New Hyde Park-Garden City Park Presents 2013-14 School Budget

“Our goal was many fold,” New Hyde Park-Garden City Park Superintendent Robert Katulak said last Monday night at the New Hyde Park Road School on the 2013-14 school budget, “to make sure that we would maintain certain program and practices in the district. This year, more than any other year we face more challenges that are beyond our control.”

Those challenges includes the state property tax cap, rising pension and health care costs, unsettled contracts and unfunded mandates.

“Previously if you wanted to offer Mandarin Chinese and it would cost each taxpayer another $25 a year, you could do that,” Katulak said. “Now you’re limited to what you can do and you cannot go over that tax cap unless you pierce that tax cap levy.”

To go above the state property tax cap requires a 60 percent ‘yes’ vote from the public.

Katulak also noted a heavy challenge in that the state is moving from a pencil and paper assessment program to a computer-based one in which every child in the same grade across the state will take the assessment at the same time.

“You have to have as many computers in the building as you have for students on a two-grade level such as the fifth and the sixth if they’re offered on the same day,” Katulak said. “It’s an outrageous mandate from the state and from the commissioner. There are 39 districts in the state who will be filing for insolvency as of this June because they cannot make their bills due to all of these things.”

The state has given districts until the end of the 2014-15 school year to put the computers in place “and right now we’re not on the because we have very little money put into our budget this year for technology and most of it is to just replace what we have now, not to expand,” the superintendent said.

As part of cost-cutting measures, the district is looking at “piggybacking” on contracts, which were only allowed for the first time this year.

“The state finally listened to the school districts and said ‘you can now do piggybacking’,” Katulak said, explaining that “if Floral Park-Bellrose is transporting five students to the Greek School in Queens and we have one student who is going to the Greek School in Queens, it’s all under the threshold of 25 miles, we can piggyback and put our kids on their bus and pay them a portion of that transportation cost rather than we have to hire a bus just for the one kid who lives in our district and that would cost us five times the amount the money the way we’re doing it.”

The district also participates in state-wide collaborative purchasing contracts for supplies and back office services like accounting and auditing.

“Our business office is so excellent in terms of keeping their books, that our auditors cannot find errors,” Katulak said. “When they can find errors, they reduce their rate to us because their work is so much easier. So when you have an efficient and an effective business office, that helps save money.”

Instead of dismissing teachers and personnel, the district is eliminating add-on positions and redeploying existing staff to other areas as needed.

“Our goal is not to add to the unemployment rate,” Katulak said, noting that Herricks is cutting 35 positions. “Some districts have $3.5 million to cut; we only had $83,000, but $83,000 to get to the cap was a lot of money in a small district such as ours.”

Other reductions include downsized clinics which were begun last year which will be offered target students most in need of them, mostly on levels one and two on the state assessments. The state has a goal that every student should be level 3 on state assessment.

“We’re there already,” Katulak said. “However, what we want to do is look at those learning challenged students so those students who are a level two can get up to those level threes and those level threes can be pushed and expanded to level four.”

The budget also maintains the district’s class size averages of 20-25 in grades K-2 and 25-29 in grades 3-6. The Nassau County class average for kindergarten is 21.5 students and 22 in New Hyde Park; 22 in grades 1-6 in the county and 21 in New Hyde Park.

“We listened and we created we believe a budget that listens very carefully to you,” Katulak said, referring to the public input sessions.

The district is also in the process of developing a new three-year plan. It is currently in the close of five-year plan which began in 2008-09.

“We did everything that we possibly could to try and make this budget something that was reasonable,” superintendent of business Michael Frank said. “We tried to adhere to what the community wanted, keeping every program intact, yet giving you something that was palatable in terms of cost structure and one that adhered to the tax cap.”

In the 2013-14 budget, the district has kept every program the public has asked except for half of one program – the elimination of an official science lab period for first and second graders – due to a spike in special education enrollment causing opening of another section of special ed class. The students will be provided with special science lab kit boxes.

“It’s one period a week in which the children will no longer have,” Katulak said.

This upcoming year the district will be maintaining kindergarten and academic intervention programs and will be creating integrated common core learning units on curriculum areas. Administrators will have 10 hours of training on APPR each year and work on the creation of formative assessments. Katulak also noted that the district won a commissioner’s grant that will pair the district with a failing school to share its practices.

In order to determine the district’s levy cap – 3.21 percent – they must begin by taking the prior year’s tax levy ($28,150,071) multiplied by a “tax base growth factor” (100.05) that is designed to, if there’s a lot of growth in the community, raise the levy. The growth increases the levy by about $14,070 to $28,164,146. However, the growth number changes every year and is not set by the district.

Prior year PILOTS (payment in lieu of taxes) are added (NHP-GCP has $49,708), subtract any  capital expense exemptions ($1,013,427). This then gives an adjusted tax levy of $27,200,427.

“We can issue the same exact tax levy next year as we did this year, no increase for the district and you tax bill can still go up for school tax,” Frank said, explaining that tax bills are relative to other homes in the district. “If your neighbors filed for reductions in their assessments and they were granted a reduction, “it doesn’t change how much we’re asking for, we still get our tax levy, but in a pro rata share you’re picking up a bigger piece of it.”

This adjusted levy is then multiplied by 2 percent (or CPI – 2.4 in January), whichever is lower, yielding $27,744,436. A projected PILOT provided by Nassau County ($55,137) is then subtracted for a tax levy limit of $27,689,299.

Employees retirement (ERS) did not rise but teachers retirement (ERS) did go up, so the district can add $350,475 back in as well as capital exclusions of $1,012,761 and arrive at a levy that cannot exceed $29,052,532, or a $902,464 million difference between the old and new levy, or 3.21 percent.

“The rate is actually going from 18.9 percent of salary to 20.9 percent of salary,” Frank said of the ERS. “For the TRS... the rates are going from 11.84 percent to 16.25 projected – that’s the state’s projections.”

The district had a budget of $34,494,380 for the 2012-13 school year. The current figure for 2013-14 is $35,354,725, a 2.49 percent increase and 3.21 percent on the levy.

Salaries will total $18,315,080, a $19,025 increase from 2012-13. The biggest jump will be benefits for employees, going from $9,026,370 to $10,047,600, a $1.021 million increase, or 11.31 percent.

“It means that we had enough retirements, resignations and offsets in terms of positions that will go unfilled, i.e. for one-to-one aides associated with a sixth grade student that might be grading out, or four retirements from teachers where there’s a savings where we hire back a new teacher,” Frank said of the salary line.

Frank presented a hypothetical example of a teacher with a $100,000 salary for 2012-13 that the district must also pay $11,800 to the state for retirement for that teacher. In 2013-14, if the salary remained the same, the retirement payment would jump to $16,250.

“That increase for that one person is approximately 4 percent, which exceed the 2.49 percent on the budget that we’re allowed to increase things by,” Frank said. “Which is why we’ve had to cut some supplies and cut some of the contractual money and we’re always looking for efficiencies.”

Frank added that if the rates remained flat, the district would be presenting a budget that would be less than 2012-13, including a tax levy which would have gone down by about $248,000 or 0.88 percent.

“Everything that we’ve done, everything that we’ve tried to do in terms of maintaining program and providing things for the district has been countered or undermined if you will, from the state and the rates that they’re putting forth,” he said.

The district is budgeting $3.9 million in basic state aid, an increase of about $163,000 over 2012-13. Any increase in state aid beyond this amount will be used in appropriations for technology to help meet the state testing requirements for computers.

“The state budget hasn’t passed,” Frank said. “We don’t know how much state aid we’re going to get – we know what the governor has proposed – but we don’t know what the legislature might come through with for us in terms of additional revenue.”

Contracts are going down the most, by a total of $454,365 or 15.6 percent. The next biggest monetary decrease is in debt by $57,060 or 2.47 percent. The district will save $100,000 in fuel costs thanks to duel-purpose boilers that can use either oil or cheaper natural gas, saving about 20-25 percent. The transfers lines will be going up by over 57 percent or $141,520, but Frank said that much of the cost was for security-related items.

The district also removed $11 per student for field trip transportation costs due to the purchase of a new bus that will allow the district to conduct some of the runs on its own and no longer need outside transportation.

The difference between a passed budget and a failed one putting the district austerity in which no increase is allowed and $902,000 must be cut is about $94.19 annually on the average tax bill.

“I can assure you.. if we had to go that route, $900,000 worth of cuts cannot be achieved without affecting program,” Frank said.

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