Malverne, West Hempstead Support BOCES Budget

"BOCES is like the mafia...they get a piece of everything," one local school board member said at a recent budget meeting.

The board trustee was referring to the fact that throughout the budgets for each local district in Nassau County, there are several lines on the expense side labeled "BOCES."

The Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, encompasses 56 component school districts within the County including Malverne and West Hempstead.

"It was created to help with cost-saving initiatives for bidding and contracting and cost-sharing, but more importantly, for services and special ed for the neediest students," said Martin Kaye, a former West Hempstead school board member who now serves on the Nassau BOCES board.  "[These students] can not be helped in their own individual districts and need a wider variety of teaching tools."

In the case of special education students with severe learning disabilities, Kaye explained that the district would need to hire a specialist, which would be very costly, to teach only a handful of students if BOCES did not exist.

Instead, by pooling resources among all the districts in Nassau, the students can receive the help they need while the district saves a substantial amount of money.

"You get much better care and a more intensive program at a reduced price," Kaye said. While each district does, however, have to foot the bill for transporting these students to the out-of-district facilities, Kaye explained that the districts will collaborate and share buses when possible to keep costs lower.

In addition to special education services, which are mandated, BOCES also provides occupational and technical training to students in its component districts.

"Many of the high schools today can't afford to run live shops like they did in the old days," Kaye said. "We offer this to districts on a per-pupil-basis for a fee."

While programs like this are available to all the districts, it is up to each one to decide whether or not they will provide it to their students.

The cost of both the optional and mandated services are ingrained in each district's individual school budget, which residents will vote on May 17, but a separate budget for Nassau BOCES administrative operations was recently voted on by school boards in Malverne, West Hempstead and other component districts in late April.

This budget, totalling approximately $20 million according to Kaye, reflects mainly the cost of personnel for BOCES. It makes up 6.4 percent of BOCES' total budget.

"We have to employ people to run our operations, building principals, administration, supervisors," Kaye said. "That [budget] includes their salaries and benefits, the employees retirement system, health insurance and any other supplemental retirement benefits because of contractual obligations."

While the final budget-to-budget increase will not be determined until BOCES gets their health insurance declarations from their provider, most likely in late August, he estimates it to come in around 2 to 3 percent. Rate changes required for different programs are expected to rise by 1 to 2 percent, he added.

"It's looking very, very good for us," he said. "Unlike some of the catastrophic increases out there, we have a good cost containment strategy."

To encourage transparency and public input, Nassau BOCES crafted its budget with help from an advisory council that met four separate times to discuss the figures. The council included over 30 people, including residents, representing the various school districts that receive BOCES services. It also included input from its Budget Review Committee, comprised of 18 representatives from school districts in the area.

Once their budget proposal was finalized they sent it to all of the 56 component districts to vote on.

"All you need is a majority," Kaye explained, saying there were a handful of school boards that could not meet on April 27 to vote. Of those who did, more than 35 approved the budget, along with the three candidates nominated for the BOCES board, all incumbents. "They became elected with that vote."

In order to keep the budget-to-budget increase relatively low, currently at 2.8 percent, the Nassau BOCES eliminated two administrative positions.

They also implemented several other cost-saving measures in other areas of its budget such as:

• Transitioning printed materials to electronic versions.
• Renegotiating telecommunications contracts.
• Consolidating its Adult Evening Program.
• Purchasing a van to transport students instead of paying an outside contractor.
• Pursuing grants.
• Consolidating departments and reducing staff.
• Lowering natural gas costs through Nassau County Energy Service bid.
• Reducing equipment requests and supplies.

"We're going to run a little leaner," Kaye said. "I think everyone is looking for this in their own school district budgets and ours is no exception."

Kaye said BOCES is also working on its pricing and fee structure for the various services it renders including teen parenting, career and technical training, special education, the Long Island School for the Arts and the Pace program to name a few.

He explained that these programs will only exist they will only exist if the component school districts decide to send students to them.

"If they're made smaller, we close down or cut back on these programs so we match the contribution made by the school districts with what we need to provide for them," he said.

Overall, he said most of the school distrcts, especially local superintendents, looked favorably on the budget BOCES created fro 2011-2012.

"It's an extraordinary good budget," he stated. "It should reflect a nice savings for districts going forward."

Click on the photos to the right to see the Adminstrative Budget for Nassau BOCES that was proposed for 2011-2012 and last year's figures.