Message from Superintendent Douglas C. Burton

  The following is a blog entry from Fort Plain Superintendent Douglas C. Burton that appeared in the Education Speaks blog on Thursday, Nov. 17:

There is a reality I think about daily.

I’m not sure if it will come to be in three years or five years—but I know it is coming.

As the superintendent of a small, poor district in Upstate New York, I see where we’re headed as a district and I am concerned. I am concerned for our staff and for our students. And I am concerned about the future of education in rural communities like ours.

I recently met with our business manager to get a sense of how our current $18.1 million budget might look in 2012-13.

We estimated our energy cost increases. We assumed our state aid (on which we heavily rely) and special education costs would remain constant. We factored in a 10 percent increase in employee health benefits and contractual obligations.

We also assumed our board of education would use $750,000 in fund balance —unsettling because, at that rate, we will exhaust our reserves in just three years.

And then, we tackled the tax levy cap. We discovered that meeting the public’s expectation of a 2 percent tax levy cap would leave the district an additional $300,000 short next year.

That $300,000 is not likely to change much because a 1 percent tax levy increase in Fort Plain only raises $53,000. We would need an additional 5.7 percent—above the 2 percent tax levy cap—to make up the shortfall. A tax levy increase of 8 percent or more would never make it past the board, let alone garner the supermajority of votes to needed to pass.

We could spend more fund balance, further deplete our reserves and shorten our fiscal life to two years instead of three.

Or we could cut five or six staff positions and offer even less to our students. But that isn’t really any option because we have already slashed our programs; we haven’t anything left to cut.

Things need to change—sooner rather than later. Our state needs to revise the way it distributes school aid and it needs to remove the floor on the combined wealth factor index in the foundation aid formula. Those two changes alone would enable us to stay within the tax levy limit and to work toward providing a sound, basic education for our students. Without those changes, our district will not survive.

Our reality is simple: we lack community wealth; we have a limited tax base; and we continue to get less and less aid each year from the state. Unchanged, public education in Fort Plain may cease to exist in fewer than ten years.

Then what happens to our children and their education?

That is my reality.