While the Commission on Property Tax Relief in its preliminary report does not go so far as to recommend outlawing unfunded mandates, it does recommend no new mandates without a complete accounting of the fiscal impact on local governments and the creation of yet another commission to study streamlining existing mandates.

Although the end of the school year is one of the busiest times in the life of a superintendent, we caught up with Great Neck Public Schools Superintendent Ronald Friedman and asked him to give our readers specific information about the mandates imposed by federal and state government on school districts and the price tags that accompany them.

Dr. Friedman prefaced his remarks by saying, "Many of these requirements are things that we would want to do anyway, however, some times the way they must be carried out are just not practical and hence more expensive than they have to be."

The so-called No Child Left Behind federal law requires testing in grades three to eight. Tallying up scoring the tests, training of scorers, paper and printing costs and additional substitute teachers needed comes to $250,000 for the district. Mandated mentoring for new teachers has a cost of $200,000 per year and the extensive remediation services in reading, writing and mathematics comes to $150,000.

Special Education costs have skyrocketed as well. Caps on class size, required counseling, occupational therapy, physical therapy, consultants for specialized services, tuition to specialized private and public schools, transportation costs and summer programs cost the district an additional $1.5 million.

The state comptroller's office now requires three levels of auditors, an internal auditor, an external auditor and a claims auditor. Cost to district? $125,000.

A new requirement under the Family Medical Leave Act that will make current unpaid leave, paid leave, is estimated to cost the district an additional $140,000.

Perhaps one of the more galling mandates has to do with data reporting requirements. According to Dr. Friedman, "extensive, cumbersome and inefficient data reporting has increased ten-fold in the past decade requiring additional staff to handle data processing as well as staff for data entry. Regular and repeated staff training is needed as new systems are developed and discarded." Adding insult to injury, Dr. Friedman says that it is his belief that no one really looks at these electronic data files. The budget line to take care of this requirement went up this past year by $75,000.

In the wake of school shootings, someone came up with the idea of requiring school districts to retrofit all classroom doors so that they could be locked from inside in case of a school shooter roaming the hallways. While New York State legislators thought that the idea was a good one and made it into law, tshey did not see fit to fund it. It became another in a long string of unfunded mandates. The cost to the Great Neck School District to implement? $500,000.

A parent in upstate New York balked at having to shell out money for a calculator for a student. And so, the legislature passed a bill requiring that all school districts fund handheld calculators for all students regardless of financial need. Cost to our school district for the 2008-2009 school year? $55,000.

Extensive modifications of buildings and grounds to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act weighed in at $6 million.

The school district purchased defibrillators for all schools and units to be taken to games, events, and field trips. The initial cost was $100,000. Training for the use of the equipment, maintenance and contracts with oversight doctors comes to $20,000 a year.

The state share for covering the costs for transportation has been drastically reduced in the past decade as well. The state used to cover 90 percent of transportation expenses, now it is less than 10 percent. Dr. Friedman shakes his head as he contemplates the impact of the rising gasoline costs and the impact it will have on the budget.

So far, the federal mandates usually amount to between $2-3 million per year. State mandates vary from year to year, but average a million or more dollars per year.

There is another mandate looming on the horizon that has Dr. Friedman very worried as well.

GASB 45 is an accounting and financial reporting provision requiring government employers to measure and report the liabilities associated with post-employment benefits such as medical, pharmacy, dental, vision, long-term disability and long-term care not associated with a pension plan. The Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) set forth "Statement 45" due to their concern over the potential magnitude of government employer obligations for future retirement benefit payouts.

Most governmental entities have used a pay-as-you-go method of funding retiree benefits, paying the current cost of retiree health care premiums in a given fiscal year.

Some school districts across the country are opting to pre-fund this liability by setting up irrevocable trusts and contributing funds every year to cover future liability. The thinking goes this way: If an entity has a huge balance sheet liability, it may affect credit decisions, bond ratings and other financial health measures.

The school board authorized an actuarial study that determined that the district might need to set aside up to $10 million per year to comply with this mandate.

School Board President Barbara Berkowitz said, "We have been living with unfunded mandates for a very long time, and the financial burden ends up being passed on to the taxpayer. In a nutshell, the government comes in, tells us what service or item is 'mandated' to do or buy or spend, then provides absolutely no money for such expenditures."