Madison BOE Budget Decrease Sparks Praise and Criticism
Over the past few weeks, the Board of Education (BOE) has been working through a review of the district administration’s recommended budget for the coming fiscal year, 2019-’20. As the budget stands now, there is a reduction of spending from the current year, but board members disagreed on how significantly funding should be reduced for the coming year in light of the impending closure of Island Avenue.
The total budget, as proposed by the administration, comes to $58,048,103, a decrease in spending of $55,608 or 0.10 percent. The budget represents a decrease in spending for general education, school facilities, debt, and flat funding for maintenance. Items driving an offsetting increase to the budget include special education and health insurance, two notoriously volatile items.
Coming into this budget, the administration promised the town would recognize a savings from the closure of Island Avenue Elementary School. The BOE voted back in 2017 to close Island due to declining enrollment. Rough estimates at the time suggested the closure would yield a savings of anywhere from about $800,000 to $1 million, a savings that would be first recognized this coming fiscal year with the school formally slated for closure in June 2019.
In the budget proposal, the reconfiguration or closure of Island has a $885,698 listed savings. In addition, to keep up with the promise to reduce staff as enrollment continues to decline, $124,620 is listed as a savings from staffing reductions.
The budget also shows a reduction of administrative staff and staff at the high school. However, the budget also invests in new staffing in other areas including an elementary guidance position, a literacy coach, a speech/language pathologist, and starting to share the cost of the second student resource officer (SRO) in the district.
With contractual increases, health insurance, and special education as the biggest spending increases in the proposed budget, the total decrease in the budget ultimately came to $55,609. Some BOE members were pleased and others thought the savings in the budget should have been much larger.
The Cost of Island
Throughout the budget discussion on Jan. 8, it became apparent that when the board voted to close Island in 2017, people had very different ideas about the impact that $1 million in savings would have on the overall budget. To some, a $1 million savings meant the taxpayer should see more relief this year than just an essentially flat budget. To others, a $1 million savings meant it is $1 million the district isn’t spending on a building year over year.
“We have a $1 million reduction, but we also have hundreds of other employees that have contractual increases, so if we were to look at a $1 million reduction, we are making an assumption here that is not spoken and that assumption is that the rest of the budget will come in at zero,” said Superintendent of Schools Tom Scarice. “…I never told the town we would be $1 million below zero.”
Board member Happy Marino said she would have liked to see a greater reduction in the budget.
“I thought we were going to be seeing a lot more savings and I would have liked to see something like $500,000 in savings,” she said. “You can say it’s a flat budget, but we are also losing students. We have 70 less students projected and yet our cost per student is higher than it was last year. If it really was a flat budget it would be saving cost per student, it wouldn’t be increasing even though we have less students…I think it is important for us to understand that we are asking this town for a tremendous amount of money this year.”
Marino also said taxpayers might not see the $1 million reduction as a savings if they think that amount of money is just being spent in a different way.
“I was expecting to see initially more cuts,” she said. “When we closed Island, we stood up telling the town and the parents at Island that we are saving you $1 million. To me it is not a savings if you spent it elsewhere and we spent it twice—we spent it on a playground and we spent it on this budget. You guys can say no but the playground cost $800,000...”
Marino was cut off by Board Chair Katie Stein, who said the playground, slated for this year, is a capital investment listed in the Capital Improvement Program (CIP) and sits in a different funding bucket. Marino did not agree with that argument.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s the same peoples’ wallet. It’s the same taxpayers. It’s not a different bucket of money.”
Marino said with the district set to make some big decisions and likely some big investments on school facilities in the coming weeks, she thought this year would have been the right time to lower the budget base even more and make some none-programmatic cuts.
“We are not looking to cut programs, but if there are other things we can do to pass along a further savings to the taxpayer to lower the base and honor the fact that we have asked for a $100 million plan that we are examining,” she said. “…It’s just a lot of money on the taxpayers for one group of families with children…I just think we need to be mindful of what we are asking the town to pay.
Board member Greg DeSantis countered by saying in a people-driven business like education, there isn’t a lot of room to cut.
“The great thing about the zero increase is we are saving the taxpayer money compared to the trend year over year,” he said. “It costs more money for people to keep doing jobs over time. We can sit here and talk economics all day on how any budget operates, but over time where you have a people-driven business like education, that is going to cost more money over time.”
A Financial Exercise
Before the budget workshop, the Finance Committee of the BOE asked the administration if it could try to find about $190,000 more in cuts in the budget. Board member Kirk Barneby said he knows that number seems arbitrary, but combined with the roughly $60,000 in savings already shown in the budget, the total savings would come to $250,000—a quarter of the $1 million Island savings.
Scarice and the administration pulled together $170,000 in savings and said it could find $20,000 later but had little notice. He identified facilities funding, casual labor, delaying a technology replacement cycle, and reducing the number of seats the district funds for an arts magnet school in New Haven. Scarice said he can look at some other options, but said there are some budget items he just doesn’t want to touch.
“We stayed away from special education for the reason that we are always teetering on the brink anyway and it would probably be a bit disingenuous if we had to then dip into the reserve fund because that is not the purpose of the reserve fund, so we stayed away from special education,” he said. “We stayed away from anything that would increase class size…and we stayed away from books, because we are a school system and we are big believer in books.”
DeSantis said on average the BOE budget goes up by 2.5 percent each year. He said since the board eliminated any increase already, it shouldn’t be asked to cut more.
“At this point in the process, to try to go below zero percent means that we wouldn’t be meeting the programmatic needs that I am expecting to deliver to the town based on what the administration is telling me,” he said. “I think the zero budget is wildly responsible and to move something like that forward would be a great year for the town, a year where you are going to see that savings compound over time…This is a big deal to be able to do this and it should be recognized.”
Stein echoed that she thought the board had met its obligation by eliminating the increase.
“At this point in the process, to try to go below zero percent means that we wouldn’t be meeting the programmatic needs that I am expecting to deliver to the town based on what the administration is telling me,” he said. “I think the zero budget is wildly responsible and to move something like that forward would be a great year for the town, a year where you are going to see that savings compound over time…This is a big deal to be able to do this and it should be recognized.”
Scarice also told the board that the public has generally supported the BOE budget at referendum by wide margins. But one audience member comment suggested that might not always be a guarantee.
“I think we might be getting to the point were the reality of the fact that district enrollment is down 1,000 students over the last several years with never a budget that was less than the year before,” said Jim Matteson. “I recognize the special education requirements and the contract requirements and so forth, but here with a school that is closed, the taxpayers are basically going to see no savings. I think we might be getting to a tipping point given that we actually have fewer voters who are parents with children in the school system, we could be getting close to were we hit that negative vote the first time around.”