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Fair The village and the school district
An open letter from the village Board of Trustees
Residents of Rockville Centre have recently been beset by a series of arguments from the Rockville Centre School District complaining of its treatment by the Village of Rockville Centre. We would like to have our say about the various issues.
Framing the argument
The RVC School District complains, among other things, that it has been forced to pay for garbage service that it has gotten for free for many years. It says that free garbage service was part of a cooperative agreement and that in exchange the village has use of two school buildings for summer recreation programs.
Much is left out of this framing of the facts.
First, the village sees the use of those buildings as an exchange of recreational space for recreational space: in exchange for a program that uses two buildings for three hours a day for six weeks in July and August, the village has provided the RVC school district, free of charge, with extensive access to the village playing fields during the entire school year.
The last signed cooperative agreement between the village and the RVC school district dates from April 1990 and provided for access to the Bligh/Ketler Little League Field, the Mill River Soccer Field and the Lister Baseball/Soccer Field for both practice and playing time. Not mentioned in that agreement, but added over the past 20 years, have been the use of Barasch Field for baseball, Tighe Field for daily physical education at Riverside School and the Skelos Sports Complex, which South Side High School has adopted as its home field for boys and girls soccer and lacrosse.
Sad to report, the high school athletic programs have been far less than considerate in their dealings with the village’s volunteer youth sports organizations, who also have a claim on these spaces, but who are often forced to delay their own scheduled times on these fields because the school teams feel entitled to them. The truth is that the sports organizations have a prior and greater claim to these spaces because their tax dollars pay for the maintenance of these fields and the administrative costs of scheduling the thousands of hours of use each year.
