New Suffolk to vote on school house’s fate, teacher back pay
People sit in a classroom and listen as the New Suffolk school board meets to discuss whether to close its century-old three-room schoolhouse on Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2018. Credit: John Roca
School board members in the tiny New Suffolk school district will vote Jan. 31 on the fate of formal instruction in its three-room, century-old schoolhouse as the North Fork system works to pay for a teacher’s reinstatement and back wages after an August ruling from the State Education Commissioner.
Trustees scheduled the vote at a contentious school board meeting Tuesday night attended by about 30 residents. They had heard the recommendations of a four-member committee that had studied the issue for several months.
The three-member school board will vote on a plan to reduce staff or close instruction at the school and send all of the district’s students to neighboring districts. New Suffolk would remain open, under that option, for administrative offices as well as extracurricular and enrichment education, officials have said.
Fifteen students in grades prekindergarten through sixth attend class at the schoolhouse, while 12 older students are enrolled in the Southold school district. New Suffolk pays for those students’ tuition.
“None of these are good options,” school board president Tony Dill said in an interview after the hourlong meeting. “These are the only practical ones that anyone can decide given state standards.”
Any option to keep the school running, he said, will involve “a huge tax increase. And I don’t think that’s going to be well received in the community at all.”
The community would ultimately have to vote to approve sending students to other districts. Superintendent Christopher Gallagher said there had been preliminary discussions with officials in the Mattituck-Cutchogue and Southold districts.
The bleak fiscal picture stems from a dispute over a teacher’s tenure and ensuing legal challenge. New Suffolk has a $1.1 million operating budget.
Teacher Martha Kennelly, who began with the district in 1998, learned that her job was cut at the end of the 2014-15 school year. Kennelly, in a petition to the state Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia, opposed her termination on grounds that she was not the district’s least senior teacher.
She said she should not have been placed in a “hybrid” tenure track, excluded from other teachers. Elia ruled that the district arrived at the tenure grouping improperly and said the board should recalculate seniority rankings, reinstate Kennelly and pay her back wages if she was not the least senior educator in the system.
Kennelly, who is paid $119,485 and says she is owed roughly $300,000 in back pay and benefits, is pursuing a separate federal age discrimination lawsuit against the district.
The meeting turned combative at times as residents alternately criticized and defended Kennelly, who sat silently in the first row. Kennelly, 54, has been devising curriculum at home and has not returned to the classroom.
Some said the vitriol directed at Kennelly resembled a “witch hunt.”
The committee report recommended that the district return Kennelly to the classroom this fall, but if enrollment declines by a large number, the district should send students to other school systems and cut the remaining teaching jobs. The committee also recommended that the district continue to remain open and float a bond to fund Kennelly’s back pay.
Scott Eidler is a deputy editor for the towns department at Newsday. Scott has worked at Newsday since 2012 and previously covered municipal government and education.
