The Great Neck School Board of Education plans to spend more on translating district messages into foreign languages and on legal fees in the 2015-2016 school year, district Assistant Superintendent for Business John Powell said.
At the board’s Saturday budget meeting where Powell and the board went through the proposed $216,441,071 preliminary budget line by line, the board asked for about $1,000 more to fund bi-lingual translations, doubling the amount already proposed. Powell said these translations are for school messages included school closings and meeting announcements.
“Our board members had attended a meeting with one of our Asian-American group organizations in the community and they had mentioned some of the translations of district messages weren’t that clear,” Powell said. “The funding would hopefully improve those messages for our many different ethnic background families.”
The board also asked for about $50,000 more to be allocated into the legal section of the proposed budget, which was unveiled at the board’s March 16 meeting, Powell said. This would bump the amount proposed to be spent on legal from $362,980 to $412,980.
Powell said the increase is partly due to the district’s attorneys increasing their rates, but mostly due to an increase in general student hearings and special education student hearings.
Student hearings, Powell said, are mostly disciplinary cases in which a student can challenge an action against him or her, such as a suspension. Special education hearings are needed when a parent of a child with special education needs disagrees with the education program the district has come up with for that child, Powell said.
“A parent can challenge the district, and that’s when we would call for an impartial hearing and bring in an arbitrator,” Powell said.
Powell said the trend has been the amount of hearings the district holds is increasing, which is the reason for the proposed increase in financing to those sections of the budget. He said he did not know why the trend is increasing.
The proposed increases the board called for in the budget will not affect the bottom line, Powell said. He said he will take money out from other areas of the budget he typically overbudgets for, such as the contribution to group health insurance for employees.
Doing the budget in April when spending won’t start until the coming September, Powell said he has to anticipate some expenditures, so he builds a little extra into the budget at various parts. He said because the health insurance calendar and the school fiscal calendar don’t match up, Powell does not know the health insurance rate the district has to pay when he makes the budget, so he has to guess how much they will have to pay based on the past year.
This year’s proposed budget calls for $21,428,208 to be spent on employees’ group health insurance. Powell said he would most likely take money from that line of the budget to expand the legal and bi-lingual translation lines, but that if the district would have to use the full amount for insurance, he would curtail expenditures in other areas.
He said he would not take away any money slated for student instruction, however. The proposed budget called for a 1.11 percent increase over the previous year’s $214 budget.
Powell said these two changes were the only major ones requested at Saturday’s meeting. The board plans to adopt the proposed budget at a meeting on April 21 after another public hearing on the budget scheduled for March 30.
Board Vice President Larry Gross has said the school district has maintained all its programs with no significant change despite an increase in the tax levy that is one of the lowest the school district has seen in years.
Powell has said the district’s efforts to keep costs down was aided by a reduction in the amount the district must pay into the teacher’s retirement system of the employees retirement system.
According to the preliminary budget, the school district expects to pay $3,947,310 into the employee’s retirement system – $259,908 less than in the 2014-2015 budget – and $13,202,107 into the teachers retirement system – $3,483,690 less than in the previous budget.
Some of the factors driving up the budget include the $3.4 million the district plans to spend on increased salaries and new teachers and the $10.2 million it plans to spend on busing students.
