Jamestown School Superintendent Invites Residents to Public Forum on Budget

Tim Mains, superintendent of Jamestown Public Schools.

JAMESTOWN – Jamestown Public School officials want to get the public more involved in helping to establish an annual spending plan.

School Superintendent Tim Mains, who is in his first year at the district, is inviting residents to a public forum designed to gather input regarding the 2014-15 budget. Mains says the forum will take place next Tuesday, Feb. 11 and any resident in the school district is invited to attend.

“It will be an opportunity for us to look at the budget and specifically look at the activities that the budget supports. So what are people’s feelings, for example, about transportation, the food service, the actual instruction that takes place in the classroom or the extracurricular activities.”

Mains says there will be several different categories that will be focused on, and residents will rotate in different groups to discuss and offer input. He says that by working in small groups, the forum will collect the community’s input and priorities on every part of the spending plan.

“We’ll take a look at each of those categories and ask people to tell us and share with us their viewpoints, their priorities, things that they think are important… we want to gather all that at the end of the evening and then the board will have that public input to take into consideration as they construct a budget for next school year.”

School officials will use the information gathered at the forum to begin the process of prioritizing and establishing a budget for the next school year.  While the final numbers are not in, it appears it will be another challenging budget year for the school district.

In Late January, Governor Andrew Cuomo released his 2014-2015 budget, which provided an increase in funding for the Jamestown school district.  However, Mains points out that most of that money is actually the state’s restoration Gap Elimination Adjustment money, or funds that should have been paid to districts years ago but were cut out of the budget when the state was running deficits.

“I’m very disappointed. Extremely disappointed. We have been laboring for the last several years with very limited resources. I think everybody got it – there is an recession and everybody need to pull up and we needed to try and get through that,” Main said. “But now, the governor is bragging that we have a budget surplus, but he’s still taking money away from the districts, on the premise that there is a deficit. That’s a problem for me.”

Mains adds that even with the increase for the next school year, state aid is still lower than where it was in 2008, prior to the recession.

As for the forum, it will take place on Tuesday, Feb. 11 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the JPS Board of Education Meeting Room at 197 Martin Road. It is open to the public and residents throughout the school district are encouraged to attend.