Schimel warns East Williston of tax cap perils

Richard Tedesco

State Assemblywoman Michelle Schimel (D- Great Neck) gave an impromptu update on the state budget battle at last Wednesday night’s East Williston Board of Education budget workshop, without much good news to report.

Schimel told board members and residents at the meeting that funding for summer special education programs and 4,201 schools for specials needs students had been restored to the Assembly’s version of the budget.

But she sounded an alarm about what she called the “unbelievable and unattended consequences” from the proposed 2 percent property tax cap planned for next year.

“There is very much a heavy-handedness in this tax cap,” Schimel said.

She said there is still uncertainty about prospects for mandate relief in conjunction with the property tax cap.

Outside the meeting she said the state budget is still a “work in progress” with a “big difference” in the process from last year in conference committees including members of the assembly and the senate. And she said she remained “hopeful” that there would be bipartisan action taken to give school boards and municipalities some relief from unfunded mandates.

“I do think it’s an opportunity for bipartisanship,” Schimel said.

Thoughts about state legislators was never far from the minds of board members, particularly when North Side principal James Bloomgarden thanked private donors in the district for making contributions for construction of the school’s new playground last summer.

“Once again, no thanks to former Sen. Johnson,” said Robert Freier, board vice president, referring to the $100,000 state grant Johnson had promised for the project, but that was never delivered. Freier had earlier referred to the “mysteriously vanished” Johnson grants.

In his budget presentation for North Side, Bloomgarden cited projected reductions of $11,783 in the mathematics budget to $32,714 due to a shift to electronic texts, $8,278 in the library budget and more than $35,000 in computers, primarily due to decreases in planned purchases of hardware and supplies. The school’s overall budget is projected to go down 6.4 percent from the current year to $327,594 with a cost per pupil reduction year-to-year from $656.54 to $545.08, but said programs would not suffer from the decreases.

“We intend to maintain all the programs that make North Side special,” Bloomgarden said.

The Willets Road School also is projecting an overall budget reduction of 11.6 percent to a projected $325,299, according to Willets Road principal Stephen Kimmel, including a $19,574 reduction in the school’s athletics budget.

Having moved to electronic texts in mathematics translates into a reduction of $6,828 next year, while planning that same migration in social studies next year will cost that department a $10,500 budget increase. Purchasing lab equipment and firth grade BOCES science kits will increase the budget in that subject by $6,595. But reductions in reference books, DVDs and paperbacks will pare back the library budget by $5,850, Kimmel said.

Citing “slack” enrollment at the Wheatley School, principal Sean Feeney pointed to the academic performance of its students that demonstrated a clear uptick.

He projected submissions of 677 Advanced Placement papers this year, compared to 600 papers last year, and noted that the high school produced 97 AP scholars in 2010, up from 58 in 2009. He said the administration was planning to add the foundation for a new AP World course and a fifth year Italian course as well as new courses in music history; design, drawing and production, and technology electives.

“Clearly these are difficult times but we are adding new programs,” Feeney said.

But as its programs continue to grow, Feeney projected a budget reduction for the third straight year of 7.61 percent to $591,314, with one teaching position to be eliminated. That would reflect a cost per student of $754, down fro $812 in the current year.

David Casamento, the East Williston’s district director of science and technology, also projected an overall 2 percent reduction in his budget, to $992,330 next year from the current budget just over $1 million.

But Casamento outlined plans for plenty of new equipment at all schools, including five document cameras at North Side, 15 Dell desktop computers and six SMART boards at Willets, and more wireless access at Wheatley along with 10 PC laptops, five SMART boards and three SMART board response systems, two Mac Book Pros for the school’s TV studio and PCs to replace 10-year-old machines that have been burned out when the school’s electrical system has shut down, and suddenly come back up.

“Our old-age computers are frying every time we have power fluctuations in this building,” Casamento said.

His technology budget is depending heavily on BOCES money from the state to support new technology purchases, and when one board member asked how he could be sure the state money would be there, Casamento just shrugged and smiled.

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