GUILDERLAND — Now that the school district has defined a problem of too much building space for too few students and not enough money to maintain the status quo, citizens will be asked to help shape solutions.

Two spoke to the school board at its Tuesday meeting — one on alternative funding and the other on the importance of reliable data.

In a split vote last month, the board decided to disregard the recommendations made at the conclusion of a controversial consultant’s report on efficient use of building space.

Four of five of the cost-saving scenarios proposed in June by Paul Seversky would have closed Altamont Elementary School, which spawned T-shirts and lawn signs across the village with the slogan, “It takes a village.” Altamont’s mayor and many residents wrote lengthy letters to the Enterprise editor on the subject and spoke out at school meetings.

The district will still hold the meeting it had scheduled for next Monday, Sept. 29, beginning at 7 p.m. in the high school’s large-group instruction room. It will be televised. The first 45 minutes will be for a PowerPoint presentation by Superintendent Marie Wiles and Assistant Superintendent for Business Neil Sanders.

“We still have a money problem we have to figure out,” Judy Slack, who heads the communication committee, told board members.

The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer period. “Everybody will get a chance to speak,” said Slack, although there may be a three-minute time limit for the first go-round.

The time limit, said board member Colleen O’Connell, helps speakers crystallize their thoughts and hone their message.

Originally, Seversky had planned to have focus groups, carefully selected from applicants across the district, to discuss his proposed scenarios. That session, scheduled for Nov. 1, has been canceled.

A meeting will be held on Nov. 6 that will be structured as “a workshop to generate ideas,” said Slack. “After that, we’ll see where we go,” she said.

Wiles said the district wanted the board to weigh in before notifying the residents who had applied to serve on the focus groups that there would be no focus groups.

“After the community brainstorming session, we’ll involve the community in vetting ideas and they’ll be involved in the analysis,” Wiles told The Enterprise.

A cross section is still needed, with representation from the entire district, just as with the focus groups, she said. But, rather than meeting for just one day, as was planned with the focus groups, this yet-to-be formed task force will meet “multiple times,” Wiles said.

There will be an application process, Wiles said, although it has not yet been defined. “We will reach out to anyone who applied for the focus groups to see if they want to be in the advisory group,” she said. Wiles anticipates that the advisory group will begin meeting after the first of the year.

Alternative sources of revenue?

On Tuesday, the board heard detailed presentations from two residents, complete with informational packets.

Jean Guyon of Altamont spoke at length about alternative revenue sources for schools, that is, money that is not from government aid or property taxes. She sited a 2006 report a Guilderland committee completed on the subject.

The school board agreed to have a committee study the matter after years of debating whether public schools should accept private funds. The report stresses many times that “a great deal of non-traditional funding is already taking place” with such practices as direct product sales, contracting with vendors for students goods and services like yearbooks, school photographs, and vending machines; and parent groups supporting sports, music, drama and art.

While some committee members wanted to use alternative revenues to reduce taxes, the majority thought the funds should be used to “enhance existing program resources or support new programs.”

The second part of the report examines the two types of foundations — school and community.

“What happened since then?” asked Guyon. She asked for an update now as the district faces “potentially destructive outcomes.”

She urged “thinking outside the box” and noted, “The idea of closing a school is incredibly difficult and emotionally charged….” (She submitted her comments as a letter to the Enterprise editor, published on the opinion pages.)

Guyon recommended the board and district investigate alternative revenue sources in partnership with the community, creating a citizens’ advisory board. “Fixing this problem is not going to be easy,” she said, but concluded, “We have the power to set an example.”

Later in the meeting, O’Connell noted that, when she was president of the school board, a local college professor was interested in setting up a foundation. Wiles and O’Connell put her in touch with community leaders who might be willing to serve on a foundation board. The professor worked on it for six months or more, said O’Connell, concluding, “She just couldn’t do it.”

O’Connell had served on the 2006 committee that made the report on alternative funding and said Tuesday, “Guilderland does not have a huge wealth center or a long history of philanthropy.”

That echoed comments she made in 2006: “We know people with four cars and half-a-million-dollar houses,” she said then, “but it’s not clear they will part with their money.”

Catherine Barber, a board member then and now, responded at the time that that was a circular argument.

Barbara Fraterrigo, who is now president of the board, said in 2006 that, as a long-time library trustee, she would not support a town-based foundation. With a school-based foundation, she said, any funds generated “would go to the kids.”

“There’s always wisdom in trying to find creative ways for additional funding,” Wiles told The Enterprise after Tuesday’s meeting. But she said of the multi-million budget gaps Guilderland has faced in recent years because of stagnant state aid, a state-set cap on the tax levy, and increased costs, “The dollar amounts are so significant, even if we had a successful foundation, it couldn’t close a $2 million gap.”

Data discrepancies?

Nicholas Fahrenkopf, a semiconductor research engineer with the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, formerly the NanoCollege, presented the board with a critical analysis of Seversky’s enrollment projections. “I make a living analyzing data from things that no one can see,” he said.

While Fahrenkopf applauded the board for setting aside Seversky’s recommendations, he urged board members to look critically at Seversky’s data as well, and pointed out some of the problems he sees with it.

He presented the board with a series of graphs, with both Seversky’s projections and his own. Seversky used a “survival” model based on historic ratios, Fahrenkopf said, as students pass from one grade to the next. That won’t work for kindergarten; there, Seversky used three different methods, based on: live births and the live-birth ratio from 2007 to 2013, live births from 2002 to 2013 and the live-birth ratio from 2007 to 2013, and historical kindergarten enrollment from 2007 to 2013.

Fahrenkopf displayed a chart of Seversky’s “low,” “mid,” and “high” projections and asked how likely each is to be true. “He literally chose three different methods of projecting enrollment,” Fahrenkopf said, adding there was nothing to say one is more likely to be correct than another.

Fahrenkopf also displayed “the doomsday graph from the Seversky study” that shows a straight line of steadily declining enrollment. “None of it fits…It doesn’t make any sense,” said Fahrenkopf.

Looking back to 1994, he said, you see enrollment is not linear, so future enrollment shouldn’t be projected that way. Fahrenkopf maintains that population is cyclical, that it goes up and down, and that, if a sample of data is too small, like the period from 2008 to 2012 used by Seversky, it isn’t accurate.

Fahrenkopf said the R-squared value for Seversky’s data, a measure of model accuracy, was low while his own model had an R-squared of 59 percent. Fahrenkopf made his own projection as a quadratic.  He used all the data available for kindergarten enrollment, going back to 1999, and came up with a projection that dipped to its lowest at around 2006 but continues on an upswing through 2017.

“Something is wrong here,” concluded Fahrenkopf, reiterating that Seversy’s methods look arbitrary; that his projections treat population over time as linear, which doesn’t make sense and doesn’t fit the data; and other parts of Seversky’s report raise concerns as well.

“Please don’t hide behind this consultant,” said Fahrenkopf, urging the board members not to say they haven’t done their homework but, instead, to read the report and understand it.

Village resolution

Finally, Fraterrigo noted that the Altamont Village Board had passed a resolution, opposing school closure. The resolution states that the consultant made recommendations “before the community had any opportunity for an in-depth discussion of all possible solutions to budgetary shortfalls” and notes attributes of Altamont Elementary like being a center of village activities,  andbeing the “only community school in the district.”

The resolution says closing the school would reduce property values, and would result in additional costs and consequences for the whole district, possibly diminishing “educational outcomes.”

Therefore, the resolution states, the village board “urges the Guilderland School Board to remove the recommendation of the School District’s Study to close the Altamont Elementary School from further consideration, and continue to work in a collaborative process to identify alternative solutions to save money.”

Fraterrigo thanked the village board for its input and concluded, “We’ll put this in the record.”