‘I want Tuxedo High School as a choice for my children’

I would first like to start out by saying how disappointed I was in the decision by the Greenwood Lake Board of Education to not include Tuxedo in the parental choice school option. My family is devastated and so many of my neighbors are simply heartbroken.
Tuxedo has been a well loved home to our students for 31 years.
Tuxedo Superintendent Carol Lomascolo was told that Tuxedo was too expensive and Greenwood Lake could not afford to send their students to Tuxedo.
We were told at countless meetings that the GWL K-8 program would suffer if we continued to tuition our students to Tuxedo.
I would like to point out that the Greenwood Lake UFSD currently has approximately 650 students in their K-8 program. Another 270 are sent to Tuxedo for high school.
The district has two building. The cost to run the district is approximately $23.5 million. Tuxedo runs a K-12 program with 650 students. They also have two buildings and a budget of approximately $16 million.
Even if you take the $3.6 million dollars in tuition away from Greenwood Lake’s budget, the district still has $20 million to spend on their K-8 program (along with transportation and other expenses just as Tuxedo does).
The question I ask is how can we accuse a district of the same size (Tuxedo), which runs its district on 16 million dollars, of being too expensive, when we are spending four million dollars more on our K-8 program?
Maybe Greenwood Lake is the district that needs to do better with its finances?
If we were more financially responsible, tuition wouldn’t be an issue.
Finally, I would just like to make one point regarding tuition. We spend 3.6 million dollars for a great high school education. Is there any other school that spends 3.6 million on their high school education?
Is there any other district that only spends 1/6 of their budget on high school?
I think not.
Why is a 16-year-old less important than a 6 year old?
Every child in the GWL school district is entitled to the best education we can give them. Pulling our students from “their” high school to save a few dollars is just wrong.
Let’s clean up our own financial mess and stop blaming Tuxedo!

Lena Buckley
Greenwood Lake