Workers in districts with rejected budgets worry about future

The morning after taxpayers in a whopping 114 of 124 school districts on Long Island passed their budgets for 2010-2011, the superintendent in one of the few districts where the budget failed fretted about what the defeat would mean to students.

The failed budget vote in the Wyandanch Union Free School District may mean slashing the kindergarten program from a full day to a half-day and cuts to sports, Advanced Placement courses and the junior ROTC program, district superintendent Frank Satchel Jr. said Wednesday.

The district had asked for a 3.4 percent budget increase.

"I wasn't surprised," Satchel said. "I hoped the community would say, 'OK, let's try to bite the bullet on this and send it through for the sake of the children . . . But we're totally aware of the economics. We all live on Long Island. It's just frustrating to know that we still have to come up with a mechanism to make this work, that we still have to go deeper when we have already cut to the bone."

Wyandanch was one of just 10 budgets that failed Tuesday. The others are: East Rockaway, Garden City, Herricks, Levittown, West Hempstead and Westbury in Nassau County; Elwood, Port Jefferson and West Babylon in Suffolk.

But the sting will be felt especially hard in Wyandanch where the district has no reserve finances - and the budget has already been slashed, Satchel said.

"The cuts have already been deep," Satchel said. "We're cutting into the bone now . . . It's going to be devastating."

Compounding those woes is that the district relies on the state for 62 percent of its budget - and the fact that the state budget has not passed yet means Wyandanch isn't even certain whether it will receive the minimum funding required to meet its contingency budget, Satchel said.

The district also faces laying off 25 staff members from a staff of about 200, Satchel said.

In Westbury, a proposed 2.5 percent budget increase was voted down. Carol Gardiner, an elementary schoolteacher at Drexel Avenue School, said she fears that will lead to layoffs and student program cuts.

Gardiner said she thinks the budget was voted down because of the tax hike.

She said she hopes school board officials will come up with a new, passable budget.

"I hope they will put it up again in June . . . with some cuts," said Gardiner, who has been teaching in the Westbury school district for 37 years.

With Yamiche Alcindor