East Williston school district residents taxes will stay flat after they voted 403 to 92 on Tuesday to approve the district’s 2016-2017 budget.
The school board will also shift slightly after incumbent Trustee David Keefe and newcomer Alan Littman won unopposed races 390 and 370 votes, respectively.
“I’m really excited to jump in and learn, and understand better what my role is and to get moving,” Littman said.
Littman, a 1981 Wheatley School graduate and a district resident for more than 40 years, will replace outgoing Trustee Barbara Slone, who said she is stepping down after six years because of increasing demands from her nursing job at Winthrop-University Hospital.
Keefe said he thinks the large margin by which the budget and other propositions passed indicates residents largely support the district and its efforts.
“I think this is a board that works well together, and that we talk to each other rather than at each other,” Keefe said.
East Williston administrators cut more than $245,000 in contingencies in April to flatten the tax levy in the $57.4 million budget, which reflects a 1.4-percent, or $791,000, increase over this year’s spending.
Residents voted 397 to 90 to establish a $4.9 million capital reserve to revamp its three schools’ athletic facilities. The package will include fixes to athletic fields, tracks and gymnasiums, with the Wheatley School getting the bulk of the work.
Residents also voted 405 to 85 to spend $2 million from a reserve established last year. That money will install new windows at the North Side School, new doors at the Willets Road School, new handicap-accessible bathrooms and floors at the Wheatley School, and new kitchen ventilation systems at Willets Road and Wheatley.
The overall budget aims to continue building and creating curricular initiatives in district schools, including an engineering curriculum; literacy programs; a new Advanced Placement capstone course for high school seniors; and a technology expansion, Superintendent Elaine Kanas has said.
The proposed tax levy hike rose from 0.39 percent to 0.47 percent after changes in projected revenue from the Long Island Power Authority’s payments in lieu of taxes, the subject of a lawsuit East Williston and more than 40 other Nassau County districts filed against LIPA in January.
Littman’s election and Keefe’s re-election come amid an outcry among over the suspension last month of beloved Wheatley School teacher Matthew Haig, and less than a week before the school board’s May 23 meeting, where many students, alumni and parents are expected to speak in support of him.
Keefe and Littman said they could not legally answer questions about Haig’s case at a May 2 candidates’ forum, but they defended the school board’s transparency and said they support teachers’ “academic freedom” to teach controversial subjects.
Keefe called the school board “very, very transparent,” and Littman said its accessibility attracted him to it.
The two largely agreed on other issues such as the budget priorities, saying they would avoid cutting school programs, and the controversial Common Core standards.
Littman said he thinks the standards are valuable but that tests aligned with them are not necessarily the best means of accountability.
While he said the district is obligated to enforce the standards as law, Keefe, a retired Hempstead school district teacher, said their link to teacher evaluations is their most controversial aspect.
