Superintendent Talks Tax Cap, Mandate Relief
On a balmy Wednesday evening of July the 6th, the Garden City Board of Education held its annual Reorganization Meeting for the year 2011 at the Central Administration Building. After board members were officially sworn into office, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Robert Feirsen highlighted some of the year’s most impressive student accomplishments, discussed the new 2 percent property tax cap legislation and provided a brief update on the current school bond referendum projects at the Garden City Middle and High Schools.
Feirsen offered congratulations to the Class of 2011 for their accomplishments and expressed appreciation for the recent high school commencement ceremony, which featured the brand new grandstand. He happily announced that Garden City High school was ranked 115 in Newsweek’s publication, entitled America’s Best High Schools.
Feirsen said one of the initiatives that the school board has encouraged the administration to pursue is to make students college ready. “We’ve seen our ranking go steadily higher,” Feirsen said, adding that the school was ranked 150 in 2010 and ranked 233 in 2008.
It was also reported that Garden City School District just received notice that the high school will be designated as a Scholar Athlete Team School of Distinction for the fifth time. In order to receive the honor, every member of the varsity teams must have achieved an average GPA of 90 percent or above during the past school year. “This is another demonstration of our kids’ commitment to things on the athletic field, but also a commitment to the classroom,” Feirsen said.
In light of the recent passing of the New York State Legislature of the 2 percent property tax cap bill, Dr. Feirsen remarked on how the new law could adversely affect Garden City residents. While Feirsen said the bill is known as the 2 percent property tax cap, it could actually be significantly less. He said because if the community rejects the school proposal for taxation, it goes back to the maximum taxable increase, which he says is zero.
“New York State School Board has also taken a position that we think that this is a misguided attempt to control expenditures, to control taxpayer’s expenditures. It does very little, almost nothing, to control the mandates that drove our budget last year and one can predict will drive our budget in the coming years,” Feirsen said.
One of the mandate relief provisions of the law is that it authorizes very small districts to share superintendents, which is already done in certain districts, according to Feirsen. He said it allows the district to do some more purchasing under state and federal state contracts and conduct a pre-kindergarten census every other year instead of every year.
Furthermore, Feirsen maintained the items addressed are not the expenditures that are driving school budgets higher. “There was no mention of pension costs. There was no mention of helping us out with health care costs. There were no mention of the many myriad responsibilities that are unfunded by New York State government,” he said.
Instead of dealing with those issues head on, Feirsen said, the state has made provisions for the establishments of a Mandate Relief Council to which the district can appeal for mandate relief. “I don’t know what that Relief Council is going to do… I do know we have a new budget coming up very shortly,” he said.
Feirsen said he will wait to see how the situation evolves. “We will follow the law and try to produce the most prudent budget that we can with a tax increase that is within the confines of the law…In many cases, the details need to be worked out,” he said.
School Board President Colleen Foley echoed Feirsen’s congratulations to the GCHS Class of 2011. She additionally chimed in on what the tax cap bill means and how it impacts the district.
“I also agree it is not a solution for our problems here. It’s going to make the process more difficult for school boards across the state. And it is disappointing to see that our local legislators haven’t really addressed issues that have been in the newspaper for months, multi-months, which is the pension and health care that’s being driven at the state level,” Foley said.
Feirsen updated residents on the status of bond referendum projects that are in progress at the south end of the middle school and high school over the next six weeks, weather permitting.
“We are doing the preliminary of the middle school addition. That’s coming along very nicely. They actually started even before we thought they would. We also have initiated construction on the bus loop, which will be completed before the opening of school. And the goal there is to provide better traffic flow for school buses and also eliminate some bottleneck every day at dismissal, as cars and buses and pedestrians try to pour out through the same exit,” he said.
Bill Zehner, the construction manager from TG Nickel & Associates, attended the meeting and reported that the current slate of projects are underway and on schedule.
