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Hayes is upset winner in Island Park board seat
The Island Park and Oceanside school budgets passed by relatively narrow margins on May 18 and, in a stunning upset in the Island Park school board race, candidate Richie Hayes clinched a five-year seat by just 10 votes.
In Oceanside, 1,936 residents voted in favor of the $128.5 million budget, a 1.98 percent increase over the current spending plan, while 1,436 voted against it. In Island Park, 502 residents supported a $32.5 million budget, a $1.3 million increase over this year's, while 448 voters opposed it.
The budgets will maintain all academic programs and extracurricular activities in the districts, school officials said.
“The fact that the community supported the budget by 500 votes is something we're extremely grateful for,” said Oceanside Superintendent Dr. Herb Brown. “Not only did the budget pass, but we had two board members get re-elected who are proactive when it comes to providing a quality education for students and keeping taxes as low as possible.”
While the results indicate that residents in both communities were nearly split over the budgets, their passage means that both districts managed to weather a stormy economic climate. Ten school budgets failed in Nassau and Suffolk counties, including the West Hempstead School District spending plan, which affects 206 high school students from Island Park (see story, below).
“We felt that in difficult economic times, people were going to be looking very closely at the budget,” Brown said, “and that's why we tried to keep the increases as low as possible.” He added that the budget passed in all four voting locations.
One Oceanside resident, who asked not to be named, said she voted in favor of the budget despite the increase in school taxes. “You do it for the kids,” she said. “Of course, it means it's going to be a lot of taxes, but this is a great school district.”
In Island Park, longtime resident Nick DeMatteo said he voted in favor of the budget as well. “I don't have children in the district anymore, but I did it for the other kids in the community,” DeMatteo said. “I didn't want it to go down because the kids could have lost out.”
