State Policy Impact on HCS Budget

(updated below 2015-03-31, and again 2015-04-03)
A link with clips to a document on the Hamilton Central website, at Factors Affecting the Hamilton Central School 2015-16 Budget (PDF)

New York Schools face an exceptionally difficult task when preparing budgets this year. The Governor has linked funding to an aggressive legislative agenda, and has pushed back the dates for sharing state budget runs with districts. This document provides a brief summary of how these proposals could impact HCS.

The Gap Elimination Adjustment(GEA) is an adjustment to state aid to schools first implemented in 2009-10 to help close large state budget deficits. ... The amount taken from this year’s budget was $474,572. We cannot predict the GEA amount for next year’s budget....With a 5 billion dollar state budget surplus there is no longer a budget gap, and there is no justification for continuing the GEA.

The final tax cap calculation for HCS that had to be submitted to the state by March 1 was -0.49%. In order to be tax cap compliant this year, we would have to reduce the 2014-15 levy amount by $32,232. Of course our expenses continue to rise, so even keeping the budget the same as the current school year would result in cuts to our current offerings....

The Governor and the Board of Regents advocate changing APPR so that 50% of a teacher’s performance score will come from student performance on standardized tests. [Part of the remaining score must be based on] observations... by an independent observer... This is an unfunded mandate, and would put more strain on our budget....

Contact Information:

• Governor Andrew M. Cuomo http://www.governor.ny.gov/contact
• Assemblyman Bill Magee contact via online form: ​ http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/William-Magee/contact
• Senator Dave Valesky​: valesky@nysenate.gov​
• Members of the Board of Regents: http://www.regents.nysed.gov/members/
• HCS Board of Education: boe@hamiltoncentral.org

Update:Deal Is Reached on New York State Budget; Ethics Measures Are Included - NYTimes.com

The governor had dangled a $1.1 billion increase in education aid in exchange for the Legislature agreeing to pass a series of reforms, including tying teacher evaluations more closely to students’ state test scores, making it more difficult for teachers to receive tenure and allowing the state to take over low-performing schools.

Teachers’ unions energetically opposed the governor’s proposals. ...

In the end, the budget will include an even larger increase in education aid – about $1.6 billion, according to Assembly Democrats. Cuomo administration officials said the budget would establish parameters for teacher evaluations that would result in a more rigorous evaluation system; the changes would be left to the State Education Department to work out.

The budget agreement would lengthen the time before teachers are eligible for tenure to four years, from the current three; Mr. Cuomo had proposed a five-year wait.

Update 2:Estimated State Aid for 2015-2016 is shown at 2014-15 AND 2015-16 AIDS PAYABLE ... HAMILTON which they summarize as

$ CHG 15-16 MINUS 14-15                                      140,890
% CHG TOTAL AID                                                 3.26
 
$ CHG W/O BLDG, REORG BLDG AID                               260,655
% CHG W/O BLDG, REORG BLDG AID                                  7.43

Most items are increased a bit, but the biggest single change is the $-291,889 reduction ("GAP RESTORATION") in the GEA. There's some discussion at Only 1 school district in Central New York will get state aid cut in NY state budget | syracuse.com

NY Merger Study in the News

In April, the Syracuse Post-Standard had an article with an HCS picture at the top, reporting that Report says change in New York law might encourage school mergers:

Syracuse, NY - The movement to merge New York's 700 school districts has virtually stopped since 1996 hamstrung by a process of multiple votes and tax disparities,...
A report by the New York State Association of School Business Officials shows that since 2010, some 30 school districts have studied merging but failed to complete the process for a variety of reasons. ...
The report says the obstacles to school mergers are: fear of change, fear of the loss of local identity, the perception that the merging communities are incompatible, higher costs and property taxes, more time needed to transport students and job security for school employees....
Most recently in Central New York voters in the Hamilton Central School District overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to merge with the Morrisville-Eaton Central School District in a December advisory vote.

The NPR summary of the NYSASBO report was slightly simpler: Study finds New Yorkers don't want school mergers, but of course citing the same "obstacles". The report itself is at 1398091412_NYSASBO School Merger Study April 2014 (1).pdf.

Nowhere, so far as I can see, is it mentioned that the proposed merger plan for the merger which Hamilton voted down was not actually going to save money; the economy of scale offered by getting all the kids into one place (reduced staff) was almost precisely balanced by the diseconomy of scale imposed by getting all the kids into one place (increased transportation). That could change, of course; plans which actually close buildings are more likely to save money anyway, and I've mentioned before that it would be possible, with a little more reduction in the school populations, to close and sell the elementary school building that's inside Morrisville, take those students to the MECS building north of town, and bring the 12th, 11th, ... ? grade MECS students to HCS -- which would let some of them sign up for Colgate classes, too. I'm pretty sure that would save money. (It might be possible even now, but the SES merger-study group didn't think so.)

I'm not sure how live an issue this really is; I suspect that most New York parents are thinking instead about the Common Core Standards. But I'm sure it will come back; the state can balance a budget with high enough taxes, but those taxes have been fueling a vote-with-their-feet anti-tax movement: to Florida, to Texas, or just to neighboring states with lower taxes. So the state will need to save money -- state promises of long-run aid should not be relied upon. It would be wonderful to think that they'll only push for mergers that actually save money, but I have no confidence that this will be the case.

Gap Elimination Adjustment

In yesterday's post I noted parts of Wanda Berry's note on NextDoor; I should also have mentioned a very important point she brings up in that note:

Whether or not the merger goes through, it is time for us to believe in democracy enough to mobilize a citizens’ effort to get the state legislature to get rid of the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which is the real threat, along with our declining school age population.

Indeed, while the proposed merger is all about promised state aid; one irony is that it is also all about previous promises of state aid being broken. More concretely:

• as often discussed, we wouldn't be discussing a merger that doesn't actually save money, if there weren't state incentives offering an average 5.3%-of-budget aid for fourteen years, plus permanent (?) reclassification of Hamilton as part of a "high needs district". But also,
• we wouldn't be discussing a merger at all if it weren't for a fiscal squeeze resulting from the "Gap Elimination Adjustment", a formula by which the state has refrained from paying millions that had been promised.

So what, and why, is this terrible "Gap Elimination Adjustment"? Basically, it's a formula by which the state says "we have a fiscal gap this year, with more outgo than income, and sure, we promised you a certain amount of aid, but here's your school district's share of the pain." And we respond with "OUCH". Here's a Vimeo video explanation:
Gap Elimination Adjustment: An Explanation from Cap Region BOCES on Vimeo.

Wanda and many others are hoping that if we all get together and say "No!" then the state legislators will say "Okay" and the schools won't be short of money any more. I sympathize very strongly, but I think we need to consider the context. What are we actually asking the state legislators to do? They want to please their voters; they already want to restore school funding. If they restore school funding, they must either reduce funding for something else, or else they can raise taxes. (Of course they can probably borrow money now, but that means that at some future time they'll be either reducing funding for something else, or raising taxes. Borrowing money now to fix it later is part of how we got in this mess.) This, of course, brings us to the Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force (PDF,page 7)

The conclusion of the Task Force is unambiguous. The existing trajectory of state spending, taxation, and administrative practices cannot be sustained. The basic problem is not cyclical. It is structural. The time to act is now.

From their point of view, the elimination of the Gap Elimination Adjustment would be a big step -- in the wrong direction. If they remove the GEA, then the painful decisions to be made get worse -- do we cut our already-underfunded pension plans, do we cut our massive health care payments, do we just let the infrastructure rust? Or -- the most obvious answer -- do we raise taxes? Hmmm... raising taxes sounds very good, doesn't it? Or does it?

Exactly how high are our taxes, comparatively speaking? That's complicated, because it involves income taxes and sales taxes and property taxes; for Alaska it also involves some weird taxes which don't actually get collected from the individual, they're based on oil movement, but apart from that we can sort of say that NY has the highest tax burden outside Washington DC in the state tax-burden chart. That's a statement that needs lots of qualifiers about what you're including and excluding; some are noted at the bottom of the chart. Some charts will put NY as low as #5 in state tax burden, but we can definitely say that a lot of New York residents and New York businesses notice, now and then, that they could be paying a lot less by moving to another state. And what happens then? Sometimes nothing. Some of us pay, and stay to pay again. For others... Income Migration: What Does It Really Mean For States? - Forbes

New Yorkers are subject to some of the highest state tax rates in the country, so it is not surprising that commentators have suggested residents will leave the state in droves. And it appears to be true. As reported by the Tax Foundation, between 2000 and 2010, New York lost $45.6 billion in income to other states. That’s far more than any other state. The next closest is California, which lost $29.4 billion over the same period.
This is a significant amount of income migration. But where did it all go? The answer, not surprisingly, is that much of the income went down south. Florida reportedly had a net gain of $67.3 billion. ...

Or as the NYT put it two years back, At 102%, His Tax Rate Takes the Cake - Common Sense - NYTimes.com

Mr. Ross said he asked his accountant what he could do. “He said, ‘Fire everyone here and move to Florida,’ ” according to Mr. Ross. He employs 10 people in his New York office.

Of course some of the migration goes to neighboring states, which do have lower state taxes; Florida has no income tax at all. But as our taxes rise, it becomes increasingly attractive for high-income Manhattan residents to start thinking: how much of this could I do on the Web, or by teleconference? As the New York Times put it a year ago Midlevel Finance Jobs Leave Wall Street as Firms Cut Costs

New York’s biggest investment houses are shifting jobs out of the area and expanding in cheaper locales in the United States, threatening the vast middle tier of positions that form the backbone of employment on Wall Street.
The shift comes even as banks consider deeper staff cuts here, which could undermine the state and city tax base long term.
“Places like New York or London will remain financial centers, but most of the players are taking a much harder look and asking whether they can move large numbers of jobs...”

When you ask the legislator to raise taxes again, you're not just being generous with your own money. You're asking that legislator to bet the state's fiscal stability on your hope that these people, people whose lives revolve around the way they care about money, will decide that they don't really care about money all that much: they'll stay, and pay again.

They might, or they might not. State aid cuts may go away, but they might expand. They might expand a lot. Ask for state aid, hope for state aid, but don't count on it.

(My inclination is to agitate for mandate relief more than increases in aid. NYS education costs twice as much per pupil per year as the national average. We should work on that.)

Rathskeller PTO Meeting

Well, the PTO meeting in the Colgate Inn Rathskeller took place this evening; several people presented parts of the ABCs of HCS, and then "student presenters" Maddie Lamel-Brown and Zach Coddington presented their Student Merger Survey Results. Note that a clickable (slightly longer) version of the ABCs is available here. The room seemed pretty full; I don't know if any minds were changed.

Comparing HCS and M-E Academic Performance

November 2, 2013

According to research, mergers work best when the two school districts are very similar (and geographically very close together). Mergers between dissimilar districts lead to tensions and conflict. Although Hamilton and Morrisville-Eaton are good neighbors and similar in some ways, we are also quite different in others. For example property values and voting records. Hamilton's property values are over 40% higher than Morrisville-Eaton's.  Our response to cuts in state spending has also been different: Hamilton has voted to raise our tax rate to retain programs, while Morrisville has not.

In terms of academics, Hamilton consistently outscores Morrisville-Eaton. First, the data, and then a discussion of what we should do about it:

NY State Assessment Test Results, ELA/Math 2013

Tables:

ELA = English Language Arts		Level 1: Students performing at this level are well below proficient in standards for their grade.	Level 2: Students performing at this level are below proficient in standards for their grade.	Level 3: Students performing at this level are proficient in standards for their grade.	Level 4: Students performing at this level excel above the standards for their grade.		Level 3+4: Students who are performing at or above the standards for their grade
Morrisville-Eaton
Group	#Tested	%Level 1	%Level 2	%Level 3	%Level 4	Mean Scale Score	% Passed=L3+L4
Grade 3 ELA	50	52	40	8	0	276	8
Grade 3 Math	51	56.9	25.5	15.7	2	274	17.7
Grade 4 ELA	60	36.7	45	16.7	1.7	290	18.4
Grade 4 Math	60	40	40	16.7	3.3	287	20
Grade 5 ELA	51	45.1	33.3	13.7	7.8	290	21.5
Grade 5 Math	51	54.9	27.5	17.6	0	287	17.6
Grade 6 ELA	54	29.6	48.1	11.1	11.1	296	22.2
Grade 6 Math	56	51.8	33.9	8.9	5.4	277	14.3
Grade 7 ELA	54	29.6	46.3	16.7	7.4	299	24.1
Grade 7 Math	54	44.4	38.9	16.7	0	289	16.7
Grade 8 ELA	53	34	30.2	28.3	7.5	298	35.8
Grade 8 Math	52	32.7	46.2	21.2	0	296	21.2

Hamilton Central School
Group	#Tested	%Level 1	%Level 2	%Level 3	%Level 4	Mean Scale Score	% Passed=L3+L4
Grade 3 ELA	51	27.5	39.2	27.5	5.9	309	33.4
Grade 3 Math	51	25.5	29.4	35.3	9.8	308	45.1
Grade 4 ELA	46	23.9	41.3	28.3	6.5	302	34.8
Grade 4 Math	46	32.6	41.3	17.4	8.7	293	26.1
Grade 5 ELA	37	35.1	40.5	13.5	10.8	300	24.3
Grade 5 Math	37	29.7	37.8	21.6	10.8	303	32.4
Grade 6 ELA	40	15	47.5	12.5	25	311	37.5
Grade 6 Math	40	25	27.5	15	32.5	315	47.5
Grade 7 ELA	31	9.7	19.4	35.5	35.5	329	71
Grade 7 Math	31	16.1	29	38.7	16.1	320	54.8
Grade 8 ELA	41	26.8	26.8	24.4	22	311	46.4
Grade 8 Math	41	29.3	41.5	24.4	4.9	297	29.3

Data source: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/irs/ela-math/2013/2013ELAandMathemaitcsDistrictandBuildingAggregatesMedia.pdf

NOTE: in 2013, the NYS Assessment test was revised to fit the Common Core standards. As a result, statewide scores dropped significantly compared to previous years. The statewide average for passing (Level 3=Level 4) was 31%.

HCS has also outscored on the SAT:

School	Class of:	# of Test Takers	Reading	Math	Writing
HCS	2009	34	519	518	520
M-E	2009	27	468	486	457
HCS	2010	31	512	526	520
M-E	2010	35	501	487	462
HCS	2011	44	522	510	502
M-E	2011	35	499	505	497
HCS	2012	41	549	538	530
M-E	2012	40	469	470	442
HCS	2013	31	533	550	541
M-E	2013	35	470	430	450

Data: HSC School Board report average SAT scores in 2013.)  

One reaction to this information is to conclude that HCS should merge with M-E because this will help M-E students perform as well as HCS students. I have thought a lot about this, and I have concluded that there are some problems with this view.  

First, it is condescending and snooty, assuming that wonderful Hamiltonians would be the savior for those "poor" M-E kids.  

Second, what evidence do we have that a merger would improve academic outcomes for M-E? In order to fix a problem, you need to know that source of that problem and have good reasons to believe that the solution you choose addresses that source. 

According to Diana Bowers, the gap in academic outcomes is due to assessments and reforms conducted at HCS. She says that if you look at the test scores from 10 years ago, HCS was not doing this well. But they ran an assessment to figure out what the problems were, and changed their teaching practices accordingly. M-E hasn't done that, but they plan to do so soon. My impression of Diana's comments is that she expects them to improve just like HCS did, without a merger.
 
We also know the following:

• Research shows that disadvantaged and/or disadvantaged students populations perform better in smaller schools than in larger ones (see Leithwood & Jantzi’s 2007 article, Review of Empirical Evidence About School Size Effects.) High performing students do well in either kind of school.  
• In a merged school district, students from both M-E and Hamilton would be spending more time on the bus. That will not help their academics.
• Mergers are disruptive, and the transition period would be unsettling. That would also be distracting from academics. (If the merger does pass, I would hope that members of both communities would put in our best effort to make it as smooth as possible regardless of how they voted. But some disruption and distraction is just unavoidable.)
• The merger is not likely to yield more resources for academics. A merged district will have just as many buildings to heat and run, plus more bus runs to fuel. A merged district will have to have single tax rate. I can't imagine that Morrisville can easily raise their rate to match Hamilton's, but if we lower our tax rate to match theirs, that's less money for the school. (If the merger fails, both communities will still need to figure out how to address financial shortfalls for their schools. I hope that everyone would pitch in energetically to help with this, regardless of how they voted.)