LAKE PLACID — The Lake Placid Central School District Board of Education on Monday unanimously failed to accept a $3.1 million administrative budget for the Franklin-Essex-Hamilton Board of Cooperative Educational Services for the 2024-2025 school year.

BOCES of Franklin, Essex and Hamilton counties has 10 component school districts. Each district gets one vote toward the budget. Of these districts, at least two voted “no” on the administrative budget Monday night: LPCSD and Malone Central School District.

Board member John Hopkinson said that, while he thinks that BOCES provides “a valuable and wonderful service,” he has “major issues” with the organization’s structure and leadership. He said that the system by which the BOCES administration receives its budget leaves LPCSD and similar districts that receive less state aid in the lurch, while favoring districts that receive more state aid.

“BOCES admin — and parenthetically, also the BOCES board, which is staffed and overweighted by these very same smaller districts — knows with near certainty that there will be majority support for their budget proposal, whatever it is. There are no realistic checks and balances in this process,” Hopkinson said.

He added that the “only path” to a better, tighter budget for BOCES needs to come from “group initiative and the self-discipline of BOCES admin … and its board members,” something he said he has not seen from the organization in recent years.

Hopkinson said he would like to see BOCES “rethink, reevaluate and come back with a lean organization and a tight budget that somewhat comports with all the things the school districts have to do to get their budgets approved by their communities.”

District Superintendent Timothy Seymour said that the “hardest part” for LPCSD is the way that BOCES structures retirement costs.

“The goal of the BOCES is to progressively roll more of those legacy costs into the admin budget,” he said. “We’re essentially paying for the retiree benefits of staff whose programs we’d never buy into anyways, but the second they retire, we buy into those. In a perfect world, the true cost of an employee would be built into the program cost for the districts that utilize the service.”

LPCSD failed to accept BOCES’s administrative budget last year, too — though not unanimously.

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LPCSD budget

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School board members approved Monday a $22.4 million budget for LPCSD for the 2024-25 school year, up from last year’s budget of around $21.7 million. The budget carries a $17.7 million tax levy, up 3.38% from last year and falling below the state-imposed tax levy cap.

There will be a public budget hearing on May 7 in Wilmington; this is different from previous years, when the board would hold a budget hearing in Lake Placid and another in Wilmington. The hearing on May 7 will be the only hearing.

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Cellphone policy

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The board had a conversation about district cellphone policy and agreed to schedule a public forum about cellphones in school to gather opinions from students, parents, teachers and mental health professionals.

Cellphone policy differs by school. They are forbidden at Lake Placid Elementary School, and middle school students are asked to store their phones in their lockers throughout the day. In high school, however, students gain more phone privileges — they can use them during lunch and study halls and also in classrooms where teachers allow cellphone use.

Seymour said that teachers and administrators have observed cellphones are used “pervasively” during lunch periods.

“There is social media use by the students … and really the only limiters for high school students presently with regards to cellphones are that they are not to use them when transferring between classes and they are not to have them in a class if the teacher expresses they do not want phones,” he said.

He added that, anecdotally, most teachers at the high school seem to be in favor of reducing students’ cellphone access during the day.

Board member Ronald Briggs said that, after reading some articles about student cellphone use, he was especially concerned about how unfettered access to phones and the internet can affect students’ neurological and psychological development.

“The research shows that there’s decreased performance in school, increased anxiety, increased depression, increased suicidal ideation,” he said. “I think we have a duty to act in the face of this empirical evidence. I really do.”

He said that the middle school’s policy of keeping phones in lockers seems like the ideal policy.

Board member Colleen Locke agreed with Briggs’s concerns about student mental health, but expressed concern about limiting parents’ ability to contact their children during the school day. She said that students do benefit from and appreciate breaks from their phones, citing how present she’s seen the students be when they attend the Wilderness Opportunity to Offer and Develop Skills (WOODS) program.

“I’m sure there’ll be some pushback, but I do agree with Ron. I think we do have some type of responsibility to safeguard our children,” she said.

Seymour said that cellphone policies will likely need to shift in the face of evolving cellphone usage, which now skews toward social media.

“The phone of today, with the algorithm built into it and the apps, is not the phone of 10 years ago,” he said. “The apps that are associated with phones today have been questioned by (the Surgeon General).”

The board agreed that Seymour could take the lead on organizing a public forum regarding cellphone use in schools before they began seriously discussing or drafting a policy.