Sewanhaka Board of Ed Has Been Doing Some Budget Cutting

With a little cut here and a snip there, the Board of Education has been able to lower the to a 8.8 percent increase in version 2A of the budget which was presented Tuesday night at the district's budget meeting.

There were reductions in three key areas: the BOCES budget went down $16,404; the teacher retirement budget took a cut to the tune of $320,000; an administrative position was cut and another administrative position had a pay cut which saved the district $210,410.

Budget 2A includes a tax levy of $131,152,809, which is up $10,622,836 from the previous school year. Expenditures in budget 2A were up 6.6 percent to $166,602,275.

The districts reserves are being tapped into with $1.3 million being used this school year and $4 million being applied for the next school year. There are $10.6 million in reserves in the district, which after the next school year's slice is taken out would leave the reserve about half of what it was.

Several of the superintendents in the Seventh State Senate District met with recently, where Sewanhaka District Superintendent relayed that Martins said he would "do his best to get Long Island its fair share of state aid."

"It is our hope that Senator Martins is going to be successful," Meierdiercks added.

He stressed that this budget is a "work in progress" and that there will be more changes made to the expense and revenue sides of the budget.

District resident Felix Procacci suggested during the meeting that the district look into consolidating the business portion of the schools and allowing citizens to have more of a say in the budget earlier in the year.

"When Nassau County was talking about consolidating services under Mr. Suozzi, they approached our schools and they wanted to know how we make it work," said Sewanhaka board President Jean Fichtl. "We do share a lot of services and when Nassau County was looking at how to do it, they came to us."

Another resident, Phyllis Falco, inquired about the program cuts in these two versions of the budget. Meierdiercks responded saying that the current budget does not include program cuts.

Franklin Square resident Muzzio Tallini asked the board to consider having a workshop about how to share more services within the district. He said that he doesn't see why there need to be several directors of curriculum, for example, when instead there could be just one.