001Hi, good evening. I'm Anthony Dallo, the interim superintendent of schools, and I'm here tonight with our assistant superintendent um of business, Mr. Eric Stark, and we are here to present our 202526 school budget. This is the third um of the uh areas in the district that we visited and uh we're happy to be here tonight. we're going to present to you um in the audience and you at home um the budget that we have put together for the 2526 school year. Um the first piece that's really very important is that uh the budget really concentrates on the instruction of our students. Um, and you will see over the course of this presentation what some of the things that we're looking to do to enhance the instruction for our students, talking about support services and personnel,
002and then talking about some of the priorities that we're looking in the resources that we're putting um into the school district. But really what's important, it's not just about the 25 26 school year, but we're looking at long-term and and what the needs of our students are as we develop them socially, emotionally, and ready for the challenges of college and career. And when we talk about the budget, we're looking at four specific areas of improvement. We're looking at turnaround leadership, we're looking at talent development, we're looking at instructional transformation, and we're looking at cultural shifts. Um throughout the course of the last two months, I've really been focusing on these budget priorities as um our long-term goals, not just for the short term. And we're talking about the reallocating of resources, how we provide professional
003development and materials that are effective learning tools for our staff and for our students. You'll see in this budget a number of new positions and vacancies, and I'll talk to you a little bit about that. We'll talk about capital projects and how we can fund them uh moving forward in the future. We've also taken some funds out of our title um allocation and put them into our aund budget and Mr. Stark will talk a little bit about that. And then we've spent some time correcting some of our coding of our students. So what's happened over the last um couple of years you know basically for the last four or five years we have seen an increase in our student population especially our LL learners and the state education department looks at districts and looks at
004a couple of things what our demographics are and then how many students are we getting in who are larners and we make sure that we're coding them properly because if we code them properly we get um more foundation aid and we'll talk about that a little bit later on. So, at this point in time, I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Stark who's going to talk to you a little bit about how the budget was formulated, a little bit about the numbers and and where we're at as we get ready for the uh March 20th vote. So, Mr. Stark, I turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Mr. D. Carlo. So, um the budget is um as every school budget is in New York State as a as a nonprofit governmental entity
005um in two parts. there's a revenue budget and there is an expenditure budget and those two budgets must be equal to one another. Um and then uh so we we'll start by having uh a little bit of a conversation about the revenue budget and in a school district's revenue budget in the state of New York. There are two main pieces. There's the tax levy and there's uh state aid and then there are a number of other uh smaller items but those usually make up the majority of the revenue budget. So um about 12 13 years ago, New York State put into um law the New York State property tax cap law which um created a uh cap on how much the tax levy can increase by in any given year. So before you begin um
006the process of finalizing your expenditure budget, you must know what your tax levy can be at a maximum and set your revenue budget up um to include uh whatever number you choose. If you stay within the maximum allowable tax levy um calculation for that year, you need a 50 uh% majority vote to pass the budget. And if you exceed that number, then you need a supermajority of 60%. So what uh you see in front of you right now is the tax levy calculation. Um it begins with the prior year's tax levy. There is a uh a property tax base growth factor that is set by the New York State Office of Real Property Services. Uh for our district this year that was 1.0074. um you adjust that, you add back in your p your pilots
007from the prior year, which are payments in lie of taxes that are set up by businesses that uh build build um buildings or have property in uh in the district when they are being built. You reduce that number by the exclusions um which are set also by the law uh different pieces that come in and out. Most of that has to do with the capital um expenses that the district has for capital work as well as um interest on uh borrowings for that capital work. Um and then you uh are able to adjust that by increasing it by the allowable growth factor. The allowable growth factor is capped at 2%. So you see in this year's um calculation it is at that maximum of 2%. Um and then you put back in all of those
008items that you took out um before doing that. It brings our maximum allowable tax levy for the um for the 2526 school year to 167 million 933629 which is an increase of approximately $5.1 million or 3.15%. So that's the maximum. Oh boy. Let's turn that off. So, um the next piece of this is to discuss um the taxes in the school district. And uh be before we get to the taxes that are in our budget for the current year moving forward um we wanted to discuss the full value school tax rate and what that is. So the full value tax rate is set by the New York State Office of Real Property Services. It accounts for the fact that assessors in each town or municipality assess property differently and it allows taxpayers to make um
009comparisons from one city, town, municipality to others. Um all being able to have um a similar look at what their tax rates mean through the use of equalization rates. Um when these rates are published, they are published for every $1,000 of value on your property. So for as an example, um the 2425 full value school tax rate in the East Ramapo Central School District is $9.86. So if you had a home valued at $500,000, that would be 500,000 multiplied by the 986, your school taxes would be $4,930. Um, this chart shows that the full value tax rate in East Ramapo is much lower than uh any of the other school districts in uh Rockland County with um several of them being uh more than double. Nanuette and Havstra, Stony Point, which is the North Rockland
010schools. So, um, it also shows here, um, the, uh, amount of tax that you would pay for a home valued at, um, $500,000 or a million dollars. Uh, so you can see that, um, the taxes that are being paid in East Ramapo of $4,930 on a $500,000 home would be more than double that in North Rockland at $10,585. Um, the next is a graphic representation of how the full value tax rate for schools has changed in Rockland County over the past 25 years. 25 years ago, um, the East Ramapo Central School District was right in the middle of all of the school districts um in in the county. Um, the red line that on the right side um is all the way at the bottom. If you follow that all the way to the left,
011you'll see that it's right in the middle of the uh of all the school districts back in the year 2000. Um so that is a little bit about the taxes. Um the next major piece is the uh state aid that is provided to the school district from New York State. Um and the district has been very very beneficial um has has been uh has gotten um beneficial results from the state aid that has been supplied to the district over the past three years which has increased substantially uh by about $60 million over the three-year period. Um this year you'll see that um if you look at this chart here overall the um the aid that we are expecting to receive for next year um is increasing from 151 million to 167 million or an increase
012of $16 million um which is 10.7% increase in the state aid which is very very good for the district. So what does all that mean when we take those two pieces and we put them back into our budget? So as you see the revenue budget here, we are not um going to the maximum allowable tax levy of 3.15% increase. In fact, we are not looking to increase the tax levy by even $1. Um and when we get to the expenditure side, we'll see why that is um such an important piece and uh and such a good thing for the taxpayers in the district. The um use of fund balance is also down. Um and as as we mentioned before, the third line there, New York State um aid is increasing by $60 million. So without
013increasing um the tax levy at all, we're able to have an overall increase in the budget of $9.6 million. Um which as we start moving through the um the the expenditure budget, you'll see how important that is. Before we get there, we just have a graphic representation of the revenue budget. And the important thing to notice here is that just three years ago in 2022 2023 property tax made up 60.2% of the revenue budget um and state aid was only 36.9%. This is the first year in um a very long time where we actually are seeing that the property tax is now the largest the largest piece of the revenue budget. it has um surpassed property tax which is at 46.7% of the budget and uh state aid is now at 48.1%. So a very
014big change over a three-year period as you can see. That being said, we will move on to the expenditure side. Um and I'm going to turn it back over to Mr. D. Carlo for just a moment. Thank you, Mr. Stark. So, I I think there's a couple important things that we have to talk about when we talk about why did this happen over the last couple of years that we have these extra funds coming from the state of New York. And here's what's happened. Um, and we can all understand that for probably, you know, the last 20some odd years, East Ramore has been shortchanged in its foundation aid. Why did that happen? How did it happen? So what happened was that the demographics of East Ramapo has changed since the year 2000. But the state
015of New York specifically when it comes to the poverty index was calculating up until the last couple of years the 2000 census on poverty rate. So if you look at them upgrading that to where it should be and I think they went back to 22 now 23. And then second, what I mentioned to you at the beginning of this presentation in coding our L-arners. And I think this is important for everybody to understand. We're an L school district, ladies and gentlemen, that are at home and in the audience. Over 65% of our students are larners. And now that we've coded them properly and it's reflective of the actual amount of students we've had, we also gained revenue in that aspect. So those are the two major areas that you will see this growth over the
016last 3 years in getting foundation aid and then aid for our LL learners which is a good thing right and what we're looking to do in this budget because we have some of these extra revenues is start to put back program and position and and positions in our district to meet the needs of our learners. Um, and as you will see in the next couple of slides, many of these positions were here, okay, 10 and 15 years ago with almost 3,000 less students. Now we have 3,000 more who are far more needier in what they need. You know, um, the general education line shows a $5 million decrease. That's not that there has been a decrease in any of those problems. uh simply that the multi-ingual education area which is ever expanding in our district
017has had many of its expenses coded improperly in the wrong areas. So um as uh Mr. Darlo mentioned earlier um as we began the program that we uh one of our goals was to reclassify everything into the right place. So, you'll see that um general ed and special ed are down um where multilingual education is up by $8 million. Another uh two other important pieces here uh to note are that uh our transportation costs uh were overbudgeted in the previous uh budget cycle and as a result of that we've reduced that by almost 10 million. Um, and uh, because we now have um, a fund balance, we do not have to do any short-term borrowings to uh, be able to make payroll during the summer and the early part of the school year before the
018tax levy comes in. So, we were able to take a revenue anticipation note out of the budget. Um, so in debt service, you'll see a decrease as well of $2 million. So when you add those pieces together that you have uh those two decreases of approximately $12 million along with an overall increase in the budget of 9.6 million. Um the really important thing to note here is that we have been able to create a budget where we are increasing the dollars being spent on the the public school and private uh non-public school students because of the transportation and other special education services that are provided to them. we've been able to increase the educational program by over $20 million and we're able to do that without adding $1 to the tax levy. So, um we're
019very um proud of being able to put this budget together uh to to benefit the students in the school district um while um also being able to as Mr. D. Carlo mentioned um putting some money back into our um aging uh facilities and infrastructure which is in that last line which shows um the interfund transfers that have been increased by $4.7 million. The uh last page of our presentation shows a graphical representation of the expenditure budget. Um, it's very typical in in a public school district in New York State for the largest pieces of the pie or in this case donut are general education, special education, and employee benefits. Um, of course with the fact that we transport uh around 45,000 students in total in our transportation department. We also have a very large piece
020for transportation which is much larger than um most of the school districts. Well, certainly all the school districts in Rockland County and most of the school districts in the state. So, um this is a a good representation of that. Um the last slide is just a reminder for everybody to vote. Um voting is uh your civic duty. As a former social studies teacher, I am bound to remind everybody of their civic duty. Uh you have the right to vote in our country. Um, and everybody should do that. Um, we're not going to tell you how to vote, although I'm sure you know what we think. However, um, the vote will be held um, a little more than two weeks from now on May 20th. Uh, we encourage everybody to go out. We will have a
021budget hearing at our next board meeting on uh, next Tuesday on May 6th um, at um, the PLCC at the district office. Um, so we encourage anybody who wants to hear this or some more detailed information about the budget to to come on by for that. Um, and with that, I will turn it back over for a closing with Mr. D. Carlo. Thank you, Mr. Stark. And I also um encourage you over the last month to month and a half to go on to our district homepage. Um, there have been a variety of different presentations um from um the specific departments here in the school district. I want to thank, you know, um, my team, our assistant superintendent, um, for all their hard work. Um, one of the charges that we had this year, um,
022by the state was producing a budget that the public could understand. the community, the board of education um and um you know the budget was submitted to the state and uh um the state said that this was a fiscally responsible budget in light of all the things that have happened this year with the monies um and as Eric said and I want to just thank this opportunity to Mr. Stark to my uh my cabinet for all their hard work um and um we again encourage you to get out and vote on May 20th um as Eric said. So we thank you very much. We hope you have a great night. Thank you for tuning in. Those of you who are here, thank you for coming and listening to uh the presentation of the 2526 East
023Ramole um school budget. So thank you again.