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BERLIN, N.Y. (NEWS10) — Berlin Central School District in Rensselaer County is facing a $5 million dollar budget gap which will result in staffing cuts. The school says layoffs are necessary to close the massive budget deficit. The cost however will be larger class sizes across grade levels.
About 15 positions will be eliminated. That includes six elementary school teachers and five grade 7-12 teachers. This will reduce the $5.4 Million deficit by $1.17 Million. As a result, grades 3-5 will see more kids per class. One teen student pled with board members to save the job of her favorite teacher before a standing-room-only crowd the girl said.
The cuts go even deeper. Mental health services and student equipment funds are also slated to be slashed.
“Any kind of budget reduction really is a menu of bad choices. It’s a matter of which choice is most palatable” said the interim business official.
So how did Berlin end up in the fiscal predicament? Berlin School District’s primary funding is NYS’s Foundation Aid and property taxes. The district says a $3 million increase in expenditures on top of Foundation aid reduction from Governor Hochul’s office caused the deficit.
Parents, however, question this, even charging that the board made mistakes in using funds.
“In regards to the millions in missing funds from last year to this year, as the kids say, the math is not math-ing” a parent said. “We have to know where mistakes were made, who made them when they were made, and why such devastation could happen in one budget year,” the school’s PE teacher said.
As far as a solution? District officials say a possible fix would be to increase revenue by increasing a tax levy by 2 percent with a 4.3 percent cap or utilize their half-million dollar reserve funds. Despite all these cuts across the board and revenue enhancements, there will still be an issue.
“We would still have a budget gap of about 1.6 million. So even doing all of those things we still can’t balance the budget” said the School’s Interim Business Official.
According to the district, a beacon of hope lies in the State Senate and Assemblies One House Budget which is under negotiation. Both houses reject Gov. Hochul’s proposed reductions which would restore over $1 million in foundation aid for Berlin. The state legislature also proposes a guaranteed 3% minimum increase in Foundation Aid for schools, getting Berlin $1.4 million.
Further town halls will be held next month. The next budget development will be announced on April 4th.
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