County School Boards Association looks ahead to looming financial challenges

GREENE – The Chenango County School Boards Association mulled over the tightening fiscal reality of New York school districts at its annual meeting where presenters focused on shared services and consolidation.
President of the Chenango County School Boards Association Vicky Gregory greeted the association’s members from district across Chenango County at the dinner, saying, “as we can all probably attest with our own experiences, schools are facing some of the biggest challenges of our time. Hopefully tonight’s speakers can inform us on what issues to expect and help enlighten us in finding solutions.”
The presenters at the Nov. 19 meeting included Douglas Land, Area 4 Director of NYS School Boards Association, Nicholas Savin, District Superintendent of Otsego-Northern Catskills BOCES, Dennis Sweeney, Assistant Director of Rural Schools Association, William Tammaro, District Superintendent of DCMO BOCES and former GMU Superintendent and consultant Doug Exley.
Tammaro and Savin started the evening’s remarks by highlighting a number of successful shared service examples.
Tammaro said for the first time this year the Gilbertsville-Mount Upton school district had saved $6,000 by ordering its yearbook purchases through BOCES, which can buy many materials at a bulk discount.
In another example, Savin said the Andes Central School and Charlotte Valley school districts had developed a distance learning program for students after each school suffered cuts in different courses.
“With this set-up we’re able to offer a lot of course work for low enrollment courses. When a school has only six, seven students in a class, it gets cost ineffective for a district. Using two-way video, distance learning can eliminate many of the expenses,” said Savin.
Tammaro also discussed BOCES current efforts to include more districts in its health insurance consortium.
“We have 23 districts included that increase our buying power and our relations with providers. In some cases, the companies were even willing to waive deductibles in order to attract our business,” he said.
Tammaro also urged districts to share other services with BOCES including cafeteria, office and records management, computer repairs, distance learning and employee relations.
While presenters talked a lot about reducing costs through shared services many added a word of caution, basically telling members that even these steps may not be enough to absorb the proposed cuts to education in the 2011-2012 school year.
“I do recognize some of the fiscal times are going to be a challenge to go through, but even with BOCES’ best effort there are some things we are not going to be able to do,” said Savin.
“When speaking to state legislative officials it appears nothing is off the table. They are seriously talking about BOCES-wide schools, county wide school districts, BOCES-wide transportation and they have began another state-wide study for mergers and what is required to be independent,” he said.
Sweeney said 49 New York counties had lost more than a 100,000 population in the last two decades, which resulted in an enrollment drop of 10 to 15 percent in those areas.
“You can replace money someday but we can’t replace kids,” he said, suggesting distance learning may have to become a common and important tool for districts in rural areas.
Sweeney said research into consolidating the Broome County school districts had indicated consolidation into a single county school was not more economical or practical.
He added that districts with less than 1,500 students appeared to benefit the most economically when consolidated, saying that on average costs dropped about 8 percent.
However he cited another study that looked at the impact in communities when they lost an area school. It found schools, especially in less populated areas like Chenango, provided a center of civic, social and economic well being for communities that could not be easily, if at all replaced, by a closure. “This is not an encouraging thing from that end,” he said.
Doug Exley was the final speaker at the dinner and said the state was hoping districts would being consolidation efforts on their own by using incentive grants.
Exley said schools looking to fund a consolidation study by the state could probably find funding, those seeking other avenues of state aid may find it difficult.
“They are pushing consolidation now, the grants are in the high priority category and less competitive. But if consolidation is a dirty word in your district there are also other studies looking at shared services but they are much more competitive,” he said.

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