For the second year in a row, the Island Trees School District is slated, in Governor George Pataki's Budget Proposal, to receive less state aid than they had the previous year.

This year the governor's proposal has Island Trees receiving $64,731 less than the district received in 1999-2000. This is on top of a $334,027 cut that the district received from 1998-99 to 1999-2000.

At the Jan. 26 board of education meeting, Island Trees Superintendent Richard Segerdahl explained to the audience that the aid projected for the coming school year would be $7,613,524. The superintendent stated, "We have a growing student population in the middle school and the high school. We must renovate the high school to make room for 250 more students. There are additional programs and staff necessary to help the students meet the state's new educational standards. Instead of offering additional financial support the governor continues to shift more and more of the educational costs from the state to the local Island Trees taxpayers."

According to Helen Costigan, business manager for the district, the reason why Island Trees is slated to receive less state aid is because the state did not increase any of the formulas and decreased some of them. "For example," said Costigan, "the proposal is for 20 percent less BOCES aid and they also reduced some of the formula for the private excess cost aid which is special education aid. I guess you would say they reduced some of the formulas in calculating the special education aid and they removed one of the aids that they gave us last year which was the Minor Maintenance and Repair Aid." She noted that these decreases and no increases in other formulas is what leads to the decrease in aid for a district.

When asked why Island Trees received a cut and other districts had an increase Costigan explained, "There's something called a transition adjustment and they made some kind of change in that calculation but that doesn't affect us, unfortunately, but that helped some of the districts get more money."

Segerdahl said that he doesn't know yet what this cut means for the district. With an increase in the student population, the superintendent noted that in order to keep class sizes down to acceptable numbers and to follow through with the capital programs that they are planning for the coming year, part of the budget process will involve cutting in some areas so the burden won't be placed entirely on the taxpayers. The district has already begun a lobbying effort to restore some of the money from the state. One aspect of this lobbying has been writing letters to Governor Pataki, State Senator Kemp Hannon and State Assemblyman Marc Herbst are requesting additional financial support for the children and taxpayers of the Island Trees School District.

"When all is said and done, whatever the difference is, there's two sides to a budget. There's the expenses and there's the revenue side and if you don't get much in the revenue side and you have to increase your expenses then the difference has to be made up by the local taxpayers," said Segerdahl. He explained that every year he sits down with each of the principals and tries to tighten the budget as much as possible, adding that often there are certain additions to the budget that are necessary and cannot be cut.

Segerdahl stated, "We've been very fortunate in Island Trees that the taxpayers have supported our budgets with passage rates of over 70 percent, so hopefully they think we're cutting where it has to be cut and spending where it has to be spent and we will continue to try to do that but it's getting harder and harder when there's less support from the state towards our public schools and more kids and more mandates and all the extra support services you have to give the kids so we either have to raise the taxes to some degree or we have to cut services and nobody wants services cut."

The superintendent noted that approximately 80 percent of the district's budget is people and that the only way to cut that budget is to increase class sizes or lay people off and do away with some of the services that have come to be expected. He went on to add that rather than laying people off he tries, when people retire, to look at the position differently and find another way to do that job without replacing the person who retired. "The other side of this coin is, we're doing an awful lot of early intervention in grades one, two and three, small class sizes, support services so that, hopefully, those children build up the skill level so that they can pass these fourth grade standards and are well on their way to being successful students, therefore successful citizens when they grow up," said Segerdahl. "So I don't want to cut any of those things if at all possible."

Part of the problem, according to Segerdahl, is that with the additional requirements from the state come additional costs to the district. One example of an additional cost that the district has been faced with is the cost of grading the new fourth grade exams. The district must provide a specified number of teachers to grade the exams, replace those teachers with substitute teachers, and then pay BOCES $6 for each fourth grader to have the exams graded by teachers from outside districts. Costs such as these are in addition to the cost of the support services that are necessary in order to help the students pass the additional exams.

"We'll do the best that we can, continue to offer the programs and the services and hopefully the people will appreciate and recognize that it's a decent budget and they'll support it," concluded Segerdahl.