Herald Community Newspapers
The Central District's 30-year-old football fields desperately need to be replaced, according to parents. The Bellmore-Merrick Board of Education voted on May 2 to spend $170,000 to lay a fresh sod carpet on Calhoun's football field, and to do necessary drain work.
The decision followed months of debate over whether to install sod or artificial turf, which would have cost more than $1 million per field. The Central District made the right decision in choosing sod. The new field will ensure that Calhoun players have a safe, clean-looking field on which to play come September. At the same time, from a fiscal standpoint, the decision to go with sod respects taxpayers.
With all the talk about the Central District's football fields, it would be easy to forget that there's considerably more going on in Bellmore-Merrick.
According to school officials, the budget is set to rise 5.39 percent, from a little more than $107 million to $113 million. The increase is more than reasonable given the current economic climate and the myriad unfunded state and federal mandates that school districts are now required to meet.
The Central District plans to expand its enormously successful Meadowbrook Alternative Program, or MAP, which provides an alternative school for students who cannot make it in regular classes. Before MAP, such students were often failing a number of classes and missing school. With MAP, which is run at the Brookside School, they receive more individualized attention, as well as support from psychologists and social workers. At the May 2 Board of Education meeting, students, parents and educators heaped praise on the MAP program.
The district also plans to increase the number of SmartBoards it has. Currently, there are but a handful of SmartBoards per school. Teachers began using them this year. They are interactive "blackboards" that allow teachers to project movies, computer programs and even Internet Web sites onto white boards at the front of their classrooms. SmartBoards, Central District officials say, represent the future of education.
The district hopes to introduce an eighth-grade pre-engineering program called "Project Lead the Way" if Bellmore-Merrick's budget passes. Students in the program would receive training in cutting-edge computer software and equipment used by engineers.
Finally, the district plans to add security guards at each of the three high schools. Given the "Columbine-like" threat that Kennedy received last fall, guards appear increasingly necessary. On the day an attack supposedly was to be carried out at Kennedy, 900 of 1,300 students stayed home from school. By adding security guards to the proposed budget, clearly the Central District is listening and responding to parents' concerns.
We should note that Bellmore-Merrick has the fourth-lowest - yes, lowest - per-pupil spending of any school district in Nassau, yet its test scores place the district among the county's top performers. The Central District's proposed budget is a solid spending plan. Vote for it on Tuesday.
