At its Tuesday evening, Jan. 22 meeting, our Port Washington school board listened to an initial presentation made about the budget for the next school year, 2019-2020. The presentation was led by Mary Callahan, our assistant superintendent for business.
The budget for next year will likely be approximately $162 million, which is not an inconsiderable amount of money.
A great many Port residents will want to know how that amount was arrived at and what steps were taken, if any, to keep the budget increase and the related increase in our school taxes as low as possible.
The meeting appeared to be very poorly attended.
In fact, as I watched a live stream of it on my computer the next day, I could not see one person from our community seated in the Schreiber High School auditorium, watching and listening to that very important initial budget presentation. I wondered why that had happened.
The meeting began with a large group of students, who appear to be high school students, being awarded certificates of excellence.
A large group of their parents were seated in the auditorium, to witness the awards ceremony. Immediately after the last certificate was handed out, all of the students and all of the parents stood up at once and quickly walked out of the auditorium.
Why didn’t the president of our school board, Karen Sloan, who chaired the meeting, suggest to that large group of students and parents that a very important initial budget presentation was coming up soon on the agenda and that surely, as interested residents, they would all want to stay to watch and listen to that very important presentation.
But no, that suggestion was never made. Why?
I can think of a number of answers to that question, but I think that the real answer is arrogance. I think that our school board, in its arrogance, believes that it’s not necessary for residents of our community to be involved in the budget process at all and that the board should determine all budget matters, on its own, without any input from our community.
After all, someone from our community might ask why it costs more than twice as much to educate a child in Port Washington than it does, on the average, in the rest of the country?
But, excluding our community from the budget process is not the way the process is supposed to proceed. Why didn’t our school district take out a full-page ad in each of our local newspapers alerting our community to the very important initial budget presentation that was going to be made on Jan. 22?
“Oh,” Sloan, or some other board member, or Callahan, may say to you, “but the presentation was announced in the agenda for the meeting.” Well, let’s see about that.
First, the agenda for the meeting was posted on the district’s website just 24 hours before the meeting was held. Then, someone needs to have access to a computer and that computer must then have access to the Internet, in order to find the district’s website.
Then a person must know what the district’s website is. Once on the website, a person then needs to know how to find the meeting agenda and once he or she finds it, the person then has to know what the following means: (IX) Discussion Item: 1. Budget, Curriculum/Programs, Personnel Work Shop.
If that tells you that an initial budget presentation for the next school year is going to be made, you speak edu-babel much better than I do.
Joel Katz
Port Washington
