The TIMES of Middle Country
Serving CentereaCh
Volume 10, No. 50
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Selden
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northern lake grove
April 2, 2015
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State’s budget comes with new ed. regulations Roller skating comes to Port Jeff Also: ‘go Ape’ winners, ‘A Chorus Line’ in Northport, Disney Week at SCPA
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File photo by Erika Karp
A few of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s, above, education reforms were approved. Middle Country Superintendent Roberta Gerold, below, described some of the changes as misguided.
Bellone maps out county’s future
Suffolk County Executive delivers annual address in Hauppauge
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Education aid numbers finally released By erika karp
Just a few hours before the New York State Legislature approved the state’s 2015-16 budget, which includes a number of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s education reform initiatives, school districts across the North Shore finally got to know how much aid they’ll receive next year. The state aid runs showed districts getting more than they expected, since many budgeted around a 1.7 percent increase. Earlier this year, Cuomo (D) announced state aid would only increase by $377 million — a 1.7 percent increase from this year — if his state education reforms didn’t pass the Legislature. And while not all of the initiatives passed, a few did, so the aid increased by about $1.4 billion statewide. “This is a plan that keeps
spending under 2 percent, reforms New York’s education bureaucracy, implements the nation’s strongest and most comprehensive disclosure laws for public officials and makes the largest investment in the upstate economy in a generation,” Cuomo said in a statement. But not all were convinced the education initiatives would reform public schools. The Education Transformation Act of 2015 amends the teacher evaluation system, changes the time to gain tenure from three to four years and creates two designations for failing schools. The hot-button item, though, was the teacher evaluation system. Under the act, the State Education Department will develop a new teacher evaluation system by June 30, which school districts will then have to locally
negotiate and enact by Nov. 15 in order to receive their allotted aid. The system also includes a component based on students’ performance on the state’s common core-aligned tests. The evaluation system was last changed in 2013. In a phone interview on Wednesday morning, Middle Country Central School Dis-
trict Superintendent Roberta Gerold, who is also president of the Suffolk County School Superintendents Association, said she believed the change to the system was misguided, and wished elected officials would have learned that “rushing into a system that doesn’t have details attached” — as was the EDUCATION continued on page A6