East Rockaway Schools waiting on state aid figures

The East Rockaway School District still has one more budget hearing before its Board of Education votes to adopt the 2010-11 spending plan, but as of now, it contains a 2.19 percent budget increase from the current year's plan with a tax levy increase in the range of 2.76 to 4.76 percent. School officials said that since the state has not finalized its budget, state aid numbers can change, and that can change the tax levy.

This year's tax levy increase was slightly over 8 percent. '"In order to finalize our budget, the state needs to finalize its budget," said Marcy Tannenbaum, assistant superintendent of finances. "That's why we have to estimate. Until we get the final numbers, we can only guess."

The district is getting $508,000 less in state aid than this year, so Superintendent Dr. Roseanne Melucci informed her department heads to not exceed this year's spending limit — which was cut by 25 percent from the 2008-09 school year — when developing their budgets. "There will be no increases," Melucci said of department head budgets. "We told them they couldn't go over what we allowed for the 2009-10 school year."

Melucci noted that the 2010-11 budget preserves all of the district's programs, but added that if it were to go to contingency, the district would look at either eliminating or reducing certain non-mandated programs. Some of the programs that could be affected by a contingency budget, she said, are the full-day kindergarten class, the elementary computer and gifted/ talented program, summer school, as well as clubs and sports. Some jobs that could also be impacted are school nurses, social workers and elementary school librarians, Melucci added.

The superintendent warned though that if the budget goes to contingency and certain programs and staff are cut, the district cannot restore them. "If the district goes to contingency and in July, the state finalizes its budget and we get state aid restored, we can't restore the cut programs," Melucci said. "Once we're on contingency, we have to work with that budget, even if we get additional revenue."