Harrison School Budget Maintains Programs

Harrison school trustees adopted a proposed $108 million budget Wednesday that hikes spending and taxes but largely keeps in place today’s programs and staffing levels.

Superintendent Louis N. Wool said that spending in 2013-14 would have to rise 3.6 percent just to keep pace with current outlays. Maintaining current programs and class sizes, the superintendent said, had been key aims, and both were achieved within the constraints of a tax-cap-compliant budget.

After minimal official discussion and no comment at all from the half-dozen members of the public at the Louis M. Klein Middle School library, the school board adopted the budget. It carries a jump of 3.47 percent—to $96,363,847—in the district-wide property tax levy, well within a state-prescribed 4.28 percent ceiling, or “cap,” on any levy increase. Tax rates are expected to rise 3.98 percent under this budget, which will have a public hearing May 8 and face a vote by district residents two weeks later.    

The budget’s formal presentation to the school board Wednesday climaxed some six months of virtually daily efforts to craft a spending plan, Wool said. The administration had sought, he said, “to maintain programs, maintain class size, live within the maximum allowable tax-cap levy and be mindful and judicious about mitigating the impact of any tax increase on our taxpayers. Those four objectives were at the forefront of everything that we did from the very beginning of this process,” he said.

Starting with 2012-13’s projected spending of $104,228,325, the Harrison Central School District’s budget makers last fall initially estimated that it would take more than $110 million simply to maintain current service levels in the 2013-14 school year.

But budget architects—including Robert Salierno, the district’s assistant superintendent for business, and the school board’s budget committee under Trustee Joan Tiburzi—identified cuts almost immediately. By February, they had lopped close to $1.4 million in non-program spending, whittling a onetime $110 million-plus budget down to $108.9 million.

Still, that much spending would have required a cap-busting 4.5 percent increase in the levy. The bean counters sharpened their pencils and produced additional clusters of cuts totaling more than a half-million dollars in March and another $300,000 earlier this month. Together, they brought in a cap-compliant budget of $108,019,168, a hike of $3,790,842 over current spending.

In large part, that increase reflects the inexorable demands of a handful of big-ticket, state-mandated expenses like contributions to teacher pensions. That line item alone grew by more than 37 percent, to  $2.2 million, in the upcoming budget. Combined with an 11.7 percent jump in other staffers’ retirement costs and 5.8 percent in special education charges, three hikes alone represent almost two-thirds of the budget increase.

“The pieces that we control are [up only] 1.7 percent,” Salierno said in noting the district’s ability to manage spending on its end, even as mandated costs jumped by 2.8 percent. “If we were able to control the entire budget,” he said, “I think the entire budget [increase] would be more along the lines of 1.7 percent.”

Certain cuts carried a bigger downside than others, Wool said in discussing staff realignments forced by enrollment changes. While the net change in total jobs is negligible, he acknowledged, “there will be some folks who are laid off.”

A public hearing on the budget is scheduled for 7:15 p.m., May 8, at the Louis M. Klein Middle School library. Residents will go to the polls May 22, from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., at each of Harrison's four elementary schools.