The Herricks Board of Education officially set the 2011-2012 tax levy for the district at $86.9 million last week at its regularly scheduled meeting, approving the 3.78 percent increase the board had projected in the school district‘s $98.9 million budget.
But rather than celebrating, board members immediately turned their attention to the 2012-2013 budget and the specter of a 2 percent tax cap threatening to force another round of serious budget cuts.
“With the tax cap, it’s pretty clear what we’ll be facing next year,” said Herricks Superintendents of Schools John Bierwirth, who estimated that the district would have to produce a budget that would be $3.7 million less than the $98.9 million budget in place for 2011-12.
“I think people are going to have to look to extreme solutions,” Bierwirth said.
While Bierwirth said the first inclination is to “hold onto everything you’ve got,” but the reality is that the district faces the prospects of laying off more than 30 employees next year and the year after that “if everything remains the same.” The budget for the 2011-12 school year eliminated 62 positions district-wide among all the employee groups with teachers making up 35 of the positions.
Bierwirth said the “biggest problem is pensions and health,” costs which rose 33 percent in the upcoming year’s budget.
On Bierwirth’s recommendation, the school board voted to allocate $1.1 million to the workers compensation reserve fund, $948,977 to the unemployment insurance reserve fund and $221,043 to the employees-retirement-contribution reserve fund. Bierwirth said the $1.1 million allocation for workers compensation is needed because the board budgeted only $200,000 for that purpose in last year’s budget.
In a discussion prior to the board’s approval of the tax levy, the recommended ceiling of 27 students in a classroom could be a difficult standard to maintain.
“We’re trying to stick to our class guidelines,” Herricks School Board President Christine Turner said, adding that some courses will increase in class size.
When one parent asked whether teaching assistants could be added to offset the loss of teachers in the district, Turner expressed little optimism.
“From what we know, it’s not going to look good next year. It is not going to be the Herricks it was,” she said.
Board member Sanjay Jain said the board had the best interests of all students in the district in mind and would seek to make “incremental” cuts in programs where cuts seemed necessary.
“We’re trying to achieve an optimal outcome,” Jain said.
Jim Gounaris, the newest board member and a parent in the district, suggested that the school board needs to think of alternate solutions for funding teaching positions and programs.
“We could have found the money in the community. We’re all one family, a Herricks family. We have to figure out a way to walk through this fire,” Gounaris said.
One tactic Herricks recently adopted was the hiring of private investigator Joseph Wendling, a retired New York City police detective, to look into cases of students improperly registered to attend school in the district.
Bierwirth sharply criticized an editorial that appeared in the Aug. 12 editions of the New Hyde Park Herald Courier and the Williston Times, which took the school board to task for what it called a “heavy-handed approach” for hiring a “low-rent” investigator.
He called the editorial a “cheap shot” at Wendling and pointedly said that the school district does not have the capacity to “go beyond the law.”
“I had the biggest problem with the words ‘low-rent’,” Bierwirth said. “This is a man who had a distinguished career. He’s certainly not low rent.”
Wendling’s remuneration depends on how many cases he handles in a year, up to a cost capped at $20,000.
He also said the editorial also was “factually inaccurate,” but did not specify what it had misrepresented.
Board member Peter Grisafi said that Wendling’s investigation process would “vary by situation.”
Bierwirth said Wendling would appear at a public meeting next month to explain more fully how he will function, and added that Wendling would have other people working with him.
When a resident asked about giving the private investigator access to information on student registrations, Bierwirth said, “We work together as a team. We want to use him to maximum advantage.”
The school district administration had already been working cooperatively with the Town of North Hempstead to identify instances in which it suspected people were maintaining illegal living arrangements in the district or were misrepresenting their real addresses to illegally register students in the highly regarded Herricks district.
In other developments:
• The school board approved a two-year lease for Harbor Child Care, which has headquarters in the Herricks Community Center, with increases of 2.5 percent each year, resulting in $290,161.92 for rent in the 2011-12 school year and $297,386.48 for the following year.
• Bierwirth said scores on the social studies AP and Regents exams in June were “excellent,” based on what he called “anecdotal” information he received about those test results.
