The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown the Wallkill Central School District completely off schedule.

The District planned to approve the budget during last Wednesday’s Board of Education meeting but ultimately pulled it from their agenda as they await further guidance on potential state aid funding cuts for the 2020-2021 school year and the establishment of a school budget vote date.

Superintendent of Schools Kevin Castle noted that the District had an approved state budget as of April 1. The District received their state aid numbers and balanced their budget with those numbers along with being within the tax cap. However, Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently started talking about 50 percent and 20 percent further reductions to state aid. A clause in the state budget gives the state’s budget director the ability to reduce aid.

“Since a budget vote date has not been established and the governor is talking about state aid reductions, we need to pull the recommendation to approve the proposed 2020-2021 budget from the April 22, 2020 Board agenda,” Castle said. “If the governor does come out with a new state aid number compared to what was approved back on April 1, the District will need to make adjustments to the budget.”

Castle assured the Board that they would weather this difficult storm.

“Due to the fiscal foresight of the board, we will get through this,” he said.

Last Wednesday, the Board of Education also suspended the following policies due to the COVID-19 school closure: Policy #7301 High School Course Grading, Policy #7302 Grades 6-8 Course Grading, Policy #7330 Regents and Regents Competency Tests as well as Policy #7340 High School Graduation Requirements. There are no Board policies that reference grading policies for grades K-5, however any procedures that do exist are suspended as well.

The District is developing a K-12 rating scale for the fourth marking period as well as a formula to calculate final averages for credit/diploma and non-credit/diploma bearing courses. Their goal is to provide families with procedures no later than May 8.

“In developing the rating system for students, we will take into consideration that the current school closure may impact each student’s achievement differently,” Castle said. “Therefore, we will make every effort to develop a rating system that will not negatively impact the grades on students’ report cards/transcripts.”