A Vote of Confidence

There is something of a pact between residents and their school boards, and the annual budget vote — one of the few times when voters have a direct say in the day-to-day budgeting of their tax dollars — is where that pact is consummated.

Credit school district voters: Last Tuesday, they all stepped up and held up their end of the bargain.

It’s not always an easy vote. For some homeowners, their property tax bill, which is most significantly made up of school taxes, is one of their biggest expenditures if they’ve already paid off the mortgage and are on a fixed income. The steady rise can be alarming, even if it’s more or less following the increasing costs of other expenses.

But school boards, and school district officials charged with drafting the budget every year, have challenges of their own. They are fully aware of the rising cost of everything — health insurance premiums, for instance, are a budget-buster most years — and have their own books to balance. That pact is a simple one: Provide a good education, but keep a watchful eye on the bottom line.

This year offered some peril. Even though most districts were able to stay under the state’s cap on tax levy increases, most were close to the edge, with spending increases ranging from 3 to 6 percent. East Hampton, Springs and Amagansett all were forced to put up budgets that pierced the cap, which meant that 60 percent of voters needed to give the district permission to do so. Springs was closest with nearly 64 percent support — but in the other two districts, it was never in doubt.

That’s a powerful vote of support for a group of men and women who serve on school boards, a job with no pay and lots of stress, suggesting that voters think they’re doing a good job keeping an eye on things. It’s a difficult time for districts to make the numbers work, post-pandemic, and with all the challenges of trying to hire and retain staff with so many headwinds on the South Fork.

Voters would have been handcuffing their boards, potentially kneecapping educators as they try to provide a competitive education to kids, and ultimately their own tax bills with vindictive or ill-informed votes against these school budgets this year. That so many people saw beyond the numbers — understanding not just the cost but the value — is an election result worth celebrating.