Wainscott school district OKs $4.8M contingency budget
Wainscott school board president David Eagan at a board meeting in May. He called the budget cuts painful. “It's quite heartbreaking, frankly,” he said. Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
The Wainscott school board has adopted a $4.8 million contingency budget that carries deep cuts, including the elimination of prekindergarten services and reductions in special education in the tiny East End school district.
“We have absolutely no choice,” school board president David Eagan said in an interview Wednesday, calling the cuts painful. “It's quite heartbreaking, frankly.”
The elimination of pre-K services in the spending plan adopted Tuesday affects six children. The reductions in special education will be filled by two of the school’s three full-time teachers who are certified in special education, Eagan said. No mandated special education services are cut, and the school will add a teacher’s aide, he said.
In addition, the plan eliminates four part-time teacher positions in art, music, computer sciences and physical education, Eagan said. There also will be no field trips.
Wainscott had to adopt a contingency budget, which includes a tax freeze, after voters failed to approve the budget May 16 and in a revote June 20.
The combined cuts would save the district about $757,000 but do not entirely cover a $1.3 million shortfall. The district still faces a hole of $541,000.
“We're trying to enter the school year with some sense of stability but knowing there's some substantial uncertainty,” Eagan said of the district’s financial outlook. “We're in uncharted waters here.”
The Wainscott district is the only one of 124 school districts on Long Island where voters failed to pass a budget for 2023-24.
The district mustered majority support in both earlier budget votes but fell short of the 60% majority needed to override its tax cap. For the June 20 revote, the district proposed a slightly reduced budget of $6,144,331, which carried a whopping tax-levy increase of more than 95% — well above the district’s cap limit.
Melanie Hayward, a mother of two who unsuccessfully ran for school board earlier this year, called the reduction in services devastating.
“It's saddening that we're in the situation,” she said. “I can't imagine how the teachers will get through each day and how the kids will stay engaged.”
The district has one school, which houses 28 students in grades K-3, and pays tuition for students in higher grades to attend neighboring school districts.
To save on tuition payments, eight third-graders who typically would have gone on to begin their fourth-grade year in Sag Habor, East Hampton or Bridgehampton school districts will stay in school in Wainscott as fourth-graders for the coming school year, Eagan said.
“We went to a traditional, wonderful, sweet graduation ceremony, and now they're going to have to be told to go back to the same school they believe they just graduated from,” Eagan said. “The whole thing is just distasteful.”
What triggered the district's large fluctuations in budgeting was a roughly 20% increase in its student body, school officials said. This past school year, Wainscott had to pay tuition for 20 additional resident students attending schools outside its borders, bringing that total to 93, Eagan said. With its small size — 121 in total enrollment — an unexpected influx of students can have a major impact on finances.
“We normally get one or two people,” Eagan said. “We've never had anything like last year happen.”
While the student influx is unprecedented and proportionally huge, Hayward said she wished the district had been prepared for such changes.
“I just hope that this is a turning-point moment for the district where their eyes are wide-open to what they need to do differently in the future,” she said.
Dandan Zou covers education for Newsday. Previously, she worked for a community newspaper in Maryland and a personal finance magazine in Washington, D.C.
