Jun 22, 2016 10:31 AMFor the second time this year, the Tuckahoe School District failed to secure a supermajority of voter approval for a 2016-17 school budget.
Tuckahoe School District residents voted on Tuesday, 215-186, in favor of the budget, but that was 26 votes shy of the 60-percent supermajority needed to pierce the state cap on tax levy increases. Since the budget has been defeated for a second time, Tuckahoe now will be forced to adopt a zero-percent tax levy increase.
“I’m a little disappointed with the result,” Interim Superintendent Dr. Allan Gerstenlauer said at the school after the votes were counted. “I think it speaks to the difficulty of trying to operate a school system under a tax levy limit that’s impractical. It makes it very, very difficult to sustain programs.”
Dr. Gerstenlauer said the zero-percent tax levy increase means the district will have to adopt a contingency budget that cuts all spending on new equipment, including computer technology and maintenance items, as well as some capital projects—which ones, specifically, will be discussed at a School Board meeting on Monday, June 27.
Like the original budget proposal, which was approved by a single vote in May but failed to muster the required 60 percent of ballots cast, the second budget proposal would have pierced the state cap. However, $240,000 was shaved from the original $19,533,000 proposal, leaving a proposed budget of $19,293,000, which meant a tax levy of $17,756,317, up 1.75 percent.
The revised spending plan was $197,607 more than the 2015-16 budget of $19,095,393.
School Business Administrator Dr. Philip Kenter said the most recent proposal was a bare-bones budget that retained all programs and staff, though it eliminated summer school, as well as a proposal to hire a security guard. A long-term tuition agreement with the Southampton School District also saved money, he said.
The allowable tax levy increase set by the state is 0.38 percent. The vote in May was 146-145, short of a supermajority by about 175 votes.
The School Board has a work session scheduled for Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the Tuckahoe School, where Dr. Gerstenlauer said they plan to discuss the list of cuts in detail.
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And also copy of the checkbook showing other dollars just being paid away with zero transparency .- dare not dive into tiny motels style or "crowded housing" with large population heading to school with little contribution to the system .....
I only wish that the voters made an informed decision, and not based on "facts" they heard playing telephone.
BTW - there is a Tuckahoe Board Meeting on Monday at 7:30, you're welcome to join the discussion.
Please do print some correct facts ? I heard little to no out of the box ideas at the last school meeting .
This is not for the kids but for the egos of some dinosaur Trustees who keep dragging the school district to shameful mediocrity and subject the kids to self confidence killing educational performance and testing among the worst in New York State.
This is the only district in the area where residents, fed up with this totally incompetent ...more Board, their supporters, and their wing nut ideas that have created one of the lowest testing districts on the East End (fact not wing nut hallucinatons) that many residents simply detest, that will no longer let them get away with academic murder, and fiscal profligacy, and have rejected their proposed budgets repeatedly in continuing expressions of NO CONFIDENCE!
To make matters worse, residents did it the second time, driving home their NO CONFIDENCE VOTE for the Board's administration! A normal self respecting Board, faced with this continued no-confidence vote confirmation will resign at this further rejection by the taxpayers but these people have faces thicker than elephant hides and are immune to public shaming.
Taxpayers do know what is going on which is why they continually rebuke this shameless Board who seemingly make the most stupid and ridiculed decisions, justifying them by your saying - "BUT IT IS FOR THE KIDS!". YOU HANG IN WITH YOUR YAHOO SUPPORTERS BECAUSE MOST TAXPAYERS ARE SECOND HOME OWNERS WHO CAN'T VOTE ON WEEKDAYS.
Even then, you can't even get a supermajority required by law to prevent entrenched malevolent Trustees with their parochial ideas from ramming through their neanderthat ideas perpetually. The reason not too many residents attend your Board meetings is that they're tired of hearing you sing the same ignorant songs, totally immune to resident recommendations.
No sir, the residents do have your number and have repeatedly refused your ideas. If you really love the kids, the three Neanderthals on the Board should just resign and allow competent residents to take over.
When people know increased spending really improves the performance and teaching in school, they will gladly approve but it is obvious this Board with all their horrendous decisions, about the curriculum, about a whole series of disappointing Superintendents, their giveaways of taxpayer money to thugs, their budget approvals of crazy union contracts and benefits that have driven the district into failure, their repeated insistence on preventing taxpayers from attending far superior high schools like Westhampton are repeated signs of idiocy that cannot be supported.
With this rogue Board in control, expect continued decline of this ill fated district that has been hijacked by provincial local yahoos insistent on dragging the school down to their level. We need a Board that taxpayers can support.
Sincerely,
Local Yahoo
Thanks...
Senate Bill S7622 (currently in committee)
"The bill would enable school districts to increase their budget over the tax level limit without a supermajority vote as long as the increase does not exceed 2 percent."
They come from the same gene pool of failed ideas that are very clear and obvious for everyone to see. For about the last ten years, the two were reliable backers of your lone culprit in his repeated whopping budget increases and some policies of which you were also complicit, like the decision to buy those two extra properties ...more that never did anything to raise the academic standards of Tuckahoe, just taxes which have disgusted the so many residents.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the taxpayers of Tuckahoe have been force fed so much humble pie that they just won't take it anymore. You constantly insist that things are not so bad because you were once so active on the Board issues, but residents know better obviously because all they read and hear about Tuckahoe is ALL BAD, as the school lurches from one crisis after another, rejected even by their cousins in Southampton who call facts as they are - THAT THE TUCKAHOE SCHOOLDISTRICT IS TOXIC AND HAVE REJECTED CONTAMINATION TWICE IN VOTES TO MERGE THAT BAILS AND MASKS THE HIDEOUS RESULTS FROM THIS BOARD!
Remove the blinders, face the facts, they're obvious, instead of constantly putting on your rose colored glasses. This type of fatuous counterargument is really tired, old, pointless, and totally contrary of results. No ma'm, things are not rosy and just peachy in Tuckahoville.
You can run that budget vote, if you could, over and over, and see no change in the result. I agree with residents who say, "enough", but I don't think further cutting is going to amount to anything substantive or long term that's good for the district. Tuckahoe frankly needs to completely rethink its very existence. Either merge with a larger, neighboring school district (I'm assuming the effort a year ago to create a central district among the South Fork districts is DOA), or find a way to gracefully cede the ground. The only other alternative is more cost, more pain, and more of this same back and forth which doesn't accomplish much. You can argue for changes in the board, changes in the budget, but none of that will give you a better result. It is a simple fact, and as a previous Superintendent said it best, "Tuckahoe will go academically insolvent before it goes financially insolvent." And as some of the commenters seem to be saying here, that process has already begun.
This day was coming.
What to do now? This a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees. All East End school districts are going to eventually have to contend with this same situation at one time in the future. My opinion is the little ones need to go big (merge with another district), or go home (let another another district take over). I think Tuckahoe has historically been a great district, but the time has come to do something very different.
First, I moved to Tuckahoe 30 years ago. I had not idea this would develop into 50K per student. I wish you would have clued me in, since you seem to be the one with the crystal ball. You would have saved me some grief.
Second: Your view about Southampton voters approving a merger is a moot point. In the end, the District is doomed, and those students are going to be educated somehow/somewhere. There is nothing like a fiscal crisis to force ...more the cowardly politicians to act. I raise the possibility that SH voters, in defeating the merger, may have made a better deal for themselves rather than one imposed by NYS. I think, rather than thinking the problem will solve itself, we should solve the problem locally before the State solves it for us.
Only the kids suffer when a budget is voted down. Building needs maintenance and union increases are legally mandated.
But the school was removed from NYS financial watch list. The one that SH district was put on due to cash flow issues. Tuckahoe will simply continue to truck ...more along preparing kids to go to Duke, Purdue, Willian & Mary, Elon, Dartmouth and many other wonderful schools.
It's a public school in one of the lowest tax districts in a very blue state....that has had the tax base reduced and the tax cap implemented..both of which crunched the school. It's not going broke. It's not *ahem* killed or anything else. There is 1 brand new board member and 1 who has been there for just 2 terms...Sorry but it's not as exciting as you all would have it.
See you next year and at tonight's graduation!!
Its time that people like yourself stop using the children as a weapon to justify the situation. 50k per student is nuts, and cannot be justified. Nobody wants to hurt the kids, but the District is not economical. And there are no indications that it ever will be. I repeat what I posted previously; If we, the residents, don't solve this problem together, ...more NYS will do it for us.
Tuckahoe is not closing and will continue to provide the amazing education that it always has. Now please go find another hobby!
-Jenn Corwith
Yes, cuts need to be made, I will not disagree there, but I can promise you the school isn't closing and it's certainly not circling the drain.
Perhaps you are right, Tuckahoe is a gem. But gems can be very pricey, and are out of reach for some of us.
It is a nightmare school district with absolutely ZERO, Zilch, NADA clam to any rational academic distinction held up only by mental hallucinations of Board members and supporters, and totally unhinged from the obvious reality well known to everyone in the region but seemingly not them.
THE INMATES ARE TOTALLY IN CHARGE OF THE ASYLUM! Productive rational debate is rendered impossible because they talk like day is night and night is day. A total and absolute reality revisionism of Olympian proportions! Now you know why Tuckahoe is in the cesspool that it is.
To residents who go back a couple of decades, we can readily see how this decline happened from "our little high quality school" that Tuckahoe was so proud of that in those times Southampton wanted to merge with Tuckahoe but Tuckahoe turned them down, not wanting to be poisoned by that grossly inferior school system.
The reason for the former success was the high quality of many residents in Tuckahoe, when Southampton College was still a thriving, vibrant college, where many if not most of the college professors lived in Tuckahoe, and actively participated in school meetings and academic affairs providing helpful state of the art strategies to improve the pedagogical capabilities of the institution.
Now you see wing nut yahoos who claim that Tuckahoe is a training ground for Ivy League bound outstanding students headed for Dartmouth, Duke, and Eton that knowing what you know, you wonder about the sanity in all this; or claims that Tuckahoe is such a superior school that it is a gem, like an academic emerald or diamond, when we all know it is nothing but a toxic cesspool headed toward insolvency at some point in the future, with test results commonly in the 50th percentile and worse in NY state, which includes metrics of inner city public school wastelands where some graduate from 8th grade functionally illiterate.
These are plain and simple truths, but those in control now are in Margaritaville and that hardly provides any comfort or hope, just despair. We all say let's do something before the four walls finally come crashing down on us, and they smugly say "If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Just come on in, the water's fine." And that folks is why we are in this abominable academic hellhole we are in and why a lot of residents in Tuckahoe have been fleeing this god forsaken hamlet for years and years, escaping for those with decent school systems. As Lamm says, the school system is a reflection of its people, ie, the ones currently in control running the show.
Rational quality people of Tuckahoe unite! Do something sensible before it is too late. "You have nothing but your chains to lose."
This gets back to my point earlier. It’s not the board, it’s not even the budget, which is likely pretty efficient (when compared to schools in the area of similar size). The average for the country is somewhere north of $12k per student, the NY average is $17k per student, the bigger districts in the county run between $17k-$25k per student.
Our nonsensical, in today’s terms, approach to continue to tolerate 10 school districts east of the canal with a combined student body of under 6,000 students is not workable for today’s education requirements. If you look at price per student for our local districts, we are paying a big premium for allowing a now centuries-old construct of tiny common and union free school districts. The average well run Suffolk County school district with budgets that work out to under $25k per student have individual student bodies of at least 6,000 students, and they have all the programs and services that a modern competitive education system requires. Tuckahoe cannot scale to these requirements anymore. These little fiefdoms of tax boundaries are not sustainable.
Those in Southampton who claim that people who bought in Tuckahoe knew what they were getting into when they moved there misses the point entirely. It’s not about location, it’s about the cost of basic education and the best way to efficiently deliver it to the most people. It is practically an elitist, racist, and unsavory enterprise that millions of dollars are levied by both the Sagaponack and Wainscott districts for less than 15 students per district, money that could be better utilized by a larger and better equipped East Hampton and Southampton district.
Tuckahoe is just one symbol of what is wrong with the district makeup on the East End. It’s time we stop whining about the boards, about whether you live in the Tuckahoe part of Southampton or the Water Mill part of Southampton, and do something concrete and meaningful that will make the educational system out here work both for students and for the taxpayers who work hard to pay those educational expenses.
dare not dive into tiny motels style or "crowded housing" with large population heading to school with little contribution to the system .....
By Jay Tuckahoe (6), Southampton on Jun 21, 16 10:56 PM
try following a school bus going to tuckahoe school and look where the students come from , many of these properties are paying minimal in taxes while burdening the rest of the tax payers
Blame the Government ...more for allowing many illegal immigrants to come to our country, then adding costly regulations, (without any funding), providing very little state aid and then placing a tax cap
The root of the problem is the multiple families living in one house, with many children. An absolute population nightmare.
When the budget gets voted down, the state mandated increases for the teachers still go through. They get raises, increased benefits and pension payments as usual. The only things that get cut are educational programs. That's Cuomo's NY State. Nobody cares who you vote for, at least have the facts. Don't do it for the kids, do it for the teacher's union. Sucker.
Do they get a Ford F-150 at the start of each school year? Vote the school district out of existence. Or send them to private boarding school, it's cheaper.