Three Village Schools Recover Close to Half a Million in State Aid

State budget numbers released late Wednesday show the Three Village Central School District is set to receive nearly the same amount of education funding it received last year, prompting a cautiously optimistic response from at least one district official on Thursday.

Jeff Carlson, assistant superintendent for business services, confirmed Three Village is set to receive $25,365,248 in foundation aid and additional amounts in other categories that total about $36 million. It's in line with last year's amount and is $475,000 more than the district was anticipating.

"We'll take it," Carlson said. "It was good news. It was a little more than we expected, but not tremendous."

The district has been struggling with closing a $7 million gap between projected revenues and expenditures in its budget proceedings, which the restored state aid will lower to about $6.5 million. Thus, "it doesn’t make a world of difference in our budget planning for next year," Carlson said.

Last year, the district received $36,112,096 in total state aid, representing about 21.6 percent of the district's $167 million budget. released in February predicted a $1.4 million loss for Three Village, but Carlson said that process was "mixing apples and oranges," and a subsequent change in accounting methods showed a budget-to-budget reduction of less than $500,000.

RELATED: to revisit Three Village's 2010-11 budget.

State Sen. Kenneth LaValle, R-C-I-Port Jefferson and chair of the state senate's Higher Education Committee, released a statement calling the state's approximately $132.5 billion budget agreement – which the legislature still has yet to formally approve – fiscally responsible.

"I fully expect that the dollars restored to the education budget will be put into the classroom and not taken from programs for our children," LaValle said.

However, a number of programs in Three Village may still be on the chopping block. At Tuesday night's budget workshop session, dozens of students, parents, educators and other community members showed up to demonstrate their support for positions like the athletic trainer and programs like music composition, IG and Pi programs, student government, elementary health education, and theater arts, all of which are in danger of being cut or restructured to try and save money.

Following nearly an hour of public comments on Tuesday, the school board ultimately took no formal action other than to request from the administration additional options for program cuts to consider.

However, several trustees did say they would not support cuts in areas like student government in particular. Ward Melville student government president Lauren Kocivar said an informal survey of the students in the student government class showed that 90 percent would stop participating if it were converted to an after-school program, and Gelinas student government treasurer Julia Hwang presented a petition signed by close to 300 students asking the district to preserve the program as it is.

The school board has previously stated a goal of limiting its tax levy increase to 3 percent, but on Tuesday, board president John Diviney suggested the community be given the opportunity to decide.

"It’s unrealistic to think we could have a 5, 6, 7 percent increase, but we should probably have the community vote on keeping these things instead of dogmatically sticking to an arbitrary number," said Diviney, whose comments were received with applause from the crowd.

A sixth budget workshop session has been added. That session, set for Tuesday, April 5, could be the final public meeting before the anticipated budget adoption vote on April 12.

Carlson said Thursday after receiving the state aid figures that the district may actually poised for a better outcome in the budget proceedings than in previous years. Last year, he said, the district had to postpone its formal budget adoption by several days, but the numbers came earlier than usual this year.

"I think the timing of it is working out perfectly," he said.