If your house off Highbridge Road carries a $300,000 assessment and you write a school tax check every September, the May 19 ballot at Wellwood Middle School is asking you for roughly $174 more next year, before STAR. That is the practical version of a 3.12 percent tax-levy increase, parked precisely at the cap, sitting on top of a $122,496,620 Fayetteville-Manlius spending plan, the second-largest school budget in the Syracuse suburbs after Liverpool. Polls open at 7 a.m. and close at 9 p.m.
The board adopted the proposal in April. The headline figures are clean enough. Spending climbs $6,077,072 over the current year, a 5.22 percent jump. The tax levy, which is the actual pile of dollars the district pulls from Manlius and Pompey property owners, grows 3.12 percent. That number is not a coincidence. It is the maximum F-M can ask for under New York’s tax-cap formula without needing a 60 percent supermajority of voters to sign off. State aid covers 31.64 percent of expenses. The levy itself does 63.24 percent of the work. County sales tax receipts, interest, and miscellaneous revenue chip in the remaining 5.12 percent. To square the math, the district will tap $3.4 million in fund balance and reserves.
Where that $174 actually goes is a more interesting story than the budget brochure tells. Roughly $3.5 million of the increase, more than half of every new dollar in the budget, is going to debt service on the F-M High School capital project, the $52 million renovation that voters approved years ago and that is finally about to finish. If you have driven past the high school this year, you have seen what your money built. The cafeteria is now a two-story expansion with two new serving lines and a video display wall, opened last September. There are five entirely new classrooms inside the building and 26 more that were gutted and rebuilt. There is a broadcast journalism studio, a new learning support center, an expanded main office, and a renovated outdoor courtyard with amphitheater-style seating and engraved bricks. The remaining work, parking lots and sidewalks mostly, is on track to wrap by fall 2026.
This story came from public records we pulled ourselves
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The next-largest line is more painful to look at. Employee health, dental, and vision insurance premiums are rising 10.5 percent in 2026-27, adding $1.8 million to the budget in a single stroke. F-M’s historical average had been closer to 6 percent. Special education and out-of-district placements, transportation, and contractual step increases account for most of the rest. Brad Corbin, the assistant superintendent for business who builds the budget every spring, said the quiet part out loud earlier this year when he was discussing fund balance reliance: “We can’t keep doing this. Something has to give.” Deb Ayers, a former OCM BOCES assistant superintendent who consulted on the plan, was more diplomatic but landed on the same point. F-M, she said, has done an exceptional job of managing fiscal responsibilities. Expenditures are still rising faster than revenue.
The district did not just let the number drift up. Building-level discretionary budgets were cut 2.20 percent across every school. The interim assistant principal slot that had been created on a one-year basis is gone, saving roughly $96,000. Seven instructional positions vacated through retirements and resignations will not be refilled, a roughly $650,000 personnel reduction. Those choices, added up, are the difference between a 3.12 percent levy at the cap and something higher that would have required a supermajority to pass.
This is also the first F-M budget cycle under a new superintendent. Dr. Magda Parvey started March 2, 2026, the district’s seventh in modern history, after a closed search that drew real criticism from parents and from CNY Central reporting earlier in the winter. She inherited the budget in flight, not as its author, and her one public quote on the proposal hewed closely to the script you would expect: 71 percent of spending sits in the program component, which is what pays for teachers, transportation, instructional technology, special education, athletics, and clubs. The construction of the budget itself belongs to Corbin, who has been running F-M’s business office through three governors and two state aid frameworks.
The board that approved the budget has nine voting members. Sarah Fitzgerald is president, term ending 2028. Rebecca Cohen is vice president, term ending this year. The rest, in alphabetical order, are Ann Bersani (2027), Jason Catalino (2026), Marissa Joy Mims (2027), Sarah Pinsky (2028), Kristen Purcell (2026), Daniel Seidberg (2027), and Jon Van Valkenburg (2028). F-M High School senior Jacob Chen sits at the table as a non-voting student member. Cohen, Catalino, and Purcell are the three seats up on May 19.
Here is where the ballot gets interesting. Only two candidates filed nominating petitions by the April 20 deadline. Purcell is seeking a second term. She lives in Fayetteville, came out of J-D High School herself, holds three Syracuse University degrees, and runs the Central New York/Oswego County Teacher Center, which serves 25 area districts. The other candidate is Robert J. Spencer, an 11-year district resident from Manlius, a Hammondsport graduate with a Hobart and William Smith BA and a Boston College Law degree. He is currently a Supervising Administrative Law Judge for the New York State Office of Children and Family Services. His wife Ana and their two F-M-enrolled children round out the family. The third seat will be decided by write-ins, which means that under New York election law the seat is technically anybody’s. In practice it usually goes to whichever organized parent or community member can rally a few dozen friends to scribble a name on the ballot. The result will not be announced until results are certified.
The public hearing on the budget is May 11 at 6 p.m. at Eagle Hill Middle School, F-M’s traditional venue for community-facing budget nights. The vote itself runs from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on May 19 at Wellwood Middle School, the single polling place for the district. Wellwood parking can fill up at peak commute hours, and accessibility entrances are on the south side of the building.
Alongside the budget itself, four other questions sit on the ballot. The two library propositions ask voters to fund the Manlius Library ($1,548,396 tax levy) and the Fayetteville Free Library ($2,172,035 tax levy) for 2026-27. A separate bus and vehicle proposition asks voters to approve up to $1,529,830 to buy six diesel full-size buses (one wheelchair-accessible, one with a luggage compartment, four standard) plus two gasoline vans that will replace aging Suburbans currently used for student transport. New York State reimburses roughly 74 percent of that cost over five years, which is the practical reason every district floats bus questions on the same ballot as the budget. And the three board seats round it out.
How F-M’s number stacks up against the rest of the Syracuse suburbs is the part of the conversation that runs late at the kitchen table. Liverpool, the biggest district in the comparison set, is asking voters for just under $223 million and a 3.3 percent levy increase. The Liverpool board got there on a 5-to-4 split vote that approved nearly 80 job cuts, drew $12.5 million from reserves, and squeezed another $4.6 million out of personnel savings to close a $17 million gap. Same day vote, same kind of pressure, very different decisions on the table.
Jamesville-DeWitt is the opposite end of the spectrum. J-D’s 2026-27 proposal totals $74.9 million, actually $365,208 less than the current year, balanced on $22.9 million in state aid, a $47.5 million levy, $2.5 million in fund balance, and $2 million in other revenue. The district has held enrollment roughly steady and managed reserves carefully. J-D holds its hearing May 11 in the high school Large Group Room. North Syracuse, which serves parts of Cicero, Clay, North Syracuse, and Salina, has a calculated cap up to 5.25 percent for 2026-27, the highest in the suburban set. East Syracuse Minoa votes May 19 with a hearing May 11 and had not posted a finalized topline as of mid-May.
F-M’s $122.5 million sits second only to Liverpool’s $223 million. The 3.12 percent levy increase is the lowest of any district in the group that has publicly disclosed a 2026-27 figure. F-M is not cutting jobs and is not facing a Liverpool-style $17 million hole. What F-M is doing, that Liverpool is not, is paying down a $52 million capital project, which is where that $3.5 million debt-service jump originates and is the single biggest reason this budget exists at all.
The political math is narrower than the dollar totals suggest. Because the levy is parked at the cap rather than over it, F-M needs a simple majority of yes votes, not a 60 percent supermajority. The board could have gone higher. It chose not to. That is a deliberate calculation about how many parents will actually show up at Wellwood on a Tuesday in May, and how many of them are willing to write a $174 check on a $300,000 house without grumbling.
Worth knowing about the district that is voting: F-M serves roughly 4,163 students across six schools. The high school finished the most recent U.S. News rankings at number one in the Syracuse metro area, number 82 in New York State, and number 804 nationally, with a 91 percent graduation rate. Per-pupil spending sits around $28,518, roughly 99 percent above the national average and consistent with how the wealthier Syracuse suburbs fund their schools. The state delivered $19,888,677 in foundation aid for 2025-26, a $483,863 increase over the prior year. For 2026-27, total state aid is projected to cover 31.64 percent of expenses, which is on the lower end for an Onondaga County district and reflects F-M’s relatively high property wealth per pupil.
The harder question for F-M residents is not whether this budget passes. It almost certainly will. The harder question is what the next five budgets look like. Enrollment has been roughly flat for ten years. Salaries and benefits have not been. The $3.4 million in fund balance balancing this year’s budget is, as Corbin already said in plain language, not something the district can repeat indefinitely. Healthcare jumped 10.5 percent in a single year, and there is no commitment from any insurer that the trend reverses. The capital project debt service does not vanish when the parking lot work finishes; it sits in the budget for the full term of the bond.
What F-M voters are actually deciding May 19, then, is two things at once. The narrow question is whether to approve a $122.5 million budget that keeps every current program intact and asks the median Manlius homeowner for about $174 more next year. The wider question, the one that does not appear on the ballot but is hanging over Brad Corbin’s office anyway, is whether the suburban funding model that has run F-M for two decades, flat enrollment, premium per-pupil spend, top-of-the-region rankings, can survive five more years of 10 percent healthcare jumps and capped levies. Polls close at 9 p.m. Results usually post within a couple hours after that. The first answer comes Tuesday night. The second one comes due every spring from here on out.
