By Doug Miller
Several angry residents adopted confrontational tones with the Board of Education and Superintendent of Schools Dr. Robert Greenberg over the proposed $97,681,755 school budget for 2005-06, which will increase the district's tax levy by 9.9 percent, and each cited escalating teacher salaries and soaring taxes as the reason.
The budget goes before voters in a referendum on Tuesday. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Voters will also be asked to vote on the Long Beach Library's proposed 2005-06 budget of $2,705,220. In addition, two seats are open on the Board of Education, and one seat on the Long Beach Library Board of Trustees is up for grabs.
At issue Tuesday night was numbers - and the various ways they can be interpreted and misinterpreted. People arguing for and against the budget sometimes used the same statistics against one another. The result was an air of confrontation, long stares and some hurt feelings.
Opponents of the budget cited the district's cost per student, dividing the $97 million proposed budget by the district's 4,000 students and arriving at a staggering $22,000 per student. Assistant Superintendent for Finance Frank Fiumano said that that number doesn't tell an accurate story, because the district bears the costs of transporting the 20 percent of the district's students who attend private schools.
But Fiumano was challenged by Damien Sciano, a resident who is chairman of the Long Beach Planning Advisory Board. "I would argue that those students work out to be a subsidy for the district," he said.
A group calling itself Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Education Solutions made a presentation, led by Eleanor Simmons and Francis X. McQuade. Its members called for the defeat of the budget, citing increases in salaries and benefit payments to district employees and claimed that the district sports a 20 percent "failure rate," the number of students who do not graduate in four years.
"Let's put this in context," Simmons told the board in a prepared statement. "For what we are spending per child, our kids could go to the finest private schools on Long Island. ... Frankly, our performance is disgraceful."
After her speech - which received a smattering of applause from the audience and more than a few hisses from the Long Beach Classroom Teachers' Association, which was represented by members wearing white T-shirts bearing the union's logo who filled one side of the room - members of the board challenged Simmons's numbers. The "failure rate" is actually less than 2 percent, Greenberg said.
Simmons's data compared Long Beach's alleged 20 percent dropout rate with Roslyn's zero percent, Greenberg said, which made it disingenuous. "Her rate includes all the students who transfer and move out of town," Greenberg said after the meeting. "Nobody ever moved out of Roslyn?"
The group also called a press conference Tuesday afternoon, in which members laid out their reasons for working against the budget. McQuade said the problem was one of degrees, claiming that the low test scores were coupled with escalating costs protected by the district and, as he put it, the "so-called" Budget Advisory Committee. McQuade said that the citizens group, which made recommendations about what it would like to see in the budget, was not inclusive enough in that it did not seek out disgruntled taxpayers like him.
He also said that the high percentage of Long Beach teachers who are native to the city contribute to an atmosphere of "patronage" in the school budgeting process.
Comments about this story? DMiller@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.
