Chaos Erupts as Board Addresses Busing, Audit

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• Publié par: Arze
• Nombre de lectures: 27
• Langue: English

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Chaos Erupts as Board Addresses Busing, Audit
Contributed by Thomas Duffy
Friday, 03 July 2009 00:00
The Levittown Board of Education held a special meeting at the Levittown Memorial Education
Center on June 22 for the purpose of discussing a petition protesting its recent decision to alter
the district’s student transportation eligibility policy.

During the budget vote held on May 19, a referendum (Proposition #2) was presented to
Levittown residents that would grant the board the authority to increase the minimum distance,
from one-half mile to three-quarters of a mile, that students would be required to live from their
schools in order to be eligible for bus transportation. By modifying the transportation eligibility
requirements, the board would make fewer children eligible for bus services and save the
district an estimated $800,000 per year in transportation costs. Although the referendum was
passed along with the budget, district residents have since compiled a petition with more than
900 signatures requesting that the board not follow through on enacting this measure and
instead arrange a special re-vote on the referendum prior to the upcoming school year.
The altering of the transportation eligibility criteria is one of a series of money-saving measures
the board has considered this year as part of a concerted effort to lower the district’s expenses.
According to Superintendent Dr. Herman Sirois, the failure of the state government to increase
aid to the district in the last few years, combined with the onset of the current economic
recession, has forced the board to implement an array of budget cuts. These cuts include
reductions in various programs, services, and staffs throughout the district.
The response to the referendum vote was the first of two major controversies that have dogged
the board in recent weeks. The second was the results of a state audit released on June 15,
which outlined a number of poor and even unlawful budgeting practices by the district in 2006
and 2007, such as over-spending on various projects and over-investing in reserve funds, which
ultimately resulted in the district accumulating a $6 million operating budget deficit. Dr. Sirois
had already publicly admitted to the district having a multi-million dollar deficit in 2007, which he
attributed mainly to the failure of a particular business administrator to calculate expenses for
roughly 25 district employees. That administrator, Dr. Sirois had said, had already been forced
to leave the district because of questions regarding the quality of his work. Although Dr. Sirois
has insisted that the 2007 deficit has since been covered by the district’s reserve fund and “had
no adverse affect on the taxpayers of the Levittown School District,” many residents have
continued to raise questions and even express outrage over the findings of the audit.
“I now question whether our children are being made to pay for mistakes due to the
mismanagement of our district,” said Jane Shortell, the mother of an East Broadway second
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grader, in regard to the recent budget cuts. Shortell, whose daughter will likely lose her
transportation eligibility as a result of the referendum, has been one of the most vocal critics of
the proposed reduction in bus services. Prior to the budget vote, she had addressed the board
at a meeting on May 12 and pleaded with its members not to include the referendum on the
voting ballot. After the referendum passed, she lamented, “I have no idea how I will safely get
my daughter to and from school. My husband and I both work. Our jobs require us to be at our
offices well before school starts.” She said many of her neighbors with children were in similar
predicaments, which makes the prospect of finding someone that her daughter can carpool to
school with highly unlikely. As for the possibility of her daughter walking to school, she said, “To
get to East Broadway, my daughter will have to walk along Seaman Neck Road, an extremely
busy and dangerous road, cross over Southern State Parkway, pass a sump, a truck lot, and
several unfenced wooded areas, crossing three streets before reaching East Broadway. That is
not something she can do alone.” She insisted, “Children that age simply do not have the
judgment or spatial awareness necessary to safely cross the street on their own.”
According to Shortell, the estimated savings gained from the passing of the referendum appear
much less lucrative when broken down.
“There are 15,114 households in Levittown school district,” she said. “Dividing $800,000 by that
number leaves an average savings per household of just $52.93 per year. I cannot believe that
any resident of our community really thinks that my daughter’s safety and the safety of all our
other children is worth so very little.”
Shortell also criticized the wording of the referendum when it was featured on the ballot,
claiming it was poorly, even deceptively worded – a complaint echoed by several other
residents who addressed the board at a meeting on June 10.
“Some [people] were confused about the language,” she claimed. “Some did not understand
that you could vote ‘Yes’ to the budget and ‘No’ to the proposition. It was not at all clear that the
$800,000 in proposed savings was already allocated in the budget they were ready to vote ‘Yes’
on.” She even went so far as to say, “I question whether the wording of the proposition was
legal.”
At the June 10 meeting, the board had voted to schedule a follow-up session on June 16 to
consider the petition it had been given concerning the referendum. But when the evening of
June 16 came – which, as it turned out, was the day after the results of the state audit were
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released – more than half the board members failed to appear at the meeting. As a result, the
June 22 meeting was then scheduled.
As is customary when attendance exceeds expectations, the meeting on June 22 was held in
the center’s auditorium rather than the standard conference room.
The meeting began with a Public Be Heard session, in which audience members who had
signed up in advance were each granted an opportunity to address the board. Although the
recent budget cuts had already resulted in heated discussions at previous meetings, the
deliberations of June 22 were by far the most impassioned and unruly of any thus far this year.
The tone of the meeting was set by the very first speaker, Gary Fisch of the Levittown
Community Council, who called on both Dr. Sirois and Board President Gina Interdonato to
resign from their respective positions. His brazen demand received a thundering ovation from
the audience. He also listed the names of the board members who were serving at the time that
the 2007 deficit was accrued.
“These were the people who were on the board when all of these shenanigans were allowed to
happen,” he said. Speaking as if addressing those individuals, he then said, “You have taken
our money, and you haven’t given the students of this district what they should be getting,”; he
added, “You should have been ashamed of yourselves.” He also claimed, “The $800,000 never
even would have come up if it hadn’t been for the tens of millions of dollars that the previous
board squirreled away in this district.”
In addition, Fisch, a former board member himself, criticized Dr. Sirois for blaming the 2007
deficit on the work of a former administrator and attributing the recent necessity of budget cuts
to a lack of state aid. He also disputed Dr. Sirois’ statement that the administrator allegedly
responsible for the previous deficit had been forced to leave the district because of the quality of
his work, claiming instead that he left over an issue concerning a paycheck.
The board rebuked Fisch’s speech with the same assertiveness he had shown.
“First of all, you come up here and complain about Dr. Sirois,” Interdonato said, “[but] you wrote
Dr. Sirois’ last contract, so what are you complaining about?” She insisted, “When any issue
came about, it was dealt with immediately. You can say what you want about why our last
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business person left, but you did not sit behind closed doors… so you don’t know why he left.
He’s gone; every single thing on that audit – which we asked to have done – has been
corrected. So let’s move on with the business of educating our children. Enough is enough with
the trashing of everybody.”
Nevertheless, speakers continued to refer to the 2007 deficit and the results of the state audit in
their speeches.
“So this is where we save our money: making the little kids walk to school,” one speaker sniped.
He accused the board of placing the burden of previous administrative mistakes “on the backs
of our children; on the backs of the 6- and 7- and 8-year-olds.” While he conceded that many
parents had been forced to walk similarly long distances when they were children, he noted,
“Times were different.” He pointed out that the projected $800,000 in savings was only “one-half
of one percent” of the district’s roughly $183 million budget, and asked, “Why do we have to
address one-half of one percent of a h