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School budgets are behind us for another year
By LOIS CLERMONT
News Editor
The school votes are over, bringing a big sigh of relief to most North Country schools — and to everyone here in the Press-Republican newsroom.
It takes months of work to be able to tell you what kind of budget each district is offering and who is running for school board.
Our reporters do budget preview stories for every public school in our coverage area — that’s 26 districts in Clinton, Essex and Franklin counties.
We want to make sure you know what is going to happen with your taxes, the programs at your schools and any cuts or costs you might care about.
Then, we also try to interview all the candidates in every contested School Board race in those districts.
All that needs to be done between mid-April, when the budgets are in some kind of solidified form, and mid-May, when the votes are held.
It’s a lot of work, but we know we provide the most complete previews and results in the region.
Just a few observations on school budget stories:
— School administrators would love us to emphasize the tax rate over the tax levy.
The levy is the amount of the budget that comes from taxing property owners. The levy percentage that we report is the best indication of whether taxes are going up for 2009-10 — and they were at every school in our area except Beekmantown, Elizabethtown-Lewis, Saranac Lake and Northeastern Clinton, where the levies stayed the same as this year.
The tax rate can go down even if the budget and levy are up.
That’s because your property assessments go up every year and even things out. School administrators always emphasize to us — and to you in newsletters — that the tax rate is down or steady or barely up. Don’t be fooled. We lead all our budget previews with the change in the tax levy.
— Three schools refused to give us estimated tax rates. Even though the tax levy is more telling, we still report the estimated tax rate per $1,000 of assessed property.
The final tax rates aren’t set until the fall, but most schools estimate them now, based on the proposed budget, so their voters have some idea what costs will be.
Three schools wouldn’t give us tax rates, even though we were emphasizing that they were tentative: AuSable Valley, Malone and Saranac. They said they couldn’t provide those numbers at this point. Funny that 23 other districts could.
— All districts have to hold their vote on the third Tuesday of May. Starting times around here vary from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. All but six schools close their polls at 8 p.m. Six stay open until 9: AuSable Valley, Brushton-Moira, Chateaugay, Lake Placid, Peru and Westport.
The schools call in their budget votes and school-board results to our staff after counting all the votes. Last night, the final school (Westport) didn’t call in until after 10:30 p.m.
After the calls, we still have to write up the results, get them edited, place them on a page and post them on our Web site, where district residents can look to find out whether the budget passed.
This is a little self-serving, but wouldn’t it be nice if all the polls closed at 8 p.m.? It’s still plenty of time to get out to voters, and it would mean faster reporting to us — which means district residents could see the results more quickly.
