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Yonkers Schools Cut Costs By Cutting Overtime

YONKERS, N.Y. – In the midst a budget crunch, Yonkers school administrators say less overtime equals less cost.

Superintendent of Schools Bernard Pierorazio said the district has been able to save nearly $1.2 million in the past year and more than $7 million since 2007 by limiting the amount of overtime dollars employees are able to earn.

“The idea of overtime and what we are spending, it’s something we have really, really keyed in on over last five years,” he said last week at a Board of Education meeting.

The initiative started shortly after Pierorazio joined the district in 2007. That's when the Board of Education passed a resolution essentially setting a cap for what employees could earn in overtime.

And it has paid off. Pierorazio said the overtime budget for the district’s 3,900 employees was $3.9 million this year. That same budget was more than $11 million when he came to Yonkers.

“Just think of what that translates into – additional staff and additional program by cutting overtime at the Board of Education,” Pierorazio said.

Meanwhile, administrators say their search for cost-cutting measures may lead them back to special education. The superintendent said earlier this month he may request an audit of the special education budget in an effort to look for ways to make the department run more efficiently.

“It’s one of the critical areas we look at when we look at costs,” Pierorazio said.

With 3,400 special needs students in the district, the programs are costing more than $86 million a year, with an additional $20 million in transportation for those students. Together, they make up more than 20 percent of the district’s entire budget.

In total, the district spends more than $24,000 a year on every student with a disability, compared to $7,000 individually for all other students, Pierorazio said.

“That’s a huge disparity,” he said.

Pierorazio said the district is redesigning the way certain social and psychological services are distributed. The strategies, including interaction in earlier grades to identify and intervene when children have disabilities, should be in place by the start of the school year next week, the superintendent said.

The hope is that earlier interaction will prevent disabilities from becoming profound and allow them to be dealt with in classrooms instead of requiring outside programs, Pierorazio said.

“It’s for those students that we can bring back, as we did with the autistic students from BOCES, or place within a local area to save on transportation and save on tuition,” he said.

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