Herald Community Newspapers
Central District budget deserves support
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, as well as 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, the Central District is clearly 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.
Vote yes on Merrick's school budget
The Merrick School District administration and Board of Education have assembled a $31.6 million budget for 2007-08 that deserves all residents' support.
According to Dr. Ranier Melucci, Merrick's superintendent, the budget is expected to increase 5.5 percent next year. The tax increase on a $600,400 home would be $178, or 50 cents a day.
We believe the spending plan is a sound and reasonable one that respects taxpayers while also increasing student services. Most notably, the budget would expand the district's highly successful sixth-grade pilot Spanish program from grade six to grades three through six. Early exposure to foreign language is a critical part of any student's education. It not only gives children a better chance of attaining fluency in the target language, but also improves linguistic skills in their native language by stimulating sections of the brain associated with speaking, reading and writing, according to dozens of university studies. Equally important, elementary foreign language exposes children to other cultures, so they become more tolerant of those who are different from them.
In 2007-08, the district also plans to introduce a six-day cycle, whereby children will receive their "specials" - phys. ed., art, music and foreign language - over six days rather than five. The district will save tens of thousands of dollars with the new cycle.
Additionally, the district plans to implement "departmentalization." The initiative, which will cost nothing, will allow all sixth-graders to change classrooms and teachers for various subjects, similar to what they will do in middle school. The program is intended to ease students into the middle-school setting.
For all these reasons and more, including upgraded reading and writing programs, the Herald offers an enthusiastic endorsement of the Merrick School District budget and encourages all Merrick residents to vote to approve it.
Residents should OK N. Merrick's budget
The North Merrick School District has once again developed a school budget that respects children and taxpayers. According to school officials, the district's spending plan is set to rise 5.88 percent to $28.6 million next year.
The tax increase over this year would be $198.41 for the average taxpayer with a home valued at $463,600.
District officials plan to hire a part-time, upper-grade literacy coach. Officials also want to place part-time reading teachers in first-grade classrooms three days a week for a half-hour a day to provide more individualized reading instruction. And they hope to upgrade the telecommunications infrastructure, which they believe would save the district money. The upgrade would be to the phone and wide area network systems.
The Herald offers an enthusiastic endorsement of North Merrick's 2007-08 budget.
