From June 13 through July 13, the Westbury school board president Pless Dickerson will have spent $5,080 of your money unnecessarily, on items ID# 5575 and ID# 5585 as shown on the June 11 Westbury school board agenda.
Though the meetings are required, this expenditure of $ 5,080 is frivolous, without merit and not in the best interest of you the Westbury taxpayers.
I take exception to this expenditure and not the lawful requirement of the school board meeting. The utilization of a facilitator, a consultant, is absurd, at the cost of $ 3,980. A facilitator by definition is merely to guide, to make, easier, to help with a task at hand.
If the present members of the Westbury School Board were neophytes, possibly there would be some need for a paid facilitator.
That is not the case. Six of the seven members have close to three years experience and they have all completed the required training by the New State Department of Education. These seven board members, most, if not all, have graduated from an accredited college or university and therefore should possess intellect enough to grasp the issues confronting the Westbury Union Free School District without the guidance of a facilitator.
My goodness, they should know the issues, they get a packet of documents every week from the Superintendent with nothing but issues.
The only guide they need to have is away from spending your tax dollars and toward the four fundamental issues that Westbury Schools continues to fail at: student performance, graduation rate of students, state test scores and district ranking.
Under their stewardship the Westbury School District is failing and surely paying a facilitator $ 3,980 will not result in improving any of the afore mentioned fundamental issues stated here.
If I were to rank which of the two were most egregious—a facilitator at $ 3,980 or the one day rental of the Glen Cove Mansion at $1,100— it would be the rental of a mansion—any mansion—when our school district has six schools and historically this meeting is held in district and none use a facilitator costing $ 3,980.
Glen Cove, Port Washington, Jericho, East Williston, Carle Place, Uniondale and Hempstead—they all will have a mandated reorganizational meeting on their school campus.
Not Westbury school board. Our reorganizational meeting will be 11.9 miles out of the Westbury Union Free School District. All of the participants can put in milege or transportation cost to and from the Glen Cove mansion.
In closing, the Westbury Union Free School District graduation will cost $10,000 to be held at the Tillles Center on the C.W.Post Campus, six miles from Westbury.
Larry Wornum
