Residents ready for school budget vote

Residents of the East Meadow School District will vote on the 2016-17 budget next week.

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, May 17 at every local elementary school. Administrators and Board of Education trustees encouraged the community to cast their ballots on the $195.79 plan, which calls for a spending decrease.

Superintendent Leon Campo gave budget presentations at each of the schools’ PTA meetings in April and at district headquarters last Thursday. 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, as it was pierced last year when 66 percent of voters passed a resolution that called for the creation of the district’s new full-day kindergarten program.

“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 to operate annually. 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.