No cuts to programs or staff are in place for the Dunkirk City School District’s 2021-22 budget.

At Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting the upcoming budget was happily announced as the state aid details were finally in to help get the numbers together for the district. “We do not need to dip into our reserves,” Superintendent Michael Mansfield stated. “This is good news. If the state follows through with the statute of full phase foundation aid over the next three years it could really help us in avoiding excessing our fund balance and reserves for another year or two.”

The budget totals $51,413,792, which is a little over a 3% increase from this year. The rise is primarily driven by the special education needs and English as a New Language services, occupational education enrollment and computer instruction.

“We are seeing an increase of $1.4 million in foundation aid and then they (the state) are planning the full foundation aid phased in by 2023-2024,” Business Administrator Cindy Mackowiak said. “We’ve seen in the past where foundation aid was supposed to be fully phased in and then remained flat for a number of years, but their plan is to give to the districts 50% of the balances that are due in 2022-2023 and another 50% of that balance in 2023-2024.”

New York state also has reinstated all the expense based aids such as transportation aid, BOCES aid and instructional material aids which are all back to being included and not lumped together either.

“In the federal aid we have the CARES Act funds which covers the period of March 13, 2020 to Sept. 30 2022, it’s federal funds, but it’s in our general funds balance for this current year,” Mackowiak said. However, she is still cautioning that federal funds will exhaust over time and will have an impact on the long-range general fund budget.

“It’s good news, the foundation aid is especially good news for us as we look at our fiscal situation,” Mansfield noted. “Foundation aid we can pretty much count on will be in the budget next year and the note of caution that superintendents were informed of today is that 50% of the fund balance that’s due to us over the next two years is going to be dependent on the state budget; so they’re counting on tax increases and so on to fund that, but it is in the budget to try and fully fund the foundation aid.”

The next course of action is for the board to adopt the budget as presented at the April 20 meeting with the request being put forth to ask the board to approve the property tax report card, which depends on the property tax levy the board sets. May 1, the budget will be available for public view and May 11 will see a public hearing at 6 p.m. via Zoom.

May 18 will be the public vote for board members and the budget.