SARANAC LAKE — Saranac Lake Central School District Superintendent Diane Fox says this has been a hard year for school officials to budget in because they are trying to read the tea leaves of the future of federal education funding.

President Donald Trump’s administration is working to dismantle the federal Department of Education and has set a governmentwide mandate to cut spending. While federal officials say the Education Department’s grant funds will still be available, Fox said they may be smaller or have strings attached. So the district is preparing to absorb these potential costs into its budget to keep special education, counseling and academic intervention staff next year without having to rely on these grants continuing unchanged.

“Even with the assurance that those grants will still be running next year, that doesn’t mean that those grants will still be running at the same financial level,” Fox said. “It’s particularly difficult (to budget) this year because there are many unknowns.”

The district is adapting by dipping into its reserves and adding spending to the general budget in tentative anticipation of cuts to these federal grants.

The district has eight staff whose salaries are paid for through $700,000 in Title I and IDEA federal grants. Because the Education Department is in the midst of being dismantled, with attempts to fully eliminate it on the horizon, this year’s SLCSD budget moves these salaries into the general budget just in case.

Fox said the future of IDEA and title funds are “clear as mud” right now.

“It would be wrong of us to just assume that we’re going to receive $700,000 again next year,” Fox said.

Fox said the district is planning to take a “gamble” by increasing its pull from its reserves from $1.1 million to $1.5 million to fund several positions though the district’s budget instead of relying on the federal grants to continue as they are. The district is still pulling $500,000 less from its reserves than was pulled last year. But, Fox added, the district cannot afford to do this long-term — it needs federal funds to be financially solvent.

The district still could receive federal grants, but they’re uncertain if there will be a drop in funding, so they’re planning for the worst. If these grants are continued at normal levels, the district will put the money it budgeted into its fund balance reserves for future years.

The budget making these changes is currently set to be voted on by the school board on April 9. If it is adopted then, it will go to the public for a vote on May 20. To read more about the budget details, go to https://tinyurl.com/2yrapn8b.

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Free school meals

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Currently, all SLCSD students can get free meals because the federal government lowered its threshold of students receiving SNAP or Medicaid benefits to qualify from 40% to 25% in 2023. However, House Republicans are proposing to raise that threshold up to 60%, the highest it’s ever been, which would mean SLCSD would not qualify.

The district is required to make its school lunch fund whole if there is a deficit in what goes out and what comes in at the end of the year. This deficit has been $260,000 in past years. Fox said they are anticipating $160,000 this year, but that federal level changes will make a difference.

The House Ways and Means Committee is also proposing a $12 billion cut to school meal funding.

“That means 900,000 New York state kids will lose free meals, 451 schools off the map,” SLCSD board member Tori Thurston said last month.

“Seeing that disappear would be bad for families,” Fox said. “We’ve had a great increase in the number of kids that eat breakfast and lunch with us this year.”

To read more about the history of universal free school meals in SLCSD, go to tinyurl.com/4m63awwy.

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Federal funding

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Last week, Trump signed an executive order commanding Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin to close the Department of Education.

“Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” the executive order states, citing unnecessary bureaucracy, low test scores, “gender ideology” and “DEI” as its targets.

Fully eliminating the department would take an act of Congress, but McMahon has been authorized to act “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”

The department enforces the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which ensures students with disabilities get adequate free public education. This enforcement is meant to continue, but the department’s staff has been cut in half in the past two months. The funds it distributes to districts like SLCSD are at risk and school leaders are concerned. Fox said they receive quite a bit of federal grant funding.

The district’s title funds — Titles I, II and IV which pay for instructional staff who provide services such as academic intervention, counseling and student support, particularly to low-income families — came to $441,455 last year.

The district’s IDEA funding, which pays for special education staffing, psychologists and other services for students with disabilities, came to $379,117.

The district is in the third year of a five-year 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant which pays out $756,000 per year for outside-of-school events — summer camps, ski lessons, multicultural night, back-to-school events, cursive writing club, first-aid certifications, bowling, art classes, theater, field trips and many others. The goal is to provide child care for working parents, build community among students and parents, and provide extracurricular education and athletics.

“We use every penny of that to support our kids and families,” Fox said.

Fox said the future of the program is in limbo, but the year-four funding has been promised to the district. She said the district had wanted to apply for this grant again. If this grant program goes away, she said it would not impact staffing, but the programs it funds would go away.

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Conference

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Thurston attended a conference in Washington D.C. last month, where she met with the offices of New York’s U.S. senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

She had long pages of notes on what Trump attempted to do with education last time he was president, what happened then and what to expect this time. Thurston said rural schools stand to be hit the worst, since schools are the “center of life” for families here. She said they have to be proactive.

“We need to stand up for the little guys,” Thurston said.

Right now, there is a “shotgun approach” with many confusing, chaotic things happening at once. They need to focus on one thing at a time, congressional staffers told her.

She said small districts like SLCSD need to advocate for themselves to elected officials and not stop fighting for the kids.

Thurston said North Country Rep. Elise Stefanik’s office has not been taking meetings in the past months since she was preparing for her presumed next role as Trump’s United Nations ambassador. However, her nomination was pulled earlier this week and she’ll continue in her House seat.

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DEI

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The Education Department last month introduced an “End DEI” portal where people can report discriminatory practices based on race or sex at public schools to get the department to investigate and potentially cut funding. An announcement for the portal says learning should be “free of divisive ideologies and indoctrination” and includes a quote from Moms for Liberty Co-Founder Tiffany Justice.

“For years, parents have been begging schools to focus on teaching their kids practical skills like reading, writing, and math, instead of pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies,” Justice said. “Parents, now is the time that you share the receipts of the betrayal that has happened in our public schools.”

The Education Department has been sued by the American Federation of Teachers and American Federation of Teachers over the portal, saying it is unconstitutional and violates the first and fifth amendments.

Fox said SLCSD isn’t involved in what this portal is looking for. When it comes to hiring practices, and she said SLCSD has a “big table” for anyone to sit at. When it comes to curriculum, Fox said she is holding the line and told teachers to keep teaching what they are free to do.

SLCSD, like many districts in New York, has a DEI committee. SLCSD’s committee was actually created before the state recommended every district have one, after its 2020 valedictorian Francine “Frannie” Newman used her valedictory address to talk about racism she endured during school as an Asian student. The committee has met monthly since then.

Fox said when they started, nobody was doing anything specifically DEI-related. In the years since, they’ve hired staff, drafted policies and increased DEI work to make sure all students fell welcome and accepted at school. Now she suggested it transition from being an “oversight committee” rather than a “doing committee” and meet quarterly.

“We are finding that as (DEI) becomes more a part of many people’s daily work, we’re finding it more difficult to have a meaningful conversation every month,” Fox said.

Board members Joe Henderson and Nancy Bernstein are on the committee now, and most of the board has sat on it at some point.

Henderson said they don’t want to have meetings for the sake of meetings — they need to have tangible goals.

“Just to be clear, it’s not meaning that we’re doing less work in this realm,” Bernstein said. “It’s that this work is going on; it’s embedded throughout everything that’s happening at the school. That’s a success, right?”