[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Hudson City Schools, like all in New York State, are facing drastic budget shortfalls, and changes in the way our public education is handled."][/caption]The Register-Star has two unrelated stories on educational issues this morning that, taken together, indicate some of the major challenges our public schools will be facing this year. At a meeting in Kinderhook on Tuesday, they report, 400 people showed up for an Ichabod Crane Community Forum on possible closure of two elementary schools in the local school district, with the most opposition raised when the idea of cutting kindergarten classes to half days was raised, along with the complete elimination of the district's Pre-K program. In Hudson, meanwhile, the paper reports that City School District Superintendent John Howe is now saying he's facing a budget gap for the next 2011-2012 school year of at least $3.6 million. The deficit represents a substantial portion of the district’s expenses, the paper reports, which neared $41 million this year. Driving the shortfall is the fact that the district will lose out on $1.8 million in federal aid that was not renewed for this year, while expenses are set to rise by $1.8 million.

Compounding the situations are two proposals coming out of Albany. The first is the prospect of a third consecutive year of cuts in state education aid. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has said that he wants to transform the way Albany doles out aid to school districts, potentially by scrapping the existing formula for school aid and replacing it with a competitive grant program. Schools would be rewarded for making strides in academic performance and for finding cost savings on the administrative side. The second state proposal — also a cornerstone of the newly-minted Cuomo agenda — is for a cap on increases in local property taxes. The cap favored by the governor would limit increases to 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower.

The ICC meeting, held in the high school auditorium in Kinderhook , was the third of eight forums in which the Board of Education hopes to elicit community response to a variety of solutions to what appears to be an inevitable and unprecedented budget crisis. The next meeting, Jan. 25, will be devoted to electives and other non-mandated programs and increase in class sizes. For more on that story, click here. For more on budget problems in Hudson, click here.