School districts in the Capital Region are waiting to hear how changes proposed to this year’s budget will affect funding they rely on. A hearing is happening Thursday in Albany on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s executive budget proposal for education.

Hochul’s budget includes a change to what’s called the “hold harmless” provision – a proposal that would give the state the power to end current sweeping yearly increases to funding called Foundation Aid. Many districts consider Foundation Aid a major source of revenue.

NewsChannel 13 spoke to multiple districts that could lose more than $100,000 in funding.

Averill Park Central School District Superintendent James Franchini said the change would dash hopes of hiring more social workers and could mean cuts to elective classes.

“It’s a huge issue for us. We’ve been a hold harmless district. Last year we got about a 3% increase in our Foundation Aid. With that increase, we still had to make over $1 million in cuts,” he explained. “With the governor’s proposal, we’re actually below last year’s budget amount by $159,000.”

Franchini acknowledged the district’s declining enrollment, but said students’ needs were increasing.

“While we have had decreasing enrollment, like many districts, the needs of our students have not gone down. The needs, in fact, have actually gone in the other direction. They’ve increased. And especially coming off of the pandemic, they kind of increased again,” he said.

The budget overall includes a $507 million increase in Foundation Aid for schools. The governor also unveiled an $825 million increase in spending for education.

However, federal pandemic aid comes to an end this year, too, meaning this change would directly impact students, Franchini said.

“It is kind of a perfect storm, when you decrease our Foundation Aid and you take away the federal stimulus money, it’s adding to the potential impact in cost to our program,” he said. “We believe we’re underserviced right now, and would love to add social workers and other staff at our elementary level and weren’t able to do it.”

Franchini also noted that the cuts would avoid an impact to taxpayers.

Some districts in the area stand to gain money to serve their students’ needs based on proposed changes. They declined to speak to NewsChannel 13 before knowing exactly what they could receive.

The joint legislative hearing on the budget proposal is happening this Thursday, Feb. 1 at 9:30 a.m. in the Legislative Office Building across from the Capitol.