Welcome Back!

We hope you and your families had a restful, relaxing, and enjoyable summer. As we prepare to welcome students back into our classrooms, I want to thank our summer maintenance crew for their outstanding work in getting our building ready and our twelve-month staff who work hard to ensure we are prepared for our opening day on September 8th..

Our campus has been buzzing with activity as our Capital Project continues to move full speed ahead. These improvements reflect our continued commitment to providing safe and welcoming learning environments for our students and staff. We are excited about the progress made this summer: At the bus garage, the new roof has been installed along with a new HVAC unit. At the main building, new windows and unit ventilators are being installed throughout the school. The Capital Outlay project is now complete. The gymnasium floor has been beautifully refinished, and I can't wait for you to see it!

In previous newsletters, I have shared information about regionalization, and I want to again emphasize that regionalization does not necessarily mean school mergers. While mergers are one option available should districts choose to pursue them, our focus is on working collaboratively with neighboring districts to expand opportunities for students. Our core belief is simple: the students of Milford Central School and the ONC BOCES region deserve the same educational opportunities as students in wealthier urban and suburban districts. Where a student lives should not determine the quality or breadth of educational experiences available to them! Over the coming months, I will be developing a Regionalization Fact Sheet to help explain why some form of regional collaboration is becoming increasingly important for rural school districts. In the meantime, here are a few key reasons why exploring regionalization matters:

• As enrollment drops, per-pupil expenditure increases, forcing districts to spend more to sustain smaller systems with fewer student opportunities.
• Increasing expenses are outpacing increases in state aid, making it difficult for districts to maintain their current levels of staffing and programming. All but one district in our BOCES is on “Save Harmless,” meaning that we will not receive less state aid than we have in the prior school year. Governor Hochul has already signaled a willingness to eliminate Save Harmless and base state education aid on the original enrollment-based Foundation Aid formula. If Save Harmless were to be eliminated, MCS would lose $1.3 million in funding based on 2025-2026 enrollment numbers; we would not be able to sustain programs and personnel should that occur.
• While small schools provide the opportunity for smaller class sizes that larger schools may not be able to provide, the data across our region does not support the premise that smaller class sizes lead to higher levels of student achievement.

At a regional Board of Education retreat in July, we met with the superintendents and Board of Education representatives from Laurens, Morris, Edmeston, and Cooperstown to discuss how we can collaborate to provide more opportunities for our kids. We have committed to continued conversations in 2026-2027 and Oneonta City Schools have also expressed a willingness to serve as a partner in this work.

We have also agreed to participate with a large group of our ONC BOCES school districts in an optimization study conducted by Cornell University. The purpose of this study is to do an in-depth analysis of how each of our districts can configure its resources to achieve the greatest numbers of student opportunities and sustain that configuration over a ten to fifteen-year period. We expect the results of the study to be released by January 1, 2027 and the results will be shared in a larger forum so that community members from local school