By Greg Sleter
With the board of education president and school superintendent both noting this years budget process will be difficult, local residents received their first glimpse of the 2010-11 school spending plan that as of now could raise the school portion of local property taxes more than 8%.
But while the school budget will be a hot topic of discussion around the community into the spring, West Islip Schools Superintendent Dr. Beth Virginia Blau during the first public budget hearing on February 24, quickly put to rest the latest school district rumor.
"We are not closing Captree," she said in reference to a rumor that school district officials were considering closing the Paul E. Kirdahy Elementary School at Captree. "I received about 50 phone calls in my office. But it's simply not true."
With the Captree rumor put to bed, Blau went on to outline the many hurdles in the proposed budget. The big challenge facing the board of education this year as it works to finalize a proposed budget over the next several weeks is the cost increases related to employee salaries and benefits in the budget coupled with a proposed loss in state aid of nearly $2.5 million.
In presenting what will be her final budget to the seven member board, Blau— who is retiring following the end of the current school year— reported that increased costs in budget line items such as pension contributions, contractual salary increases, insurance and social security payments as well as others account for an increase of slightly more than $3.3 million.
Those increases combined with possible cuts in state aid leave the district nearly $6 million short from the 2009-10 school budget that totaled $101,200,325. As proposed currently, the proposed 10-11 budget includes a 3.37% spending increase equal to just over $3.4 million.
During the meeting, Blau also offered an outline of projected class sizes for all six of the school district's elementary schools. But because of declining enrollment figures, there appear to be no major issues with class sizes.
During the meeting, board trustees did not provide any hint in terms of what possible changes they could make to the proposed budget. Currently, the board has four more public budget work sessions scheduled with the next one to be held Tuesday, March 2, 8 p.m. at the Beach Street Middle School Library.
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