Mineola school district residents voted 863 to 205 to approve the district’s 2016-2017 budget Tuesday, giving themselves a miniscule tax cut and setting the stage for a five-year capital plan.
Hampton Street School PTA Co-President Cheryl Lampasona also won her unopposed bid for a three-year term to replace outgoing school board Vice President Patricia Navarra with 806 votes.
“Words cannot express my thanks to the wonderful people of my community for entrusting me to continue the greatness that the Mineola school district is, by electing me as their new (school board) trustee,” Lampasona said in a statement.
Navarra is stepping down after one term to pursue a position with a national collective bargaining group for college professors. The school board will select a new vice president in July.
The budget grew 1.73 percent to $91.2 million this year despite a $10,000, 0.012-percent tax levy decrease under state tax cap law.
Helped by a nearly 10-percent state aid boost and $650,000 additional unallocated fund balance money, the district will make more than a dozen equipment purchases and take up nine of 22 projects in a five-year capital plan Superintendent Michael Nagler presented in April.
Among them are repairs to the cupola and classroom air conditioning at Jackson Avenue School, a new district storage facility, new music rooms and lockers at Mineola High School, dedicated pre-kindergarten wings at two schools, a new playground surface at Meadow Drive School, and a bus loop at Mineola Middle School.
Lampasona, 38, has said she wants to keep the district on the “cutting edge” while continuing the programs administrators have started, such as elementary school Spanish classes and the use of technology in classrooms.
“I think education, it’s a giant wave, like it’s always changing, so we always have to be on the new front of something,” Lampasona said in an interview last month.
Lampasona has worked as a full-time and part-time teacher for the past 12 years and currently teaches third grade in Woodside, Queens.
She has lived in the Mineola district for six years and is the mother of a Hampton Street School kindergartner and second-grader, she has said.
She comes to the board following the growth this year of Mineola’s “opt out” movement of parents protesting the controversial state tests aligned with Common Core educational standards.
Lampasona has said she thinks the standards are valuable and would not have had her older child sit out tests this year, but she thinks it is good that parents have a choice in the matter.
“What the kids are taking now, are they fair? No. They’re very difficult exams,” she said. “I just hope they’re being put to good measure and good use to further education, not hold something back.”
