NY TIMES Editorial: July 11, 2004
LONG ISLAND
School Scandal on Long Island

The fallout from the Long Island school scandals stretches far beyond Roslyn, where the former superintendent, Frank Tassone Jr., was taken away in handcuffs last week, formally charged with stealing more than $1 million from his academically elite district. Because of Roslyn, however, every school district that asks its residents to pay more for quality schools will have to battle new suspicions that tax dollars are being misspent. It's critical to take action now, but the damage is too great to be repaired quickly.

Dr. Tassone pleaded not guilty after he was arrested, as did the district's former business manager, Pamela Gluckin, who was charged earlier with pilfering another million or so. With $8 million in unexplained expenses still on the Roslyn district's books, as many as 20 people are now under investigation. Meanwhile in Suffolk, a retired school official has been charged with stealing $750,000 from the William Floyd School District. And there are questions being raised in other districts around Long Island.

The problems in Roslyn seem to have gone unnoticed for so long mainly because the community believed that the students were getting a good education, as shown by test scores and college admissions. This is not usually the case in places where widespread mismanagement occurs. When the impoverished Roosevelt district had recurring financial problems, the State Education Department opted to take over the whole operation two years ago and run it from Albany. But in that case the students, whose test scores were low, were getting cheated as well as the taxpayers. Although parents in poor districts will undoubtedly suspect that Roslyn is getting lighter treatment because of its wealth and clout, no one would be served by a state takeover there. Local control is always better than administration from a distance, and the Roslyn district has shown itself capable of taking care of the children, if not the money.

But it's ridiculous for multimillion-dollar operations to be run like cozy mom-and-pop nursery schools. One of the most distressing aspects of the Roslyn story was how one official had complete control over all the finances from A to Z, from the checkbooks to the computer systems that were supposed to double-check the school accounts. The part-time school board had a hard time challenging the entrenched school bureaucracy, and nobody seemed to be studying the fine print. Dr. Tassone, for example, billed his district for thousands in dry cleaning bills and even more for his diet doctor.

School board members must exert their power to pry, to demand rigorously independent audits of even the best administrators. They must also go by the book when things go wrong and resist temptations to overlook misdeeds that may have been committed by friends or neighbors. In Roslyn, the school board failed to report the first problems to the police, convinced that such public shame would harm the students. Instead, their cover-up has brought shame to the entire community.

The state, meanwhile, cannot count on every part-time school board to examine its district operations and reform them when necessary. It's time for Comptroller Alan Hevesi to expand his team of auditors so they can make more spot checks of smaller school districts. The comptroller and the State Education Department should also outline the best practices for school district accounting and make certain that such internal controls are used in districts of all sizes.

For the Roslyn students and their parents, the culmination of the Tassone scandal couldn't have come at a worse time. On Tuesday, the district's school budget comes up for a vote. The first budget proposal was defeated in May, and this new $78 million version has been trimmed by almost $4 million with the help of alarmed parents and other critics of the previous administration. The new budget is worth approving, especially if those newly energized Roslyn voters help the school board and the state keep a better eye on the district's finances.
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OUR TOWNS
A New Home Base and a Fresh Disguise, but the Same Old Corruption
By PETER APPLEBOME, NY TIMES, July 11, 2004

Roslyn, N.Y.

WANDERING around this lovely Long Island village, with its eclectic historic district, its downtown full of pastel boutiques and bistros, where George Washington actually did visit what's now the George Washington Manor and Restaurant and even the triptych of the town's environs in the Roslyn Savings Bank has a stately, reassuring air, it's easy to see how the whole place could have been scammed for a few million dollars by the people handling the school district's money.

Our enduring image of government corruption has to do with big-city pols and the golden era of Tammany Hall, but there aren't any Boss Tweeds navigating Lexus sport utility vehicles along Main Street here.

Instead, the man accused of being the main culprit, former School Superintendent Frank A. Tassone, was a folk hero for the district's success at getting students into A-list colleges and for his proclivity for popping up at local book clubs to offer his literary insights.

The image, of course, is getting a little moldy. Tammany's influence was on the decline by the 1920's.

And many experts on urban politics say New York City, despite its share of scoundrels and the allure of the Tammany myth, has had relatively clean government for most of the past 70 years.

Not so suburbia. In fact, to read the news these days is to survey a sprawling realm of suburban malfeasance that would leave the Tammany pols humbled.

There's Long Island, where decades of one-party rule in Suffolk and Nassau Counties has left a record of municipal corruption of historic proportions.

Thursday alone offered a corruption twofer. There was something old: Robert McDonald, the former chief deputy Nassau County executive under Thomas Gulotta, a Republican, sentenced to prison for his role in an insurance scam that cost the county $70 million.

And there was something new: Peter Sylver, former deputy county executive under Thomas Suozzi, a Democrat, arrested on a felony charge of filing false travel vouchers and a misdemeanor sexual abuse charge.

The full roster of fallen Nassau and Suffolk politicians is grist for a book, not a column.

In the greenswards of Connecticut, the new governor, M. Jodi Rell, is starting from scratch after John G. Rowland, whom you could imagine presiding over a backyard barbecue in an apron reading "The Guv," helped redefine the state from the land of steady habits to Louisiana with foliage.

In New Jersey, the nation's most suburbanized state and long thought to be the Mount Olympus of bad habits, a long-running federal corruption investigation is lapping at the edges of the governor's mansion.

What's going on? Nothing entirely new. The author Robert Caro remembers his initiation as a young Newsday reporter in the 1960's, as he slowly discovered that there could be a dubious deal behind every bend in the Meadowbrook Parkway or variance to build a gas station.

"I came from New York City, with this image of urban corruption like Boss Tweed, but the more I learned the more I realized there was a quieter, perhaps more genteel, style of money influencing politics everywhere you looked."

In part, there may be more suburban corruption because there's more suburbia. Definitions and populations change over time, so there are no identical census comparisons. But the 2000 census put the population of New York City at 8,008,278 and the population of the metropolitan area at 21,199,865. In 1950, the city population was 7,891,957 and the metropolitan area, which then did not include parts of Connecticut, was 12,831,914.

Because of the city's size and history of corruption, there's a level of scrutiny in New York City that far exceeds that of smaller municipalities. It's a lot easier to pocket a million bucks as superintendent in Roslyn than as chancellor in New York.

And the wealth of some suburban communities - something similar to what happened in affluent Roslyn happened not long ago in equally affluent Wyckoff, N.J., to the tune of $1.7 million - can make residents who are accustomed to forking over whatever it costs for that new Weber grill fork over whatever is presumed to be needed to keep the schools near the top of the heap.

"People wanted the best for their children and were willing to pay for it, and that was taken advantage of," said Jill Liebhaber, a parent in the district.

OF course, there's another school of thought that argues that the relevant comparison isn't city versus suburb but region versus region. Political scientists cite a study of the political cultures of the United States developed by Daniel Elazar.

One model is a "moral" political culture that sees government as a positive force and reveres good government. Think Minnesota or Oregon. Second is a "traditional" political culture which stresses limited government with a conservative or custodial role. Think Alabama or Mississippi. Third is an "individual" political culture with a utilitarian view of government and a high tolerance for dirty politics. Think New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Lesson: urban or suburban, watch your back.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.