Rockville Centre Schools Keeps Staff Cuts In Latest Budget Proposal, Aims To Fill $3M Gap

ROCKVILLE CENTRE, NY — As questions about the Rockville Centre School District’s budget persist, the RVC board of education met Thursday night for a work session. The goal of the work session? Simple: Figure out how to solve a $3.2 million budget deficit that the district faces for next year.

In his presentation before the board, superintendent Matthew Gaven said the budget gap was about $6 million when the district started budget planning this year. Previously, the district had said it had been able to shrink the budget gap to about $3.78 million by reducing budgets, offering retirement incentives to some employees and letting those employees’ positions go unreplaced. Thursday night, Gaven said the budget gap stood at $3.2 million.

Where The Gap Comes From

In previous presentations before the board, Gaven had outlined a combination of factors that were making it difficult to balance the RVC schools budget: Decreasing enrollment, rising costs of doing business and a limit on the amount of tax money the school can levy. In the past 10 years, Rockville Centre has lost about 288 students, equal to about 8 percent of its student body, consistent with a 7.33 percent decrease in enrollment across Long Island in that time.

Regardless of enrollment trends, construction and insurance costs or other economic factors, the dilemma facing the district remains: Rockville Centre is over $3 million short on its upcoming budget and needs to balance the books.

What The School District Proposed

“The question is, with a $3.2 million gap, how do we go about closing that gap and still providing the best possible programs for our students?” Gaven asked. “When we came up with the proposed reductions for staffing…we started with our programs. What are the programs we want to offer? What are the programs we wish to support? How can we make it sustainable?”

This was the first budget presentation since Mar. 12, when the administration had proposed a budget that would eliminate 24 teaching positions, 40 teaching assistant roles and an assistant principal role at the high school. After community and BOE feedback at that meeting, Gaven presented an amended budget proposal Thursday night that still featured reductions in teaching positions, displayed below:

“The weight of those reductions is borne by all of us,” Gaven said. “Including the people not only that would not have a job next year, but also the people left behind.”

Currently, Gaven said Rockville Centre ranks in the top quarter of Nassau County schools in terms of teacher-to-student ratio and staffing. The district maintains a 10:1 student to teacher ratio while most Nassau County schools are at 11:1.

“We’re currently higher staffed in terms of teachers than about 75 percent of the districts in the county,” Gaven said. “So, our recommendations were not based on this data, but were based on the fact that we’re trying to bring our staffing more in line with our drop of enrollment, while still supporting all of the programs and goals we currently offer. When we went back and looked at the data, the data does seem to support that we seem to be on the higher end, in terms of teaching positions relative to student enrollment.”

After community feedback from the last meeting, Gaven said RVC would be proposing the reinstatement of an elementary school position, a speech instruction position and leaving a contingency position in the budget in case the district’s ESL, world language or elementary instructional needs change.

But What About The 40 TA Positions?

Gaven said Rockville Centre currently employs teaching assistants and aides at the third-highest rate in Nassau County’s 56 school districts, when expressed as a ratio compared to the student enrollment.

As of Thursday, Gaven said the district employed 190 full-time equivalent teaching assistants and aides. Across Nassau County, the average number of teacher aides and assistants kept on staff is 102, the superintendent said.

“We are staffed high in terms of support personnel. The staffing of teacher aides and assistants is an outlier in Nassau County. It’s relatively high. Our recommendation was to reduce teaching assistant positions to, again, reflect enrollment and student need…the data seems to support that.”

And What About What They’re Spending On Administrators?

One of the areas Gaven said the administration had been surveying since the last board meeting was administrative staffing; the superintendent said there had been calls to reduce administrative costs at the last board of education meeting, and that the district had tried to survey Long Island districts to find where RVC stood in relation to its counterparts across the island.

On the whole, Gaven said Rockville Centre has more principals and assistant principals per student than most districts. Using data from 47 districts, Gaven said Rockville Centre was spending the 7th most of any district on its administration while employing a below-average number of administrators. The mean from the 47 districts, Gaven said, was 26 administrators. Rockville Centre, he said, employs 23, good for the 32nd-highest administrative headcount of all the districts surveyed.

Part of that discrepancy between expenditure and staff count, Gaven said, could be chalked up to Rockville Centre operating a seventh building, while most of these districts surveyed only run six.

In total, Gaven said the district was recommending the reduction of one administrative position, an assistant principal role in the high school.

The Next Steps

The school district will hold a preliminary budget hearing Apr. 16, with a full budget hearing May 7 ahead of the budget vote May 19.