Officials in the Saugerties Central School District project that the district could find itself in a $5.1 million hole by the 2024-25 school year. According to an August 10 report by the district’s Governance Committee, fixing the problem without adversely impacting programming may include closing one of four elementary schools.
Superintendent Kirk Reinhardt summarized the study, which included possible district-shifting changes including reduced staff to align with the needs of dwindling enrollment and three elementary schools that would each house specific grades, regardless of current attendance boundaries.
“As always, every conversation is about what’s best for students,” Reinhardt said during the Board of Education meeting held on Tuesday, August 10. “We bring everything back to that in our district goals…The goal is to maintain programming.”
Reinhardt showed that student enrollment in the district was over 3,000 from around the 1995-96 school year through 2010-11 when it dropped into the high 2,000’s. Since then, student enrollment has steadily declined.
“We’re looking at about 2,200 in the near future,” Reinhardt said.
Even more recently, the district’s four elementary schools had a combined 1,290 students during the 2018-19 school year. The number of elementary school students in Saugerties in 2024-25 is projected to be around 1,100, or a decrease of 14.9 percent.
“That’s a 200-student loss, and that’s just in that five or six years,” Reinhardt said. “Enrollment has continually declined.”
Perhaps the greatest culture shift being studied by the Governance Committee is closing one elementary school, and using the remaining three as districtwide hubs for specific grade ranges: K-2, 3-4 and 5-6. Under this scenario, the Jr. and Sr. High would not be impacted.
Of the four elementary schools, Reinhardt said Grant D. Morse would make the least amount of sense as a hub for a number of reasons, including its location, northernmost in the district and therefore having the greatest impact on transportation costs. At 49,230 sq. ft., Morse is also the district’s smallest school, yet its operating cost per square foot is $1.32, by far the highest in Saugerties. Lawrence M. Cahill (90,860 sq. ft.) is the largest elementary school in the district and costs the least, at $0.88 per square foot. Riccardi (57,100 sq. ft./$0.89) and Mt. Marion (53,060 sq. ft./$1.07) are the district’s other elementary schools.
Reinhardt said the committee had identified several other New York school districts who’ve dealt with similar fiscal difficulties, including the Hendrick Hudson School District in Westchester County, which recently adopted a similar grade-range approach to its elementary schools for the 2022-23 school year.
“What was unique with the research is there’s been no empirical evidence that one model has greater student achievement over another, which as an educator, I kind of thought that was kind of weird,” Reinhardt said. “But I actually talked on the phone for about an hour with the superintendent from Hendrick Hudson…and I asked him about that, and his answer was if you look at the schools that switched to it, they’re high-achieving schools and they would switch back if they didn’t like it.”
Reinhardt said one concern he’d heard from parents in the Governance Committee is whether switching buildings every two or three years would be difficult for students, but he said research showed that it wasn’t because each grade would be moving together.
“If the students stay with 100, 150, the same 200 students, it was not this major transition,” he said.
Reinhardt said that while further studies will continue over the next few months, he expects to come back to the Board of Education no later than January 2022 with the Governance Committee recommendations; a shift to the three-elementary school model could happen as early as the 2022-23 school year.
Increasing class sizes is also under consideration by minimizing sections across grades. For example, there are currently nine first grade sections in the district, each with an average class size of 18.1 students. By reducing the number of sections to seven, the average class size would be 23.3, still lower than the district goal of 25.
The Governance Committee report also showed that during the 2020-21 school year, the SCSD had the equivalent of roughly 220 full time employees. But based on the current enrollment, a more efficient equivalent number of full time employees should be closer to 175, which would yield a savings of around $2.5 million. This figure could be achieved through retirement, Reinhardt said.
But while the district needs to become more efficient, Reinhardt stressed that it shouldn’t do so to the detriment of the students, both as they continue to ease back toward normalcy following the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
“My biggest concern coming into this fall is the social, emotional wellbeing of our students,” Reinhardt said. “We really need to make September a place for our students to feel safe, anxiety is down, we’re learning from students again, we’re learning from friends again, we’re building community relations.”
The superintendent added that he would like to invest some of the savings from any reorganization back into academic and extracurricular programming.
“One of the things that’s wonderful about public education is the fact that students can learn Shakespeare,” Reinhardt said. “They can do the classics, they can see a play, they can learn to play an instrument as part of being a public school. Increasing curricular supports, increasing AP classes, these are some of the things that people have talked to me about since I got here (ahead of the 2019-20 school year) and we just don’t have the funding right now to do it.”
School Board President Robert Thomann said Reinhardt was making the most of a difficult financial situation he inherited from the administration of former Superintendent Seth Turner, who left the district in late September 2018 to take on a similar role in the Amagansett Union Free School District.
“My heart goes out to (Reinhardt), to (Business Manager) Jane (St. Amour) and to (Director of Human Resources) Dan (Erceg) for dealing with a tough situation,” Thomann said.
Trustee Katie Emerson-Hoss commended the Governance Committee, which is comprised of around 25-30 members of the community, for the diligence in looking at creative solutions to looming fiscal difficulties.
“I really trust that we’ll be able to get to a place where not everybody will be happy, but we will really make good fiscal and learning decisions for the school (district),” she said. “I encourage folks to sort of look at the research and, you know, sort of think about what it says, the implications as well as what it means for us as individuals and parents.”
The next meeting of the SCSD Board of Education is scheduled for Tuesday, August 24.
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