This year the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park School District has a major goal to improve communication in all aspects of its operations. At the board of education meetings, residents are asked to leave their e-mail addresses when they speak during the visitors’ portion of the meeting.
The board is committed to responding to residents’ questions within 24 hours as a way of improving communication. On the school level, we follow the communication chain-of-command to ensure questions can be answered right at the source of the inquiry. If there is a school-wide issue or to update parents of information, principals are using newsletters on the website, mass e-mails or the Blackboard Connect mass phone notification system all in an effort of going “green” and keeping the lines of communication open.
District-wide, we use our website to keep parents and community members informed of events, happenings and concerns throughout the year. In the event of emergency situations, weather concern or school closing, our Blackboard Connect electronic phone and text system can notify all parents at all the numbers that they register.
In addition to making sure that all of our community members know details of events, they also need to be informed about our fiscal operations. Each year, we must hire external and internal auditors to review our books, fiscal policies and financial operations in our business office. We recently completed our external audit and for the second year in a row our auditing firm has determined a flawless audit, meaning that all operations, policies and regulations mandated by NYS law have been implemented with utmost fidelity helping build trust and confidence of our public regarding our financial status.
Transparency in communication helps to build an open, relationship built on responsibility to our community and our board of education and administration continues to be committed to this goal.
