Merger discussion's been going on for quite some time. I just wanna remind folks, what's on the table here for this merger?

So we're looking to merge the Livingston Manor and Roscoe School Districts, into a new school district.

And that's not a new idea, is it?

No. That's, I mean, I grew up in Roscoe, graduated high school over there in the the eighties, and it's been something that's been popping up about every couple of decades, I think since the the fifties.

And what is it about this that has kind of drawn out the process so long?

There's a lot of things that that make school mergers complicated. You know, there's a small schools make up the majority of school districts across New York State. The school is always the center of the community, the center of the town, you know, and it's it's hard, you know, for people to to let go of that and and change and and become something else.

You get a little bit of school pride in there, I guess, as part of it, in addition to some of the costs involved, but it seems that things may be more advantageous for for some of the cost savings. Is that right? New York state changed how much merger aid would be calculated earlier this year?

Yeah. There's there's been some recent changes that have they've made it, a lot more both financially beneficial and educationally beneficial. For a number of years, the incentive aid connected to school mergers was frozen to your foundation aid amounts in the 2,005, 2006 school year. That was recently changed in the state budget last year and they it still looks at your foundation aid for the previous year, but it looks at your current amounts. So for Roscoe and Livingston Manor, when we looked at this in 2002, the incentive aid was about $7,100,000 This time around, it's $30,700,000 and that's paid out to the district over a little bit each year over a year period.

So it's not a a 30,000,000 in one shot. It's 30,700,000 over a 14 year period.

And in addition, you know, the the school districts have kind of been sharing resources for quite some time now too. Right? I mean, it's not entirely new concept.

So no. This is definitely not new for Roscoe and Livingston Manor. We've been doing a lot of stuff together. We've been sharing sports for over 2 decades, with, Livingston Manor Hosco and other school districts from around the county. As enrollments have continued to decline, not pretty significantly in our 2 districts, you know, it's been harder and harder to maintain programs and keep opportunities for kids on the table when we have so few kids, you know, in the 2 districts.

So, you know, kind of working together has been kind of you know, our mantra for, you know, very heavily for the last couple of years. You know, in addition to sports, we have about 12 administrative and support staff between the two schools that are that are shared. You know, kinda making you know, looking at a full blown merger, the next logical step.

You mentioned, you know, fewer kids. The trend has been fewer bodies and seats, fewer students enrolled.

Yeah. Not just, in Roscoe and Livingston Manor, but all across New York State. You know, rural schools have seen a pretty significant decline. You know, Manor has gone from, you know, in the neighborhood of 700 plus kids back in the 90s to just under 400 kids right now, and Roscoe is at about 201. So, for these two districts, combined would still be the smallest school in in Sullivan County.

As recently as a few years ago, Livingston Manor and Roscoe Communities voted down the centralization merger. I think that was in 2022, if I'm not mistaken. Now it seems as if there's more enthusiasm for this. There was a unanimous vote from both boards of education to move forward?

So, yep, in every the boards have been committed to this for for quite some time. You know, back when they initiated the study in the 'twenty one-'twenty two school year, you know, every step of this process has been unanimously supported by both boards of education because they've seen the writing on the wall and live the day to day putting together budgets and dealing with having to make tough decisions about programs each year. So the boards have been behind this. It's just been getting the communities behind it. Since we did the initial study in 2021, 2022, not only the change in incentive aid, but it was projected in that initial study that enrollments would continue to decline, which they have.

From 2022 to 2024, we lost an additional 61 students between the two schools, And one of the most, you know, troubling things is each year our incoming pre k classes have been getting smaller, so our graduating classes are, you know, we don't have students coming in to replace the students that we're losing. Currently, right now in Livingston Manor, we have 14 kids in our pre k program where a couple of years ago, we had 2 sections with 20 each. Roscoe, a couple of years ago, I had, over 20 kids in my pre k program. This year, we have 7.

Those are some sterling numbers. Are you hearing from folks who are still perhaps not behind this idea?

There are there's you know, change is difficult no matter what type of change you're talking about. You know, there are folks that are concerned about bus rides. There's folks that are concerned, you know, their kids, you know, potentially the way the schools might get restructured, you know, having to go to a different school building. You know, the reality of this is, you know, mergers have been happening. The schools that we have right now are the result of a a massive centralization movement that took place in the, you know, in the thirties and forties.

We went from, you know, several 1,000 school districts across the state to the the 700 and something that we have now, through mergers. This isn't something new, it's just it's kind of stalled for a while and with the upcoming changes in Foundation Aid, it's going to be more difficult to keep programs on the table as our state aid fluctuates. This is something that we saw last year when the Governor's budget proposal came out. The changes in foundation aid would have resulted in a $1,300,000 loss in aid to Manor and a $100,000 loss in aid to Roscoe. And as that process works itself out, as the foundation aid goes down in the years to come, so does the merger incentive aid.

So, kind of right now, the money that's on the table associated with the merger is more than likely the highest it will be for a long time going forward. So, we've weathered some rough patches. We've found some different efficiencies through sharing, but it's still we can't do the types of things that we want to do being 2 separate school districts. You know, everybody around the county has programs and opportunities for kids that, you know, it's just as 2 separate school districts, it's it's complicated and complex to to kind of pull those things off as shared services.

And you believe that combined, you can offer more together to students and to the community?

Yeah. If if we can restructure ourselves, you know, in a situation where, you know, gradually over the next couple years, if the merger gets approved, you know, on 19th, putting a a transition plan in place where one of the schools is transitioned into an elementary school, the other one's into a middle high school, having all those kids in one spot, allows us to have a more robust and expanded offerings for our elementary kids and what we can offer them as a true elementary school and the same for our middle high school kids. Having all those teachers with all of our different certifications between Roscoe and Livingston Manor in one spot, there's a wide variety of electives and programs that we can kind of put together a continuum of that right now as being separate districts, even though we've tried sharing teachers and things like that and stuff through distance learning, it's just not it's not the same as having everybody in the same spot. As far as extracurriculars, we've tried sharing. While shared sports have been successful, there's kids that don't want to participate because they don't want to travel on a bus to a different school to play in a sport.

If it was after school, we'd do sports and it's our own thing. There's a handful of kids that potentially could participate. We've tried sharing different drama and extracurriculars, but, you know, shuttling kids back and forth for that, you know, has not been the easiest thing to figure out.

Let's talk about the process. You mentioned the vote. There's a merger vote set from noon to 8 PM, December 19th at the Livingston Manor and Roscoe Gymnasiums. Prior to that, though, you're hosting, it looks like 5 informational meetings to talk about the merger proposal. What can folks learn at those meetings?

Yep. So these are we've had a number of meetings throughout the process, and, you know, this is we've had real in-depth things where we kind of plowed through the the merger study and the recommendations from the study, but at this point, you know, we've kind of talked about a lot of those things and there's a group of folks that are willing to travel to these events with me, some board members, some teaching staff, just really to answer questions relating to the merger, and, you know, an opportunity for kind of some back and forth dialogue about what it is and what it isn't.

Those start December 3rd. Roscoe PTA meeting at the Roscoe Diner at 7. That's, later tonight at 7 o'clock at the Roscoe Diner, and then there's a list of those at, each district's website. Can you explain how folks can vote on the merger?

So yep. Right now, we got the official signed order from the commissioner. She signed that last week so that the process is in place. Absentee ballots are available.

Which, by the way, is the from the state education department. Is that correct?

Yep. Yeah. The commissioner of education. In order for a merger vote to take place, you know, there was a whole bunch of steps we had to take leading up to this, some petitions, you know, and signatures from representatives residents in both communities. We made it through all that, and the boards had to officially vote to make a formal request to our district superintendent who then made a formal request to the commissioner, that was signed last week, and those orders were issued.

They were posted around the communities both communities by the district clerk, and absentee ballots are currently available. For anyone that is not gonna be around on 19th, they should reach out to Marlon Peters, the district clerk. She's a shared district clerk, so she's for Roscoe and Livingston Manor. So if you contact either school, missus Peters can get you set up with an absentee ballot, or anybody that's eligible and registered to vote can vote in person on 19th.

And residents must be 18 years old, a US citizen, a district resident for at least 30 days, and registered to vote at the county board of elections, as you mentioned, which automatically registers them to vote at their respective district. If they're not registered with the county, they can register before December 13th at their district main office between 8:30 and 3:30 while school is in session. So I wanted to get that in there. And I wanted to clarify. It's from the state education department.

It's not like you guys can just decide to do this. There's there's a lot of steps to go through as you mentioned.

Oh, yeah. The the whole having to do a study and then updating the study, multiple board votes, you need to be able to demonstrate community support before the commissioner would schedule a vote. The first time around in 2022, we use a straw vote, which is a non binding vote that if it passes in both communities, the commissioner would then go through the process to schedule a vote. This time around, we used a petition process that has been made available to school districts, and in that process, what they do is they use the average number of people that voted in your previous 3 budget votes in board elections. And in the case of our 2 districts, it was 3 100 and, 39 or 309 people in Livingston Manor and 227 in Roscoe, you had to get that many signatures, indicating that they would support a merger.

And, you know, we surpassed the number of signatures required in both districts by, I think, 50 or so in each place. And then once the board's officially accepted those, the commissioner accepted that as a demonstration of community support and then took the steps on her end to schedule the official vote on 19th. There's newsletters that will be going out to all district residents, that should hit the post offices and be in people's hands by the end of the week. There's copies of those also available, at the district office. We're putting them in the banks and the post office and then local businesses just to kind of make sure that everybody has access to the information, and like you had mentioned earlier, everything that we've done throughout the process is available on both district websites.

There's a section set up for the merger that has all the different presentations. Some of the meetings that occurred were live streamed. Those are recorded in there for people to watch, or they can just reach out to the school if they have questions.

Now if this merger passes after this vote, it's not like the schools are gonna merge effective January 1st. How long does this process take?

So, if it passes so when people vote on 19th, they're voting on 3 things. The first item is a merger, yes or no, and if that results in yes in both districts, then they look at the other two questions, and the other one is, should the new board be 5, 7, or 9 members and should the terms be 3, 4, or 5 years? So if it passes, the next step is to elect a new board of education, so anybody that's interested in running for the board of the new district, would pick up petitions and run. Election would be held in the January, February time frame, and then that new board would put together and, you know, begin the process of, you know, creating the new district. They'd have to put together a budget for the new district, which would be voted on, by statute on that budget vote in May.

So, when everybody votes on their school budget, the new district would have to vote on their budget in May, and the new district technically would begin to operate July 1, 2025. So not January 1st, but, you know, a short 6 months later, things, you know, on paper would would start to be consolidated as the new district.

We've been talking to superintendent John Evans about the proposed merger between the Livingston Manor and Roscoe Schools. That vote is coming up on December 19th from noon to 8 at the Livingston Manor and Roscoe Gymnasiums, and there's more information at both school district's websites. And, you can even reach out to the superintendent, I understand as well.

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tim.