Aging facilities, shrinking numbers: Adirondack schools face double bind

Boquet Valley serves as example of problems facing many small school districts in the Adirondacks

By Tim Rowland

With a functional new school — one where everything worked — close to becoming a reality, the Boquet Valley Central School District had hoped it could run out the clock on failing systems at its two aging buildings in Westport and Elizabethtown.

But after voters overwhelmingly rejected the new complex, school leaders must now turn their attention to porous roofs and broken heating systems — and the bigger question of where  Boquet Valley turns now to provide safe, healthy and adequate space for its students at a cost taxpayers can afford.

Paradoxically, the vote against the new school in Boquet Valley could mean students and property owners end up with the worst of both worlds: a patched-up old school that ends up costing taxpayers more than new construction, which the state would have helped pay for.

It also comes at a critical time for rural districts, as the state considers repeal of a policy known as Save Harmless, which prevents the state from contributing less to a school district than it did the previous year. Repeal of Save Harmless would cost Boquet Valley $1.1 million a year.

These building and funding issues are ones most all Adirondack school districts will have to address, if they haven’t already, along with the more basic questions of how to run their programs under state funding formulas that almost seem custom-made to punish the Adirondack condition.

“This is what is happening in rural New York,” said Boquet Superintendent Josh Meyer. But, as with other thorny issues from housing to employment, in the Adirondacks it is more-so.

To save money, the state department of education is pushing merger and regionalization, but “we’ve already merged,” said Meyer, referring to the 2019 unification of the Westport and Elizabethtown-Lewis districts, which once totaled close to 1,000 students, but now serves 380.

Steeply declining enrollment is a common problem in the park. According to the Cornell Program on Applied Demographics (PAD), Essex County — the most populous county entirely inside the park — has 4,956 students, 750 fewer than in 2015. The other county entirely within the park, Hamilton, has lost a third of its students in the same period.

Declining enrollments also help explain why the community rejected the new school by a 3-1 margin. In the merged district, elementary students attend the 91-year-old Westport school, while upper grades attend a 70-year-old building in Elizabethtown. (Elizabethtown, among other shortcomings, has no athletic fields, so teams must be bused 12 miles just to practice.)

Yet voters understandably wondered, Meyer said, how two schools that once accommodated 500 kids each, now were too small for a student population that today is less than half the size.

The answer is that programs the old schools never had to accommodate, such as mental health, social workers, student support and counseling now all clamor for space. The system once had one special education teacher; today there are nine. The state demands it, but doesn’t pay for it.

Based on public comments, voters also felt the district should have done more to maintain its two schools, where ceilings leak and malfunctioning boilers force teachers to open the windows in the dead of winter. But with a new school a possibility, that seemed like throwing good money after bad, not to mention that it would have drained money away from teaching.

Adirondack schools in a bind

Declining student populations, unhelpful school funding formulas, decaying buildings and state-required spending on new programming, place school boards in an impossible situation when deciding where to allocate precious dollars, said Cynthia Ford-Johnston, a retired administrator who gained a reputation in the Eastern Adirondacks for being able to shore up troubled districts.

Beyond that, administrators must, with little money, deal with the Covid-related offshoots of poor attendance, stunted child development and addictions to both drugs and smartphones. “These challenges lead to decreased enrichment opportunities for children, a shift from prevention to treatment and reduced maintenance of facilities,” Ford-Johnston said.

At a time when communities should be pulling together to solve these challenges, state funding policies drive a wedge between the needs of children and the property-owning taxpayers who must pay the bill and have a direct, ballot-box say over spending. 

Adirondack school administrators say it’s hard to blame Adirondack taxpayers because they already pay a disproportionately higher share than taxpayers in other parts of the state. That’s because the Adirondacks lacks the industry that most regions can count on as a budgetary backbone, Meyer said. Further, as a highly desirable vacation destination, city dwellers and snowbirds build expensive second homes that, to a state algorithm, make Adirondack communities look wealthier — and less in need of financial help — than they are. And since boards can’t raise taxes on those who can afford to pay without raising them for those who can’t (and because they must comply with a rigid tax cap), they are powerless to make up the difference.

Attempts to rectify this have fallen on deaf ears, said John McDonald Jr., a former Ticonderoga Central superintendent who, during a budget crisis in 2019, took early retirement to protect school programming. 

Schools are also penalized, McDonald said, because, while the state pays tax on public land, it does not reflect the true value of that land, either as a tourism draw or for its environmental value, such as water quality and carbon capture.

“The Adirondacks is unique to other rural schools, because the amount of land that can be developed is shrinking,” McDonald said. “Forever Wild is good, but there needs to be some other tax base.”

While superintendent, McDonald drew up what he believed to be a more equitable funding formula for schools inside the Blue Line, but while several Adirondack districts signed on, “it just never got any traction” at the state level,” he said.

Instead, there are fears the state will go in the other direction. Gov. Kathy Hochul’s executive budget calls for the elimination of Save Harmless on the grounds that rural districts with declining enrollments shouldn’t need as much. 

But administrators say any savings are more than offset by state-mandated programs that Albany doesn’t pay for. Nor do districts necessarily pay less to teach fewer kids. “If a teacher loses 25% of their class, they don’t get 25% less pay,” Meyer said.

New school plans up in smoke

The new Boquet district did realize savings from consolidation, and saved up $5 million, which it considered would be an adequate 10% local match on a new, $50 million school. On the eve of the pandemic, the school submitted its plan to the state for approval — and then for 18 months didn’t hear a peep. Meyer said he’s reluctant to criticize organizations that were stressed by the pandemic, but with each passing day, building supply costs were spiraling. A $50 million project quickly became a $64 million project.

What the district did hear from the state was even more devastating. Typically, the state pays 90% of new school construction. But the state concluded that only 40% of the project was eligible for state money. “They said we didn’t read the fine print,” Meyer said at a public meeting earlier this year. “We didn’t know there was any fine print.”

Large districts have lobbyists that might have gotten the state to act sooner, and staff dedicated to grant writing and building proposals. Boquet Valley and its 380 kids had neither. So the state was able to shift its financial responsibility to the taxpayers of Westport, Elizabethtown and Essex, who, to pay for a new school, would have faced a 24% increase in the levy. Meyer said it’s small wonder they turned it down.

Meyer said a new committee will be appointed to study the options, but while he led the group that worked out the details of new construction, this time he’ll turn the reins over to an outside  consultant. “I’m having trouble breaking away from that (new construction) option,” he said. “From an operational and academic standpoint it made fiscal sense to me.”

It’s an issue Boquet Valley has already studied top to bottom with no obvious solutions in sight.

“I find myself wondering what the future holds,” Ford-Johnston said. “How might technology be able to bridge some of the gaps in program options, staffing challenges and population sparsity.  Perhaps buildings and districts as we know them will change or need to change to be able to provide all young people the tools to compete in the world.”

Photo at top: The Elizabethtown-Lewis-Westport high school girls soccer team (in black uniforms) congrats Keene players after a fall game in Westport in 2019. The school is an example of how districts are merging in rural areas. Photo by Mike Lynch