The current Herricks school district's operating budget is $58.4 million to provide education and services to 3,900 students and maintain district and grounds. The latest budget proposal calls for an additional $2.7 million to get the job done in 2002-03.

Nearly 90 percent of the budget is used for salaries and benefits. Herricks educators are among the best compensated on Long Island. The superintendent and school board recently went further by granting domestic partner health coverage to same sex couples. Herricks is apparently the first school district on Long Island to grant such coverage. It may well lead to domestic partner coverage for any employee that presses for it on legal grounds. This precedent could also obligate other school districts to offer such coverage. This was done without any union negotiation, collective bargaining or employee concessions.

Each year special interest groups exert pressure on the school district to provide more costly services such as full day kindergarten, universal bus transportation, additional funding for gifted/talented student programs. Interest debt from the new construction bond issue, which was narrowly passed two years ago, is accumulating and must be dealt with in future budgets. Unions representing administrators and teachers will soon be eager to negotiate new contracts. Residential property reassessments will soon be completed and the county executive promises a 20 percent increase in county taxes for 2003. Yet the superintendent and the school board seem alarmingly unconcerned.

Working families and senior citizens are faced with school budgets and property taxes that are growing faster than their ability to pay for them. Without a large commercial tax base to help absorb the costs, the tax burden falls more heavily on Herricks homeowners each year. We can no longer expect to compete with more affluent neighboring school districts in providing unlimited salaries, benefits and services.

Faced with the reluctance of the superintendent and the school board to control spending, voters must consider putting the school district on a fixed income by rejecting the latest budget proposal in the revote on June 20 at the Herricks Community Center.

Timothy F. O'Leary