School budget fails residents

As a Downingtown Area School District resident, I take exception to the validity of quoted material published in your article regarding the approval of the DASD preliminary budget.

CFO Richard Fazio is quoted as saying “It is a significant achievement to have no real estate tax increase or cuts in staffing or programming.”

This statement is inaccurate as the preliminary 20182019 DASD budget is eliminating the daily nurse staffing at Bishop Shanahan High School.

At a recent meeting with DASD administrators, Bishop Shanahan administration was informed that the school district is eliminating the district employed nurse who staffs the nurse’s office at Shanahan as of the 2018/2019 school year and will only provide annual screenings henceforth.

In addition, DASD Board President Jane Bertone is quoted as saying “I do want to thank Dr. Lonardi and our administrators for their hard work in successfully crafting an educationally sound budget that is fiscally responsible to our constituents.”

In fact, the preliminary budget is anything but fiscally responsible and is also discriminatory as well as very short sighted.

The DASD decision to eliminate daily nursing services at BSHS is discriminatory, since nursing services are not being cut from the public schools as well.

Eliminating daily nursing services is an injustice to the BSHS students who each save the district over $16,000 annually and to their parents as DASD taxpayers.

Funding for school nursing services is provided not only by the school district where the nonpublic school is located but by the state of Pennsylvania as well.

DASD receives annual state reimbursement of the nursing services provided to BSHS, based on total enrollment at the school, since it lies within DASD boundaries.

Additionally, the decision to cut the daily nursing staffing at BSHS is very short-sighted as the tax paying residents of the Downingtown Area School District who choose to send their children to Bishop Shanahan represent a significant collective cost savings of over $4,000,000.00 annually for DASD taxpayers, that vastly exceeds the cost of providing BSHS students with the nursing services that they deserve.

What the school board is obviously neglecting to realize is that if the parents of every current BSHS student residing in the DASD are forced to send their children to the public high school due to prohibitive tuition rate increases brought on by BSHS having to bear the full cost of daily nursing services, DASD will most certainly face far greater budgetary pressure than the small amount that it costs the district to offer daily nursing services to BSHS.

Such an increase in public school student enrollment, not related to new tax-paying property owners moving into the district, would immediately cause an increase in not only teacher salary expense, but other benefit expenses as well.

In addition, the increased burden on the district’s infrastructure resulting in increased capital and maintenance expenditures would eventually total much more than the initial $4,000,000 expense increase.

Furthermore, the BSHS students and their tax-paying families deserve more than the mere minimum services of annual screenings and bus transportation from the over $220,000,000 budget that the DASD will be seeking to approve at the June 13 board meeting.

This budget must not be allowed to pass without the reversal of the discriminatory cost cutting measure of eliminating daily nurse services from BSHS, in order that all district students receive the services to which they are entitled.

The DASD Board must be held accountable to all taxpayers within the district, and not just represent those who send their children to the public schools.

Both Radnor & Marple Newtown school districts provide daily nursing services to the private schools within their borders, I see no reason DASD should not be able to afford to do the same. Bonnie Reagin West Bradford