By: Alexander Gault-Plate
OSWEGO – The Oswego City Board of Education held its first digital meeting during the coronavirus pandemic on Tuesday night at 5 p.m.
The meeting, which occurred via Skype, was livestreamed by the Oswego High School WBUC broadcasting program on Channel 16 and on their YouTube page.
Superintendent Dean Goewey informed the board that currently, schools across the state are closed until April 15 and are expected to be closed for longer.
“I fully anticipate that extended closings will be announced every two weeks from the governor,” Goewey said. “I’m very hopeful that we will get back to school by the end of the year.”
During the suspension of physical classes, all public school districts across the state have been required to provide remote learning, food to children ages 1 to 18 within their borders and child care to first responders.
“Now, our school district, as well as all school districts in Oswego County, has the primary responsibility of feeding our children,” Goewey said. “Our food service department has become a department of unsung heroes.”
Over the last three weeks, the department has produced and distributed over 13,000 lunches across the county, at meal distribution sites and through delivery programs.
Goewey shared how the district is planning to move forward with education during the school closings, and said that instruction at the moment should be focused on maintaining the social and emotional health of students, while providing review and enrichment materials. Currently, instruction on new content is not permitted.
Goewey said that while some school districts in New York have the capacity to, and plan to begin teaching new content to students during the school closures, the Oswego City School District does not have that capacity.
“Some districts have one-on-one device assistance, meaning they have digital devices for each and every one of their students,” Goewey said. “We are not that district.”
Currently, the district is preparing to allow teachers to reach out and provide review and enrichment materials to their students specifically, but no plans are currently in the works for providing new content to students remotely.
Goewey said that he also expects that Regents exams, which are state exams used to gauge students’ academic understandings of several core subjects, to be canceled in light of the closures.
“The longer that we’re out, the less likely I believe it will be that [Regents exams] will occur,” Goewey said.
Goewey also presented a portion of the school district budget for 2020-2021 and stated that the district may be facing even tighter budget restrictions than normal, as the state faces what could be a $15 billion budgeting shortfall as it faces the coronavirus pandemic.
“We’ve talked about this being a very challenging budget,” Goewey said.
All numbers presented by Goewey at the board meeting were preliminary, as the budgeting process moves through a number of phases where numbers are adjusted.
Among other challenges facing this year’s budget, what was expected to be an increase of over $6 million in state aid to the district was found to actually be an increase of $1.1 million. This comes as a result of an adjustment to a formula that calculates how much money should be allocated to public school districts across the state, known as “foundation aid.”
Established in 2006 following a state court ruling that found that New York public schools were failing to provide an education that would provide students basic literacy, math and verbal skills, foundation aid is the result of the state legislatures vote to increase school funding across the board.
However, the projected revenue for the district has increased by an expected $3.23 million, largely due to an expected $17.73 increase in property tax revenue, thanks to the addition of Nine Mile reactors one and two to the city tax rolls.
“You’re going to see a significant increase in our property tax generation, and you’re going to see a significant decrease in our PILOTS income,” Goewey said.
Previously, Exelon Generation, the company that owns the reactors at Nine Mile Point, were paying over $16 million directly to the school district in lieu of taxes, through the Payments in Lieu of Taxes program that is often referred to as PILOTS. The district will receive over $1 million more from property taxes this year than is being lost from the PILOTS program.
Overall, Goewey said that with this budget, any increases made will be as close to students and instruction as possible, as any more money coming from the state is unlikely. Currently, board elections and the budget vote are scheduled for June 1, per guidance from the governor’s office.
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