After vote, residents, trustees look ahead

Residents celebrated last week’s school budget vote, in which voters passed a proposition that will implement full-day kindergarten for the first time in the East Meadow School District.

School board trustees, meanwhile, got to work searching for a new superintendent to oversee the program’s transition.

The May 19 election attracted more than twice as many voters as last year — 6,067, compared with 2,548. They decided on two propositions: a smaller spending plan that would have maintained the current half-day program, and a larger proposal to expand to full-day kindergarten next year, while piercing the state tax levy cap. Sixty-six percent of voters passed the larger budget, well over the supermajority of 60 percent that it needed.

The vote capped a successful campaign by hundreds of residents who gathered at nearly every school board meeting this year to urge trustees and administrators to lengthen the school day for kindergartners, as all but five other Long Island districts have done.

“It was complete joy,” said Jodi Luce, one of the lead advocates and a co-founder of a 750-member Facebook group supporting kindergarten expansion. “It really was a little bit surreal, because when we started this about a year ago, we believed it was the right thing. But I don’t know that we ever felt we could achieve it in just a year.”

Luce was one of several parents who spent Election Night at polling stations, handing out fliers to residents to remind them that they needed to vote for both propositions in order to approve full-day kindergarten.

Other advocates described the victory as bittersweet, noting the friction that had developed in recent months between many residents who supported full-day kindergarten and those who preferred to maintain the current, less-expensive program. “We did get a lot of pushback,” said Tara Fitzpatrick. “We did have some very vocal opponents, to the point where it almost got a little divisive.”