School budget’s details draw early focus

The largest portion of the budget is instructional spending, which includes teacher salaries.

Alex Costello/Herald

Electronics — report cards and voting machines — were the big topics of discussion at the Board of Education’s budget meeting on Feb. 25.

The board met to discuss the proposed 2015-16 school budget, which totals $107.2 million, $4.1 million more than this year’s spending plan. But a relatively small item in the budget — $2,200 for Nassau BOCES — sparked a discussion of paperless report cards. The district would work with a company called WebEdge to create the online report cards for parents. In the following years, the cost would drop to $1,800.

“We believe, ultimately, this is how we will be communicating with both our students and our families,” Superintendent Dr. William Johnson said after the meeting. “We’re going to try to move away from paper to electronic communications and do it universally, across the board.”

Parents would be able to access the report cards through the Parent Portal on the school district’s website. The portal, which is currently available only to middle school and high school parents, allows them to view their children’s quizzes and tests, attendance reports and grades. Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Christopher Pellettieri described it as a “live teacher grade book.”

The new digital report cards, he explained, would be full report cards, like the ones that are mailed home, with students’ grades, a tabulation of absences and lates for each class and comments from their teachers.

Parents who can’t or don’t want to receive the report cards electronically can opt for the paper version. “Everybody will get an e-report card, but they can request and receive a paper one if they choose,” Johnson said.

He added that the district would probably save some money on printing and postage for the paper report cards, but that wasn’t the main reason for the switch. “… [T]his isn’t just about saving money,” he said. “It’s about walking ourselves into the middle of the electronic age and using electronic media to transmit information to each other.”

The other topic of conversation was the 2015-16 district election, and the voting machines that will be used for it.