Array of political, systemwide factors drive state to choose four districts for full-blown audits
BY KARLA SCHUSTER AND JOHN HILDEBRAND, Newsday, August 9, 2004

The four Long Island school districts have very little in common yet they landed on the same list.

Manhasset, Lawrence, Hempstead and Brentwood last week were targeted by state Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi for full-blown audits as part of a project to restore public trust shaken by scandals in the Roslyn and William Floyd school districts.

Hevesi also plans to conduct limited financial reviews of at least 15 other Island districts at a cost of $1.2 million.

The school systems were chosen largely based on tips from the public - 130 specific allegations concerning 32 school districts, Hevesi said.

But the four districts share more than vocal critics who reported concerns to the comptroller's office. In each, voters rejected school budgets the first time around, in the May 18 election. Manhasset, Lawrence and Hempstead are on austerity spending plans this year.

"Every district has internal issues around a construction project, a failed budget, a disciplinary hearing," said Jericho Superintendent Henry Grishman, who is chairman of the New York State Council of School Superintendents. "As we all waited for the comptroller to release the names, there was some sense it could have been any district in Nassau or Suffolk."

A closer look at each district reveals a host of political and financial factors that may have put them on the comptroller's radar.

BRENTWOOD

In the heat of last spring's school board races, Brentwood residents opened their mail one day to find some disturbing revelations.

Brentwood recently had hired the daughter of the district's business director as an internal auditor - a fact brought out in campaign fliers from a group called Residents for Better Schools. The implication was clear: The hiring threatened to upset Brentwood's financial checks and balances, by concentrating oversight of the district's $224.6-million budget in a few hands.

Brentwood voters evidently found the news unsettling, too. On Election Day, a school-board faction that had run Long Island's most populous district for decades was overthrown. Now, the board's new majority says it welcomes the comptroller's audit.

"Everyone here is wondering where all the money's going," said George Talley, a leasing-company owner and co-founder of Residents for Better Schools, who recently was named school board president.

Les Black, superintendent for the past 11 years, insists that the audit will find a well-run operation. He dismissed the hiring incident as a "non-issue", saying that the internal auditor works for the board, not the business manager, and that she held the position for only about a month before leaving.

Finances are tight in this diverse, working-class district in Islip Town, where most tax revenues come from houses on quarter-acre lots. Schools provide some superior services, especially in music and science research, but there are embarrassing gaps as well. Last fall, all four of Brentwood's middle schools appeared on an annual state list of schools failing to meet academic standards.

Along with pledges of academic and financial reform, board members elected in recent years bring a more diverse face than previous panels, in a district where minorities have complained of underrepresentation. Two of Talley's allies on the board, Gail Kirkham and Helen Moss, are black, and a third, Tomas Del Rio, is Puerto Rican. More than 60 percent of Brentwood's enrollment is Hispanic - the biggest proportion of any Island district.

Political opponents say they are waiting to see whether the board's turnover represents real reform, or simply a power grab in a district where patronage hiring has been a recurring problem. Since taking over, the board majority has put new people in four district posts, and one of those jobs, treasurer, has changed hands twice in the past few weeks, due to internal wrangling.

"In my opinion," said Anthony Palumbo, a nine-year member of the board defeated by Moss last spring, "they're going to self-destruct."

HEMPSTEAD

Financially speaking, the Hempstead school system would appear in pretty good shape - at least, on paper.

The district spends more than $15,000 per student, comparable to tuition at many private schools. The longtime superintendent receives salary and benefits totaling more than $240,000, according to the latest published figures - one of the best packages on the Island.

But drive through this urban district in central Nassau County, and the picture that emerges is one of obvious neglect.

At the district's 86-year-old Prospect School, closed indefinitely last fall due to crumbling brickwork and other decay, the playground is choked with weeds. A mile south, the 93-year-old Marguerite G. Rhodes School has been shut down due to deterioration.

An attempt last year to float a $177 million bond issue to replace the two buildings and repair others was voted down, and many blame community apathy, compounded by decades of political in-fighting on Hempstead's school board.

"A lot of parents don't go to board meetings, and now it's too little, too late," said Zenobia Richbourgh, who lives across the street from the Rhodes school. Her daughter, Shanaysia, 9, had hoped to attend fourth grade in the neighborhood school, but instead will go to school about a mile away.

Like many residents, Richbourg is heartened by Albany's plans to audit her district - if only to establish whether mismanagement may be responsible for some of the problems faced by Hempstead schools.

Even before the audit, ample evidence points in that direction. Last winter, for example, an independent consultant found widespread problems in the district's food services, including pilferage of food. Meanwhile, board members trade charges that their colleagues are placing friends and relatives on the payroll, or using political influence to get payoffs from groups doing business with the system.

"If there's any wrongdoing, we certainly want to know about it," said Youssef Soufiane, new board president.

A four-year board member, Soufiane has fired off memos and letters to school administrators and state officials, seeking investigations of alleged corruption. He's not sure what the audit will find, and expressed disappointment that state action wasn't taken earlier.

Nathaniel Clay, superintendent the past nine years, declined to respond to Newsday's questions. A former board president, Regina Lattimore, who stepped down this year, suggested that the community is unlikely to support the school system so long as its leaders are divided.

"If there's no trust on the board, the people think you're not doing the right thing with their money," Lattimore said.

LAWRENCE

Come September, Lawrence will consolidate two elementary schools, the result of a decade of declining enrollment as more and more families send their children to private school.

First proposed in the early 1990s, the plan went nowhere, a casualty of the bitter feud between public and private school parents that has dominated school board politics and financial policy for years.

"When politics and emotions become that elevated and intertwined, good logical thinking often doesn't prevail," said second-year Superintendent John Fitzsimons. "Nobody wanted to bite the bullet."

And for years, they didn't have to. Even as costs went up and enrollment dropped, the tax rate stayed relatively stable, due in large part to the district's decision to use an $18 million surplus to cover operating costs. School budgets passed easily through the 1990s.

As money got tighter and taxes spiked, simmering resentment surfaced. Private school parents, many from the Orthodox Jewish community, ran for the school board on fiscal reform platforms.

Public school parents dug in and blamed state mandates that require districts to pay some costs for private school students, like transportation.

For two years, the district has been on a contingency budget, forcing layoffs and program cuts. In late June, under pressure to make deeper cuts, the board voted to fold Number 1 School into Number 6.

A few weeks later, the fractured community found something it could agree on when state Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi announced in July his office would audit several Long Island districts.

The school board requested a state audit. A petition signed by 1,800 residents did too.

"No question why they picked Lawrence - a lot of things have been going wrong for a while," said Bruce Scher, a founder of the town-based Alliance for Public Schools. "If things were the way they were 10 years ago, probably nobody would give a damn. But now everybody is keyed up."

Fitzsimons believes the audit and the school consolidation will position the district well financially and politically, so that "we can turn this thing around quickly."

Lisa Sgouros of Atlantic Beach is willing to absorb the changes, for now. Her second-grade daughter moves from Number 1 school to Number 6 next month.

"I hope closing the school will make it better for everybody and maybe they can bring programs back," she said.

MANHASSET

On Long Island's North Shore, competition among the small, affluent school districts is fierce, with residents often tracking the number of Intel science contest winners and Ivy League-bound graduate numbers more closely than the size of their tax bills.

A peek inside Eugene Garges' journal shows how that equation has changed and offers clues as to why wealthy Manhasset became a district some residents say is ripe for an audit.

The pages of the gray, hardcover book Garges, 85, keeps in a desk drawer chart every utility and tax bill he's paid during 47 years living there.

School taxes: 1957, $320. 2004, $8,310.

"In 1985, it started going up about 10 percent a year and the final frosting was the reassessment," Garges said. "My school tax bill went up 73 percent in one year."

That year, 2003, Garges cast his first-ever 'no' vote for the school budget. He wasn't alone. Manhasset's budget failed for the first time in a decade.

It has been an uphill battle for the district ever since. Some residents began turning a jaundiced eye on everything from the superintendent's pay and perks to class size, even the length of class periods.

At the same time, turnover among Manhasset school finance officials was running high - three assistant superintendents for business in the past six years.

Officials had to do the delicate dance of tightening its budgets for those frustrated by high taxes without alienating its core constituency: parents.

This year's budget, which failed twice, cut elementary school language instruction. Further reductions followed when the district was forced into a contingency budget.

"For a premier district like Manhasset, it's a very sad choice," said Regina Rule, who sits on the district's Citizens Advisory Committee for Finance and is the mother of two daughters at Shelter Rock Elementary.

"There's a lot of bad blood in Manhasset right now," she said. "Everybody, sadly, ended up sort of unhappy and kind of alienated."

Superintendent Lawrence Bozzomo hopes the state audit will put questions about school spending to rest. His only concern is that state Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi's plan to audit districts every three to five years will not be funded once this first wave is complete. Hevesi has asked the State Legislature for $5.4 million next year to hire 89 school auditors.

"What I'm hearing is that the message is 'Hey Jericho, you didn't get picked this time, but you're turn is coming. Everyone's is,'" Bozzomo said. "It's OK that we're the first. I just don't want us to be the last."
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