Norwich City School working to reduce financial strain

NORWICH – Interim Superintendent Diana Bowers has been working with business managers to balance the Norwich school budget and bring the district back in the black.

During Wednesday night’s school board meeting, Bowers announced the school expects to start receiving more state aid after correcting a number of issues identified in a recent state report. Those fixes should help increase the amount of aid the school is eligible for.

The Resident Weighted Average Daily Attendance (RWADA) report looks at how many students are in attendance of the school district and the poverty level of the area, as well as the financial circumstances surrounding each student.

Bowers said the average RWADA score for New York is 1, and anything below 1 is considered to be at poverty level. Norwich Schools score is .5 and is considered a high needs district.

“That number helps the state calculate the expense driven aid that comes back to us. So when we were looking at some of the reports that we pulled out during the budget season we saw that there was a need to make a shift in the RWADA. The number was incorrect and we needed to go in and make the correction,” said Bowers.

Bowers explains that the RWADA is a number that is used for all expense driven aids the school gets state aid from. So the school has to spend money to have money come back to the district, she said. For example, The school receives about 90 cents to the dollar back from transportation aid. Other expense driven aid involves building project and technology upgrades.

“Now the first aid will have the old RWADA driving the expense driven aids, and the second legislative will have the new numbers. We should be seeing, even if there isn't a big shift in the state, an increase because we were able to go in and shift the RWADA,” said Bowers.

According to Bowers, the first state aid run will be received towards the end of January, and the second legislative run should follow soon after.

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