By KYLE WIND
Freeman staff
kwind@freemanonline.com; twitter.com/KyleatFreeman

Of 16 school districts in the region, only three — Germantown, Highland and New Paltz — are asking voters to override New York’s new cap on property tax hikes, according to the state Education Department.

The Germantown and Highland superintendents have said their districts are in particularly stark financial distress, and Highland officials have reached out to neighboring school districts to study a possible merger. Germantown Superintendent Patrick Gabriel said earlier this year that the district has to consider whether it will be financially viable to have a high school in two years.

The decision to seek voters’ permission to override the cap has been debated in all three districts. At recent New Paltz school board meetings, some district residents argued the public cannot afford it, while others argued it is essential to keep cuts to a minimum.

Mid-Hudson School Budgets, Tax Levy Increases

In Germantown, where the school board voted 4-3 to bring the over-the-cap budget to voters, Gabriel said he knows other districts will be watching the outcome closely. He expressed optimism, though, that if the spending plan is adopted, it will help put the district on better long-term financial footing.

Adopting a school budget that overrides the tax cap, which varies by district, requires approval by at least 60 percent of the people who vote — a soc-called “supermajority.” A simple majority is not enough.

Half of the region’s school districts are seeking approval of school budgets that cut spending, including New Paltz, where 2012-13 appropriations are down 0.34 percent from 2011-12. And, like every other district in the area, per-pupil spending in New Paltz is being held at about current levels.

The new financial restrictions also have pushed many districts to take major steps to reorganize their operations for the coming school year to keep spending down.

Among them:

• The Kingston school district is closing Frank L. Meagher Elementary School after the current school year ends, and district officials are working on plans to further reconfigure the district for 2013-14. Continued...

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• The Rondout Valley school district is closing Rosendale Elementary School after the current school year and adopting a grade-clustering approach for elementary and intermediate grades.

• The Hyde Park school district is closing Hyde Park Elementary School after the current school year.

• The Onteora school district is reconfiguring its elementary schools with a grade-clustering approach.

School district officials have found silver linings to some of the difficult decisions they have made. In some cases, they see reconfiguration as an opportunity to reimagine the way education in their districts is delivered — particularly in Rondout Valley and Onteora. In other districts, officials have said they are “rightsizing” after sustained periods of declining enrollment, a trend that continues.

All of the region’s districts, with the exception of Ellenville, Highland and New Paltz, project lower enrollments next fall than in the current school year. The districts with the sharpest expected drops in their student bodies include Marlboro, with an anticipated 5.4 percent decline; Germantown, 4.95 percent; and Catskill, 3.06 percent.

In Kingston, school board President James Shaughnessy has said that leading up to the decision to close Meagher, the district had lost about 25 percent of its students in a 10-year period. He said closing schools helps the district offer more programs and services.

Hyde Park Superintendent Greer Fischer said on Friday that closing an elementary school will save the district $1.7 million and allow it to restore a number of programs and positions that were slated to be cut. They include high school electives that she said help students graduate, a middle school world language program, field trips, middle and high school teaching positions, after-school transportation and clerical and administrative positions.

Fischer said her district lost about 800 students between 2001 and 2012 and that closing Hyde Park Elementary School provides an opportunity to even out disparate class sizes with only a small increase in average class size.

Fischer said it was difficult for many people in the community to lose the school, but she said the district could not keep the school open and continue to offer the eliminated programs. She also said, though, that the state tax cap has put school districts in a financial position that is unsustainable and that there is not much money left in the district’s reserves.

“It’s devastating,” she said. “We’ve lost $4 million in state aid from three to four years ago, (and) we have rising costs like salary and benefits.”

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