ORANGE COUNTY, N.Y.—The Port Jervis School District has proposed a $104 million 2025-2026 budget, a 7.7 percent increase from last year to fund school building renovation and the purchase of an adjacent property.
The local tax levy for the school district will not be raised for the fifth year in a row.
District superintendent John Bell said the higher budget is the result of construction projects. This year the district is proposing to spend $49.9 million on phase five of their construction plan. The money would pay for a redo of the entire HVAC system and related electrical work, as well as putting air conditioning in every middle and high school classroom.
The school district spent $26 million on phase four of the construction plan this year, which included resurfacing the school roofs and installing air conditioning in some of the buildings.
The district is also looking at acquiring the 11.5-acre Joyland property adjacent to the high school. Purchase of the property would connect the school to the Glennette football field. The school plans to pave and light a path from the school to the field so that students can safely travel between them.
Currently, there is a lot of travel time between the two locations, as students have to walk through Port Jervis to get to the field for sports activities. It would be much quicker to walk through the Joyland property.
The 11.5 acres could also be space for a new school 20 or 30 years in the future. Having the property connected to the high school campus would make it much easier to build a new school, as a new campus wouldn’t be required.
The district tries to keep costs and taxes down by finding ways to save money, like cutting positions as often as they can. Bell said that the district had eliminated six or seven positions in the last two years, and that a wave of 25 retirements in upcoming years will provide opportunity for further trimming.
The school is also working with Consolidated Edison to put solar panels on the buildings to help lower the electricity bills, which total $400,000 to $500,000 every year.
The current school levy has been $29 million for the past five years. The district is able to maintain the low tax because it gets 70 percent of its money from the state and 30 percent from local taxes. Most districts have it the other way around.
While this strategy does keep the taxes down now, in the case of a recession, it’s likely the school would have to dramatically raise the school tax. Bell laid out the recession scenario at a May 12 Deerpark town board meeting.
“And when there’s a major recession and then the state cuts state aid, then small cities and a lot of rural schools, like a lot of the Sullivan County schools, we’re very aid dependent because we’re relatively poor. That’s when the rubber meets the road. We’ve seen those cycles through the times. In ‘91, ’92, in 2001 at 9/11, we had a recession at 2008. So when you hit those large macro cyclical downturns, the schools that are heavily relying on state aid are the ones that get impacted the most. And part of that is that 20 percent of the state budget comes from Wall Street.”
Bell told The Epoch Times that he isn’t too worried about a recession any time soon, but that the government spending more than it brings in does scare him.
Due to inflation, it’s likely that the district will have to raise the tax rate next year, he said.
“It’s been a great five-year run, but it’s unlikely that we would be able to do a zero [percent increase] next year,” Bell said. “We’re gonna have to start doing small increases to the local tax base to build up our revenue.”
