School officials present first part of Lynbrook district budget

By Brian Croce

bcroce@liherald.com

Lynbrook School District administrators unveiled part of their tentative 2012-13 school budget to the Board of Education and community members on Feb. 15, proposing cutting one section of the 10 kindergarten classes and creating a double block of English classes for sixth-grade students, increasing the class time from 40 minutes to 80 minutes.

The meeting, the first of three scheduled budget work sessions, focused on staffing, salaries and benefits, central administration budgets, inter-fund transfers and debt.

Dr. Melissa Burak, the district’s assistant superintendent of business, and Denise Nystrom, administrator for personnel and student support services, gave presentations on ways the district envisions reducing the budget in order to comply with the state’s new 2 percent tax levy cap.

Burak explained that the district had a March 1 deadline for submitting its maximum allowable tax levy to the State Education Department. She added that she had just found out that the district was also required to submit its proposed tax levy, though district officials were not told about this in December, when information about the tax levy was released.

“I don’t even think everyone in the state has ... come up with all of the definite details with this,” Burak said, “so we’re still mulling this over, but that’s going to be an issue moving forward year after year, because how many people recall the state budget being solved by March 1?”

Information from the state is still coming in, according to Burak, which makes planning a budget difficult. “If a school district relies on state aid to help bring down its levy to help it get to the tax cap,” she said, “how are we supposed to present that if we don’t have that information before March 1?”

Unlike past years, administrators began planning the 2012-13 budget with the tax levy instead of ending with it. “We usually build our budget and we take what our needs are and ways we can improve the program,” Burak said, “but what the tax levy legislation has now forced all school districts to do is actually work a little backwards.”