Dr. Kevin Whitaker can see the fiscal cliff for school districts coming — and he’s not the only one.

Whitaker recently touched on the issues Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposed 2021-22 state budget presents for school districts. As Whitaker said a couple of weeks ago, the news for Jamestown’s 2021-22 budget is good. The district appears in line to get all of its previously withheld state aid as part of the March state aid payment from the state while proposed aid in the 2021-22 budget is stable because the state is using all of its projected federal stimulus money to offset state aid cuts.

The concerns are what happens after the next school year when there is no federal aid to replace that $6 billion in federal money.

“There’s future considerations in this budget,” Whitaker said during Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting. “With the thought of future considerations, my concern is not so much this year. We’ll be fine this year. It’s a little bit next year. We’re going to have some costs that we’re going to have to trim. But the year after, and the year after, and the year after, there’s going to be some fiscal cliffs that, what we do this year and the next, is how we will survive years three, four and five. We have to be very cautious and future-looking.”

Whitaker’s concerns were shared by several officials during the state’s recent Joint Legislative Public Hearing on 2021 Executive Budget Proposal: Topic Elementary and Secondary Education. One of the issues school superintendents across the state are raising is Cuomo’s plan to use all of the federal education aid in the CARES Act in one year rather than three years, as federal law allows. Doing so means the state will have to raise education spending by $3.8 billion in the 2022-23 budget to maintain schools’ funding in 2022-22.

“While we understand the current fiscal realities our state is facing, we cannot balance the state budget on the backs of our students by forcing school districts to use federal funding to fill the holes left in their budgets by a further decrease in state aid in this year’s proposed budget,” said Betty Rosa, interim state education commissioner, during the budget hearing. “As we laid out in our Regents budget and legislative priorities, we are opposed to a one-shot federal funds replacing needed state dollars for schools. It is vital that the Biden administration and our Congressional delegation provide much-needed state and fiscal relief, however, this one-shot federal funding should be used to help school districts meet the enormous cost of the pandemic and to address learning loss and other adverse student impacts rather than pay day-to-day expenses.”

A FAMILIAR CONCEPT RETURNS

Cuomo’s budget also contains two proposed reductions in state support — a a $1.35 billion “Local District Funding Adjustment” applied against STAR property tax reimbursements to school districts and a $693 million cut against what districts would otherwise receive from a collection of 11 aid formulas proposed to consolidated into a Services Aid block grant.

The reductions, according to the state Council of School Superintendents, would fully offset new federal stimulus allocations for more than 70% of the state’s school districts, so that none of Washington’s $3.8 billion education aid infusion would be left to help those districts pay costs they have accumulated over the past year.

“However, history tells us that as soon as federal aid stops, the state is left with a multi-billion aid gap to fill,” said David Little, Rural Schools Association of New York State executive director, in testimony to state lawmakers. “Last time (GEA during the Great Recession) it took the state over a decade to get to pre-recession aid levels. The time needed for the state to recover its pre-recession aid level would take up the entire educational career of a student; from kindergarten to graduation. Our children deserve a better preparation for life than the systematic defunding of their educational programs.”

SERVICES AID PROPOSAL

The governor’s budget proposes to consolidate and eliminate eleven separate expense-based and categorical aids, creating a new Services Aid category for 2021-22. The 11 aids include Transportation Aid, BOCES Aid, Special Services Aid, Charter School Transitional Aid, High Tax Aid, Supplemental Public Excess Cost Aid, Academic Enhancement Aid and the four Instructional Materials Aids (library, textbook, software and computer hardware). The proposal would make the consolidation immediate and cuts about $700 million in state aid.

“We’d stand to lose about $800,000 — $850,000 over next year and then we would anticipate additional cuts,” Whitaker said. “I understand where he’s going with that, and where he’s going is trying to control state expenses because if you spend $1 million this year and then $5 million next year and you have 90% aid, the state’s end of that is 90% of $1 million or 90% of $5 million, and he can’t predict it. I get why he’s doing it, however it is not beneficial to us because it doesn’t let us know what we’re goign to get and it puts the money back into the control, essentially, of the governor and the legislature. That’s concerning.”