NHP-GCP Superintendent’s Report: 2013-14 Budget, NYSSMA and Shining Star Awards

The following are the remarks of New Hyde Park-Garden City Park Superintendent Robert Katulak made during the public meeting of the NHP-GCP Board of Education on March 11, 2013:

Good evening, everybody. As you know we’ve completed the budget process for the next school year and now we will have the various presentations by members of the central administration to the faculty, PTA groups and civic groups in our community to answer questions in detail.

Our students are working diligently to prepare for the new common core assessments on a daily basis from the excellent classroom instruction they receive from a dedicated group of teachers. In the beginning of April, the state will be selecting the five schools who are in need of improvement to partner with us and details will be shared at the April meeting.

We look forward to honoring all of our music students who qualified for all-county chorus and who will become award winners at the NYSSMA conference at a future board meeting. Tonight you just heard an exceptionally small group of students who will be participating in that competition.

On March 18 the board work session has been cancelled to allow members of our community to attend the annual Scope “Shining Star” Awards dinner. The following people from our district are being bestowed upon that award honor from the Scope people:

• Board member David Del Santo, representing our entire district
• Administrator Karen Olynk from Hillside Grade School
• Teacher Angela Fiorillo, who works throughout the district in the math enrichment program
• Clerical person Diana Riccardi, Garden City Park School main office secretary
• volunteer John Klett of the New Hyde Park Road School who’s ben working in the first grade for a number of years.

We’re very proud of them; the dinner and the ceremony will take place at Villa Lombardi in Holbrook at 6:30 p.m. on that evening.

On behalf of the board, I’d like to personally thank everyone for their past input in the budget process this year. We’re one of only seven school districts in Nassau County again this year that will not have any teachers losing their jobs and that has created a budget that preserves almost all of the program for our students. I was at a meeting and astounded by 50, 60, 70 staff members that school districts around us in Nassau County have to cut so again I want to thank all the budget builders, my central office staff, Michael Frank, Mary Ellen and her office for all the hard work they did with that.

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