The budget passing was a big step towards financial sustainability and so I also want to thank those of you who voted “yes”. I realize that our community is still grappling with some of the decisions that were made during this budget season and the realities of how we deliver a best-in-class education to our students given limited resources. Just know that this is my top priority and something that I will focus on relentlessly while on the board.

I also want to thank the other two candidates, Christa and Janet. I am particularly appreciative of Janet who dedicated a lot of time and effort to the district over the past 3 years.

For those of you who have lawn signs, you are welcome to set them aside and I will do a round of pick-ups next week - we will use them if I decide to run again at the end of my term. I will send around an email to collect information (no worries if you have already tossed it!).

I hope everyone enjoys their long weekend!

Mary Beth

I thought my final Q&A would be my last post but I am back to make one final pitch to please vote “yes” on the budget. I have made a few different posts on why I think you should vote “yes” and I have linked those at the bottom.

As a reminder, if the budget does not garner 50% of votes on the first vote, the board has an option to have one more chance to get a budget approved by voters.

Last year, 24 districts in NY state voted down their budgets on the first pass. Of these, 17 were trying to pierce the tax cap. Of the 7 that were not exceeding the tax cap, 3 districts were including plans to purchase buses (long-term budget impacts). Only 4 districts statewide had budgets that failed on a 1st vote that were not piercing the tax cap and that were not purchasing buses. None of these were in Long Island, although in the past Long Island districts have been impacted by failed budget votes (Westbury went to a contingency budget in 2011).

Only ONE of the budgets that were presented for as second vote went up and it was by a nominal amount (0.02%). On average, the budgets presented for a second vote went down by ~1%. Some of the budgets that were re-presented as-is failed and the district went into Contingency. As a reminder, contingency is when the state law prescribes specific rules for how you can spend funding and it is a way for the state to ensure the schools can operate even if voters can’t agree on a budget.

NY 2025-26 School District Budget Revotes - Initial vs. Revised Budget

Districts that had their 2025-26 budget defeated on May 20, 2025 and held a revote on June 17, 2025 (Indian Lake’s initial vote was May 13). Yellow cells indicate values not confirmed in open sources.

Of course, this does not mean that RVC has to take the same path as these districts. Even if elected, I would not have a voice in that as new board members are not formally active until July 1st. I do think it is worth pointing out a few things:

1. The board / district does not have to change anything; they could present the same budget for the 2nd vote OR they could elect to go right to contingency (which seems unlikely). There is a very limited timeframe to make these decisions and review them with the public.

2. There isn’t a consensus view on what “rework” would result in a higher approval. Most people want to trade off more administrative reductions instead of teacher excesses. However, it is unlikely that the district can balance a budget without teacher excesses given the other cost factors. So then you are faced with questions that you do not have the answers to:

   1. What level of administrative reductions and teacher “add backs” would result in enough voters changing their minds? Will you get a higher share of voters vote yes if you address staffing in certain programs like ICT or elementary small group learning? Do administrative reductions make it less likely that you can be nimble and ensure student learning is not impacted?

   2. Would the community approve a budget that “dipped into” reserves and pushed more of the issue of solving the budget into next year? Would the board and administration even present this as an option after how painful this year has been?

3. We have not yet seen a draft of what the contingency budget would look like. The contingency budget would require the tax levy to stay flat from the current year. The district would not be allowed to complete any CAPEX next year. Based on my math, the district would have more allowed expenses than it would be able to expend based on a contingency budget ceiling and the board would be required to create a budget that falls within the allowed parameters (with some spending restrictions imposed by the state in terms of what categories of spend are allowed).

For all these reasons, I believe the best vote is to vote “YES” on the budget and elect a board who has the right skills to 1) do the long-term planning work to ensure we are never in this position again 2) monitor the progress during the year next year so that changes can be made quickly where allowed by budget. I am asking for your vote tomorrow to be able to do this work! Please remind your friends to vote and remind them of the importance of voting “yes” on the budget.

Here are my prior posts on the important of voting “yes” on the budget:

I have gotten a few other questions that I wanted to respond to as we approach election day. See my Q&A below, please send me an email if you have questions on any of this.

Remember when you are voting that what we need is a set of board members with diverse experience who are willing to have hard conversations. My financial experience as a CFO is deep and clearly evidenced. I have done significant work to understand the financial and performance data. I am having hard conversations by engaging with every question that is put to me. If someone is not willing to have hard conversations with voters now, how can you expect them to have hard conversations with the board?

So, here are the remaining questions I have heard and my responses:

Why are you running for school board?

I started doing analysis on the financial issues facing the district with the intention of just using my skill set to understand the situation better. I wanted to be able to understand and tell friends whether it was really a crisis, were the cuts necessary, could we pull from reserves? Where had the money gone? I spent somewhere around 100 hours this year analyzing the school budget and historical spend versus what comparative districts are doing. I have looked at performance metrics like test scores, graduation rates, and college matriculation. I have reviewed all the financial reports published by the district (there are a lot). I ultimately realized that if I did not run, we were unlikely to get someone on the board who: 1) has the right skill set to advise on financial topics 2) was willing to invest the time and effort on an on-going basis to really understand the issue and provide thoughtful input and push the district to do the long-term planning that we need to do.

You can check out the information on my substack: https://substack.com/@marybethjoyce1

You don’t have to subscribe or login to read, it is just like a webpage.

What is your relevant background?

- Parent to 4 kids ages 10, 8, 8 and 2

- 23 years in finance and accounting roles, including:

o CFO / Head of Finance – 9 years as a CFO managing cash, strategy, financial forecasts. I have extensive experience with corporate boards from this work.

o McKinsey consultant in finance – 7 years advising big company executives on finance and strategy

o Audit – 4 years at a Big 4 firm reviewing financial statements and performing audits

- Education

o MBA from University of Chicago

o Masters in Accountancy from Notre Dame

o Undergraduate degree in Finance from University of Wisconsin

- Certifications

o CPA (license inactive)

o Chartered Financial Analyst

Do you have kids in the public schools / do you send your kids to private school / how old are your kids?

I will have a child enrolled in RVC public schools every year from now until 2042. Currently my children are in 5^th grade and 3^rd grade (twins), my youngest is 2. My oldest child is going to private school for middle school which is a choice we made based on his personality and what we thought would be best for him. I will not be the first or the last parent to make private decisions specific to their children and my commitment to the school district is unwavering. My other children will stay in district for middle school.

How would you approach rising costs while keeping property taxes reasonable?

- We need to do long-term planning. I feel like a broken record saying this but it is true. What does long-term planning mean? It means we need to create a forecast that shows:

o Projected Enrollment

o Number of teachers required to deliver programs based on enrollment and other factors

o Expected retirements

o Expected hiring

o Cost of facilities based on their projected use

o Contracts expiring and expected renewal terms

o Projected cost escalation factors for non-contracted items

Once you do this work, you can then plan how to best use the available resources to the highest effect.

- We also need to be clear on what we measure as performance outcomes. There is a feeling right now that we are not getting the results for what we spend. You can see my performance summary vs peers at the link below. What do we, as a community, prioritize in terms of outcomes? This does not have to be limited to test scores. As an example, we could survey parents and students of graduates annually as to whether they were well prepared for post-high school plans. Why do I tie this to spend? If you are not clear on your desired outcomes, it is difficult to say whether spend is being used most effectively.

How involved should the school board be in reviewing or approving curriculum and instructional materials? How would you handle debates about age-appropriate materials? What is your stance on parental access to curriculum, books, classroom content?

I think the role of the board should be to ensure the district has clear, transparent policies for how instructional materials are selected, reviewed and aligned to state standards and community values. I believe the Board should actively oversee that process by asking the right questions, requesting regular updates on curriculum from the administration, and ensure a formal review framework exists.

On age appropriate materials, I believe decisions should be made based on developmental research, state guidelines, and input from educators and parents.

If a parent is concerned about materials used in their child’s class, there should be an appropriate process to address those concerns, starting with the teacher and in-building administration. The board’s role is to ensure that this process is applied consistently.

Parents have every right to know what their children are being taught. I really encourage parents to be involved in their child’s education, review homework and other materials children are taking home, engage with their teachers if they have questions, and talk to their kids about what they are learning.

How do you think the board should address parental concerns about sports / bathrooms / locker rooms?

New York state law is clear on this and New York State is our funding authority - the source of all of our state and federal funding. The Dignity for All Students Act (enacted July 1, 2012) and related implementation guidance is clear, and our current policy aligns with this.

There is right now a push by the Federal government to remove funding from organizations based on the premise that some of their policies do not comply with Title IX. The New York City public school system is currently in a lawsuit with the Federal government over this policy.

Importantly, New York City was fighting to keep direct federal funding they received via a magnet school program. Since our funding comes from the state of NY, we need to comply with their policy. If the Federal Government disputes the New York State policy and pulls funding from the state, NYS will likely pursue it legally with the Federal government as NYS has consistently defended these protections.

It is likely that this will end up in a Supreme Court case at some point. In the interim, our district needs to comply with the laws set by our funding entity (New York State) which we are doing. I do not think we should spend any district resources on litigation related to this and should not put our district in a position where litigation is possible.

My personal view is that we should support student safety and inclusion. I also feel this debate has been a distraction to the core issues facing our district, which are student performance and financial stability. Still, the board should listen respectfully to all parent input, explain the legal framework clearly, and ensure our policies are consistently communicated.

https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/diversity-equity-inclusion/oag-nysed-dei-guidance.pdf

https://www.nyclu.org/commentary/your-rights-have-not-changed-students-are-allowed-to-use-the-bathroom-that-aligns-with-their-gender-identity

Do you support transparency measures like clear public dashboards or third-party audits?

Yes, 100%. I have advocated for a performance dashboard throughout my campaign. I would also like to see a long-term plan published publicly.

Quickly on audits - the district financials are audited annually by a 3rd party and you can see these audit letters on their website. The district is also subject to state oversight and I understand audits have been performed by the state periodically.

I have heard some calls for a “forensic audit” which I don’t really agree with at this point, and here is why - forensic audits are typically used when there is evidence of fraud like embezzlement. They are expensive and there is no evidence that this has occurred. I believe what most people are actually asking for is a review by a 3rd party which would make recommendations on where the “fat” is to trim or where funds are not being used effectively. This is not what a forensic audit does. I would support having the district bring in an outside party to help with recommendations on budget, vendor selection, and improving spend effectiveness. Ideally their fees are structured based on a percentage of reductions rather than a flat fee.

I wanted to first clarify one thing in regards to not having an alternative budget.

Here was the question at the forum: “Are you willing to voice your opinion on issues if they are in opposition to administration?”

Here was my response (roughly): “I am, and it is part of what is required as a board member because as a board member you have oversight over the administration (together the board does) and you need to be able to speak up when you don’t agree with something. It has to be fact-based, that is the most important thing, and that is why I think it is really important as a board member to do your research, come in understanding the issues, speak to people in the community… I also feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t say that this is probably in reference to the budget issue this year. It was a very difficult process and one of the things that I want to acknowledge is that I didn’t ever hear from a board member ‘I would like to see an alternative budget that includes X,Y and Z. I want more cuts to administration, I want more pulling from reserves, here are the rough amounts I think we can do.’ I think that would have been a more collaborative way to really push the administration and to ensure that this view was heard more directly.”

I worry this was misconstrued that I believe there is a “better” alternative budget for 2026/2027. I do not. What concerns me is 1) I think there is a large group of people who want “something else” and want to push it back onto the administration to figure out what this “something else” should include. In my view, once you are a board member, you forgo having this as an option; it is your job to ask specifically for the alternatives you want to see. 2) Some of the alternative cost reduction levers were discussed but we never saw a full alternative budget and I think that makes it hard for people to understand the risks and trade-offs.

Even though I don’t think there is a substantially different alternative budget that would have been better, from a PROCESS standpoint, I would have liked to see this presented. Why?

• There is a wide view in the community that the administration should have been cut more. First, I think there is a real case that if you are making cuts to teachers the administration should “share in that pain” even just from an optics perspective. However, there are just not enough administrators to cut $3m across that pool to close the entire budget gap. So, in an “alternative” budget, you could show a reduction of a fixed amount of roles and quantify what that savings would be - and everyone would understand that is not enough to balance the budget alone. Then I would want to hear from the administration as to the impact on students and programs when you reduce the amount of administration. I also want to acknowledge that sharing these cases publicly causes some retention risk, as staff now have the sentiment that their jobs are at risk even if you do not select that budget alternative.

• Any alternative budget case likely would have also included pulling from reserves (basically our savings account) and I would have liked to have it clear what that impact would be on 2027/2028. In my view, pulling from reserves is a deal-breaker in any budget for this year. We are already very low on reserves compared to other districts in Long Island and we are heading into a year where two major contracts will be re-negotiated (teacher employment contract and transportation). We need to maintain all the flexibility we have and build in more flexibility, not kick the problem to next year.

• I don’t see a scenario where you could have avoided cuts to instructional spend this year. I think looking at an alternative budget would have shown that. There are many items that are not addressable for next year as they are part of long-term contracts or require more lead time to change (like zoning).

So, I think an alternative budget would have at least let everyone compare side by side and see why the budget that is up for vote was necessary (or provide more specific input for smaller trade-offs). I acknowledge that the administration (Jackie Rehak in particular) has tried really hard to make it clear why these decisions are the right ones. There are still things in the budget where I have concerns about implementation, but I don’t believe there is a “better” budget out there that is substantially different.

Meet and Greet Tuesday

I will be hosting a Meet and Greet at North Village Tavern Tuesday 5/12. See below for the info and RSVP here. Please come with questions, to just say hello, or to understand how you can help support my campaign in the last week before the election.

Sign up to receive a lawn sign - Lawn signs increase visibility and drive conversation in town about the election.

Here is the link to sign up to receive a lawn sign (and thank you!).

Submit questions so that I can respond and continue to address community concerns.

If you are not yet decided on which two candidates you will vote for, I would love to hear from you. If you have decided and still have comments or questions, submit those too! I am working on a post addressing a few of the top questions.

Here is the link to submit questions / comments.

Put the key dates on your calendar:

• Wednesday May 6th - PTA candidate Forum, 7pm at South Side High School - see info below

• Tuesday May 19th - Budget Vote and BOE candidate vote, 7am - 9pm at South Side High School

We are also holding a “Meet the Candidate” night on Tuesday May 12th at North Village Tavern, 7:30 - 9pm. I hope to see you there!

Caveat: while this information is readily available on www.seethroughny.net, it isn’t very usable in that format and I used an AI tool to help aggregate the data. Please email me if you see anything that looks off.

First, what do the Teachers Union contracts contain?

• A pay structure table that guides teacher compensation given years of experience and education level,

• Escalation or growth factors that lay out how this table will change over the course of the multi-year contract,

• The amount teachers need to contribute to their health care (usually), as well as which plans they will have access to,

• Benefits like how many sick / personal days each teacher receives,

• and other monetary factors like substitute and coach compensation, bonuses for longevity, etc.

Notably, all teachers are a part of the state teacher retirement system and the payouts and contributions are governed by the state and are not negotiated as part of individual district teacher contracts.

The contracts are fairly standard in format so you can easily compare across districts.

How does RVC compare on the major compensation factors vs other peer districts?

Previously, I compared spend across a set of Nassau County peers so I used these same districts to look at teacher compensation.

• RVC is currently around the 60% percentile of compensation across peers (meaning we pay more than 60% of districts, and less than 40% of districts). In order to do this you can benchmark a few steps - it’s hard to compare every step in the table.

  

• RVC had the lowest cost escalation factor among peers (1.10% per year vs 1.7% per year average for the peers with some as high as 2.5%).

• In terms of health insurance, RVC teachers are paying about the same percentage as other districts who disclose this clearly in their union contract (21%, increasing to 21.5%).

Conclusion: I don’t see anything here that indicates that the teacher contract is wildly off what it should be.

So - if teacher comp is not the problem, then, again - why are we here?

If teacher compensation costs are in-line with other districts, why are we in this critical budget point and other districts are not?

1. We have a lower student-to-teacher ratio of any of the peer districts. Our teachers are paid comparably, but we have more teachers.

2. We have low reserves so our ability to tap into savings to bridge difficult budget years is not there to the level that it is in other districts.

3. Finally, costs of health insurance, transportation and general liability insurance are cited as cost pressures in nearly every district I have looked at. Some of these districts have more “wiggle room” than we do for the above two reasons or other structural reasons (some have newer buildings, have done recent redistricting, etc).

What does this mean about the future?

First, I think that it is really important that you vote “YES” on the current budget if you care about teacher retention.

I don’t see a path to a budget that keeps more teachers if the budget is voted down. I would love if a "no” vote meant we could go back to the drawing board and start this three month process over and maybe have a different outcome. This possibility doesn’t exist. Why? Understand the timeline if the May 19th vote fails:

• May 19th - budget vote

• June 2nd (about) - revised budget needs to be available to the public

• June 16th - revised budget vote

This gives the district two weeks to create the revised budget.

1. That is a lot of planning and consensus gathering in a very difficult year.

2. I haven’t heard anyone give a viable plan of what material budget lines could be reduced this year to allocate more spend to add back teacher positions.

3. The peer comparison data indicates that the district staffing ratio is too high (teacher : student ratio). Instruction is one of the only areas where we are a spend outlier. While I am really unhappy that teacher reductions is the way this was adjusted, I have a hard time seeing how another solution this year gets us towards the long-term outcome of financial stability.

If you are a person (and there are some!) that just wants to use voting down the budget to force the district to reduce overall spend, then go ahead and vote no, and understand it may be painful.

We need to do better planning to avoid excesses in the future

In my personal view, teacher excesses are not a good tool to adjust to optimal staffing ratios. Excess is a formal process by which the district notifies teachers that they are overstaffed in a given area and will be making reductions. The administration is not able to pick and choose what teachers are impacted by excesses; they are required to excess the teachers of lowest seniority. This can result in some really great teachers being impacted. If you do an excess multiple years in a row, you are risking recruitment issues as candidates don’t want to take jobs in unstable districts (especially if they will be low in seniority and first at risk). Instead, the administration should have a long-term view on optimal staffing ratios and should use adjusted hiring, voluntary departures and retirement to meet the targets.

It is to the benefit of the teachers for the union to support strengthening the financial position of the district

It is apparent that there is some trust to be rebuilt among the union, the board and the administration. But the union has a strong incentive to participate actively in the process of creating a district that has a strong financial position. If they don’t 1) there are less funds to go around when the next contract negotiation comes up 2) they will consistently be fighting excesses 3) the voters will eventually force financial reform on the district, and instruction is the largest share of budget. This does not mean they should support excesses, but that they should support the planning and long-termism that creates a more stable district.

I am only pointing this out as I believe this budget process was really fraught, and I think that is partially because many stakeholders didn’t fully understand the true financial position until late in the process (and many still don’t). We need to move to a long-term planning process once the current budget is settled, and in my view active participation from the teachers should be encouraged in this process.

First, the “line by line” budget can be found here. I am going to spend more time with this over the next few days but overall there are no immediate surprises.

I made a few quick comments after the budget was approved by the board. I wanted to expand a bit on these points here.

First, we need to focus on long-term financial planning going forward.

Last year the board created a strategic plan. This document is here. The finance section of this plan has a few recommendations which included a 5 year financial roadmap and a reserve management plan. I really worry that we have spent so much time on the budget cycle this year that there may be budget exhaustion and that everyone will “move on” from finance once the budget is (hopefully) passed.

The importance of a long-term financial plan

A rigorous long-term financial planning process is critical to retention of teachers. This budget cycle has been very difficult and I’m sure some teachers who are not affected by the reduction are still very worried about their job security. By doing a robust forecasting exercise where we lay out the contract renewals, cost escalation factors in existing contracts, projected enrollment, etc we can start to instill confidence back into the community of stakeholders, teachers included. I understand this isn’t a glamorous request and that no one will want to hear a word about budgets after May 19th, but it is critical to the future of our schools and the long-term job security for our teachers.

I would also like to see a format to gather community input on some of the longer-term or structural decisions or at least lay out how these review processes overlay the financial planning process. There were several people who spoke about the importance of retaining IB. I am assuming that this is because there have been a lot of questions from the community recently on the program overall as well as the budget implications. Mr. Gaven noted that the administration and the board are not recommending eliminating the IB program. It would be great for the community to understand when the curriculum reviews are occurring and what the forum is for gathering community input or answering questions. This is just one example of something that has come up with frequency during the budget process. All of these larger decisions made by the administration and the board factor into the annual budget and long-term financial plan, and I would love if the board or administration could address whether they are on the docket to be reviewed and when.

Improving reserves: we should establish a simple metric to make it simpler for the community to understand

Regarding the reserve level, I would really like to see the board adopt targets for the reserve levels and measure progress against it during future budget cycles. It was easy to miss that Ms. Rehak pointed out that our reserves are among the lowest level in Nassau County. Previously I looked at unrestricted reserves / total spend and found that we are very low relative to peers. We were at 6% unrestricted reserves / total spend in 2024, I would like to see the board set a target of increasing that to 8-9% within the next 3-5 years.

It can be very difficult for people to really understand the annual budget process. Having a dashboard of metrics with targets (including reserve level / spend) and analyzing our progress against them each year would really help the community conceptualize our financial health and whether each annual budget strengthens or weakens our position.

Second, the downside of not passing the budget is significant.

On May 19th, if at least 50% of the voters vote against approving the current budget, the district has one more chance to pass a budget in June. If that budget does not pass, the district moves to “contingency” funding which has specific rules stipulated by the state. This contingency budget takes a lot of control on spending items out of the hands of the administration and the board. I covered this in one of my earlier process posts. One of the implications that I did not cover which Ms. Rehak raised tonight is the difficulty of the budget in the subsequent year.

Take an example budget. Let’s simplify it and say your budget starts at $100m and all your revenue comes from the tax levy, no adding to or removing from reserves, etc. In my simple example, assume there is 2% cost inflation which matches the tax cap.

Year 1 Budget is $100m, Year 2 Budget is $102m, Year 3 Budget is $104.4m ($102m *2%). Easy.

Now let’s say that for some reason your budget vote fails in year 2. You are required to keep the Year 2 budget at $100m. Now when you go to pass the Year 3 budget, if you want the same expenditure items as in Year 1, you need to increase the budget by 4.4% which is above the tax cap and you need 60% of the voters to approve it. If you try to stay under the 2% tax cap for Year 3, your budget has effectively shrunk on a real cost basis and these dollars are “lost”.

I also just want to point out that in most years, the voters who vote against the budget are doing so only because they think the budget is too high. This year we have a large contingent who think the budget is too low or that the reductions should be in other areas. This is to say - it isn’t really clear that it will be easy to get consensus and create an alternative budget that passes if the initial budget fails.

I am accumulating my links to the data on every post, here is an updated list:

Here are all the links to my data and summaries:

RVC 5 year budget summary - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison to other Schools - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison of Spend by Student to Peers

Here is a link to my summary of the spend by district

And the data available on the RVC websites:

2026/2027 proposed “line by line” budget

Strategic plan

Financial reports with audit letter (“Financial Statements”, the audit letter is in the first few pages)

Other audit reports

Line-item budgets (“Final Budgets”)

A little about me: I’ve spent my career in finance and accounting, including time as a CFO for high-growth companies, a consultant at McKinsey & Company, and earlier roles in government and public accounting. My work has always focused on bringing structure, clarity, and accountability to complex decisions.

I hold an MBA from the University of Chicago, a Master’s in Accounting from the University of Notre Dame, and a Finance degree from the University of Wisconsin. I’m also a CPA (license inactive) and a CFA charterholder.

I’m a parent of four young children, all age 10 and under, and we’ve lived in Rockville Centre since 2022. I have decided to run for the board because I believe I can make a significant contribution given the current budgetary needs.

What I Believe

Educators should lead—supported by strong financial discipline.
Teachers and administrators are the experts in how kids learn, and that should remain at the center of decision-making. At the same time, strong financial and operational oversight ensures those decisions are sustainable. I see my role as helping bring a clear framework around spending, outcomes, and best practices.

We need a long-term plan for fiscal stability.
The district should have a multi-year view of enrollment, costs, spending, and reserves. Without that kind of planning, it’s difficult to make consistent decisions year to year. A strong plan should also consider structural drivers of cost, like facilities and program models.

We should define and consistently track what success looks like.
There has been a lot of discussion about rankings. While they can be useful, they don’t fully define a great school district. We should establish our own set of metrics—academic performance, graduation outcomes, and feedback from families—and review them consistently, ideally through a simple, transparent dashboard.

Clear information leads to better community engagement.
Even with a background in finance, I sometimes find district information difficult to follow. When data is presented clearly and consistently—and shared in usable formats—it leads to more productive conversations and stronger community involvement.

I would love to hear from you if you have input or would like to help. You can comment here or message me at marybethforRVCBOE@gmail.com.

That being said, there are a few things that I think everyone should be asking from the district, regardless of whether you agree with the current reduction plan or not.

A long-term plan

First and foremost, I really wish the district were giving visibility beyond 2026/2027 school year. The district actually committed to doing a 5 year financial plan in their long-term strategic plan that was published a year ago, but I don’t see any projections beyond this year. This makes it difficult to understand if this is a band-aid on a huge problem or a fix that will bring us back in line with financial responsibility. The district is impacted by many long-term contracts that contain cost escalation factors (like labor contracts). Additionally, there are some structural costs like busing and facilities that would take longer to implement.

Transparent vendor management best-practices

The district likely already has policies that define the monetary threshold over which contracts are taken out to bid, how frequently contracts are put to bid, and how frequently the relationships with larger state organizations like the health benefits provider are reviewed. These should be made public, and the district should have a public disclosure when these are being put out to bid.

Increased transparency on financials

First, I want to acknowledge that there is a lot of financial data available that most of the public is not aware of. Still, it would improve transparency to:

• have the district contracts linked easily on the website

• disclose a long-term financial forecast

• release financial data in excel where possible

Beyond these factors, I wanted to raise a few points regarding areas of potential cost reduction that I don’t think are well understood:

Administrators

The district splits the administration costs into two buckets, one for the superintendent’s office, and one for in-school administration. There is a lot of talk of reducing administration instead of teachers, and I wanted to make sure these costs were understood.

First, the administrators have a separate contract from the teachers. All the contracts are available on See Through NY. Search for “Rockville Centre UFSD” in the Employer / Agency and they all come right up.

Total spend for in-school administrators was budgeted to be $4.6m in 2025/2026, and the superintendent’s office was budgeted to be $0.6m including the superintendent and some staff. Yes, these are big numbers, and likely there can be some reduction here, but you need to consider a few facts in terms of what the potential decrease is:

• the salaries are governed by contract

• the starting administrator salary is not significantly higher than the higher teacher salary grades

• the potential for reduction is lower than for teachers / instruction as there are many less administrators than teachers, and you have 7 schools that all need administrative oversight.

Busing

There is a NY state law that governs transportation. Districts are required to provide busing for students in K-8 that live more than 2 miles from their school, and in grades 9-12 that live more than 3 miles from their school. Since our district is 3 square miles and has 5 distributed elementary schools, there should be very little busing that is required by the state law. However, at some point historically voters passed a law (rule?) that we would bus at 0.8 miles for elementary school. In order to change this, voters would need to approve a new rule.

Also, the state requires that school districts outside of city limits bus any students that are attending private schools to school if they attend a school within 15 miles of their home. In my personal opinion, I would like to see the state change this law for the dense suburban areas like Long Island. The cost to bus a student 15 miles in Long Island during rush hour must be really high (the district doesn’t split out the costs in-district vs private school busing). It is particularly painful to ask taxpayers to bear that cost in periods of declining enrollment where that student could be accommodated within the existing district cost structure.

I want to acknowledge that there are all sorts of complexities to busing within the district, including safety factors (a lot of parents don’t feel like RVC is an area where it is safe for students to walk to school unattended), limited public transportation, some low income families without access to cars, and special education transportation.

Total cost for busing currently is ~$6.6m / year.

First, a summary of the facts from the data I have gathered so far (data linked at the bottom of every post):

• RVC spending per student is among the highest of the Long Island peers. We spend $40.2k per student per year. Of the peers I looked at, only Jericho ($40.9k) is higher, some of the other districts like Garden City ($32.7k), Port Washington ($36.2k), and Manhasset ($35.1k) spend a lot less.

• RVC operates with lower general reserves (the district called this “operating cushion”) than the other districts I looked at. The unrestricted reserves as a percentage of total expenditures (for 2023/2024, latest available peer data) was 8%. The average of “top performing” schools was 14%. What this means: we have $8m unrestricted cash to operate a budget of ~$135m / year, Garden City operates the same size budget but has $27m in unrestricted cash.

• Over the recent years, there have been a number of cost pressures on the budget, including:

  • Employee health insurance costs (up 7% a year but are projected to be up >9% next year)

  • Transportation costs (up 9% a year)

  • Liability insurance costs (up 16% a year, have doubled since 2020/2021)

All of these costs are increasing at a faster rate than the budget overall which means they are taking up an increasing share of the spend and “squeezing” other budget items.

Now, the 2026/2027 budget process -

The budget process is governed by state law. The state requires the school board to present the budget information in a specific way, to hold hearings for the public, and to give the public enough time to review the budget in advance of the vote. The vote on the budget is the 3rd Tuesday in May (every year).

The state also sets parameters regarding how a budget is approved by voters. The budget needs to pass by at least 50% of the vote. However, the state also sets a limit as to how much the tax levy (total school taxes raised) can go up every year. Generally, this factor start with the lower of cost inflation or 2%. There is then some complicated math including businesses that got tax benefits to spur development (PILOTs) and other exemptions and the maximum increase in the tax levy allowed by the state usually lands between 2.0 and 2.7%. If the district wants to put forth a budget that increases the tax levy by more than the allowed amount for that year, they need the budget to pass by at least 60% of the vote. This is called “piercing the tax cap”.

Were the budget vote to fail, the district gets one more chance to pass a revised budget in June OR they can go right to a “contingent budget” that has specific rules in terms of what can be spent, with no increase to the tax levy from the prior year.

The district has stayed under the tax cap in recent years.

Once the tax levy is set, it gets applied to individual home taxes based on property values. Your school tax is effectively your home value / total value of homes in the district * the tax levy. This is a simplification but it is more or less how it works.

A side note: Over the past 10 years, enrollment went down. If you are continually increasing the tax levy (even if it is under the 2% limit) in declining enrollment period, you can end up with fairly high spend per student just based on math. There is a lot more to this topic, because there are really valid reasons why spend might not be tied exactly to enrollment. Some examples are the cost of maintaining buildings, difficulty adjusting class sizes in periods of changing enrollment, specialist salaries (you need an art teacher whether you have 20 sections in the building or 22) and retiree benefits.

For the 2026/2027 budget year, the district is saying that they are having difficulty creating a budget without piercing the tax cap and they need to make cuts.

The district notified the public of this and created a set of meetings to address the 2026/2027 budget and get public input.

In order to understand this, I am going to lay this out in two pieces:

First, funding sources: What is the district communicating about total available funding?

Including the tax levy, how much funding is available and how does it compare to the prior year? Here is the current proposal from the district:

The district’s current projection is that the tax levy cap will be about 2.1% this year. Even so, the forecast is that total revenues available for spending in 2026/2027 will only be up 1% from this year. Why is this?

1. Appropriated Fund Balance - this is the amount that is pulled from the current year “savings” into budgeted spend for next year. In recent years, this has been more or less the same every year. This year, the district is planning to roll over less than it did previously. I went back and listened to the section where Jacquie Rehak reviewed this in detail. She is saying this is the projected amount of excess available - revenues less expenditures that is available to roll forward from 2025/2026. In recent years, something was always rolled forward in this way, and the amounts have been above $2m every year. So, less available here. It would be great to see the detail on spend actuals so far. The board asked for this in one of the public meetings but I’m not sure if it is something they can / will provide to the public.

2. Smaller changes in other sources - interest income is down slightly (the district earns income on the amounts in the bank, the district said this is due to falling interest rates), and there are some small changes in other sources.

3. State Aid - State aid is 15% of the budget and it is only increasing 1%. It’s still an increase but its below the 2% the budget has grown historically.

So - the total revenue is only projected to be up $1.4m or 1% if we do not pierce the tax cap (ask for a tax levy increase over 2%).

Second, projected expenditures: What spend items is the district projecting?

The district is giving a view of the projected spend in pieces as we go through this process. The final recommended budget with all the detail won’t be published for a few weeks. But the district has given a lot of information as to what they expect to be in this budget. I listed the changes in the “big ticket” items that are driving a lot of cost increase below.

Health insurance alone is projected to go up 10%, or $1.9m. Already, that’s a problem - total revenue sources (without piercing the tax cap) are only going up $1.3m. The district won’t know the final cost increase until December 2026, but they are expecting significant increases.

Other Employee Benefits include the cost for funding employee retirement.

Transportation, which has been a major rising cost, luckily isn’t projected to go up next year.

Finally, out of district placement are tuitions paid to private schools and other organizations. My understanding is that this is primarily special education placements. The board hasn’t said too much about what is driving this increase other than that they have names against all but three of the slots, so it isn’t a high-level prediction but is based on actual student needs. It would be great to understand whether this means more students are moving out of district (must be?), and if so, if the in-district costs will go down as a result.

The next steps

The district is rolling out their plan for reductions in two areas - Instruction and Special Education (which was presented on March 12th) and then Athletics and Art which will be presented on March 26th.

I am taking a deeper look at the reduction plans presented so far as well as some alternative ideas - more soon on this.

I am accumulating my links to the data on every post, here is an updated list:

Here are all the links to my data and summaries:

RVC 5 year budget summary - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison to other Schools - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison of Spend by Student to Peers

And the data available on the RVC websites:

Financial reports with audit letter (“Financial Statements”, the audit letter is in the first few pages)

Other audit reports

Line-item budgets (“Final Budgets”)

Presentations on Proposed 2026/2027 budget

First, why might people be asking this?

There was a tragedy in December 2024 in RVC where a pedestrian was hit and killed by someone who was driving a van owned by the RVC school district. It was covered briefly in the news when it happened. I’m truly sorry to the family of this individual that this is coming up as part of these conversations.

There also seems to be some chatter about potential litigation from former employees - I’m not sure why or the details.

The liability insurance costs have risen significantly over the past 5 years. In 2020/2021, it was about $450k and this school year it was budgeted at $950k. From the data in the 2023/2024 ST-3 filings, RVC was in-line with their comparable size peers: Roslyn and Jericho both spent nearly the same on liability insurance. I took a peek at Roslyn’s budget and they budgeted $957k for 2025/2026 - nearly the same to the dollar that RVC did. So, liability insurance costs are not impacting RVC more than its peers but ARE a pressure on the budget since they are growing more than the budget overall.

This is what the district says about its insurance coverage in the latest financial statements (I added the emphasis): The District is exposed to various risks of loss. The District purchases various insurance coverages from independent third parties to reduce its exposure to loss. In addition to other coverages the District maintains commercial general liability insurance coverage with policy limits of $1 million per occurrence. The District also maintains school board legal and employment practices liability coverage for school board members and employees up to $1 million per claim and $2 million in the aggregate and an excess catastrophe liability policy (umbrella) with a limit of $25 million per occurrence/claim. Settled claims resulting from these risks have not exceeded commercial insurance coverage in any of the past three fiscal years.

Finally, legal expenses - RVC is spending about $280k per year on legal expenses. Of the 10 peer districts, only 3 spent less on legal and several spent 2x what RVC is spending.

I am reviewing the 2026/2027 budget proposal and will do a post summarizing where the increases are. Liability insurance appears to be increasing up to 10%, but overall that makes up a tiny portion (3%) of the budget shortfall.

So, to conclude - the liability insurance costs are a budget pressure but there isn’t anything to indicate that this is a primary reason for the budget shortfall this year or something that is unique to RVC.

I added a tab with the benchmark data on liability insurance and legal to this peer comparison file: RVC Comparison of Spend by Student to Peers - Google Sheets

I am accumulating my links to the data on every post, here is an updated list:

Here are all the links to my data and summaries:

RVC 5 year budget summary - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison to other Schools - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison of Spend by Student to Peers

And the data available on the RVC websites:

Financial reports with audit letter (“Financial Statements”, the audit letter is in the first few pages)

Other audit reports

Line-item budgets (“Final Budgets”)

Presentations on Proposed 2026/2027 budget

• This data is actual spend from 2023/2024 - the latest school year isn’t posted yet

• The spend and budget data all uses a consistent set of expenditure line items for reporting, which is great as it makes it easy to compare across schools. There could still be inconsistencies depending on the way the districts are run. One example I gave on Facebook was that if you choose to pay private tuition for students who have special needs, that spend shows up in a different place than if you hire someone to run that program in-house.

• The state has a summary of the spend per student by district and their roll-up is slightly different (they compare different totals), but the source data is the same. I linked these summaries in one of my other files.

Ok, and then on to my findings:

• Syosset, Jericho, Manhasset, and Roslyn are all ranked in the top 10 in the state. I evaluated our spend against these as top performing benchmarks. There is a separate discussion to be had as to whether they are really educating students better or if they are just teaching to the test and chasing rankings… but let’s hold that for now.

• In the year I analyzed, we spent 6% more per student than the “top performing schools” average. That doesn’t seem like a lot, but consider that 6% of our expenditures in the 2023/2024 year was $8m - more than the gap we are trying to close for the upcoming budget.

• We spent less per student than these schools on General Support - this is overhead and in-school services that are not directly related to education. This includes security, custodians, utilities, finance, insurance, and legal). You can see my breakout of the RVC spend in this category here.

• We are spending more than the benchmark in Instruction, which includes Teaching, Special Education, Pupil Services (guidance counselors, social workers), and Instructional Media. We are spending less in in-school administration, the variance is in “regular” teaching and special education.

• Employee benefits is a huge cost for the high-performing districts - about $9k per year per enrolled student. Our spend is consistent with where the rest of the districts are.

• There are some other small categories which are not big areas of spend and are not material drivers of variance from the benchmark average.

Important point: I didn’t consider (yet?) the demographic makeup of the districts and the special education model including what percentage of special education students are kept in-district.

Here is a link to my summary of the spend by district

I am accumulating my links to the data on every post, here is an updated list:

Here are all the links to my data and summaries:

RVC 5 year budget summary - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison to other Schools - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison of Spend by Student to Peers

And the data available on the RVC websites:

Financial reports with audit letter (“Financial Statements”, the audit letter is in the first few pages)

Other audit reports

Line-item budgets (“Final Budgets”)

To further my understanding, I set out to research how we compare to Long Island districts on spend and funded status (how much cash / savings the district has). I included some measures of performance (rankings and test scores). I understand this is controversial but personally I DO care very much how the schools are performing. Happy to take input of what other measures we should look at - I didn’t find anything great at the high school level as regents are reported but are not taken consistently to my understanding.

What did I find?

• RVC School spend per student is among the highest of the Long Island peers I looked at. Only Jericho was higher on a per student basis for raw expenditures. Many schools “perform” better and spend less.

• We have a much lower fund balance than districts of our size. You can think of this as how much the district has in the bank. It is reported as restricted (reserved for employee benefits or other specific purposes) and unrestricted. I calculated the % of unrestricted reserves to total expenditures. We are at 6%. Only Baldwin was lower (3%). The average among the top 5 performing peers was 14%. Still, not a crisis necessarily, some other districts like Port Washington (9%) operate with relatively low reserves.

• I am cautious about the rankings which are from Niche. I would love to hear from those who have spent time with the ranking methodology. Our 3-8 ELA and Math scores are aligned with top performers (top 20 in rankings). I can’t figure out what else they are factoring in that brings us down.

Also - The state has measures that attempt to calculate the actual spend per student at a general population and “special education” level. I am somewhat wary of the special education per student spend as it seems to exclude students who are sent out of district and the districts all have really different models here. I included it in my data for you to view but I think it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Here are all the links to my data and summaries:

RVC 5 year budget summary - Google Sheets

RVC Comparison to other Schools - Google Sheets

And the data available on the RVC websites:

Financial reports with audit letter (“Financial Statements”, the audit letter is in the first few pages)

Other audit reports

Line-item budgets (“Final Budgets”)

Audits

First, there has been some discussion about audits. The audit opinions are available annually in the financial reports located here. So to the extent that there are questions coming up about whether the district has “clean audits” etc, that is publicly viewable. In all the recent years, the auditors agree that the financials are accurate as presented.

There are also some additional audit reports available online here, including one from 2021 that stated that the district should increase transparency of the financial information available to the public. Interestingly, one of the findings was that the is no multiyear financial plan available on the website - and still I can’t find one.

“How did we get here”?

There is a LOT of data available on the board website in terms of where spend has gone, how we got here, etc. It is mostly in PDF. I went through the process of dumping the historical spend into Excel so I could analyze it.

Here is what I found when I looked at the change over the past 5 years:

Over the past 5 years, the budget has increased on average 2.4% per year, or $15.8m total. Some categories are increasing faster which means they are taking a larger budget share.

• Pupil transportation, increasing at 9.3% per year. Total increase over 5 years, $2.3m

• Employee Benefits, growth of 4.0% per year but total $ growth over 5 years of $6.0m

• Central Services, growth of 3.0% per year, total growth $1.3m (custodians, security, maintenance)

• Pupil Services, growth of 3.8% per year, total growth $1.4m (biggest growth in guidance and social workers)

Simply put, growth in other lines has to go down to accommodate the fact that these are growing faster than the budget is growing overall.

Overall, what I see in the numbers is consistent with what Mr. Gaven is saying. Here is my excel budget summary if you would like to take a look.

I hope this helps. I have purposefully left my own view out of this post as I think that developing a shared understanding of the issue is the most important first step.

I am sharing here on Substack to make this information public and shareable with a wider audience. I welcome input - you should be able to comment or message me here. All of my data is from publicly available sources and I have tried to link the source where possible. Much of what I have done is aggregate very detailed data in summary formats so that it is comparable and digestible.

I am posting my analyses as I complete them; my understanding of the situation is evolving as I gain more information. If there are areas you are curious about, I would love to hear them.

A little more about me: I am a parent of 4 children, 3 of which currently attend elementary school in RVC. I am not affiliated with the Board of Education or the School District.