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BOE proposes state aid fix
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Three Village Board of Education Trustee Jonathan Kornreich traveled to Albany Tuesday to testify before a joint Senate and Assembly committee considering the education budget. There Kornreich delivered a plea to slightly alter one formula that costs Three Village residents thousands in lost state school aid each year.
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| | | 3V Trustee Jonathan Kornreich outside the hearing room in Albany Tuesday. (click for larger version) | |
"My concern lies in the question of how a district's wealth is measured," Kornreich told the panel of legislators. He said there is a "serious oversight" in the Combined Wealth Ratio, one of the factors that determines how much state aid goes to a particular school district.
"Last year, Three Village's income ratio was about 1.6, which indicates that our district's income is 60 percent higher per pupil than the state average," he testified. "By this measure, we seem to be high earners and doing pretty well." Kornreich then went on to explain how "outliers," in the case of the CWR formula a handful of
super-wealthy district residents, can skew the computation and make the district appear to be "high wealth."
To demonstrate the absurd result of the current formula Kornreich used the example of the average male height in the U.S., currently about 5 feet 10 inches. "Even the world's tallest man — according to Guinness — at almost 9 feet tall, wouldn't quite be considered an outlier," according to Kornreich.
The trustee then cited a New York Times article published last March that reported one partner at an East Setauket hedge fund earned $125 million the
previous year. "To make an analogy back to the height distribution," said Kornreich, "an outlier of that same magnitude would be a person standing approximately 4,800 feet tall. That's what a real outlier looks like."
"This is precisely the methodology used in determining a school district's wealth and ability to pay local taxes," he said to the legislators. Kornreich went on to say if outliers were removed from the calculation of district wealth in Three Village the income ratio would drop to 1.02, almost exactly the statewide average.
Assemblyman Steve Englebright (D-Setauket) cited examples of school districts in upstate Liberty and another outside Albany as locations where a single wealthy individual moved in and the rest of the residents saw their tax bills go up significantly.
Although Kornreich did not use Miller Place, much closer to home, as an example in his presentation, Englebright agreed that, because a couple living there just won a Mega Millions $165 million jackpot, taxes would probably increase for every other resident in that district.
Kornreich suggested several potential solutions to the state legislators, including "removing the top and bottom half percent of returns from each district; removing the top 10; or by the use of median household income."
Englebright called the first suggestion, what he refers to as the 99 percent solution, "good public policy." He also said such a change would be "an insurance policy" for districts around the state who might someday have their own lottery winner.
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