The Island Trees School District was at one point ranked as having the highest tax rate in Nassau County but has dropped down in recent years to number 33.

This transformation did not happen easily. In the 1983-84 school year this small district, that has students from Levittown, Bethpage, and Seaford, had the highest tax rate, per hundred of assessed valuation. This was one of Superintendent Richard Segerdahl's first years in the Island Trees district and he faced the monumental task of turning this around. He and the board recognized the need to remedy the situation and worked diligently to do so. Their goal was to provide quality education while controlling costs and taxes. It was a slow process that began in 1984 when they instituted a long-range Capital Improvement and Maintenance Plan, which allowed the district to plan for capital needs over a long period of time and not operate from a position of crisis management. The process really began to kick in in the early '90s by which point they had fallen to the number 12 ranking.

The first step in the further transition was to close the Gallow Elementary School in the early '90s. The district reorganized its grade level structure to include two K-4 schools, a grade 5-8 middle school, and a grade 9-12 high school. Closing Gallow Elementary School, about six years ago, saved the district approximately a million dollars. This also allowed them to rent out the building to the South Shore Christian School which brought income into the district. They also, around this same time, eliminated district owned and operated buses and contracted out all bus service, which was less expensive.

The next step in this process was to do something about the salaries. Segerdahl started off this process by refusing an eight percent raise for himself in 1992. This allowed Segerdahl to gain support from the school district, which then helped him to negotiate a one year wage freeze for school administrators and teachers. Segerdahl says "It was a time when things were really difficult financially for everybody. It was very nice of everybody to be willing to do that. It helped us to control the costs." The district also offered retirement incentives, which allowed them to hire teachers who were just starting out on the salary schedule, which helped cut costs even more. They have also managed to keep their expenditure low by controlling the number of staff members and eliminating positions that they did not need.

Segerdahl says that this was a very tough time for the district because they had lost about $2 million in state aid. He explains that "we then looked at how we could not put people out of their homes (because of high taxes), still give the best education we can, and try and control taxes, and each year we came up with new ways to try to fight what was going on, which was that as the state continued to decrease their support of education, more and more obligation fell on the local taxpayers." He said that he did not want to see people moving out of the area because they could not afford the school taxes. He adds "We did our best to come up with ways to keep the taxes down while still providing the best education."

Since 1992, Island Trees School District has fallen from being ranked as the 12th highest school taxes to the 33rd, which is below the median for the 53 school districts in Nassau County. Segerdahl is very proud of this accomplishment and says "It's been a major effort for us and one we're proud of because we shouldn't be down that far. We should be up with Levittown, Wantagh, Plainedge, East Meadow, and Seaford, which are up in the top 10 percent in Nassau County in terms of tax rates. It is really because of the effort the board has put forth to make some of these difficult decisions." He describes the reason that they fell from number 30 to 33 in the last year as being a combination of work that they have done to lower costs and other districts having raised costs. According to the district, offering the best educational programs possible for students while trying to keep the taxes in Island Trees as low as possible has been and will continue to be a strong priority for them.