State aid restored, but is it enough?

Long Beach has recovered about a half million dollars’ worth of state school aid it was set to lose. But school officials and local lawmakers are still fighting the state for additional funding in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

In January, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would be cutting high-tax aid for schools in the 2013-14 state budget. High-tax aid is money directed to districts in which residents pay high property taxes. It goes mostly to downstate districts, and is extremely beneficial to many on Long Island, said Long Beach Schools Superintendent David Weiss.

The district will receive $417,000 in high-tax aid next year, the same amount it is receiving this year and $292,000 more than the state originally proposed, according to the New York State Education Department website. The district will also receive $48,700 in foundation aid, and its “gap elimination adjustment payment” — the money districts must contribute to the state to help close the state’s budget gap — will decrease by $177,500, according to Weiss. In total, the district will receive $502,179 more in state aid than detailed in the initial January proposal.

The additional revenue came as a relief for school officials, who were struggling to close an $800,000 budget gap just a month ago. Thanks to the new funding, and a significant number of teachers who took advantage of incentivized retirements, the district was able to close the gap, and even reconfigure some staffing cuts to avoid the elimination of some positions that led to a pubic backlash. Officials restored all of the first grade teaching assistants, and will eliminate only one teacher-in-charge rather than all four, which was a point of contention in the community. The only one that will be eliminated is the Lido Elementary teacher-in-charge, who will be replaced with an assistant principal, to avoid redundancies in the Lido complex.

“We’ve listened to what people have said, we’ve reworked some of the numbers and we are able to present a balanced budget,” said Weiss.

Nonetheless, district officials said they still don’t feel that the state has fairly assessed the needs of the city’s schools, especially after Sandy.