In response to Ms. Rubin’s column published in the Great Neck News on Friday March 22, I want to clarify for Ms. Rubin and the community, a statement that I made at the Great Neck Unified School District Board meeting held on March 11.
I am the “same guy” who “asked for more information on the budget and questioned why the district provides a table to show that it’s tax rate, at $489.555 is second to lowest in Long Island … even in districts where home values are comparable.”
The manner in which Ms. Rubin has written this completely misrepresents my statement and the intent of my questions and comments at the meeting.
1. As indicated in a letter to the school board and administration, my point was to impress on the stewards of the more than $200 million/year school budget that they should provide better metrics for the residents to assess their efforts in both educating our students and managing the budget. I have not, nor am I able to, make that assessment based on the operating budget presented to the community.
In fact, I specifically indicated at the meeting that I was not criticizing the board or the administration. It would be foolish for me to be critical of the job they were doing without the relevant facts to base a judgment on.
That said, I believe it is equally foolish for anyone to believe that the board and administration are doing an “excellent job” as Ms. Rubin and the board themselves represent, simply based on the current data they provide the community.
That is the point I am making: the board and administration are not providing enough or the correct information for the community to make an informed judgment on the quality of their efforts.
2. Specifically, page 91 of the Proposed Operating Budget did reference (property) tax rates throughout Nassau County and indeed Great Neck’s rate is second to lowest. Unfortunately this doesn’t provide any information whatsoever.
The rate is amount of tax (in $) per $100 of assessed value. In two communities where the tax rate is the same one must know the aggregate assessed value of the homes in those communities to make a fair judgment on the meaning of the rate. In two communities with the same tax rate, if community A has an aggregated assessed value 20 percent higher than that of community B, community A is collecting 20 percent more tax dollars than is B.
Nor does it matter, as Ms. Rubin implies it does, that comparative property values between communities provides a legitimate basis for a comparison. In two communities with the same “home values” what matters is how many of those homes there are.
Ultimately, with respect to this particular dimension (fiscal management), what matters are the absolute amount of dollars collected on behalf of the school district. If the board and the administration want to make a fair comparison they should compare total absolute dollar amounts by school district. Better yet it would help to know the spending per student enrolled in each district or, even better than that, the total dollar amount spent on instruction per student and do the comparison by school district throughout Nassau County.
Unfortunately, page 91 of the proposal as currently constituted, is representative of the incomplete and unhelpful data provided by the board and administration.
3. The fact that a line by line review of the budget proposal occurs does not mitigate the issues that I am raising. This can be only be done by assessing our school district relative to benchmarks. The line by line “bottoms up” review assesses only how well our district is being managed year over year, not relative to other districts.
I don’t believe that there is a flaw in my logic and that leads me to the following conclusions:
1. The board and the administration must do a better job in defining and publishing the metrics that they and the community use to assess their efforts. If I, as a member of the community, am to support the board and administration, I must insist that the facts that they use be relevant and credible.
I will admit to a bias, in that my going in assumption is that as professionals who have decades of cumulative experience, members of the board and administration should know better than to include at best meaningless and at worst misleading information in a budget proposal.
If we are going to pay a superintendent and assistant superintendent of business base salaries in the amount they are paid, it is not at all unreasonable to demand accurate, relevant and well thought out measures to assess their performance.
2. An informed and educated public is the hallmark of a great democracy. Efforts to bully, shout down or embarrass those among us who ask legitimate questions and do not take at face value the information that elected representatives provide us are ill-conceived and run contrary to the principals that Ms. Rubin continually espouses.
By characterizing people’s statements and inquiries as “resentment” and part of the “right-wing agenda,” Ms. Rubin unfairly and inaccurately misrepresents the position of those among us who ask questions and want more and better information. Shame on her.
3. Ms. Rubin, given her difficulty with both multiplication and division, must not be a product of the Great Neck School District. I suggest she enroll in a crash course on “Critical Thinking”.
I hold no preconceived notions as to whether or not the Great Neck school board and administration is dong a “good job.” I simply ask that the board and administration give substantially greater thought and do a much better job in defining how to best represent the quality of their efforts.
In my opinion this can only be done by developing meaningful metrics and comparison to benchmarks across other school districts.
All of us who care about public education, the quality of our community, the stewardship of our tax dollars and, most importantly, the future of our children, deserve this information so that we can make a considered judgment when voting for board members and when hiring the district’s senior management.
Ron Guggenheimer
Great Neck
