The Greece Central School District administration is proposing an estimated $318.5 million budget for next school year.
Superintendent Jeremy Smalline said funding priorities were decided based on feedback from community surveys, site visits and conversations with parents, students and staff.
“Here are some of the recurring themes that we heard," Smalline said. “Students' needs have changed in our district. Student behavior affects learning. Staffing shortages impact everyone. We need to ensure students are ready for life after graduation, and that families want to be engaged as partners.”
About $9 million is earmarked for things like an expansion of intervention services and safety initiatives, as well as employee recruitment, the superintendent said. Another $11.6 million is expected to go to community partnerships, extracurricular activities and sports, digital literacy and college and career readiness programs.
The budget is larger than last year’s — about $10.7 million more — at a time when the district reports declining enrollment. From 2006 to 2025, enrollment has dropped from about 120,700 students to 96,000.
But district leaders said those changing student needs require more resources.
Smalline said one recent shift that the district is seeing is a significant need for more special education classrooms.
“We have (an) increased number of students coming to our district that require self-contained classrooms, which take up our space,” he said in a recent presentation to the school board. “We welcome all of our students, but we are running out of space for additional classrooms.”
Additionally, the need for special education support services, like speech therapy and occupational therapy, has grown by 42% since the 2019-20 school year, he said.
The budget also addresses expanding prekindergarten programs, Smalline said in his presentation to the board. School board member Todd Butler raised a concern that there is already not enough space to meet demand. He said more than 100 families are currently on that waitlist.
“Part of the issue that we're dealing with started when we went from half-day to full-day. Which is a good thing, so I'm not blaming that,” Smalline said. "But ... that took away about half of that space for our students.”
To address the need for more space, Smalline said the district is seeking to expand partnerships with community organizations but did not elaborate.
The exact amount of state funding that school districts will have to work with is yet to be determined as the state budget has not yet been finalized.
The school board is scheduled to vote on the budget on April 22, and voters can cast their ballots on May 20.
There are also two propositions on the ballot. One is to replace 35 school buses. The other is a proposal to create a Capital Reserve Fund for construction and renovations.
