Voters in Long Island vote an 18 year old to the school board, a message that politicians need to hear throughout the nation.

The Voters Say Enough, Already
By VIVIAN S. TOY(NY TIMES May 30, 2004)

PLAINEDGE

DOUGLAS PASCARELLA said he remembers the heavy pounding of his heart as he stood in the Plainedge High School gym waiting for school board election results on the night of May 18. He admitted that both he and his father, Peter, were pretty surprised when they learned that he had, indeed, won. Then they went home to celebrate with family and friends.

"Bagels, ice cream and soda," he recalled with a smile.

Not exactly typical victory party fare, but then Mr. Pascarella wasn't exactly a typical school board candidate. An 18-year-old high school senior, Mr. Pascarella pulled an election lever for the first time in his life when he voted for himself for the school board. He defeated Dominic DiPrisco, a 48-year-old lawyer and three-year incumbent, by a vote of 1,360 to 998, and will take his seat on the governing body of the Plainedge school district only a few days after graduating from it.

A solid B student headed to Adelphi University in the fall, Mr. Pascarella served three years on the student council but was disqualified this year for putting up campaign posters and handing out Smarties. But for the school board race, he did things by the book.

He campaigned door to door and handed out 2,500 flyers over the course of six weeks, more than double what his opponent managed. He also helped register fellow high school seniors who were eligible to vote, which he thinks gave him an easy 80 votes.

His platform consisted of little more than his firm belief that the board needs a student voice. "I wanted the school district to realize that there should be better representation for young people," he said.

But given his margin of victory, it's safe to assume that he touched a chord beyond the youth contingent of the electorate. He achieved the perfect pitch he needed to win simply by being an alternative to the status quo and the budget and tax increases associated with it.

So although Mr. Pascarella did not campaign with an anti-tax message, he has become a poster child for the voter anger against rising taxes that expressed itself at polling stations across Long Island this month. Nassau and Suffolk voters rejected 46 of 122 proposed school budgets, including Plainedge's $55.8 million budget, which included an 8.1 percent tax increase. Long Island's failure rate of nearly 40 percent set it apart from the rest of the state, where only about 15 percent of proposed school budgets were defeated.

"We're very concerned that while this year a sense of tax fatigue hit Long Island, next year it could spread to other parts of the state," said Robert Lowry, associate director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, which represents about 700 school districts across the state. But he asserted that "we were actually pleasantly surprised that things went as well as they did on the whole, given the circumstances that schools and taxpayers have to face."

Those circumstances include several budget factors beyond the control of local school districts, including no significant increase in state aid, hefty increases in pension and health insurance costs, and soaring gas and fuel prices.

The fear that Long Island's voter anger may become contagious is compounded by the uncertainty over how state officials will deal with a court-ordered mandate for increased education aid to New York City. School officials on Long Island and in other relatively well-to-do areas fear that as the state devises a new school aid formula to meet a July 30 deadline, wealthier districts will be robbed of state funding to benefit poorer ones, thus pushing even more of the school funding burden on local taxpayers. "There's definitely some trepidation about what the new formula could mean for school financing," Mr. Lowry said.

Timothy G. Kremer, the executive director of New York State School Boards Association, said that while many factors probably contributed to the high rate of budget defeats on Long Island, concerns about the state aid formula "probably played in the hearts and minds of voters there, because many of them feel that they're already doing their fair share to pay for education and they don't believe that New York City is."

These concerns likely weighed more heavily on Long Island voters because of the Island's proximity to the city and because residents have traditionally voted to tax themselves at relatively high rates to pay for what they consider a superior education, he said.

"People on Long Island, particularly those who commute to New York City, are much more attuned to the way things are funded than in other parts of the state," Mr. Kremer said. "And people were saying, 'How long can we continue to raise our property taxes while we watch the school funding burden shift more and more from the state to the local districts?' "

Mr. Lowry cited several factors that separate Long Island from most other districts upstate. They include rising enrollments that require increased spending, a continued cost-of-living disparity that drives up downstate costs and soaring property values on Long Island that have driven up local tax bills.

On average, budget and tax increases also were higher on Long Island than elsewhere in the state. The average spending increase was 6.9 percent for schools in the state and 7.9 percent for Long Island, Mr. Lowry said. The average school tax increase was 8.7 percent for the state and 9.5 percent for Long Island, he added.

Charles A. Fowler, superintendent of the Hewlett-Woodmere schools and president of the Nassau County Council of School Superintendents, said the sting of last fall's school tax bills, the first ones issued since the county's first comprehensive property revaluation in nearly 65 years, probably was at the heart of many of the budget defeats in the county. Twenty-two of the county's 56 school districts - 39 percent - suffered budget defeats.

"I suspect you could see the budget votes on Long Island as a thermometer of how people are feeling about the economy, state taxes, federal taxes and local taxes," Mr. Fowler said. "It was more a generic expression of concern and this is the only place where the voter has the opportunity to express it."

John A. Richman, the Plainedge schools superintendent, said he had no doubt that general voter anger at rising taxes played a large role in his district's budget defeat and in the election of Mr. Pascarella.

"I think people were striking back at the way the system is and maybe it was a condemnation of the world around us," he said. "There are a lot of things I can do, but I can't control $2-a-gallon gas prices, $4-a-gallon milk prices and the results of the property tax reassessment in Nassau County."

Mr. Pascarella also said that as he campaigned door to door, the most common complaint he heard from voters was the rate of increased costs and taxes. "A lot of people said they want more for their money," he said.

Other districts faced very local issues that turned voters against them. In Roslyn, voters turned down a budget for the first time in more than 20 years after a former assistant superintendent was accused of embezzling $1 million in school funds. In the Bellmore-Merrick high school district, voters approved the budget but ousted an incumbent board member. The district has been rocked by the hazing scandal in which four high school football players are accused of abusing younger teammates at a summer football camp.

Suffolk County districts did not have a property reassessment to contend with, but voters defeated school budgets at nearly the same rate as in Nassau - 24 of the county's 66 budgets went down, a failure rate of 36 percent. Officials said Suffolk school districts were probably hurt by considerable increases in property values across the county.

Jeannette Santos, president of the Nassau-Suffolk School Boards Association and a former Amityville school board trustee, gave her own home as an example. "I bought my house 45 years ago for $19,500 and now it's worth $300,000," she said. "That doesn't mean I have that much money in my pocket, but this is what I'm being taxed on."

Gary D. Bixhorn, the superintendent of the Eastern Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services, said that housing prices have risen so significantly in recent years that it's not unusual to find some homes double what they were worth three to four years ago.

Many districts in eastern Suffolk are also different from districts in Nassau County because they are below the state average in terms of wealth and are therefore more dependent on state aid. At the same time, they are in a very high-cost region, he added, so when "state aid doesn't keep up property taxpayers are forced to pick up a bigger share of the expenses than elsewhere in the state."

James H. Hunderfund, the superintendent of Commack public schools and president of the Suffolk County School Superintendents Association, said that his members told him many voters "were almost apologetic about voting no. They would say they loved the schools and the kids, but they were just at the point of no return with paying these increases."

Commack voters narrowly approved a $116 million budget by a margin of 92 votes out of 5,100 cast. The district learned its lesson last year after suffering a budget defeat and having to put up its budget for a second vote to get voter approval, Dr. Hunderfund said. So this year, the district started public meetings and sending out budget updates to voters about six months ago.

The district ultimately cut 12 teachers, eliminated its elementary summer school program and increased average class size by 2 students, to 26 in the elementary grades and to 29 in secondary schools. "Even with all that, the budget was still an 8.9 percent increase," Dr. Hunderfund said, because of uncontrollable costs like contracted raises and increases in health insurance and pension costs.

"People think that districts are just making threats when they say that an austerity budget means cutting teachers, sacrificing programs and class sizes going through the roof," he said. "But they're not threats. It's just telling people what reality will be."

In Plainedge, the school board voted last week to put up the same $55.8 million budget for a second vote on June 15. The board has also prepared an austerity budget in case voters reject the budget a second time.

The decisions that had to be made were difficult ones, said Mr. Richman, the Plainedge superintendent. "I think Doug is a nice kid," he said of the new school board member who will take office on July 1. "But he's not prepared to make this level of decisions. He shouldn't be doing this on a lark."

Mr. DiPrisco, the school board member whom Mr. Pascarella unseated, agreed. "I personally don't believe that any 18-year-old is able to face the challenges that face a school board," he said. "Besides all the fiscal situations, there are a lot of sensitive issues regarding staff and students, a lot of things that I don't think an 18-year-old has the life experience to deal with."

Mr. Pascarella, who was voted Class Clown by his fellow seniors for the coming yearbook, said he knows that the administration and his future colleagues think he ran "as a joke." But he insisted that simply wasn't the case. After a stint as an intern for Representative Peter T. King earlier this year, he said he decided that "this is something I want to do in the future because I like to fight for people when something goes wrong and get them out of jams."

To prepare for his campaign, he found two 18-year-old politicians - a city councilman in Ohio and a school board member in Maryland - and he called them regularly for advice. He said he knows that his learning curve on the school board will be steep, but he plans to spend the summer studying up on school legislation and regulations.

Mr. Pascarella also reached out to Assemblyman Thomas P. DiNapoli, who was the youngest person to hold public office in the state when he was elected to the Mineola school board in 1972 at age 18. Mr. DiNapoli said they never managed to hook up, though, "because every time I called him back, he was out campaigning."

Mr. DiNapoli served on the Mineola school board for 10 years, eventually becoming the school board president. He said he too was received with less than open arms when he was first elected, particularly since he was rebellious enough to attend board meetings in blue jeans.

"My first year was very tough," he said. "They were very patronizing to me and it was a little tense, but I was determined not to be an obstructionist or to create a revolution. I just wanted to present a different viewpoint."

Mr. DiNapoli said he would advise Mr. Pascarella to bear in mind that "as a consumer of the school system, he has some inside knowledge, but he's got to realize that he can't try to speak for students anymore because he won't be one himself once he takes office and he has to represent a much broader constituency."

And as for Mr. Pascarella's new colleagues, Mr. DiNapoli said, "They should keep in mind that part of the diversity of a community should include our younger citizens and he's got a real insider's point of view that nobody on the board has. They would be wise to respect the voters' wishes and give him an even chance."