies and utilities, sharply rising health insurance and employee retirement costs, contractually mandated salary increases for teachers, an increased tuition rate to send Springs high schoolers to East Hampton, the need for more security personnel and property insurance, and the need to replace an outdated method of teaching reading with a new, science-based curriculum.
The storm has been gathering for some time, school officials acknowledged. Though taxpayers approved an over-the-cap budget last year, administrators said this 11.7-percent increase is what is needed to stabilize finances.
“It’s a hard budget for us to look at, but we know it’s the reality of our current financial situation,” said Barbara Dayton, the school board president. These last few years, officials have been “softening the blow as much as possible,” she said, but “when push comes to shove, the can gets kicked only so far.”
The district will need at least 60 percent voter approval — a supermajority — for the budget to pass. Springs is not the only local school district in this position; both Amagansett and East Hampton are attempting to pierce the cap as well, for similar reasons, with proposed tax increases of 7.77 percent and 9.77 percent respectively.
A Springs budget breakdown presented on Tuesday shows the increase to the general instruction budget (including teacher salaries, classroom materials, high-school tuition, textbooks, and the reading curriculum) is 6.71 percent, or just over $1.5 million, bringing the total to $17.4 million. It also shows a proposed 9.77-percent increase, or $571,214, in the money needed for students with disabilities, up to $5.86 million.
“This is the bulk, as it should be, of the budget,” said Nancy Carney, the school’s deputy superintendent. She will assume the superintendent’s role on July 1.
More money is needed to pay for interest on the short-term loan, called a tax anticipation note, that the district must take out each year to pay its expenses from June through December until January, when the money from taxes starts flowing in.
“The cost is going up because last year you didn’t borrow enough,” Mr. Schneider told the school board. “As a result, the district wasn’t able to make timely payments to its vendors. You need to increase your appropriation for the interest because you have to borrow more.”
The board is choosing not to replace one retiring teacher, but the budget does include money for vacant positions including teaching assistants and a business official. The district is forgoing a “transfer to capital” this year, which is the mechanism by which districts set aside money for infrastructure improvements and repairs.
A modest 1.29-percent increase — $4,400, bringing this area up to $344,380 — is proposed for student activities, including clubs, team sports, and other programs that school officials say benefit students socially and emotionally. These are “dollars well spent,” Mr. Schneider said.
But areas such as field trips, intramurals, Robotics Club, Chess Club, Journalism Club, and others would be vulnerable to budget cuts, should the budget go down to defeat and Springs be faced with making reductions.
That would “really be devastating for our district,” Ms. Carney said. Springs, she said, would have to cut about $4.16 million from the budget, resulting in a contingency plan that would almost certainly include staff layoffs, larger class sizes, no new equipment purchases, and no sports, clubs, or field trips.
“We’re hoping we don’t have to go in that direction,” she said, calling the proposed $37.8 million budget one that supports “all the things we hold dear here in Springs.”
Mr. Schneider echoed the recent words of Adam Fine, the East Hampton superintendent. “It’s not the time to be removing things from [the students], because they just survived that really life-changing, for a young person, experience. Having to be on a contingent budget will devastate this program.”
During the public comment portion of the meeting, Kristy LaMonda, a special-education teacher and a Springs resident, said that “nobody wants this. Nobody wants a big increase, but I think it’s really important for everyone to hear that this is not frivolous spending. This is really just to maintain the basics that we have.”
The school budget will not be set in stone until April 23, meaning there’s still time for administrators to make changes before the May 21 vote. Of note is the continued negotiations in Albany on New York State’s own budget, which was due to be approved on April 1. This could improve Springs’s bottom line, “but at this point we’re kind of out of time here,” Mr. Schneider said. “I think we have to go with this revenue budget . . . You don’t have any other firm numbers. It’s a big risk to assume the money’s going to come back.”
The state legislature has approved multiple short-term extensions while deliberations continue, with Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. saying this week that a deal is still several days away — but that it’s a deal that maintains school funding to at least the amount that districts received this year, despite Gov. Kathy Hochul’s initial proposed cuts.
For Springs, that cut would have looked like $247,000, leaving the district with little choice but to make up the difference with a tax increase. It remains an issue because of the timing of the budget vote: Schools are required by state law to publish several notices ahead of the official vote.
“On school aid there’s an agreement now with the governor’s office and the Senate and Assembly that no school districts are going to lose state aid,” Mr. Thiele said by phone from Albany on Monday. “I can say now with pretty much 100-percent confidence that for any district that would have been adversely impacted . . . it’s not going to happen. They will at least get the same amount of money they got [in 2023-24] under foundation aid.”
Though that $247,000 is not enough to stave off the need to pierce the tax cap, every bit would help, Springs officials said Tuesday. And since the actual tax levy isn’t declared official until September, after the books are closed on the previous school year, the district could still choose to decrease taxes if that state aid comes through.
After the meeting, Ms. Dayton gave an assurance that the board would have that conversation. “Absolutely, if that extra money comes in, we will have to look at how that offsets things in the budget,” she said.
During a public comment session that followed, David Buda, a Springs resident who keeps a close watch on town and school district affairs, was skeptical of the budget proposal.
“Yes, life is getting more expensive and there are a lot of expenses you have no control over, but it’s going to be a hard sell for the taxpayers,” he said. “You may have reached the point where maintaining all of your programs and all of your staff is just not viable and necessary in the minds of the people who have to fund your budget.”