Schools

West Hempstead's Budget Advisory Committee Gets Much Bigger

The Board of Education decides to open up the 2012-2013 budget process to all stakeholders instead of a few.

In its first year, the West Hempstead school district's Budget Advisory Committee consisted of seven residents, three board members and one district official.

But after much discussion at their Oct. 4 policy meeting, the Board of Education has decided to invite more community members to participate. Make that, all community members.

This year, the public budget workshops will start much earlier too, sometime in November rather than March, to allow more people participate. This includes parents, students, faculty and residents who do not have children enrolled at the schools.

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"The consequences of a failed budget are going to be great this year. You need to find a way to engage the whole community," Board President Walter Ejnes said at the meeting. This was something he learned at a seminar he recently attended in Albany with Vice President James Mariano that focused on Budget Advisory Committees (BAC). There they studied one school district that disbanded its BAC, opting instead to open the process up to all stakeholders and not just a selected few.

"They got 500 people to work in small groups,” a set-up similar to that used by West Hempstead’s Strategic Planning Committee, Ejnes said. “In the end not everyone was a winner or a loser but they had a better consensus.”

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Ejnes’s fellow board members were also in favor of seeking more public input when crafting this year’s budget, especially with the addition of the 2 percent tax cap and the information gleaned from the district’s transportation study.

“Residents think the cap means taxes can’t go up more than 2 percent but that’s not entirely true,” Trustee Cynthia DiMiceli said. “We will need to educate this year.”

Superintendent John Hogan agreed that the district will face extra challenges this year with the budget.

“The ways we used to think about the budget or explain it aren’t going to work anymore,” he said. “We are living in a different budgetary world… it’s going to come in close to the 2 percent but some things aren’t going to be included and people won’t understand it.”

He added, “There aren’t many places you can go without affecting the educational product.”

While the district is legally not permitted to tell residents to “vote yes” for the budget, it can educate the community about the process, the challenges they face and various components of the budget. Board members are looking into speaking at to local organizations throughout the community and holding Saturday afternoon workshops for older residents who may not be able to attend the evening ones.

The handful of applicants who were selected to serve on this year's committee before the format was changed, will be asked to help coordinate efforts to get the whole community involved.

“We can still call it a Budget Advisory Committee,” Ejnes said, “but it’s bigger.”


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