Many North Country schools were relieved to get a little bit more financial assistance from the state this upcoming school year, but Morristown Central School is another story. The school received a reduction in state aid, adding almost $100,000 more to their budget gap. But our Cara Thomas reports the school has found out why there was a reduction and a way to fill the gap.

  To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.

Then come back here and refresh the page.

MORRISTOWN, N.Y. -- The school budget situation isn’t fun for any administrator right now, but in Morristown, things went from bad to worse. For the third year in a row, Morristown received a reduction in state aid, adding almost $100,000 more to their budget gap.

"It's not what you want to see when that legislative run shows up. You want to see more money. Unfortunately we saw less but we have the planning in place to handle that," said Superintendent David Glover of Morristown Central Schools.

The board passed their proposed budget Monday night, deciding to keep below their 2.9 tax cap and using money from their fund balance. They decided earlier in the process to save a certain amount of money to secure themselves for the upcoming years, but Superintendent David Glover said they will use some of it now to fill that extra gap.

However, some personnel and program cuts are still expected.

"It could be worse, it could be better because you never want to have less money. But we had a plan for 'x' amount of applied fund balance just in case something happened. And this, well... something happened," said Glover.

He said the state aid reduction was caused by a change in their combined wealth ratio. Glover said that data has a large effect on the state aid formula and the change impacted them negatively.

"I think we all have the recognition of, we're going to have to start doing something differently because we can't go through this every year," said Glover.

Morristown is the only school district in St. Lawrence and Jefferson counties to not receive additional state aid.