Costs might sink two special LI schools. That's a shame
Parent Jennifer Boudin, center, of Melville, is brought to tears as she learns that Billy Joel may donate money to help save the Long Island High School for the Arts and Doshi Science Technology Engineering and Math Institute, during a meeting of the Nassau BOCES board on Thursday night, Nov. 19, 2015. Boudin's daughter Emma, 15, is at right. Credit: Danielle Finkelstein
Saved by the Piano Man.
Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Almost sounds like another Top 40 hit.
Unfortunately, this tune might not have legs. The two specialized high schools Billy Joel has tentatively offered to help still might face closure next spring. And that's a shame. Because they meet a vital need in Nassau County.
The Long Island High School for the Arts has been around for 42 years. The Doshi STEM Institute opened in 2013. Each serves like-minded kids who want to immerse themselves in their areas of interest -- one being the arts, the other the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. By all accounts, the students are dedicated and passionate, push each other and support each other, and have great camaraderie, as you would expect.
But if one strength of these schools is what its students have in common, another is how they're different. Minority students make up one-fourth of the arts school and three-quarters of the STEM school, which means many on their shared Nassau BOCES campus in Syosset are exposed to, and enriched by, a diversity they otherwise would not experience in their largely segregated home school districts.
But they're all caught now in a game of numbers.
School districts have been less willing or able to pay tuition for students they send -- $14,000 a year for the arts school, $9,000 for the STEM school -- as resources tighten under the state tax cap. They're focused more on keeping and strengthening their own programs. That's unlikely to change soon -- the cap for 2016-17 might allow no tax increases.
Wealthier districts are more immune to those pressures. They've always had strong programs and that continues. It's the other districts that are getting squeezed and whose kids are being hurt disproportionately. STEM school students, for example, come from Baldwin, Freeport, Hempstead, Hicksville, Malverne, Oyster Bay, Seaford, Syosset and Uniondale.
Those 46 students are well below the projected 125. And enrollment has plunged at the arts school, from a high of 240 students to 92.
The budget for the two schools for a full contingent of 300 students would be $3 million. Joel's offer, while not spelled out, is laudable but not enough. The schools lose $1 million a year, and private beneficence can run dry. That's what happened with the family that recently abandoned a four-year funding commitment to the STEM institute that was helping tamp down tuition. Sustainable revenue is needed.
State school aid totals $21 billion a year, so state funding in that context seems reasonable. But other areas of New York could rightly complain about financing boutique schools on Long Island when their kids don't have similar opportunities. You could argue the state should fund such efforts everywhere -- there's no shortage of kids who love the arts and are good at math, after all -- but small upstate communities much farther apart make that much harder to do there.
If these two schools close, the failure can be traced to a much larger problem -- our balkanized system of dozens of small school districts. Imagine a group of neighboring districts, say seven or eight, becoming one and offering both traditional high schools as well as an arts academy, a science institute, a vocational school and others -- in existing school buildings with existing teachers, administrative savings and, most likely, more exposure to diversity for students sorely in need of that.
Yes, I'm a dreamer. But that vision has a nice ring, too.
Michael Dobie is a member of Newsday's editorial board.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
