Wainscott School Has Limited Options for Help Beyond Cost-Cutting

Within minutes of the Wainscott School District budget being voted down by voters for a second time last month, ensuring that the district would face a multimillion-dollar budget deficit going into the 2023-24 school year, talk turned to whether the district could appeal to New York State for a financial “bailout.”

By the next evening, district officials made it clear that such a thing was highly unlikely — and, even if it were possible, would likely come with conditions that board members said were untenable.

District officials have been speaking with State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. about possible options the district may have in the event it cannot close the budget gap with steep cuts in programming and drastic changes to the arrangement of grades at the tiny Wainscott School.

Any substantial help the state might offer would only be used as leverage to force the district to dissolve itself and consolidate with one of its neighboring districts, board members worried last week.

Consolidating school districts, especially small ones, to reduce the number of high-level, highly compensated administrators that taxpayers must fund has been a goal of state agencies for decades.

Thiele acknowledged that for many state lawmakers, there would be little sympathy for Wainscott’s plight, especially with a simple solution at hand.

“It’s a unique set of circumstances in Wainscott because of the size of the district and the nature of the district — it’s very small and it’s very wealthy,” Thiele said. “It presents an image in Albany, and the first thing anyone is going to say is, ‘Why don’t they just merge?’”

Wainscott School Board members brainstormed possible ways to get out of the hole they are in, largely because of the 2012 tax cap legislation, which requires school districts to get 60 percent voter approval if a budget pierces the 2 percent cap on tax levy increases, rather than the 50 percent normally needed to approve a school budget. The Wainscott budget, which would have spiked the tax levy by 66 percent, got more than 50 percent support in both votes but fell short of the 60 percent mark each time.

“It’s undemocratic,” lamented Kelly Anderson, a Wainscott School Board member. “A ‘no’ vote counts more than a ‘yes’ vote.”

Thiele said the district could make an appeal for special permission to pierce the cap once without the 60 percent voter approval. But he said that, too, would likely be a high bar to get over, considering that the tax cap legislation has not been amended in any way since it was adopted in 2012 and is largely seen as having been a resounding success at keeping school taxes in check in most places.

Thiele himself has proposed amendments that would provide exemptions for school districts that have to tuition most students to other districts, and are thus at the mercy of those districts billing schedules for much of their budgets.

“We have a lot of small school districts on the East End — Wainscott, Sagaponack, Remsenburg-Speonk, Tuckahoe, Oysterponds,” he said, “and any district that has to tuition their students has no control over a big part of their budget, which was the point I made.

“But during the [Andrew] Cuomo era, certainly, it was impossible to get any changes to the tax cap to go anywhere,” he added. “We have a different governor now, but I don’t know that I would expect a lot of movement on that from the governor’s office.”

Anderson also had floated the idea of getting the district’s lines redrawn.

The district deficit has been caused, in part, by an influx of new students at the start of the recently ended school year. According to school officials, registration records show that most of the children making up that influx are living at the Cozy Cottage, formerly the Cozy Cabins, on Montauk Highway and a collection of small cottages on the edge of Sag Harbor Village and owned by the Sag Harbor Community Housing Trust.

The cottages are also due to become part of a larger apartment complex development by East Hampton Town on neighboring land, which the district expects to generate as many as 30 new students for the district, though that impact won’t be felt in the budget until at least 2025.

Town officials have said in the past they see shifting the school district lines to exclude the new development and the cottages as a potentially beneficial move for all involved — since the new apartments would be within an easy walk of the Sag Harbor schools, rather than a roundabout bus ride away from the Wainscott School.

But Eagan said that such a change is a long-term project that could not be effected in time to help the school address its current crisis.

Thiele echoed the sentiment that trying to tackle the underlying issues that put Wainscott in the predicament it’s in — which also includes state policy that limits school districts to maintaining just 4 percent of their budget in reserves — are matters to be addressed over time, while the limited options the district has before it are kept at the fore.

“I think it’s important for Wainscott to focus on what it needs right now,” Thiele said, “and not what statewide laws need to be changed — which brings in a whole host of other issues.”