TUPPER LAKE — The Tupper Lake Central School District has put forward a budget for next year that is below the tax cap, because of several federal COVID-19 stimulus packages.

A public hearing on the budget will be held Tuesday, May 4, and voters will take a vote on it May 18.

The $20,549,718 budget increased $1,143,767 from last year, a 5.89% rise in spending.

The tax levy — the amount to be collected from school taxpayers — is set at $9,000,168, an increase of $110,230 from last year, a 1.2399% rise. The levy is $312 below the state’s tax cap, set this year at 1.243%.

District Business Administrator Dan Bower said there are no cuts in programming planned. There are not planned cuts to staffing, either, although he said there are rearrangements every year based on students’ needs.

The district may make changes to how money allocated in the budget is spent after it is passed, depending on how the federal and state governments tell it how to spend the aid money. This will not impact the tax levy. Bower said they had to adopt the budget now, before all the details of COVID aid are available.

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Budget changes

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Bower said there have been many improvements to the school’s budget outlook since January, when Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s executive budget projected cuts to school aid. At that point, he said TLCSD was looking at making between $400,000 to $600,000 in cuts.

He said COVID-19 stimulus packages passed over the past year have held those cuts at bay.

“A lot of really good things happened in this budget as a result of having those stimulus funds available,” Bower said.

A lack of cuts feels like a gain for the district, he said.

“I’ve been doing this for 22 years now. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bower said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime influx of cash.”

He said this stimulus money is a big opportunity for schools that, if mishandled, could be squandered. There is a temptation to spend big with these new federal dollars, he said, but they have to be wise. TLCSD’s budget is conservative, not adding many new expenses.

Bower called it a “prudent” budget. District Superintendent Russ Bartlett called it “responsible.”

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Aid

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The district has received three rounds of federal stimulus aid.

The first came in April 2020 with the CARES Act, netting $154,000 for Tupper Lake. Bower said the state used this money to fill in holes which would have resulted in budget cuts.

The second came in December 2020 with $696,772 for Tupper Lake.

The third came this February with the American Rescue Plan Act, bringing $1.8 million to Tupper Lake to be used as additional revenue.

Of that total, Bower said 20% is required to address learning loss due to the pandemic. He said the district is still figuring out exactly what that means. He anticipates this money could be used to pay for summer school, or intervention and supplemental education for students who fell behind in core classes in the past year.

“We’re going to continue to discover the impact of this (pandemic) well into the first semester of next year,” Bartlett said.

The district is not spending all this money from the ARPA right away. The federal government has given districts until 2024 to use it all.

“That’s wise. I’m glad they did that,” Bower said. “We couldn’t possibly spend all this money in a manner that would help us do this in one year.”

He said stimulus money that must be spent quickly can actually be detrimental to schools. The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act stimulus package following a recession gave TLCSD a lot of money, he said, but led it to a “financial cliff” the next year. TLCSD made a 25% reduction in staff in 2010.

“We’ve fallen off the cliff here once,” Bower said. “Russ was a principal. Hey Russ, do you want to go through that again?”

Ever sarcastic, Bartlett replied, “Yeah, that’d be great.”

The way the new ARPA is set up, it allows districts to ease off the stimulus money on a gradual decline.

“We don’t want to be shortsighted and just use the cash. We want to use it prudently,” Bower said.

He gave an example. The district could buy Chromebooks for students with the cash. But when it purchases them through BOCES, that generates future state aid. That’d be a better way to spend the money.

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Lessons from the pandemic

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Bartlett said when the pandemic made students learn from home, he realized Tupper Lake was in good shape technology-wise. They had plenty of Chromebooks to send students home with. Still, he said, that supply needs to be replenished now.

Aside from general wear and tear on the technology, he said many have needed to be outfitted with new screens and chargers. Others have been lost completely.

“Two of our Chromebooks have been recovered by fishermen this spring,” Bartlett said.

The school has budgeted for 900 new Chromebooks next year.

Bartlett said these may become more necessary as distance learning may stick around after the pandemic is over.

There’s also been a teacher shortage building in New York in recent years, he said.

“It’s not going to get better in the post-COVID world,” Bartlett said.

He said as math, science and foreign languages teachers become more scarce, districts lacking instructors in those courses may rely on distance learning to bring teachers in other districts to their students. If one district has a physics teacher, he said students from other schools may attend remotely via the internet.