A contract just approved by the LaFayette school board calls for Laura Lavine to make $15,000 as interim superintendent and just $30,000 if the board appoints her full time after three months. Read More
Tag: Schools
Mayor Bill de Blasio's 9-year contract agreement with the United Federation of Teachers, including a pair of 4 percent base-salary increases retroactive to the fall of 2008, will cost so much that he wants to defer some of the expense all the way out to the end of the decade. Read More
Twenty-four school districts sought to override the state’s property tax levy cap in yesterday’s school budget votes. Nine districts, or 38 percent of those attempting, failed to garner the 60 percent supermajority vote needed to pass an override. The vast majority of school districts held their proposed tax levies below the statewide average of about 2.1 percent, including allowances for voter-approved capital spending, property taxes generated by new construction, and other factors. On a per-pupil basis, as detailed in the Empire Center’s annual School Budget Spotlight, the average proposed tax levy hike came to 2.6 percent. Spending growth in proposed budgets was 3.2 percent per pupil, one and a half times the inflation rate. Read More
Updated pension data for retired New York State public school teachers and administrators, released to the Empire Center pursuant to a landmark Court of Appeals ruling last week, were posted online today atwww.SeeThroughNY.net. Read More
Average per-pupil spending under proposed 2014-15 school budgets will increase by 3.2 percent, more than one-and-a-half times the 1.9 percent projected inflation rate, according to analysis issued today by the Empire Center for Public Policy. Read More
While voters across New York go to polls to determine the fate of proposed school district budgets, the Census Bureau has just released its annual breakdown of public school spending. Read More
Opponents of Governor Cuomo’s 2 percent property tax cap were able to stick one major exclusion into the legislation before it passed in 2011: a provision excluding a portion of local government and school employee pensions from the total allowable “levy limit” in years when taxpayer-funded employer contributions rise by more than two percentage points of salaries. Read More
Based on inflation trends through the first 11 months of 2013, it looks like the starting point for property tax levy caps affecting 2014-15 school budgets across New York will be lower than 2 percent. Read More