In 2004 four neighboring local school districts joined together to consider issues of mutual concern and come up with solutions. A dedicated advocacy group of board members and superintendents meet each month to discuss and respond to legislative issues like: 
- Fair and sufficient funding for all districts
- Relief from state and federal mandates
- More effective local school board function and control
- Relief from standardized tests
The five current READ districts are currently working directly with the media, local legislators, and the county-wide WPSBA, to further the interests of education in our region.
Join us, or contact your local school district liaison, and help advocate for your school's success.
READ member superintendent Dr. Dan McCann has released a letter on the TRS/ERS crisis. published in Gannett's Journal-News:
Dear Editor:
During my tenure as Superintendent of the Hendrick Hudson School District, every effort has been made to provide the community with reasonable budgets that were both conservative and provided the necessary tools to ensure the success of our students. My staff and I have worked hard, to produce fiscally responsible budgets that our community could afford and still preserved the integrity of our educational programs.
Following a period of double-digit tax rates increases we presented budgets with tax rates averaging between 3% and 4%. Significantly, the depletion of the Tax Stabilization Reserve, established with Indian Point Payment in lieu of taxes (PILOT), and the slower growth of our community than projected necessitated a very deliberate effort to reduce expenses in order to control tax increases. This work continues.
Despite reducing expenses by almost $900,000 including $725K in staff reductions this year and reducing approximately 8% of our operations budget which included a 14% reduction in staff over the last 3 years, we still find ourselves in a precarious position this budget season.
This year we face an unusually high contribution rate towards the NYS Teacher’s Retirement System and the NYS Employee’s Retirement System. As state contributions to the retirement system are calculated based on how well or in this case poor the financial markets do, local contributions are subject to drastic rate increases and decreases making it increasingly difficult for school districts to adequately plan for and anticipate future payments. The 2010-2011 budget year, will see pension contributions from Hen Hud salaries rise over 37% for TRS members and over 68% for ERS over the 2009-2010 contributions
In an effort to meet the payments, districts will be forced to raise local property taxes to numbers that most communities cannot bear, especially in the current fiscal climate. The other option is to make deep cuts to our educational programs. In either scenario, our communities will be forced to make difficult decisions. Budgets will fail and districts will be forced to operate on austerity budgets thus hurting our ability to provide the high quality education and programs our children and communities are accustomed to and deserve.
In an effort to mitigate this doomsday scenario New York State Comptroller DiNapoli has proposed the adoption of an “Employer Contribution Stabilization” program. This program “would allow us the option of spreading out the difference between the current contribution rate and a mitigated rate (defined in the legislation) over a 10-year period. For contributions payable in 2010-11, the average rate for an ERS employer is 11.9 percent, while the proposed mitigated rate would be 9.5 percent. We anticipate that the interest rate for the amortization will be about 5 percent. We support his proposal and in addition are calling on both the Comptroller and the legislature to extend this opportunity to the Teacher's Retirement System as well. For Hendrick Hudson the added contributions to both TRS and ERS are contributing over $1 million to a $68.2 million dollar budget. If we are given the opportunity to finance this extraordinary increase we could potentially reduce our tax levy by nearly 3%.
As an administrator I believe this issue is at the heart of local control of our schools. We need our elected officials to allow us the flexibility and opportunity to manage our finances in a way that best suit our needs and the needs of our constituents.
Westchester County has a reputation for providing high quality education to our students. Our community has come to expect nothing less from our schools and more importantly our students deserve nothing less. We are working hard to balance quality standards with fiscal responsibility.
Every effort must be made to communicate to our local legislators the necessity for this relief. Failing to act now, will only compound the problem in the future. A system needs to be in place to protect schools, municipalities and most importantly local property owners from sudden and violent swings in the financial markets. I believe that this is a significant step in that process, that will allow our district to continue to provide fiscally sound and responsible budgets to our community.
Sincerely,
Dr. Daniel McCann
Superintendent of Schools
Hendrick Hudson School District
