Recent letters to The Roslyn News have decried the supposed excessive amount of time that the current board spends on financial as opposed to educational issues. The authors of such criticism somehow fail to see the connection between the financial and educational spheres. To put it more simply, no money, no staff, no education. The school districts employees do not nor should not work for substandard wages or benefits. But the realities are that competitive salaries and benefits cost money, lots of money. The most serious challenges facing the current school board are financial. The board has the unenviable and nearly impossible task of reconciling rapidly escalating health benefit and pension costs with a seemingly unquenchable demand for expanding educational services against a background of a stagnant tax base. If the current board does not spend the appropriate time on financial matters, the only educational decisions that future boards will make are how much larger to increase class size and what non-mandated educational programs serving the great majority of the districts children to cut. Any significant tax increases will only exacerbate the problem of diminishing diversity in the district by driving out seniors and residents of more modest means. At some point our ever increasing tax rates will disproportionately erode the real estate values of all but the districts most expensive homes. If the aforementioned financial issues are not addressed, we will eventually face the worse case scenario of ever-increasing taxes and declining educational services.

Apparently many in the community have forgotten, never read or disagree with the findings of the Hevesi report regarding the conduct of the past board. What is it about the reports conclusion of "abysmal oversight" that they do not understand? Was it the failure of the past board to review and anticipate the financial consequences of contracts they signed? Was it the failure of the past board to review school budgets as evidenced by their lack of questioning of a patently bogus line in Tassone's last budget appropriating $113,000 for "psychological furnishings?" Was it the failure of the past board to evaluate moral character? Was it the failure of the past board to appoint a qualified director of buildings and grounds resulting in $5 to $10 million of damage to the districts physical plant? Was it the failure of the past board to insist on the hirings of a labor lawyer and benefits expert to negotiate millions of dollars of labor contracts? Or was it the failure of the past board to recognize that the English curriculum had not been reviewed in over 17 years while giving the retiring assistant superintendent for curriculum a $65,000 going away gift?

No matter how hard some might wish, the laws of economics cannot be suspended at the borders of the Roslyn School District. The denial of the linkage between inadequate time spent on financial issues and adverse educational consequences defies logic and contradicts the expensive lesions of our recent past. There is something especially disingenuous and hypocritical about those who criticize the current board's meticulous attention to financial detail while being sympathetic to and stunningly silent about the "abysmal oversight" of the past board which created the financial problems that demand so much of the present board's time.

L.R. Heisler