GUILDERLAND — The school district here, like those across the state, is facing a new budget year without the ability to raise taxes unless it can get a supermajority of voters to approve a hike.

Enrollment at Guilderland for 2016-17 is expected to be stable — just 32 fewer students, to 4,830, according to Assistant Superintendent for Business Neil Sanders.

The district is coming off years of cuts as state aid has stagnated and a state-set levy limit is set at 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. Before state aid last spring restored $1.4 million, Guilderland cut 227.6 posts since 2008.

The projected Consumer Price Index for 2015 is expected to be at or near zero for the 2016-17 budget calculation, Sanders told the school board at its meeting last Wednesday. (See editorial on page 2.)

“It creates a very punitive kind of arrangement,” Sanders said. The CPI measures goods and services for households, he said, and doesn’t work well for schools.

He likened it to the contingent plan a district would have to adopt if its budget had been voted down. With the state-set cap, he said, “We can’t increase the tax levy at all, just like having a failed budget.”

Sanders went on, “The only way we could increase is to go to the voters for a supermajority,” referring to at least 60 percent of the vote. He stressed this would be “just to pass a regular operating budget.”

Since the levy limit was adopted, Guilderland has stayed under the state-set rate, requiring just a simple majority, or 50 percent, to pass its budgets.

Sanders also focused on the Gap Elimination Adjustment, originally adopted as a temporary measure when the state, facing a huge budget gap six years ago, took promised aid from school districts. Sanders said Guilderland had lost $3 million to $4 million annually in state aid because of the GEA. Guilderland this year has a $94 million budget.

Sanders said that the state had a $5.4 billion surplus last year but still maintained the GEA. “We’re not gaining any ground,” he said.

Earlier at the Nov. 4 meeting, the board had heard from Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy that, while the state budget surplus in the upcoming year won’t be as great as the previous year, it will still be substantial.

She said the tax cap is probably Governor Andrew Cuomo’s most popular program.

“It’s devastating,” said board member Judy Slack. “Our expenses are not fixed at 0 percent.”

“The more we can unify the message, the better,” said Fahy. She said other topics in education, like teachers’ assessment, have dominated the discussion. “It was just getting lost,” Fahy said of the tax cap.

She hopes to address it on several fronts: Making the 2 percent “more real,” addressing exemptions, and seeking more state aid.

“We can’t keep pushing it down to the local taxpayers,” Fahy said of increased property taxes to make up for loss of state school aid.

She reiterated, though, that the tax-cap is a “signature issue of the governor and extremely popular with the public…It’s something I’m going to support,” she said.

Slack also told Fahy that the most important thing for Guilderland is to get its GEA funds back.

Fahy responded that the numbers show Guilderland is doing better with Foundation Aid than GEA. “We need to pay it down,” she said.

Calling it a “sleight of hand,” Fahy also said, that the formula that took the money from districts to close the state’s budget gap in 2010 is not the same formula that is restoring it.

Fahy also said the GEA had “taken on a life of its own” and paying it down would get past the issue.

She concluded, “Think broadly because you want to get that overall number up.”

“Strong plea”

Superintendent Marie Wiles broached another problem, other than financing, that she sees in the state’s approach.

She told Fahy, “Decisions specific to the technical part of teaching, learning, and evaluating teachers shouldn’t be in the hands of — sorry — legislators and the governor to negotiate.”

Wiles made what she termed a “strong plea” to return those duties to the Board of Regents and to the State Education Department. “They’re the ones that need to figure out APPR,” she said of the newly required Annual Professional Performance Review, where teachers and principals are evaluated in part by student test scores.

Fahy noted that, last year, a majority of the Regents were replaced, which she called “unprecedented.” She said it was important to “make sure the Regents are no longer a rubber stamp for the State Education Department.”

“We want the Regents to take back this authority,” said Fahy.

Fahy also said she was “very encouraged” with the new state education commissioner, MaryEllen Elia, who dumped the contract with Pearson, an English firm, that had developed the state’s standardized tests.

In July, the sate education department chose Questar Assessment Inc., and Elia said in a statement, “New York State teachers will be involved in every step of the test development process. Teacher input is critical to building a successful state test, and that’s why the new contract emulates the collaborative process used to develop the Regents Exams.”

There is more of a push, Fahy said, to have Elia and the Regents “own this.”

Wiles said that she, too, was encouraged and noted, in turn, something she called “unprecedented.”

“In the last three months,” said Wiles, I’ve seen SED reach out to practitioners more than I’ve seen in years.” She gave the example of a recent request to review questions on trigonometry and said, “That’s where the work needs to be.”

Wiles concluded of legislators hastily adopting evaluation parameters, “The negotiation at two in the morning affects children, not in a good way.”