I’m writing this message to congratulate, as loudly as I can, Mary Callahan, Dr. Michel Hynes, Nora Johnson, Dave Kerpen and the rest of our school board members for pulling off a robbery now that is so supreme that even world famous robbers like Willie Sutton, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow and Bernie Madoff, would have to stand up and praise them. I didn’t realize until I saw our school district’s Budget Notice, finally posted on our Portnet website, how wonderfully thought out, our district’s supreme robbery is. By the way, we should have received that Budget Notice in the mail long before now and certainly, well before the absentee ballots were mailed out to us. But, they weren’t (or can I say , they cleverly weren’t?). The voting this year by mail-in absentee ballot is a win-win-win, for our school district. I’ll explain why.
Our current, pre-pandemic school budget, for the school year 2019-2020, which ends at the end of next month, totals $160.5 million. The proposed school budget, for the next school year, 2020-2021, totals $163.2 million. The proposed increase in school spending is $2.7 million. The proposed budget assumes that all schools will be reopened and that all pre-pandemic programs offered to the kids will be offered to them again. And it also assumes that all district employees now on the payroll, will still be on the payroll for the next school year, which begins July 1.
If the proposed budget is approved of by the voters, our school officials will be as delighted as all-get-out. They will have another $2.7 million to spend. However, if the proposed budget should be defeated by the voters, our school officials will still be as delighted as all-get-out. Why? Because if the proposed budget is voted down, the district will have to adopt a Contingency Budget, which is summarized on the Budget Notice cited above. Lo and behold, that contingency budget will be exactly the same as the budget that our school district is NOW operating with. The contingency budget will total $160.5 million.
So, our school district won’t have suffered any decrease in spending. It will just have suffered a decrease in a proposed increase and I don’t think that our school officials will cry much over that. They will especially not cry because they know very well that when schools are reopened, whenever that may happen, that many, many of the programs previously offered to the children won’t be offered to them again, at least not for a very long time.
That means that the contingency budget of $160.5 million will generate a very generous surplus for our district by June 30, 2021. How much might that surplus be? I would guess that it will probably come in at a minimum of $10 million and could easily be much, much more than that. And that explains why Willie Sutton and the other robbers mentioned above are patting our school officials on their backs.
The proposed budget for the next school year, 2020-2021, should take into account the continuing pandemic, but it deliberately doesn’t. Schools not reopening or reopened on a “hybrid basis” means that our school district will spend many millions of dollars less than it did before the pandemic. I previously estimated that the proposed budget is excessive by at least $25 million.
I watched and listened to both of the recent “Meet the Candidates” gatherings that were livestreamed to us. At the LWV gathering, the four candidates for a board seat were asked what they would cut out of the proposed $163.2 budget, if the district had to go to a contingency budget. None, especially Ms. Gilliar, who now sits on our board, could find a reasonable answer to that question. I think that they all said instead, vote for the budget.
Does it really make a difference Mr. Block, Mrs. Epstein, Ms. Gilliar and Mrs. Nadolne, since if the proposed budget is defeated, all that will be happening is that a proposed unneeded increase will be decreased. There’s no harm in that is there?
Joel Katz
Port Washington
