A Broken System

It was, Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. readily acknowledges, mostly a symbolic gesture — his trio of bills seeking to update New York State’s school funding formula and to boost the amount of foundation aid for some school districts face a nearly impossible path forward during the typically contentious budget season in Albany, currently in overtime. His hope is just to get the conversation started now, hoping it bears fruit in the next year, or the year after that.

As other matters — primarily the ongoing partisan battle over bail reform — continue to delay the state budget adoption, here’s hoping the final version will include a tiny $1 million earmark to pay for a closer look at the issue. At a time when local kids, parents and school districts are still grappling with post-pandemic stress, reexamining how the state supports local schools with funding is vital.

It’s a broken system. The foundation aid is awarded based on property and income wealth, using largely out-of-date data and ignoring other factors that can significantly impact the challenges a district faces. That’s particularly true on the South Fork, where the mere fact of wealth in the real estate surrounding the schools is not a guarantee of riches in the classroom.

Some of the challenges are based on a diverse population that requires more services. Some tiny school districts grapple with huge budget swings, or swaths of property that are undertaxed — such as the number of private golf clubs that make up a significant chunk of Tuckahoe School District’s constituency. State aid for capital projects is hard to come by, and the costs of expanding schools is prohibitive.

But the districts are struggling in other ways. Some smaller districts, like Springs, are considered “high-wealth” districts because of proximity, when that isn’t the reality. The disparity between the wealth in pockets of the South Fork and the everyday lives of parents who send children to the schools is well-known: Even if the state could provide aid to fund the kinds of food programs that popped up during the pandemic, it would have a measurable effect on children’s lives here.

This is a time when New York State should be spending more on schools, more on special education, more on aid that directly supports the youngest residents. The formula for awarding aid, which aims for equal distribution, has to look beyond real estate values and into the lives of the students, and the schools they attend. It’s complicated, and every administrator here will say so.

That $1 million is a drop in the bucket, but it’s a seed that could begin to grow into a solution. Let’s hope it gets planted.