If for ANY REASON you will not be able to vote at the various School District Polling Places between 7:00 AM and 9:00 PM on May 19th you are entitled to VOTE NOW!!! If you have friends, neighbors or family members forward them a copy of the Application Form below or print it out and hand out to to them.
2009 Absentee Ballot Application for New Rochelle Schools & Library Election
If want to stop by the Second Floor at City Hall you can ask the clerk to provide you an absentee ballot and vote right then and there.
We need EVERYONE to vote this year not just the 3,000 to 4,000 who have been voting in previous elections. Every vote counts!
The School District has been engaged in a get-out-the vote effort at school board meetings to motivate their base to come out to the polls, going so far as to register voters at school board meeting held at the public schools. The teachers union, the school administration and school board and the PTA Council (which is run by the head of the teachers union) have all been engaged in efforts to bring “their” voters out to the polls. The School District counts on very low voter turnout (less than 10% of registered voters actually vote in school board and school budget elections) and voters who either work for the district or otherwise have reason to be in school building on voting day (10 of 13 polling places are in public schools).
In these tough economic times, Talk of the Sound wants to make sure the other 90% of New Rochelle residents who typically do not vote on the school budget are heard.
Here is what you are being asked to vote on this year:
RESOLVED, that the general fund proposed budget of expenditures of the Board of Education of the City School District of the City of New Rochelle, Westchester Coun ty, New York, for the 2009-2010 school year in the amount of $229,462,969 for the purposes shown in the statement of estimated expenditures be and hereby is approved and authorized to be submitted to the voters at the Annual School Election/ Budget Vote, May 19, 2009; and the amount thereof shall be raised by a levy of a tax upon taxable property located within the school district, after first deducting the monies available from State Aid and other sources as provided by law?
You should take a very hard look at that resolution.
What is this “proposed budget of expenditures” they are talking about. Is every voter being given a copy of that budget? Do they realize that NONE of the line items for salaries are actually for 2009-10 as the cover of the budget says?
What is this amount that “shall be raised by a levy of a tax upon taxable property located within the school district”. The figure they provide – $229,462,969 – does not directly answer that question. Why? Because the district does not know exactly how much in state and federal aid they will be getting during 2009-10. They guess that the amount of the levy will be somewhere around $176 mm. They are going to increase taxes to whatever figure is required to take that money. So what are the taxes? The District says 3.22%. Do not believe it. The truth is they have no idea because the City does not calculate the assessed value of property until August-September, long after we vote on the school budget.
This District has prepared a “budget news” mailer which will be sent to every voter in New Rochelle.
This document is predicated on a phony budget packed full of flagrant misrepresentations of costs and revenue projections.
For example…
1. The School District claims “costs to launch the expanded Kindergarten program are offset by New York State incentive grants that cover district costs involved with transitioning from half-day to full-day kindergarten programs. One-time costs include modifying some classrooms to create the kindergarten program and purchasing furniture and supplies”. They say the district may also receive additional funds as the per-pupil allocation increases from half-day to full-day students.
This is meant to fool voters into believing that Full-Day is “free”. In fact, at the first budget workshop, Assistant Superintendent for Finance John Quinn stated that the district “might even make money” from Full-Day Kindergarten. Does anyone really believe that this is a “free” program?
Let’s look at reality.
Going from half-day to full-day is equivalent to doubling the amount of class time a student receives which means you need twice as many teachers, twice as many assistants, more supplies and more of many other things. You need one less bus trip in the middle of the day. You get some money from the state and there is a one-time grant. So you have a bunch of new costs and a PARTIAL OFFSET for just the first year.
What the District fails to mention is…
…the state MAY cover SOME of the per-pupil costs but State Aid is only about 15% of the entire school budget; 70% of the per-pupil costs come from local taxes so about 500% more of the per-pupil cost will be borne by local taxes. Of course, people who pay taxes in New Rochelle also pay state taxes so the State Aid is not “free” unless you are an educrat.
…the budget calls for $110,000 to pay for new teaching assistants. That is an entirely new cost not mentioned by the District in their newsletters.
…there will be a “reassignment of some existing certified staff”; we believe this will be a “reassigning” 7 teachers (if anyone has the exact figure please add a comment and I will edit this). We do not know who these teachers are or how much they are paid but these are teachers who were apparently not needed elsewhere. There has been no explanation as to what these otherwise unneeded teachers are doing right now but they are all being paid right now. As a guesstimate, 7 teachers will costs somewhere around $600,000.
So, this “free” program will actually cost about $2 mm out of which somewhere over $900,000 will be reimburse for year one after which the full cost will be paid by the district which with 70% coming from local taxes translates into new spending of $1.4 mm this year, go to $2 mm or more each year after.
For those who understand Net Present Value (NPV), the standard method for using the time value of money to appraise long-term projects, you know that if assume a time period and an interest rate we can approximate the cost today to provide this program going forward. I will leave it to the experts to add a comment with some scenarios but suffice to say that the NPV of Full-Day K is tens of millions of dollars. The good news is that we do get about $900,000 in “incentive grants” this year — that’s SOME incentive huh? Take in $900K so we can pay out tens of millions. Only for an educate is 900,000 to tens of millions an “offset”.
2. The School District claims that the the decrease in assessed value of property in New Rochelle will decline at 1.76%. No one in their right mind believe this number. Every home owner knows their property values have cratered over the past year. Yet this assumption of 1.76% allows the district to claim that the tax increase required to support their budget will be 3.22%. Ha! The tax increase will be FAR HIGHER but by the time you know that (September) the budget vote will have come and again. We will have more on this soon.
3. 51% of the budget goes to salaries and 19% goes to benefits. Another 5.1% goes to BOCES which, in turn, gives about 70% of its money to salaries and benefits of their staff. Another 1.4% goes to pay private school tuition of special needs students which likewise pays out most of its revenue in the form of salaries and benefits. Altogether, more than 75% of the budget is going to pay salaries and benefits, the vast majority of it here in New Rochelle. District administrators and school board members told residents at budget workshops that they could not discuss ongoing union negotiations which, we are told, will not conclude until after May 19th. How convenient! Despite claims by school officials that it was illegal for anyone involved to discuss ongoing negotiations both the Superintendent Richard Organisciak and Union Boss Marty Daly discussed this very topic with the press; Organisciak told the Journal News there would be no pay freezes and no job cuts something he pointedly refuse to address to New Rochelle residents at board meetings. What kind of negotiator tells the the other side that their starting position is no job cuts and across the board pay increases? I want to get in on that school board poker game!
4. The numbers in the budget are basically a fraud. There are millions and millions of dollars hidden between the line items contained in the budget.
THE SOLUTION?
The only real way to know what is going on here is to vote down the budget (twice) so that the state can come in and have accountants from outside the District look at the books. This is what happened in Mount Vernon and they were able to get rid of 816 kids who were “incorrectly enrolled” from other districts, mostly the Bronx.
Despite all the scare tactics by the school district — the only people who really need to fear the budget vote this year is those pigs who have been feeding at the public trough known as the City School District of New Rochelle. By voting down the budget (twice) and bringing in the state to inspect the books, we can do what Mount Vernon did and get rid of the 800-1000 kids have no right to be in our schools, get rid of 50-60 teaching positions that have been supporting them , all while lowering the budget by over $20mm, REDUCING school taxes, improving student-teacher ratios, and improving test scores (rest assured those kids from Mount Vernon and the Bronx are not INCREASING average test scores in New Rochelle).