At Tuesday night's meeting of the Garden City Board of Education's second budget work session, Superintendent Dr. Robert Feirsen and Assistant Superintendent and Treasurer Al Chase said they are trying to reduce the burden on taxpayers while also using new money to improve the school district in the long term.
Presenting the administrative portion of the proposed budget, which would make up 11.5 percent of the total budget, Chase said that the district would be decreasing the amount of money used for capital spending from $1.2 million to $700,000.
"I don't like to see that go down below a million," said resident Mort Yuter regarding the decrease in capital spending. "We talked about that for years and years and years. I hope you look at it again."
Feirsen and Chase said they hoped that the $36.5 million bond passed in October, which will be used to renovate all nine of the district's buildings, would make the decrease in capital spending affect the district less.
"This is a treading water budget at best," Dr. Feirsen said. "It's designed to get us through some very difficult economic times and still maintain the support of the community. We're not going to make a lot of progress, but at least we're not going to go backwards."
Pushing capital spending over the $1 million mark was something that residents have requested for years, according to the board. Chase said he hopes to include more than that on capital spending for long-term projects next year, should the economy improve.
In another cut to spending, the school will only purchase one bus this year, as opposed to the three per year that had been the norm. Dr. Feirsen said that by only purchasing one bus, the district was able to save $280,000.
The board estimated that before it became standard to purchase three buses per year, there were some buses in use that were more than 20 years old. Since the new procedure, there are few buses over 12 years old.
Barbara Trapasso, vice president of the Board of Education, questioned the decision to only purchase one bus. "I don't want us to get back to that position that we were in years ago," she said. "I want to make sure that we revisit this again next year."
Despite these potential budget cuts, the proposed overall budget is $98,275,256, a 3.21 percent increase over last year. The district is contractually obligated, Chase said, to pay more in the 2010-2011 school year through employee benefits and personnel services. Personnel services will have the largest strictly monetary increase, moving to $57,238,851, a 2.05 percent increase. Employee benefits will increase 11.84 percent to $21,831,586.
Chase said the reasons for these increases revolved around the poor economy. With retirement investments typically making less money, the district is required to chip in the rest of the money. In a good economic year, investments might do better and the district would have to include less money.
"That's something that we have absolutely no control over," Chase said. "Those are dollars that are not going to increase the educational program."
Chase said the district has been able to save money by reducing the amount of print mail it sends out, though the savings there do not carry the weight that the millions spent on employee benefits do. This year's budget includes $84,800 for central printing and mailing, and that decreases 9.08 percent in next year's proposed budget to $77,100.
"We've been able to make increasing use of electronic means of advertising jobs," said Chase. "Our reliance on things such as the New York Times, Education Week, has gone down fairly nicely over the last few years."
Chase added, "We look for alternative means, we've been doing a lot of things on the Internet. Hopefully this budget will continue to go down in the future."
The next budget work session is scheduled for Tuesday, March 2, at 8 p.m. in the Garden City High School's library.
