The Common Council's education committee met with the Syracuse City School District leadership to discuss the proposed 2026-2027 budget. Superintendent Pamela Odom, Chief Operating Officer Mike Pincheco, and Deputy Superintendent Robert DeFloral presented the budget, which focuses on the strategic plan emphasizing literacy, numeracy, CTE pathways, and attendance. The district faces significant fiscal pressures, including a $24.5 million use of fund balance, rising costs, and a low local revenue contribution (9% of total revenue, the lowest among over 700 districts in the state). Key discussions covered state aid, charter school costs, transportation for homeless students, the impact of PILOT agreements, and the district's five-year fiscal outlook.
Sorry. What's your title? Okay. We are here to have a discussion on the Syracuse Board of Education, our school district. Budget for this coming year. I want to welcome Pamela Odom, our superintendent of schools and fellow Heneger graduate. I want to I want to welcome Mike Pincheco, our chief operating officer, Robert DeFloral, Deputy Superintendent. So we're here going to discuss our our budget for the coming year. And what are our goals for the coming year with our students? And uh we can just have a general discussion. I I'm the chair of this committee. Today, Councilor Martinave. I am with Common Council President, Rita Paniagua, Port District Counselor, Patrona Jones Rouser, and Counselor at Large, Joel Majok. So if you would like to start, Pam. But our presentation. Absolutely. Okay. The budget is focused on our strategic plan and our goals. We will continue to focus on literacy and numeracy for all of our students. Obviously, our CTE pathways we'll continue to focus on, and the budget will represent that as well, and also our attendance goals. So I'm going to turn it over to Chief Pachenko. Thank you. Good morning. Thank you very much, everyone, for having us this morning. The first thing I'm going to talk about is going through our budget. I'm going to talk about the uh community input, the state budget release and state aid, our revenue and expenses. I want to share with you an analysis of our revenue over the last several years, and then provide you with opportunity to ask the superintendent myself any questions. As you know, we are all waiting the governor and the legislature to do a final approval of next year's budget. So we put this budget together based upon what the uh governor's preliminary budget plans were, um, and we based all our decisions off of that. Um, if you go to the next page, talked about community input. Um, we did community outreach, we did forms, uh, we sent out postcards, social media posts. Um, we had a couple of proposed budget uh public hearings. Uh the superintendent also met with the student cabinet and also the parent council. And what we also did, we had an online um big project called the balancing act. And what this did was it allowed the community to voice their input on how they see the district expending their funds. Um, and we had uh 1,376 um page views on that, and the result of that was the top three wait weighted areas were literacy, numeracy, and before and after school programming. Um, and as the superintendent mentioned at the start, um, the first two literacy and numeracy are key areas that we are focusing on this year, so it is consistent with what the community um has asked us to do. We start looking at the uh state budget. Um, this is based on the current legislative proposal. Again, we do not have final figures, um, but we'll come to the common council with our uh overall spending limit. Should anything change, then we would reduce our uh uh use of fund balance, but our spending limit will not be increasing um once it's approved by the common council. So there's a 39.3 billion dollar education budget, which fully funds the current foundation aid formula. This is an increase of 1.6 billion dollars, which is 4.3% over the 25-26 year, and there's almost a $300 million increase in foundation aid, um, which is about a three percent increase over last year's budget. One of the areas that we've been talking about with the governor's office and the legislator is foundation aid. Um the Rockefeller Institute did a study on the Foundation Aid formula, um, and they made a new number of recommendations about a year and a half ago. Uh last year, uh a few minor low-hanging fruit things were adjusted on the foundation aid formula, but there are many other things that we feel need to be adjusted. Um, and we've made those recommendations numerous times, and we're gonna continue to do that. We feel that the foundation aid formula is not fair to uh students in Syracuse, uh specifically the way they do the wealth index, um, the way they do uh special education per pupil waiting, ENL waiting. Um those need to be adjusted because they really do not make any sense. So hopefully, um, if not this year, um, in the coming years that we'll really spend some more time making those adjustments again within the governor's executive budget.