Staffing needs: Scarsdale takes 1st look at 2023-24 school budget

Assistant superintendent for business and facilities Stuart Mattey said other budget drivers are staffing needs, contractual obligations, self-funded health insurance, inflation, projected state aid and other nontax revenues, status of fund balance and reserves, property tax levy limit calculations, enrollment projections, new and continued instructional and noninstructional initiatives, building-specific budgets, noninstructional budgets, employee benefits budget, debt service budget and projected revenues.

Mattey said the district looks to be efficient in several areas including optimizing staff, maximizing state aid, considering timing for projects, cooperative agreements with the village and with purchasing and bidding, managing technology and conserving energy.

Scarsdale uses a three-tier system of prioritizing staffing needs, with Tier I being what the administration is recommending for the upcoming year. For the 2023-24 budget, the administration is proposing two social-emotional learning support consultants at the elementary school level, adding a .5 Committee on Preschool Education chairperson, adding a full-time custodian at the high school, making a title change for an office aide to an office clerk, and converting a full-time Committee on Special Education chairperson to a full-time administrative role. In addition, the administration would like three full-time contingency positions that would only be filled if needed — one middle school and one high school special educator and one to-be-determined teacher.

Assistant superintendent for special education and student services Eric Rauschenbach broke down the requests in detail.

The district wants to hire two “full-time equivalent” contractor social workers at $100,000 each for the school year at the elementary level to go to Quaker Ridge and Fox Meadow, the two largest schools, every other day and then split the rest of their time between the three other elementary schools, since the district has seen a rise in younger students needing counseling. This will help lighten the load of the current school psychologists.

“At this time while the psychologists have had to move into a more reactive stance, just as we talked about with the high school last year, we are still unsure which is the best way to parse apart exactly what help they need and can use, so we’re hoping to use this next year to identify the best ways for these consultants to work,” Rauschenbach said. “The initial thoughts are they would take over the classroom instruction piece of the psychologists’ job, in other words doing those push-in lessons, addressing mostly nonmandated groups for executive function, anxiety, friendship circles, social skills circles and doing intervention on acute situations that are happening on the days they are scheduled in the buildings.”

By hiring consultants, the district will be able to evaluate the needs going forward to see what might be needed for future budgets in terms of more consultants or district employees.

Patrick said the Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling Service (SFCS) Youth Services Project has not been in the elementary schools, so administrators consulted with SFCS director Jay Genova to decide how to proceed. The district opted to recommend social workers for this year because they are “multitalented clinicians,” according to Rauschenbach, who noted certain other positions like guidance counselors can’t be contracted.

“Very similar to what we talked about in the secondary levels for last year, COVID has certainly been a catalyst, however, I don’t think [it is] fully causal of what we’re seeing from a mental health and well-being standpoint,” Rauschenbach said. “Prior to COVID we were seeing increases in student mental health needs, in student well-being issues. We started the original SSP [Student Services Project] well before COVID because of that trend, and I think COVID both catalyzed that need, probably caused the graph to point higher, but I think it really is an ongoing trend that hopefully we see plateau shortly.”

Rauschenbach said assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction, and assessment Dr. Edgar McIntosh will talk later in the budget process about the district’s “approach to social-emotional learning and a focusing in on drawing that curriculum, those sets of skills, into our grades on a longitudinal basis…”

Patrick said the district is “committed to supporting … a districtwide approach to the regular instruction around the sets of skills and dispositions kids need to be resilient and work through problems and challenges, both individually and with their peers.”

The next recommendations were connected with hiring a half-time CPSE chairperson for $55,000 and converting a CSE chairperson to an administrative role for $35,000. Rauschenbach said the district’s expanded special education services, which led to keeping more students in the district over the last five to seven years, has seen the district’s classified population grow from 409 in 2016-17 to 562 in 2021-22.

“With every classified student that joins us, we have a new set of special education paperwork, a new set of annual reviews, reevaluations and then each of those students [who require services] have another meeting,” he said. “So our CSE chairs each handle anywhere from 180-225 CSEs per year in addition to their other duties.”

He said while they are “phenomenal professionals who can really spend their time working with families,” his department needs more support. In addition to special education programming and enrollment, Rauschenbach said his office has also taken over safety, security and emergency services and there has a been a rise in custody disputes and court orders of protection and Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) cases.

Rauschenbach is the lone administrator in student services, with the other leaders being teachers on assignment, not administrators who can lighten the load of the department by taking over certain duties.

“We’re looking to move one of these to a 12-month position that would focus in on management of special education programs, take on a supervisory and evaluation portion of nontenured special education teachers, and then focus on helping with the most intensive CSE students and chairing those meetings, helping those families find the right services and focusing that way,” Rauschenbach said. “This would allow for a more programmatic focus in the special education department around supervision and balancing that with the process management of the CSE process.”

For an estimated cost of $75,000 and a savings of $21,850 in overtime and substitute costs, the district is looking to hire a full-time early afternoon into evening Tuesday to Saturday custodian for cleaning and light maintenance.

The shifting of a part-time aide to a full-time office clerk in the high school humanities office at a cost of $30,500 is more of a shift of being “consistent” to the position and duties being performed, a change that had been made in other positions throughout the district previously for similar civil service positions, according to interim assistant superintendent for human resources and leadership development Carole Priore.

The district’s Tier II staffing priority is to hire a groundskeeper for facilities and fields potentially in the 2024-25 or 2025-26 school year.

For the current 2022-23 school year, the district had prepared for 661.7 full-time employees throughout the district and ended up needing 665.12 with 4,677 students enrolled. For this year’s budget they are proposing 665.42 for a projected 4,730 students.

Though enrollment is lower than the 10-year lookback peak of 4,821 in 2014-15 when there were 596.4 full-time employees, Scarsdale has increased its staffing every year over the last decade except 2018-19. Patrick and Rauschenbach said special education and mental health support have been the main drivers in the rise of full-time employees.