The Saugerties Central School District’s Board of Education last week unanimously adopted an $83,758,576 budget for the 2026-27 school year, a spending plan coming in around $1 million less than a draft presented one week earlier.
The final budget proposal was presented by interim superintendent Gwendolyn Roraback and business manager Mike Staiger during a Tuesday, April 21 meeting of the board of education.
“Tonight we’re going to spend some time talking about student needs and proposing a budget that is fiscally responsible to our community, but also keeps the student needs as our priority,” said Roraback. “Every single year in the Saugerties Central School District when the budget presentation comes up, it is generally a plethora of cuts of staff and a plethora of student programs that impact our students’ Sawyer experience. What we are going to propose tonight, after a lot of thoughtful dialogue and consideration and crunching numbers, is that we maintain all of the student programs and services and they are our first priority.”
The budget comes with a 3.15 percent tax levy increase, at the state cap for the district, thus requiring only a simple majority at the polls to pass.
Like other districts locally and across the state, the SCSD has been faced with years of declining enrollment. Between the 2011-12 and 2025-26 school years, the district fell from 3,006 to 2,466 students. That drop is not as precipitous as in other Ulster County school districts and it has been met with three increases over that period, most recently in the 2023-24 school year, when enrollment rose from 2,469 to 2,529.
But while student enrollment continues to decline, most expenses have increased. Among the anticipated expenditure increases identified in the budget summary are property insurance (52.34 percent), board of education and central administration (18.89 percent), BOCES services (15.26 percent), transportation (13.32 percent), and debt services (6.2 percent).
The budget also includes the cost of adding the equivalent of 13.5 full-time teacher aides and assistants to meet the needs of 504 and IEP students and the hiring of an assistant superintendent of human resources and instructional leadership, a recommendation of a recent external audit. The equivalent of two full-time learning community teachers, four full-time learning community teacher assistants, one junior high special education position and a part-time junior-senior high counselor are also among the additions for the 2026-27 school year.
“This goes back to the whole enrollment versus not being proportional to student needs,” Roraback said. “These are current student needs.”
The district will see savings in reducing the armed security contracted through Goshen-based Atlas Security Services from four to one, with the junior-senior high school campus still covered. Door monitors and a school resource officer will take their place at the elementary level.
To overcome a nearly $4.5 million shortfall, the budget includes numerous staff reductions through retirement, the elimination of a universal PreK nursing position, reductions in overtime and extra pay approval and the elimination of superfluous transportation routes. And $1.7 million of fund balance and reserves will also be used to balance the budget.
“Many school districts use reserves to balance their budget to protect student programs,” Staiger said. “We’ve done this in the past. In the most current school year that ended June 30, 2025, we had appropriated to use reserves, but we didn’t actually have to use those reserves.”
The balance in the various district reserves as of April 21 is nearly $12 million, including capital reserves ($4,703,252), the employee retirement system ($3,121,385), the teacher retirement system ($2,293,087) and the employee benefit liability reserve ($1,269,264).
Much of the budget presentation focused not only on the immediate future, but also plans for future stability. Though it’s as yet unclear what specifically the district was looking for in a recent transportation opt-out survey, of the 159 responses received, an overwhelming amount — 69.2 percent — said they rely on buses to get their kids to and from school and would continue to do so. A further 21.4 percent said they do not need district transportation, while 9.4 percent of respondents were on the fence pending more information.
Other stated pieces of the district’s stability puzzle include staying at the tax cap; leveraging retirement attrition; ongoing review of staffing; class sizes and program delivery; potential elementary restructuring; maximizing revenues, including Medicaid and state aid; advancing capital projects to increase future state building aid; reviewing potential transportation efficiencies and route optimization; and a commitment to long-term financial stability while supporting students.
The district will hold a budget hearing on Tuesday, May 5, two weeks before the public has its say on the spending plan at the polls.
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