Dr. Kevin Whitaker, Jamestown Public Schools superintendent is pictured. P-J File photo

Kevin Whitaker likened the state’s fiscal situation and its impending effect on schools to a confidence game.

“Think about a three-card monte where you move the cards around and you try to find the ace or the king or you have those cups and shells where there’s a marble underneath one of them and they get moved around,” the Jamestown Public Schools superintendent said. “That’s what’s going on in the state right now.”

Whitaker provided a budget update to the district’s board of education during a school board meeting earlier this week, emphasizing that “we are in an environment of missing information” as New York state continues to grapple with a $15 billion budget deficit that has yet to be improved upon due to a lack of federal aid.

“We just don’t have the information we need to make exact determinations of how much we may get from the state in terms of aid, how much may be withheld from the state in terms of aid and other particular issues like funding from grants and funding from other sources that has been delayed thus far,” he said. “We are supposed to get it, but it has been delayed. We have heard that both significant reductions are coming and also heard that the reductions won’t be as significant. We know that federal aid is the key to both this year and next year’s budgets.”

“In the absence of federal aid, the division of budget will continue to withhold payments through this year, the summer of 2021 and maybe beyond,” added Brittnay Spry, school business official.

The district has seen several aid payments withheld from the state which has created increased concern among school superintendents across the state that the $8 to $9 billion that has yet to be paid out by the state Division of Budget will instead be cut in the absence of federal aid to states and municipalities.

The district, for example, should receive over $3 million in universal pre-kindergarten aid from the state for the 2019-20 school year, but only $2.35 million has been received and an additional $76,608 due. The district has over $1.5 million receivable for this school year, but only $1.23 has been received, with an additional $306,615 still due.

Whitaker played a clip from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Dec. 10 press conference in which Robert Mujica, director of the state Division of Budget, indicated that payments will be made “at the end of the (state’s fiscal) year.” Whitaker indicated that means that $3.6 million could be taken from the district’s March aid payment, which is its largest scheduled payment month. Some of that money would be, reportedly, shifted to June and recalculated based on data on file as of May 15.

Spry noted that while the federal stimulus package did not include aid for local municipalities, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act did include a Governors Emergency Education Relief Fund of $4.094 billion. The state, however, does face a budget gap of $15 billion dollars.

“Remember that the gap for K-12 education is $5.3 billion and the withholdings that had already been made amounted to $300 million meaning that ‘.3’ would drop off so that $4 billion would nearly close the gap for K-12 education,” Whitaker said, but noted that the delivery of funds is the same as it was for the CARES Act in the spring.

“We were granted $3 million in CARES Act funding that the governor immediately duplicated in state aid funding by removing it. He pulled the state aid in the same amount of federal aid that we got so it’s possible that he could do the same with this money as well.”

“That’s my concern,” said Joe Pawelski, school board member. “That’s exactly what I’m concerned about.”

In terms of action items, the district has begun meeting with principals that are related to reductions.

“I will certainly not engage in any conversations about cost cutting or reductions without meeting with bargaining unit representatives to discuss those plans and have those conversations so that none of it will be a surprise,” Whitaker said.

Whitaker said that Spry will also discuss a “revenue anticipation note” with fiscal advisors as to whether or not the district should consider doing so.

“It’s like a short-term loan where we say ‘We’re going to get this aid, but we don’t have it now but we’d like to use it to cover expenditures we have in the meantime,'” Whitaker said, also noting that the district is awaiting the governor’s budget proposal in mid-January.

“That is the current status of the big budget question mark that we have hanging over our heads,” he said in concluding the presentation. “It is actually better news than we thought in August or even October, but there still is a lot of mystery yet to be uncovered.”