Rural schools threatened by evaporating enrollment, proposed budget cuts

A tan and gray Netherlands dwarf rabbit perched primly on a heap of alfalfa. His name was Oakley, and this was his lucky day.

It had been a journey. Oakley was in a Wayne County animal shelter before Lily-Anne Lachnor, the agriculture teacher at Marion Junior/Senior High School, took him in for the animal science program. There he was fed, cleaned and cared for by agriculture students.

Now, one of them had decided to adopt him.

It all was done through physical and social infrastructure that Lachnor, a third-year teacher, has built on a shoestring. The agriculture program launched three years ago in response to student demand, Superintendent Ellen Lloyd said, but Marion is a small district and there was no money for big capital expenses.

Marion is one of hundreds of school districts across New York at risk of losing a huge chunk of state funding in Gov. Kathy Hochul's executive budget proposal. If adopted, the proposal would remove a key safeguard that helps districts maintain fiscal stability, even with falling enrollment.

Indeed, most districts in New York have falling enrollment, with upstate rural districts in the vanguard. The fight over this year's budget proposal comes just a year after Hochul agreed to finally live up to the state's broken but nonetheless prescribed funding formula, something school leaders have been demanding for years.

What that all means is that the Marion agriculture program has to operate on a shoestring. Lachnor went to work when she took the job, bringing in wooden pallets from nearby farms and cast-off torches from welding shops.

Students started stopping by for their own reasons: shy kids to feed the iguanas and ferrets, floppy-haired boys to handle the welding torches.

"I have students who might be valedictorian and others who we’re not sure if they’re going to graduate," Lachnor said. "But I can connect with all of them and have awesome trusting relationships because there’s all these tools to reach them."

As long as the district can afford it, that is.

Marion would lose $1.2 million in state funding, or about 9% of what it received in 2023-24. With a cut of that magnitude, it would be difficult to maintain an agriculture program that, though popular, is not required by state education law.

To students, that is precisely the allure. A dozen live animals, shelves full of plants, lessons in pest control and floral design and many other things, and not a Regents exam in sight. "When you come into math class, you can expect it’ll be math," eighth-grader Taubri Myers said. "Here, it could be anything."

Issues with New York's education aid formula

The controversy has to do with New York's basic education aid formula. It is broken in a number of different ways; some of those fractures harm school districts while others benefit them.

In the latter camp is a provision known as save-harmless. It ensures that a school district will never receive less state education funding than it did in the previous year, even if the number of students it serves has declined dramatically.

That helps explain, for instance, the fact that 97 of the 100 districts with the highest rate of per-pupil state and local funding have fewer than 500 students.

Hochul's budget would eliminate the save-harmless provision and, according to the governor, redirect money toward districts that are growing or have higher needs. The exact mechanism by which the money moves has not been made public.

State Budget Director Blake Washington said in early February that Hochul's changes represent an equitable re-allocation of resources to districts serving the students who need the most help.

"Instead of asking the question, 'How much more money are our schools getting?', it should be, 'Why do we have a formula that forces us to pay for students that don’t exist?'" he said.

Leaders of districts large and small, though, say it is misleading to focus only on the save-harmless provision without considering the aid formula more broadly.

"There’s nuances within where enrollment is going down," Webster Assistant Superintendent Brian Freeman said. "We’re seeing higher-cost students coming into the system. We’re seeing more students with disabilities, we’re having more English language learners."

Another Must-Read: Money shifting, excuses, head-scratching questions: The story behind CRC's fall

Marina Marcou-O’Malley, interim co-executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, suggested a fully updated and accurate formula would probably increase funding, not decrease it.

"My suspicion is that once you take a look at the formula and the weights in the formula and reassess the amount it takes per student, and maybe account for newcomers or increasing poverty … you’ll find that not only school districts need to keep what they have, but they probably need more funding," she said.

Advocacy groups and the New York State Union of Teachers are asking the Legislature to appropriate $1 million for a study on how best to update the foundation aid formula.

Washington, the budget director, called that "kicking the can." Last week, though, he signaled openness to restoring at least part of the education reductions.

Falling enrollment spans upstate districts

Whether or not this year's school aid reductions are restored, Hochul's willingness to poke at the save-harmless provision could be the first step toward a reckoning for upstate school districts that have been losing enrollment for years.

In the nine-county Greater Rochester metropolitan area, only seven school districts out of 142 have gained enrollment over the last decade; the median decline in enrollment is 12.2%.

The trend spans urban, suburban and rural districts, with different factors at play in each.

The largest, the Rochester City School District, declined from 31,000 students in grades PK-12 in 2013 to 23,000 in 2023. In response it has closed a slew of schools and next year will implement a long-planned school reconfiguration.

At the other end of the spectrum are school districts like Dalton-Nunda in Livingston County. Its 2013 student body of 758 has now shrunk to 527, a loss of nearly a third.

"By keeping the current school structure (neither allowing regionalism nor a viable process for consolidation) and lowering the funding even further (in what has long been called the nation’s most inequitable distribution methodology) the governor has proposed a plan that would further devastate rural schools," Rural Schools of New York State Executive Director David Little said in testimony to the state Legislature.

The proposed cuts are not concentrated among rural schools, but other districts could be hit as well. Among them is Hilton, which is slated to lose nearly $2 million in state aid.

"We had finally gotten to a point where we felt good about how public education was being funded, and then, wham, we get hit with this," Hilton Superintendent Casey Kosciorek said.

Distinctive programs at risk

Marion, too, is threatened by falling enrollment on one hand and the specter of reduced funding on the other. At a recent budget hearing, district leaders said there was a "mass exodus" from New York state and asked residents to think of ways to stem the tide.

"Are you working with Marion town government and Wayne County to encourage families to stay? How?" they asked on a presentation slide.

The agriculture program is an example of such inter-community collaboration in action. Students run the town's monthly farmer's market from June to September and organize its annual Easter egg hunt in the spring.

Lachnor has developed relationships with local farms and other businesses, asking them for supplies and expertise and, in turn, lining up interns and part-time employees among her students. "It’s 100% not a school project; it’s a community project," she said.

Another point of pride in Marion is its improbably thriving German language program. It is directed with verve by 35-year veteran teacher Shelly Thompson, better known throughout the school as Frau.

Besides teaching all grade levels between 7 and 12, Thompson also organizes a regular trip abroad to several cities in Germany and Austria. For some students, she noted, it may be their one chance to travel abroad.

When she began teaching in Marion in 1988 there were about 100 students per grade level, she said. This year's 11th grade has 28. The district also offers Spanish and American Sign Language, but such low enrollment makes it hard to maintain three world language offerings.

In a recent 10th grade German class, boys and girls faced off in a vocabulary challenge, constructing sentences on large sheets of paper on opposite sides of the room and tossing familiar insults back and forth.

"It's such a small school; these kids have known each other forever," Thompson said. "It's like a family, which can be a good thing or a bad thing."

— Justin Murphy is a veteran reporter at the Democrat and Chronicle and author of "Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York." Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/CitizenMurphy or contact him at jmurphy7@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: NY rural schools threatened by evaporating enrollment, budget cuts