The New Hyde Park-Garden City Park school district started its public budget process to little fanfare Monday night.
Two people spoke at the Garden City Park School during the first of three budget workshop sessions the district holds to collect community input before assembling its first draft budget.
One possible explanation for the sparse participation, Superintendent Robert Katulak said, is the fact that no specific cuts to programs have been proposed yet.
“When there’s no rumor mill going around that X, Y and Z are going to be cut, then nobody comes out,” Katulak said.
Nonetheless, Garden City Park School PTA president Susan DiGregorio asked the school board and administrators to maintain funding for music programs and the district’s Odyssey Program for gifted fourth- through sixth-graders.
The district will hold a second budget workshop Feb. 8 at Hillside Grade School and a third at New Hyde Park Road School on March 14, when administrators will present their first draft budget.
That meeting is usually best attended, Katulak said, because there’s something concrete on which to comment.
A low state-mandated tax cap of 0.73 percent this year leaves little flexibility, meaning any increases in district expenses must be matched by cuts elsewhere, Katulak said.
“We always use the scales of justice in our presentation, that whatever you get on the revenue side and the expenses, you try to match them so they balance out,” he said.
Katulak also announced Monday that school superintendent groups in Nassau and Suffolk Counties and the Lower Hudson region sent a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week asking him to push for the implementation of reforms his Common Core Task Force issued in December.
The Jan. 8 letter from the Nassau County Council of School Superintendents, the Suffolk County School Superintendents Association and the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents pushed Cuomo to call for education policy changes in his State of the State address this week.
In the letter, the groups argue the state should stop collecting test scores based on the controversial Common Core standards until they’re fully reviewed, as recommended by the task force, to help rebuild public trust in the education system.
“Given the Task Force’s recommendation of the review and the revision of the Common Core Learning Standards, we believe that developing any new assessments linked to standards still under review will continue to erode our communities’ confidence in our system,” the letter reads.
