Superintendent Mary Jones spends the meeting with her face in...

Superintendent Mary Jones spends the meeting with her face in her hands, not speaking a word at a Wyandanch School District meeting concerning their budget on Jan. 28, 2019. Credit: Raychel Brightman

When the New York State United Teachers union works to abolish the state’s property tax cap, Wyandanch is the kind of district the organization says it’s fighting for. Wyandanch, struggling with a budget deficit this year, is the poorest school district in Suffolk County in both property wealth and taxable income. About 87 percent of students are low-income, and 98 percent are minorities.

The tax cap, NYSUT president Andy Pallotta said in a blog post this month, “hurts our poorest districts the most, placing the most severe limits on their ability to raise funds and punishing parents and other taxpayers in low-wealth districts who try to provide more funding for their children.”

This liberal teachers union is the backbone of the Democratic Party in New York. And it says the tax cap makes it too hard to impose large tax increases on poor people. Can NYSUT really not hear how poorly reasoned that sounds?

The tax cap limits increases in district levies to the lesser of 2 percent or the rate of inflation each year, barring a 60 percent vote to pierce it. The cap was enacted in 2011 and expires every few years. This year, suburban legislators and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo want to make it permanent, while NYSUT fights to keep it temporary or watered down.

A 2015 Siena College Research Institute poll found that 73 percent of voters supported the cap, and it’s not surprising. School district tax increases on Long Island averaged 6 percent a year for the decade before the cap was in place, a rate at which taxes would have doubled every 12 years. Hikes have averaged less than a third of that since.

Now let’s look at Wyandanch. Has that poverty and the tax cap led to low per-pupil spending? No, Wyandanch will spend nearly $26,000 apiece on its 2,763 students this year, right around the Long Island median and double the national average. That’s largely thanks to $43 million ($15,600 per student) from state school aid, a 6.37 percent increase over last year’s aid, a hike partly due to the district’s 3.5 percent enrollment increase. The district gets almost $3,000 per student in federal money, as well.

Does Wyandanch need more money? Maybe. Only 13 percent of students in third through eighth grades are proficient in English and math, and the high school graduation rate is about 65 percent. Teaching disadvantaged students takes a lot of resources, particularly if English is not their first language. And the district faces an unexpected $3.3 million budget deficit that a recent audit said stems from overspending and overestimating revenues. But those are issues of management more than funding.

Residents, students and employees of the Wyandanch school district crowded...

Residents, students and employees of the Wyandanch school district crowded the school board meeting on December 12, 2018. Credit: Michael Owens

Would doubling per-pupil spending help? Probably, somewhat, but that does not change the fact that the residents of Wyandanch don’t have the money to give.

Nor does it change the fact that, as NYSUT so often points out, many of these kids’ challenges, of poverty and hunger and poor housing and neglect, happen outside school and can’t be blamed on educators.

If that’s the case, then maybe NYSUT ought to push for more funding to address hunger and homelessness and joblessness and health care and all of the things that plague poor children outside of school instead of seeking to drive every possible resource to schools.

But the union should not push to make passage of huge property tax hikes in such communities easier, driving up housing costs for both owners and renters. That only worsens the societal and educational problems that poverty causes. That cannot be the goal of our educators.

Wyandanch school district business official Idowu Ogundipe at Tuesday night's board...

Wyandanch school district business official Idowu Ogundipe at Tuesday night's board meeting. Credit: Raychel Brightman

 Lane Filler is a member of Newsday’s editorial board.

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