School leaders crunch the numbers

After the East Meadow Board of Education adopted the district’s 2016-17 budget on March 31, trustees and school administrators shared the details of the $195.79 million plan — which calls for a small spending decrease — at PTA meetings across the district.

Superintendent Leon Campo gave budget presentations at each of the East Meadow’s nine schools’ parent meetings in the first two weeks of April. He said that it was important to note that although the maximum allowable increase in the tax levy — the total amount the district needs to raise in property taxes to meet expenses — is just .04 percent, the budget maintains all current instructional and co-curricular programs.

The state’s so-called 2 percent tax cap actually limits tax levy increases to approximately 2 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is smaller. But Campo explained that the board made a promise to the community last year that in 2016-17 it would not craft a budget that exceeded the cap.

In last May’s budget vote, the district’s new full-day kindergarten program was included in a proposition that pierced the cap, and therefore needed supermajority approval. The program was instituted this academic year, after 66 percent of voters approved it.

“We did not want to go to the community and have to do that again,” said Joseph Parisi, the board’s president. “That set the tone for all of the planning. Once we set a ground-level objective of not piercing the cap, we got a lot of input from everyone.”

Campo said that the kindergarten program would cost the district an additional $2 million per year to operate. Another new expense came via a state mandate: The district will need to spend an additional $750,000 on its English as a New Language program in 2016-17.

In order to balance the budget, the board drafted a plan that calls for a .03 percent spending decrease next year. Leaders focused in particular on tightening the capital portion of the plan, which includes infrastructure and technology costs.