By KAREN RICE
Many residents, including parents of private school students, expressed outrage with the policy, which is to take effect immediately, and several attended the meeting to voice their displeasure.
The tight-budgeted district cannot continue to absorb the expense of having a custodian present to open a school building for use by non-Lawrence Public Schools groups, said Frank Parise, school board president. School Superintendent Dr. Mark Rosenbaum estimated that the district incurred about $90,000 last year in weekend expenses alone.
The impact for cost is very simple, said Dennis Verriello, Lawrence schools' supervisor of facilities. If someone has to come here to open the building and they were not scheduled to regularly be here, there is a cost impact. If that cost impact is not there, then we do not charge.
Verriello's office estimates that it costs about $50 for one custodian for one hour on a Saturday and about $70 on a Sunday. The expense varies depending on custodians' individual salaries.
The policy passed by a narrow margin, with three board members trustees Frank Argento, Dr. Asher Mansdorf and Dr. David Sussman voting no and four Parise and trustees Anthony Licatesi, Rose Harris and Kathy Raquet-Barry voting in favor. Raquet-Barry initially tried to abstain from the vote and strike a compromise by instituting the policy for next school year, but was forced to vote to break the tie.
Mansdorf argued that the policy would send the wrong message to the private school community. The Lawrence school district has held meetings in recent years with officials from private schools in an attempt to improve cooperation, and he feels the policy is a step backward. I had thought that this board, as it's now constituted, prided itself on vision, he said. And I think the vision that we have if we adopt this policy is a little myopic. What this policy does, very specifically, is target a segment of the community. Although from a [broad] review you're saying it affects every single organization that uses the school, from a realistic point of view the majority of school usage after school hours is from a specific demographic segment of our community.
He added that it would be unfair to charge the private school community because, as residents, they already pay for the facilities with their taxes. Although they're taxpayers in the community, we're going to tax them yet again for the use of a facility that they contribute to maintaining every single day, he said. It's inappropriate, it's unfair, it's just downright nasty.
Parise argued that it is never easy to make cuts, and referred to the Super Saturday and Super Sunday programs, which the district could not afford to maintain and had to drop this year.
It's difficult to cut programs, he said. I take exception to [the claim that] we targeted a community because, to me, it's very difficult to cut any program. We had to cut Super Saturday and Super Sunday and that was just as difficult. And we cut that program because we could not afford it.
Licatesi agreed that the policy was a necessary cut and that it in no way was meant to target any segment of the community. Tonight, nobody was targeted or discriminated against, Licatesi said. A lot of people got up and said that there was a particular segment that was targeted and that's absolutely incorrect.
Josh Gindea, immediate past chairman of the board of education at Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway and former chairman of the youth department at Young Israel of Lawrence-Cedarhurst, said the new policy would be unfair to the private school community because those schools have already planned their budgets for the year.
In the past, local synagogues and private schools have not been charged for their use of the LPS gyms in off-school hours for athletic activities and programs. Charging for building usagewould be changing the rules in the middle of the game, said Gindea, who is also a member of Lawrence's redistricting committee. Private schools also prepare budgets. The synagogues also prepare budgets. All schedules are done, all games are scheduled, every gym is accounted for. It would be impossible for us to arrange to [hold activities] elsewhere and therefore it would be completely unfair and unequitable to start charging now.
Resident Paul Silverstein, a youth director at Young Israel of Woodmere, said that charging for facility use now would also be unfair to the parents of private school children. [Private school children] have programs that they've been enrolled in and parents expect them, he said. They registered them for the year, or close to a year, and it would be unfair for the parents to change itIt's only fair that the kids should use these schools.
Vicki Fishof, parent of a Lawrence High School student, was adamant that the board find other ways to save money without compromising the needs of the children. Previous boards of education had a philosophy that when they come to budgeting and working out the monetary issues they face for the current year, they do their darnedest not to affect the services of children in our district both public and private school students, she said.
I suggest you look at places to cut in your budget that will not affect the children of this district. Our children must come first. Their educational, recreational and emotional needs come before anything else.
