Category: Whitehall

The state aid amounts to local school districts were released on Wednesday. These are the figures for the Whitehall School District.

For the 2010-2011 year, the district received $8,119,139. For 2011-2012, the district is scheduled to receive $7,361,054. This is a $758,085 cut which translates into a 9.34% reduction in state spending.

To see the entire year by year comparison for Whitehall, look here (bottom right of page).

The problem for the taxpayers of the school district is that historically no matter what the state does, the district increases property taxes. This is a good year to reduce spending, in so far as enrollment is falling and the population is declining. Once the school board recognizes that the decline of the town and the school district are related to their tax and spend policies, we might be on our way to an improved situation. At least our state leaders are recognizing this fact and are cutting spending.

The Post Star has a must read article on Huletts’ Billie Borden.

This is an excellent piece! And of course, kudos to Billie for her courage, character and intelligence.

I went through the last 6 years worth of data that is publically available and put together this table which compares the student enrollment in the Whitehall School district to the number of staff positions. As you can see, enrollment has been falling (and is projected to continue to fall) while teacher and staff positions have either risen or stayed approximately the same.

I think these numbers are important for a number of reasons:

1.) The school board during the last 5 years lobbied for and spent millions of dollars expanding the physical plant of the school while enrollment was falling. It should be apparent that this was a very poor use of resources (as residents of Huletts argued). You may recall that the teachers supported this expansion. Doing simple projections on the expected enrollment over the next 10 years should result in a discussion about mothballing certain buildings going forward. It is absolutely reasonable to look into consolidating both the elementary school and the high school into one building at this time. At one time the buildings which comprise the school district housed approximately 1200 students. If current projections hold, we will reach approximately half that number sometime during the next 10 years.

2.) The teacher’s are very vocal about losing jobs and while this should be a concern to all of us, the ability of the taxpayer to fund rising salaries, benefits and other expansive ideas of the education establishment (all in a time of documented enrollment loses) has been reached at this point. Doing away with a number of positions based on falling enrollment is quite reasonable and should be expected based on these numbers.

The Whitehall Times has an eye-opening article on the problems Whitehall has made for itself by the school board’s out of control tax and spend policies.

Finally, the plummeting enrollment of the Whitehall school district can’t be hidden anymore. Readers of the Huletts Current have known about this for some time now. What is the school’s board’s response? A proposed property tax increase of 13% at this time, which taxpayers of the district (including Huletts Landing) will be expected to pay.

Here’s an idea for the Whitehall School board. The plummeting enrollment (which all of New York is experiencing) is directly related to policies that always assume that the taxpayer can continue to match the spending increases that our school board regularly enacts. Look around Whitehall, the town is in serious decline and has been for some time.

The plummeting enrollment is expected to get worse over the next ten years. The discussion needs to include mothballing buildings, cutting spending drastically and lowering property taxes.

As enrollment falls and the cost per student rises, the Whitehall School board is proposing to spend $500,000 on building improvements, the Whitehall Times reports.

The fact that is not really presented in the article is that, if undertaken, the project has already been paid for by the taxpayers.

This is how the school board does it:

The budget is consistently over estimated and excess taxes received are deposited in “reserve accounts” after approval by the voters. The voters have never been asked, as long as I can remember, if these excess funds should be returned to the taxpayers and the next year’s budget never seems to reflect the overcharges from the prior year. Projects are then proposed where the state reimburses a percentage of the amount expended and claims are made that it will not effect the budget. That’s because we’ve already been overtaxed. When the state reimburses where does the money go? It goes back into the reserve funds.

Governor Patterson made note last year of the large amounts of reserve funds many school districts, like Whitehall, are holding.

In the last couple of years, we’ve added a large addition to the school, added tennis courts to the school, refurbished the pool, refurbished and added a new roof to the gymnasium and now we are proposing to refurbish the auditorium. All the while, enrollment is plummeting and costs per student are rising because of falling enrollment. When you see the school board holding special elections in the middle of winter, you can surmise that their budget excesses where better than they had forecast and they either want voter approval to spend the excess or put in into reserve accounts.

Keep an eye on the propositions that the school board puts forth in May. Excess money that they want approval to put into reserve accounts comes from our checkbooks that they have overcharged.

It’s the middle of the dead of winter, and what does the Whitehall school district decide to do?

If you guessed hold a special election, outside the normal budget process where “unreserved, unappropriated” funds (translated overcharged property taxes) are spent to buy more school buses, you are correct.

In all the years I’ve followed the machinations of the Whitehall school board, they have never held a vote to return overcharged property taxes to the taxpayers.

Legal Notice

by order of,
Martha Basque
Districk Clerk