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Despite widespread advertising and outreach on the part of the Lansing Central School District to solicit community input on the upcoming budget, only three people (including a reporter from the Lansing Star) showed up at a Town Meeting last week.  With widespread reports of severe cuts in next year's budget school officials expected a healthy turnout.  School Business Administrator said that people may be so overloaded with bad news these days that they stayed  away.  But King and Superintendent Stephen Grimm went through the presentation they prepared anyway.

Grimm explained that the state reduced aid by $746,000.  By reassigning money from other accounts, the district plans to put $600,000 back into the fund balance.  "That takes that disaster stress off of our system," Grimm said.  "We can survive for four years using this plan.  And we want to engage our financial advisors to help us create a five year plan that is more extensive."

There are so many variables up in the air with an enormous state budget crisis, the federal stimulus package, the economic crisis, and a myriad of variables that school districts in New York are hard put to figure out what resources will be available, and they may not find out before they must finalize their budgets. 

"We do have a budget crisis in New York State," he said.  "The deficit at the state level is growing, and the fact that New York State has Wall Street is also of concern because all the profits that Wall Street would normally get are not coming into New York State.  Therefore the state doesn't have the funds to distribute to all of the social agencies they need to fund.  That affects our aid."

If the state doesn't pay for our schools, local taxpayers typically pick up the slack.  But Grimm noted that recent developments make it very hard on property owners whose rising expenses and declining salaries are stressed to the breaking point.

"If it's not coming from the state, it's coming from the taxpayers," he said.  "Our taxpayers have the same economic problems that we're having, but they're also being laid off, or suffering wage freezes.  Borg Warner laid off 50% of their work force in the past year, and the people who are left have a 10% pay cut.  So they're under stress, too."


Grimm said he had hoped to get more input from the community about what rise in the tax rate would be acceptable.  "The expectation of the community is 3% increase in your costs," he said.  "But look at our benefits -- 9%.  Those are uncontrollable costs.  Our salaries are controllable by contractual obligations and those are around 4%.  Not everything is tied to the consumer price index."

Grimm and King got what input they could from the few people who showed up, Arel and Amanda LeMaro.  With a significant anticipated cut in state aid, Grimm explained how the district will be pushing existing money around to soften the impact.  How much of that money is pushed around to manipulate the levy and tax rate depends on what school officials think taxpayers can support.

"I'd rather have a steady increase," Arel LeMaro said.  "If this is a bad year keep it at two or two and a half percent.  I'd rather budget knowing the next three years it's going to be two or three.  Budgeting for a family that makes it easier."

But Amanda LeMaro, a teaching assistant, spoke against cutting teacher assistants.  "I am a TA," she said, "but I am also thinking about it as a parent.  I don't think it's a luxury.  It's a way to get these services to the kids and the attention that they need."

The bottom line is that there will have to be cuts, and a long litany of them have been outlined at school board meetings over the past month or so.  Meanwhile the teacher's union is watching the process with keen interest, quietly waiting for the final cut list before formulating a response.

"The LFA is negotiating strongly to restore some of the reductions that we feel will directly affect kids," says Lansing Faculty Association President Stacie Kropp.  "We are working in conjunction with administration and the BOE to creatively find the funding for such positions.  The reduction list is changing on almost a daily basis at this point and I hesitate to weigh in and possibly sound alarm bells if they are not needed."

But 'wait and see' is not an approach that Grimm and his team can afford to take.  They continue to solicit input as they continue to craft a final budget that the school board will vote on later this month.

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