Auditors gave the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park school district a clean bill of health at Monday night’s school board meeting, but longstanding concerns from the community about employee contracts and state education standards persisted.
Representatives from R.S. Abrams & Company and Nawrocki Smith said the district is in better financial standing than similar districts in the area thanks to its leadership, purchasing procedures and use of services like Nassau BOCES.
It routinely saves taxpayers money by appropriating existing funds toward things like employee benefit reserves and capital reserves, the auditors said.
But about a dozen of the district’s seven nurses, 26 custodians and 16 clerical workers continued protesting stalls in their contract negotiations Monday.
The custodians and nurses have been working under expired contracts for three years; the clerical workers, for five.
They want raises and to keep their health insurance premiums where they are, but a representative from the Civil Service Employees Association likened the district’s proposal to variable rate mortgages.
“Typically, premiums don’t go down,” he said before the board at the meeting. “They only seem to go up. I hope we can come to a negotiation that is good for both sides.”
No progress has been made with any of the groups during recent negotiation meetings. A representative of the clerical workers told the board that tensions are wearing thin.
“The morale of the members is very low,” she said. “We work hard. We like our efforts to be appreciated and noted.”
The workers have been attending the meetings in red shirts with the words “Working Without a Contract” emblazoned across the back since the beginning of the school year.
“The district is as well as it is because of all of us,” said one clerical worker who asked not to be named. “They don’t appreciate anything. They don’t care about us. Taxes and cost of living keep going up. Most of live here, and we want to stay in our schools.”
The school district’s attorney has said it wants to make its labor costs more manageable, as the state-mandated tax cap limits its revenue growth.
The state’s Common Core standards also drew more concerns from parents and teachers during the meeting.
A mother of two students at Hillside Grade School tearfully pleaded for a before- or after-school program to help her second-grader get through the year.
“I don’t even understand the work that they’re getting,” she said. “This is one of the very few districts that does not have a program. She’s going to fail out of school.”
Ralph Ratto, the president of the Teachers Association and a fifth-grade teacher at Manor Oaks School, said the board to ignore the state education commissioner’s new toolkit for districts, calling it “a slap in the face” and referring to Common Core tests as “child abuse.”
“Taking a few questions off doesn’t help,” he said.
He and a concerned parent asked the board to advocate for the state to decouple high-stakes testing and teacher evaluation and support parents’ decisions to allow their children to opt out of tests.
There will be an educational forum on the controversy Nov. 23 at the Elks Lodge in New Hyde Park.
