For School Budgets, the New Word Is No

FOR decades, voting yes in a school budget election on Long Island was as natural as mowing the lawn on Saturday morning.

Both things happened regularly because strong public schools and well-maintained lawns were integral to the unwritten suburban compact that had everyone working toward a common goal of maintaining property values.

But while the lawn-care rule still holds, school budget votes have become much more unpredictable.

Since multimillion-dollar scandals in the Roslyn and William Floyd districts first made headlines two years ago, Long Island voters have rejected school budgets at double the statewide rate. Voter mistrust generated by the scandals in turn has fed growing anger at rising school property taxes. The taxes have become such a burden for many residents that state and local officials who have no control over school districts have waded into the fray to try to help contain costs and find other revenues.

Both county executives, Thomas R. Suozzi in Nassau and Steve Levy in Suffolk, have spoken out against rising school taxes and have brought school officials together to try to come up with ways to consolidate costs while still allowing school districts to maintain local control over educational programs.

Officials in the 124 public school districts on the Island hope for better results at the ballot box this Tuesday, but across the Island, school officials and parents agree that the climate around the budget elections has changed significantly in recent years. While voting against a school budget would have been unthinkable for many residents a few years ago, more and more now see it as their only option. More than one-third of school budgets were rejected on the first vote in 2004 and again in 2005.

Mr. Suozzi said that historically the battle lines for school budgets were drawn with parents on one side and childless residents and tax protesters on the other. "But now there's no more line of demarcation," he said. "Now, everybody's fed up and everybody understands that school property taxes are just too much."

Tom Calabrese, who has had two children graduate from the Sachem Central School District and has one child still in the district, said he and other parents were now more willing to vote no, and might even see it as their responsibility.

"Nowadays you don't have to be a senior citizen to vote no," he said. "Now parents are starting to realize that being in favor of public education sometimes means voting against a budget where your money won't support the educational programs for your children."

Ronnie Lubel, a Roslyn resident and father of three children who graduated from Roslyn High School, said that he voted for school budgets "without questioning it" when his children were in the school system.

"But my confidence in this district, along with everyone else I know, was lost a few years ago, following the scandal," he said, referring to the theft of more than $11 million from the Roslyn district. "Now it's no longer automatic that we support the budget. I think we all want to know exactly how our money is being spent."

Mr. Calabrese said that even in a district untouched by the financial scandals that have rocked Roslyn and other districts, he and other parents "find ourselves not trusting our administrators and board members to do the right thing and spend most of our money on our kids."

Mr. Levy called the school scandals "a watershed in changing the perspective of people in the 35-to-55 age range who used to believe that more money for schools was equated with 'it's for the kids.' " School district mismanagement and theft uncovered in the last two years, he said, have fostered more skepticism and prompted much greater scrutiny of the school budget process.

Tom Murphy, the board president for the North Shore Central School District, said: "Communities are definitely saying, 'We don't trust you any more.' I think we're all still sucking wind from what happened in Roslyn."

In an effort to regain some of that trust, many school officials tried to come up with more conservative budget proposals this year and have made concerted efforts to inform the public about the merits of their proposals.

Mr. Murphy and his board members, for example, attended about 50 "budget coffees," where they went into voters' homes to make budget presentations and answer questions. Mr. Murphy, who is in his eighth year as a school board member, said, "We seem to be spending much more time these days talking about the fiscal end of things rather than educational issues."

RECENT reports put out by Alan G. Hevesi, the state comptroller, and by the Rauch Foundation would suggest that there is good reason for that shift in focus.

Mr. Hevesi reported last month that taxes on suburban homeowners in New York were 73 percent above the national average, and that they had risen much faster than inflation in recent years. His report found that the tax burden on Long Island households — where homeowners have an average annual tax bill exceeding $10,000 — was more than double the statewide average.

In January, the Rauch Foundation announced that polling for its Long Island Index on public policy issues found that a majority of residents saw soaring tax bills as their biggest problem. The poll also found that a majority favored drastic changes, like a local income tax to replace school property taxes, the biggest and fastest-growing part of the tax bill.

Mr. Levy said he believed that because these reports had heightened attention on the high cost of living and taxation on Long Island, school officials were perhaps more willing to consider options they might not have entertained in years past. That includes participating in a recent meeting of school officials convened by Mr. Levy.

At that meeting, school officials agreed to consider sharing resources in nonacademic areas like buildings and grounds maintenance and security, pooling their purchasing power for basic materials, and revamping employee health care packages by becoming self-insured, as the county has done.

To deal with the revenue side of the school budget debate, the Suffolk County Legislature has created a Homeowners Tax Reform Commission to consider alternatives to property taxes for financing public education.

"We're absolutely at the point of a tax revolt, because people just can't afford their property taxes any more," said William J. Lindsay, the Legislature's presiding officer. "And I think people are willing to look at alternatives they might not have been willing to five years ago, including an income tax."

In Nassau County, Mr. Suozzi started meeting with school officials in January to try to find ways to help school districts cut costs and to jointly lobby for state legislative changes that would bring more state aid to Long Island school districts.

"People need to understand that there's a structural problem in the state aid formula that particularly shortchanges schools on Long Island," said Mr. Suozzi, who has made the need to cut school property taxes a plank in his campaign platform for governor. The state aid formula does not take into account Long Island's high cost of living or the fact that many people living in houses of great value are house rich but cash poor.

George Leeman, the president of the Hampton Bays school board, said his district had been fighting that disparity for years because, despite being part of the high-rent Hamptons, many households in the district have relatively low income.

"It just comes down to how expensive Long Island living is," he said. "This current tax system doesn't realize that people don't pay their taxes with their property wealth, they pay for it out of their pockets with their salaries."

To those who would argue that shifting the burden to the state government would merely mean taking taxpayer dollars from another pocket, Mr. Suozzi said. "But if we hold the state accountable, they would help more to address the problems." State officials could, for example, approve legislation making it easier for school districts to share services or to alter teacher contracts.

Most Nassau districts are willing to share some administrative functions to help save money, Mr. Suozzi said. "That would have never been the case a few years ago, but they know now that things have gone too far and the public is demanding that they change," he said.

Ron Walsh, the president of the Locust Valley School Board, said his board and many others were willing to consider changes "because if we don't, there will be a lot more austerity budgets in the state and the people who will suffer are the kids."

He said that if more budgets are defeated this year, it will not necessarily be because more people are willing to vote no, but because "there are people out there who want to vote yes but who just can't afford it anymore."

His district is one of only 12 in Nassau County that have proposed budget increases of less than 5 percent. "But that's still 5 percent, and I know I didn't get a 5 percent raise this year," Mr. Walsh said.