Franklin-Essex-Hamilton BOCES' Adirondack Education Center near Saranac Lake is seen on Thursday. (Enterprise photo — Chris Gaige)

SARANAC LAKE — A new state Education Department initiative to have school districts discuss ways they can pool resources has been met with mixed reactions locally.

The department formed the initiative over the summer originally on the heels of a failed push by Gov. Kathy Hochul to cut back on state aid for education through, among other measures, the elimination of the ‘save harmless’ provision, which holds that school districts cannot receive less foundation aid than the previous year, even if their student enrollment declines.

After strong backlash from school districts throughout the legislative negotiation process, Hochul rescinded the proposed ‘save harmless’ provision elimination for this year’s budget.

Dale Breault is the Franklin-Essex-Hamilton BOCES district superintendent. Among other duties, he serves as a liaison between the 10 school districts in the BOCES — which include Saranac Lake, Tupper Lake and Lake Placid — and the state Education Department.

Brealt said the state Education Department started the initiative to encourage school districts to collaborate and discuss ways they could combine resources which could become more pressing if spending reductions in school aid come to fruition in future state budgets.

The initiative was originally mandatory, which sparked intense backlash from some districts — particularly from those located downstate — who thought that the initiative could force them into unwanted partnerships with neighboring districts, consolidations or even mergers.

Several districts filed a lawsuit against the state Education Department, and the department announced in December that the initiative was no longer mandatory, but still encouraged districts to take it up. Breault said much of this anger was spurred by misinformation, as the regionalization initiative never meant to get school districts to merge, consolidate or hand over more power to BOCES.

“There was a lot of misinformation that was happening on Long Island and downstate,” he said. “(The misinformation was that) this was a big initiative to have BOCES take everything over. There was also a lot of misinformation that this would force mergers and consolidations, and again, just not true at all.”

Breault said the intention of bringing districts together is to learn from each other as to what each others’ needs are, what services each provides and if there are any new ways they could collaborate with one another to expand opportunities provided to students across different districts.

“Just encourage school districts to talk to each other and see if they can come up with some really good ideas on ways in which they can share resources, whether it’s teaching opportunities for kids, extracurricular activities, facilities resources,” he said. “You name it, nothing’s off the table.”

Breault said that after the state stripped the mandate, Franklin-Essex-Hamilton BOCES districts voted to move ahead with these discussions. The first of which is set to take place today at Paul Smith’s College.

Since that decision, however, three of the districts in the BOCES — Saranac Lake, Lake Placid and Malone — decided to pull out of the discussions, which are still scheduled to take place between the other districts as of press time Thursday afternoon, according to Breault.

“I do have to say, I’m a little disappointed that a few of our districts decided to pull out,” he said.

Breault said he respected each district’s decision and noted that districts in the BOCES already — and to a greater degree than many other areas around the state — collaborate with each other on matters such as transportation, career and technical education programs and extracurricular activities.

“While I say I’m a little disappointed — and that’s because I think these are going to be some really interesting conversations that lead to new ideas — we can’t forget that our region has a very long history of collaboration and sharing,” he said.

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Local districts react

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The Saranac Lake Central School District discussed the regionalization effort at its Jan. 8 Board of Education meeting. The board ultimately voted unanimously to not participate in the discussions.

Superintendent Diane Fox said the district’s decision boiled down to three primary reasons. One, she said, is that the district already engages in extensive collaboration with neighboring districts. She gave examples of sharing buses, special education resources and career and technical education programming.

Another reason was financial. She said the Saranac Lake district receives significantly lower rates of state aid reimbursement — which are determined by state Education Department formulas that take into account property values, income levels and other economic factors within a district — for funds the district contributes to shared programming than other BOCES districts, making it less financially beneficial.

SLCSD Board of Education President Mark Farmer echoed this at the board meeting. He stated that the lower reimbursement rates could lead to their budget being especially strained, compared to neighboring districts, for comparable investments toward shared programming.

“Schools like us who don’t (have high reimbursement ratios), we’re now left to go try to make up that money from our taxpayers,” he said. “But then (school tax raises are) capped so we can’t exceed that, but we need to get more money, where’s it going to come from? Well, that leaves us with only one place to get it. That’s to reduce what you’re doing in your school.”

Fox said an additional reason was that the district felt that it was not an effective use of time for district staff members to attend the discussions, which she said would take away from their already busy days.

Lake Placid Central School District Superintendent Tim Seymour said the district was in a similar boat to Saranac Lake’s decision when it came to financial considerations.

“Aid rates for pupils are just not comparable to the north end districts in the FEH BOCES, he said. “So other districts may be more incentivized, financially, to participate in shared programs. … The uniqueness of that (state aid formula) funding mechanism has led to just different philosophies of the role of shared services and the extent to which they are of value to districts like ours.”

Seymour also cited concerns with how long of a term districts would have to honor collaboration agreements, as well as the lack of specificity around how they are to be implemented.

“The process is designed to set up these regional collaboration labs, which will ultimately create a plan that lasts for 10 years,” he said. “And then there’s some expectation about the implementation of those plans and I don’t know the extent to which there’s clarity with what implementation of those plans could look like.”

Breault said that the process gives districts the option to not implement something that they are not in agreement with.

“Really, at the end of the day, the way this was written up, no districts are forced to implement something that they’re not in agreement with,” he said. “So, if something comes up in the planning that a district says, ‘Jeez, that doesn’t really work for us,’ they have the option of saying, ‘We’re not going to participate in that.'”

Tupper Lake Central School District Superintendent Jaycee Welsh said the district has longstanding collaboration agreements, such as maintaining busses for its southern neighbor, Long Lake Central School District, which is too small to have a bus garage of its own.

Despite this, Welsh felt it was beneficial for districts to meet and discuss their needs and services to bounce ideas off of each other and see if areas for further improvement open up.

“We’re already doing some of those things,” she said. “And truly, let’s put us all in the room together and see if there’s some things that we can do better. I think we’re all welcome to that opportunity, especially in the wake of not knowing exactly what our state aid is going to be,” referencing the ‘save harmless’ budget fight last year.

Besides potentially coming up with ways to save money, Welsh cited academics as one possible area where districts could help each other without creating additional burden. She noted that the TLCSD struggled to hire a physics teacher this year, and may have benefitted from collaboration agreements that would have enabled the district to partner with a district that had a physics teacher through distance learning.

“Was there a better way to do that with the school districts in our region that we didn’t have to go through this very complicated way to get it done?”

Welsh also highlighted credit recovery — when a student doesn’t pass a class and has to retake it to satisfy graduation requirements. She said New York recently increased standards for online platforms students frequently use during the process. She said this could preclude certain options that the district has historically used for credit recovery. She said she was looking forward to learning how neighboring districts are planning on handling this change.

“What are other school districts going to do for credit recovery that was traditionally online?” she asked, rhetorically. “Instead of each school district tackling that by themselves, tackling that as a group seems like a much more efficient idea, especially when there are so many people in the room.”

In addition to the budget fight, Welsh believed the state Education Department’s push to have school districts increase collaboration with each other was ignited by a statewide deterioration of academic performance over the past several years, which she said superintendents feel is tied to a lack of financial resources at the district level.

“When the state took a look at declining test scores and declining graduation rates, and really in conjunction with the foundation aid study, they’re looking at most school districts (academically) struggling,” she said. “The (grades) 3 through 8 test scores, the regents test scores — as a state — have gone down. Often times, what superintendents are attributing that to is lack of financial resources. One of the state’s solutions was to pool resources.”

Welsh emphasized at the TLCSD’s Board of Education meeting on Monday that the program is not meant to merge or consolidate districts while acknowledging that the initiative’s name may invoke concerns for some.

“It is not merging,” she said. “I think there are some people who say, ‘Regionalization, that means merger.’ That’s not what they’re talking about. Nobody’s talking about merging.”

Welsh said the initiative — as it was designed by the state — is inherently more difficult for rural districts, which are physically more distant from each other, often making it less feasible to pool resources.

“What the state was hoping to do is that for school districts in really close proximity would pool some of their resources and do some things regionally instead of school districts themselves,” she said. “Unfortunately and kind of true to form, a lot of New York state’s population lives downstate so sometimes there are initiatives that are put forward that make sense for New York City that don’t necessarily make sense for Tupper Lake in rural New York.”

Welsh said it took a lot of effort on districts’ parts to get to the point where they could talk, especially when they were operating under the assumption that the program was mandatory.

“In (early September), when state ed put this out, the amount of data that we had to get on our school district (was extensive) — it probably took me between 10 and 12 hours to do, and that’s probably a conservative estimate.”

Welsh added that unless districts sit down and discuss with each other, they simply won’t know if there are any ways they could work with each other to grow to the pie.

“We’re excited to see where that goes, and we’re excited for our students because we don’t know if there are opportunities there if we don’t go and talk about it as a BOCES and as a region,” she said.