Board mulls $22M budget proposal
Costs up, enrollment down at VCSD

By David S. Lewis

NEW SCOTLAND—As enrollment decreases, the school board plans to adopt a $22 million budget for next year that represents a 2.8 percent increase over this year’s spending plan. This budget does not include the hiring of any additional teachers or sending a second student to Tech Valley High School next year, despite the protests of parents who attended the Monday’s budget meeting. 

The board is slated to adopt the plan on April 7; voters will have their say on May 20. The budget for staff salaries is $15.6 million, which includes $4.7 million in fringe benefits for retirement and health and dental insurance.  The proposed budget provides for the salaries of 115 full-time teaching staff and six full-time administrators, including the addition of a new curriculum coordinator, whose duties will include the analysis of the standardized test scores. 

“Our kids spend a lot of time testing, and most of it is mandatory,” said board President David Gibson.  The curriculum coordinator will help target holes in curricula based on analysis of test scores, which will improve the quality of education for individual students, Gibson said.

District-wide enrollment for next year is projected to be 1,208, down from 1,232 students this year.

At the elementary school, projected enrollment for kindergarten is 76 students, with an average of 19 students per class.  Eighty-five students will enter first grade, with an average class size of 17 students, due to the creation of a permanent extra section in that grade.  Second grade will see 88 students with an average class size of 17.6, but this year’s second grade class is the second largest in the school, with 92 students going into third grade and an average class size of 23 students.  The fourth grade next year will have 89 students, with 22.3 students per class; the largest class, fifth grade, will see 98 students in four sections, with an average class size of 24.5.

Assistant Superintendent for Business Sarita Winchell told The Enterprise earlier that the enrollment decline doesn’t impact the budget. “If you lose 10 to 15 kids, it’s across the board,” she said, and not enough in one place to cut staff positions. The current enrollment is nearly the same as it was 20 years ago, she said, with the peak year at 1,369 students in 1996-97.

Growth analysis

 Monday’s meeting began with a presentation by Chuck Voss and Leif Egstrom analyzing district-wide growth; the study concluded that the next two years would see a further drop in enrollment.  Although enrollment has decreased in 11 out of the last 12 years, some residents thought  that pending developments such as the Kensington Woods subdivision, which will include 160 single-family homes, and the prospective development of the Bender melon farm would increase the enrollment in the district.  Both Voss and Egstrom are associates at CT Male, an architecture and engineering firm; they conducted their research and presentation at no cost to the district. 

Many questions were raised, as Kensington Woods alone could theoretically bring over 200 children into the area.  Egstrom, a member of the Capital District Regional Planning Commission, said the cause of the falling enrollment is the lower number of children being produced.  He cited the birth-control pill and the 1973 United States Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion as primary causes in the decline of births.

Another factor is the lack of residents moving into the area, which Egstrom said was largely due to the troubled real-estate market.  In 2002, New Scotland issued 2,072 building permits for the construction of single-family homes in the area.  In 2007 that number dropped to 944, so in five years less than half as many new homes were being.  Egstrom predicted that enrollment would be down for two years, at which point the real estate market should be recovering and enrollment could begin to climb upwards again. 

So who is going to be living in all the new subdivision housing?  According to Egstrom, it won’t be families with children.

“A lot of the housing is being designed for empty-nesters,” he said.

He went on to say that, even with regional commercial projects such as the nanotech chip factory, there wouldn’t be the kind of influx into the region that would lead to needed redevelopment factors such as improved infrastructure in largely rural New Scotland area.

“The nanotech factory, even with the ancillary businesses that would locate close to the factory, would still bring in less than a thousand new jobs…When we’re talking sub-thousand, even 1,200 new jobs, we’re still under 1 percent of the workforce in the Capital Area.”

Egstrom remarked that it was difficult to predict such things beyond a three- or four-year window, “because these things are very fluid.”

Parents want smaller classes

Many of the parents who attended the meeting didn’t come to hear about projected growth statistics; their main concern was hiring a sufficient number of teachers to keep class sizes low.  Parents of children in the current fourth-grade class petitioned the board when their students were in kindergarten. A class of 24 students had a higher-than-usual number of students with special needs and behavioral issues; the parents wanted to see an additional section created.  Their request was granted for third grade but the teacher was re-assigned when the class reached fourth grade, rather than staying with the class, as parents had expected. 

The additional teacher is now permanently transferred to the first grade, and, while many parents support an extra section for the first grade, they feel the board did not full fulfill its obligations to the current fourth grade, or to the voters who granted approval for the extra teacher. Many said it was unfair for children in the higher grades, whose class sizes had always been large, not to share in the benefits brought about by additional teachers and the resulting decreases in class size.

Kenneth Lein, principal of the elementary school, said that he had decided to focus on keeping the class sizes for younger children small, even at the cost of having fewer accredited teachers for the older students.  He indicated that the addition of teachers’ assistants would help make up for the higher number of students, but not everyone was convinced. 

“Having a teacher’s assistant in the classroom is not the same as having one teacher with a smaller class,” said a parent.  She pointed out that many of the special-education students have Individualized Education Programs that require a teaching assistant be present during instruction, which makes it less likely that the assistant would have time for the other children.

“I am glad to see the smaller class sizes for the younger grades, but I don’t like that it seems we have to take one or the other,” said another.  She called the faculty-to-student ratio “deceitful.”

Principal Lein made assurances that the teachers were doing an excellent job, which was corroborated by Superintendent Linda Langevin.  She beseeched the parents to have faith in the decision-making ability of school administrators.

“You’ve trusted us before with your kids, and we haven’t caused them any harm…I just analyzed the data on the literacy test; the information is embargoed but I wish I could show it to you, because the kids did fantastically,” said Langevin.  She said the creation of another section for the fifth grade would be “overkill.”

Other business

In other business, the school board:

— Passed a resolution to reduce the length of term of office for members of the board taking office on or after July 1 from five years to four years.  Gary Hubert and Kevin Kroencke opposed the measure, while Gibson, C. James Coffin, Thomas McKenna, Paige Pierce, and Timothy Blow supported it.  Voters will have to pass the measure on May 20 for it to take effect [See “archives” for Feb. 21 at www.altamontenterprise.com.];

— Unanimously passed a resolution to submit to  voters a proposition on May 20 to transfer $95,000 from the general fund into the school-lunch fund to pay  the debt the school lunch program has accrued over the last five years [See “archives” at www.altamontenterprise.com for March 13, 2008];

— Unanimously accepted a computer and two printers donated by middle-school teacher Sheila Lobel;

— Unanimously appointed Heather Higgins as the replacement for Mrs. Kelly Lendrum, the long-term substitute teacher for the first grade; and

— Set the next regular meeting of the Voorheesville board of will be on Monday, April 7 at 7:30 in the school cafeteria.  There will also be a special meeting for the Board of Cooperative Educational Services budget vote on Monday, April 21, at 7:30 a.m. in the district office.