Protesters blame Hempstead school board for financial troubles

A small group of protesters called Tuesday on the Hempstead school board to postpone key decisions until after the May 17 vote on the district’s budget and board candidates and blamed the system’s leadership for its financial troubles.

Eleven protesters outside a Main Street building used as a high school annex said, “Enough is enough,” referring to what they said are decades of poor academic achievement and mismanagement.

They were reacting to an auditor’s February report that the district overspent its budget by $8.6 million in the 2014-15 school year and has a $2 million deficit this year, and to last week’s appointment of a board member to a vacant seat.

The school board, they said, should have filled the vacancy on the board before Nassau BOCES Superintendent Robert Dillon appointed the Rev. David B. Gates to a seat left empty by resignation.

Dillon, as a regional BOCES leader, is empowered under state law to fill vacancies in local districts after 90 days if a slot remains vacant and the board has not scheduled a special election.

“Our school district’s problems are not because of lack of funding,” Phyllis Pruitt, a resident, said at the protest. “They are because of fiscal mismanagement.”

The first public salvos of the spring election season also were sounded Tuesday.

Pruitt, a retired Internal Revenue Service agent, said she is planning to run for the board as a team with Dennis Jones and Melissa Figueroa, who also were at the protest. New York Communities for Change, a nonprofit advocacy group pushing for school reforms, is endorsing them.

The seats of president LaMont Johnson, trustee JoAnn Simmons and Gates will be up for election. The seats now held by Johnson and Simmons will carry three-year terms; the abbreviated term of the seat that Gates filled is one year.

Johnson dismissed the event as a pre-election ploy by the candidates and the advocacy group, who together he said he regards as obstructionist.

Current board members Maribel Touré and Gwendolyn Jackson were elected last May with backing from those advocates.

“It’s a shameful attempt to put their three candidates in office,” Johnson said. “We had a very solid financial record until the last two years, and that’s when the increase in population happened” and overwhelmed the administration.

But Jones called on outside agencies, including the Nassau County district attorney’s office and the state attorney general’s office, to investigate the district’s finances, saying “there are just too many instances” where the district’s use of taxpayers’ funds has come into question. The district busting its $184.9 million budget is “a travesty,” he said.

Johnson said the district will move forward to comply with directives from state officials to fix its finances and address poor academic performance — especially at Alverta B. Gray Schultz Middle School and Hempstead High School, both now under state receivership and categorized by the state Education Department as “struggling” and “persistently struggling,” respectively.

District spokesman Michael Fricchione echoed Johnson’s comment, calling the protest “a prime example of a few negative individuals who want to insert politics into the school district and distract from the actual hard work of making sure every student receives a top-notch education.”

The state attorney general’s office did not comment. The Nassau County district attorney’s office and the state Education Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.