Saranac Lake Central School District Superintendent Diane Fox speaks at a hearing on the district budget Wednesday. (Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone)

SARANAC LAKE — The Saranac Lake Central School District is seeking public input on plans to reconfigure its classroom locations for grades three, four and five as it reduces its number of the elementary classrooms by one-quarter and shifts some students around.

When school starts up next fall, some students at Petrova and Bloomingdale elementary schools will have to change buildings.

“Current enrollment does not require maintaining the same number of classrooms for grades 3-5 to meet contractual class size limits,” Fox said.

There are two ways to do this, and though the final decision will be made by SLCSD Superintendent Diane Fox, she wants to collaborate with the board of education and the public on investigating that decision.

On Friday, she sent a letter to staff and families seeking their input and telling them the board will hold its May 21 board meeting at Bloomingdale Elementary with a public work session on the topic of elementary reconfiguration.

People can share public input up until May 20 by contacting Board of Education Clerk Gina Pollock at pollockgin@slcs.org or by mail at 79 Canaras Avenue, Saranac Lake, NY 12983.

Fox said she should decide what to do by the beginning of June. Since any shift would require several students and one or two staff members to change schools, she wants people to be ready for the change.

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Options

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One option would be to move some students in grades three through five from Petrova to Bloomingdale — having two classrooms at Petrova and one at Bloomingdale.

Under this option, around five students from each of the grade levels would transfer from Petrova to Bloomingdale.

Fox said this option would preserve the Bloomingdale school’s identity and community. It would offer a smaller, more intimate school environment. It would also be more convenient for people who live in the Bloomingdale-area community. And it would provide extra space at Petrova.

The other option would be to move all Bloomingdale students in grades three, four and five to Petrova — filling the three classrooms currently at Petrova and having none at Bloomingdale.

Under this option, all students in these grade levels would move from Bloomingdale to Petrova. This would essentially make Bloomingdale a pre-K to second-grade school.

Fox said Petrova has enough capacity to handle this. She said it would be more efficient for staffing and instruction. It would balance general and special education in the same building, centralizing access to special education and other support systems.

She said she has an initial opinion on what to do, but she didn’t want to reveal it yet before the public conversation.

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The need for the shift

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When the district starts its budget project, it starts with a “rollover budget,” copying the budget from the previous year with all the new expenses.

This year, the rollover budget expenses were $2.7 million over its projected revenue. This is largely because of an 8.4% increase in staffing costs — a $1.2 million increase in salaries, a $975,000 increase in health insurance and a $119,000 increase in employee benefit costs.

Fox said she had to look for significant amounts of money to reduce this gap. Because of the enrollment decline, she cut staff to maintain the district’s student-to-staff ratio.

Students in grades three through five are split between the district’s two elementary schools — Bloomingdale and Petrova. There are four classrooms for each grade level, with one classroom from each grade level at Bloomingdale and three classrooms from each grade level at Petrova. Both schools are seeing smaller class sizes.

With fewer students, and now fewer teachers, Fox said they need to reduce the total number of classrooms they run for each of these grade levels down to three.

Because of contractual maximums on the student-to-teacher ratio in each classroom, this would require moving students from one school to the other.

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Past and future

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Last year, after a lengthy discussion about the potential of closing Bloomingdale Elementary due to having fewer students, the district planned to start a committee to discuss the idea. The committee never started, though, because the number of incoming kindergartners this past fall was higher than anticipated.

“There is a feeling I’m sure that there was a ‘slight of hand,'” Fox said, adding that that was not her intention.

She said the district had promised that if the board was to consider closing the Bloomingdale school, it would form a committee to study and debate the idea. In the case that students shift out of Bloomingdale, essentially making the school a pre-K to second-grade school, it would reduce the school’s relevance to the district.

Fox said she “read the tea leaves” of a higher incoming kindergarten class in September and decided to cancel the committee. But February brought them unexpected financial situations — federal funding started to be up in the air, and the district’s health insurance consortium with other districts in the local BOCES had unexpected health care cost increases.

The district has moved fourth- and fifth-graders from Petrova to Bloomingdale before. When that happened, they first asked for volunteers to move. There weren’t enough volunteers. They made sure students who changed schools moved with a “buddy.” But Fox also said the SLCSD community is small enough that students at the two elementary schools already know each other well.

The May 21 meeting at Bloomingdale Elementary will be held at 5:30 p.m. and livestreamed on the district YouTube channel at tinyurl.com/mrtue9s8. Viewers can listen in, but not talk during it.