Huntington voters reject school expansion plan

Residents in the Huntington school district Tuesday rejected a referendum to allow district officials to spend $2 million in capital reserve funds to build an addition to Woodhull Intermediate School.

The vote was 863 to 624.

Assistant Superintendent David Grackin declined to comment last night on the results. The school board will next meet on Sept. 13, Grackin said. "That'll be their first opportunity as a board to discuss future plans," he said.

The money would have financed the addition of five to seven classrooms, two bathrooms and a hallway.

One voter, Walter Burke, a Huntington Bay resident, said he supported the proposal because it's in the best interest of his daughter who will be entering sixth grade. "There are no tomorrows in these things. I'm concerned about my daughter's education now, so we have to start addressing the issues today."

But another voter, Michele Foulke Edwards, of Huntington Station, who has one child in the district, said it doesn't make sense to spend money when there is no long-term plan and a perfectly good building in the Jack Abrams School.

"They should have canceled the vote," she said. "The board needs to rethink the long-range plan. Really they need to come up with one before spending $2 million on a building that isn't our most pressing need."

Officials say the addition would have had no impact on taxpayers since the money is already in the capital reserve fund. The $2 million represents the entire amount in the reserve fund, officials said. Construction would have taken about two years.

District officials say they have struggled with space constraints for years because of increased enrollment and the need for increased academic intervention services and small-group instructional spaces.

Enrollment in grades K-12 is a projected 4,450 this year, up from 4,115 in October 2000.

Woodhull already is slated to get three modular classrooms by the end of this year, a plan that was put in place after the school board voted in April to use its other intermediate school building, the Jack Abrams School, as a districtwide sixth-grade center and send fourth- and fifth-graders to Woodhull. The cost for leasing the modulars to accommodate the added students at Woodhull was included in the 2010-11 budget.

District officials said Tuesday's referendum was not related to their decision last month to close the Jack Abrams School to students because of safety concerns; the surrounding Huntington Station neighborhood has been plagued by several violent incidents.

But at a school board meeting Monday night, administration officials conceded that the overcrowding problem was exacerbated by the closing of the Abrams building. They said class sizes there already had been increased because of budget constraints.