Spread Responsibility Through Consolidation

News last month that the Springs School Board was beginning to work toward an overdue building project came as no surprise. Nor was the estimated cost of expansion of the district’s buildings, as much as $20 million depending on the options selected, surprising.

The district has been struggling for years to educate far more students than its classrooms can handle — and doing a truly commendable job. The school’s year-in, year-out student opera, which will be seen at the John Drew Theater next week, is but one example of a vibrant, can-do institution. Parent buy-in is terrific as well, with outstanding fund-raising efforts and classroom visits by artists among their contributions.

The problem is hardly one of Springs’s own making. By dint of ill-thought early zoning and East Hampton Town’s decade-plus failure to control group houses, parts of the hamlet add up to an overburdened bedroom community for people who work in the trades. But at the same time it is home to a great number of retired people, as well as weekenders and others whose awareness of the school and its needs may extend only as far as their tax bills.

Making things more difficult, the Springs School District has suffered financially because town officials have delayed, and delayed again, a state mandate for a full property reassessment. This appears to have resulted in the district being essentially cut off from the deeper sources of potential funding that would otherwise be found among the taxpayers who own houses along the hamlet’s miles of now highly desired waterfront. There is tons of value there, money that could help pay for the expansion, teachers, and other educational costs, but it is all but untouchable until someone in Town Hall steps up.

Failing that, any number of Springs taxpayers, already feeling put upon, can be expected to howl about paying for school expansion. Consider the recent brouhaha over Town Hall’s rocky effort at regulating large commercial vehicles parking overnight in residential neighborhoods. Why should Springs bear the brunt, people opposed to the trucks ask. This question may well be heard again, with regard to the Springs School’s student population, as plans begin to solidify for its next big undertaking.

Meanwhile, the Wainscott School Board continues its reprehensible opposition to a modest affordable housing project that could bring in a handful of new students. And in East Hampton, a school board member recently intimated that the district was somehow less than absolutely obligated to cover the full cost of educating children from an existing low-income complex.

Solving the disparities between hamlets and school districts must come from above, in the form of state guidance toward consolidation and the East Hampton Town Board grabbing the bully pulpit. A super-district made up of all of the town’s tax base would spread the financial burden of the Springs expansion, as well as future costs in Springs and elsewhere, more equitably.

In the absence of a regional authority, narrow interests can be dominant (witness Wainscott). Providing a good public education in adequate surroundings is an obligation that we all share as Americans. The cost of seeing that we live up to that obligation must similarly be a collective responsibility in as equitable a way as possible.