Long Beach school district begins budget talks

Officials introduce technology spending plan

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Long Beach school district officials presented a draft of the proposed 2017-18 budget to the Board of Education on March 9, offering a $135.6 million spending plan that they said maintains programs and services.

The budget, which is just .05 percent larger than the current spending plan, could change as talks continue over the next month. The school board is expected to adopt the budget on April 6, and it will be put to a vote on May 16 after a public hearing on May 4.

In addition, school board Trustees Dr. Dennis Ryan and Maureen Vrona are up for re-election this year.

While there are no program cuts in the spending plan, the district’s chief operating officer, Michael DeVito attributed the small increase to new staffing costs, specifically social workers and psychologists. “We’re providing more mental health services this year than we did last year,” DeVito said.

The proposed tax levy is $98.9 million, he added — a 1.84 percent year-over-year increase.

In a presentation to the school board, DeVito focused on the staffing and technology budgets, explaining that there is a higher demand for social workers and psychologists in the high school, Lido Elementary, Long Beach Catholic Regional School and for district-wide positions.

If the budget is approved, spending for all staffing would increase $1.2 million next year, to $71.9 million, he said.

Those costs, however, would be offset by savings in other areas, DeVito said, including teachers’ pensions. The district has also stopped directly servicing the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach.

“Although the Long Beach school district would no longer have to pay the expenses relating to services at HALB, they also lose the revenue that other districts paid to Long Beach for those services,” Schools Superintendent David Weiss said.

DeVito also introduced a proposed $2.3 million technology budget at the meeting. Over the past several years, the district has used about $380,000 in general budget funds to purchase 930 Google Chromebooks for students, and in January it spent another $820,000 to buy 2,438 more of the laptops, which will be reimbursed under the Smart Schools Bond Act — a $2 million state-provided fund meant to be used for instructional devices, security systems and infrastructure.

Spending on technology would rise about $132,000 over last year’s budget item, because of equipment upgrades needed in the high school sound and video studio — which DeVito said was well-received by students — and infrastructure upgrades contracted out to the Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, program, including the installation of wireless access points throughout the district to accommodate Wi-Fi needs.

“We were pretty solid in our wiring, but we added coverage because we had some blind spots,” Weiss said.