Submitted by Harry Fisher, Republican Chair of the Board of Estimate and Taxation
There is not much new under the sun. Recently a friend sent me the following, published in the Greenwich Time, referring to the 2019-2020 school budget: About Peter Bernstein, then Republican Chair of the BOE, the paper wrote that ‘The school district and the school board did not have time to review programs for efficiencies, but it needs to be done.’
“It is not a hard cap,” BET (Democrat) Chair Jill Oberlander said Friday morning of the 1 to 2 percent. “It’s possible the BOE will say ‘We can’t do better.’”
The current reduction in the BOE budget imposed by the BET is about 2 percent.
The following paragraph read, ‘A majority of the school board members were open to increasing the size of middle and high school classes, ending subscriptions to underused teaching software and trimming professional and curriculum development costs.’
Responsible budgeting needs to be forced on the current BOE, and that is all that Republicans have called for, six years after the above efforts on the part of a Democrat led BET.
Harry Fisher
Republican Chair of the BET