Schools

East School's Fate a Moot Conversation

Board of Education says district-wide construction projects must be completed before a decision can be made the city's oldest school.

George Costello believes East School should be closed — and soon.

The West Pine Street resident voiced his opinion to the Long Beach Board of Education at their meeting on March 8, when school officials said that renewed discussions about the 84-year-old school’s fate are at least a year away.  

“There’s a clear decline in [enrollment] population that will continue for many years to come,” Costello said. “I think instead of dragging our feet on this East School thing, we can close it down and benefit the other three remaining [elementary] schools and save lots of money. Our taxes grow every year and it’s a burden on everybody.”

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Board trustees told Costello that they had promised the community they would give the East School issue two years before making any decision on it and intended to honor that committment. But that deadline has since passed, as the board opted in January 2009 to postpone a decision on whether to close East School, the oldest and most deteriorated school in the district.

At the board meeting in January 2009, Patrick Gallagher, the board president then, announced: “For the next two years, we will very carefully monitor what is going on relevant to the wait-and-see issues, very carefully monitor what’s going on with enrollment ... and very carefully have more input of people that need to give us more input.”

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At last week's meeting, Costello said he believed the board should have made a decision on East School at that time. “A couple of people came in and spoke against it, and the board relinquished and gave those two years,” Costello said. “I don’t think the board should have relinquished it at that time.”

Board President Dr. Dennis Ryan told Costello that East School is more than just a building but a school that represents a significant number of families in the community concerned about its fate.  

“And what we learned in that forum was just how significant even the discussion of closing the school brings,” Ryan said about the talks the board held with the community on East School more than two years ago. “And we’re not going to treat it lightly … We are going to give it much more thought.” 

East School parent Lisa McKay reminded people that education is funded by property taxes. “And if you close the school and thereby lower the property values in a certain section of the town, it’s more of a binding system than to just say ‘we shut the building and we save some money.’”

In 2008, the board believed they had decide on East School's fate that year since they planned to put up a referendum on  a$98.9 million bond to fund the district’s “preservation plan,” the first phase of a district-wide master plan of renovations, upgrades and consolidation of its facilities.

The board had planned to close East School but allow students then enrolled in kindergarten through fifth grade to finish their elementary education there, and then consolidate future classes and staff into the district’s other elementary schools: Lindell, Lido and West. The community approved the referendum in May 2009.

All along, many East School parents had charged that the board has not offered the community enough time to review its proposals, and that it should take a wait-and-see approach, particularly with regard to federal aide.

At last week’s meeting, Gallagher said that there was misinformation on the issue of East School, calling the two-year time frame “a very generic number” that was not meant to be specific.

“The issue really was that we could not do anything on East School because of decisions on the other schools and the construction at the other schools,” Gallagher said.

He said that until the reconstruction of the Lido Complex — the middle school and Lido Elementary School — is completed, possibly by fall 2013, there’s nothing that can be done with East School. “It’s a moot conversation — probably for about another year,” Gallagher added.

Meanwhile, the school district awaits the release of the 2010 Federal Census, which will provide more details on Long Beach’s youth population. 

Back in 2009, the district explained that two studies of the district — one done by Nassau BOCES and one by an independent demographer — concluded that Long Beach schools would lose 800 students over the next 10 years. Given this projection, the board decided it had the responsibility to consolidate its elementary schools.

At the time, Superintendent Dr. Robert Greenberg explained that the independent demographer found that families throughout Nassau County whose children have graduated from high school are staying in their communities, including Long Beach, and that most of the people expected to move into the city’s new condos and co-ops will not enroll their children in the city’s schools.

At last week’s meeting, Greenberg said that enrollment in the district has steadily declined since he became superintendent seven years ago.

East School's enrollment was 332 in October 2009, 339 in October 2010, and 338 as of this week, and district-wide enrollment is just over 4,000 students, according to statistics provided by the district.

The district has demographers give them updated reports that it will incorporate into the census data, Greenberg said, and their findings are that the rate of the decrease has slowed. 

“So while enrollment is still going down,” Greenberg said, “it’s not going down as steadily as it had been.”


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