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Rising kindergarten enrollment prompts request for two new classrooms and $30,000 per-room furnishings
Summary
A Goose Hill presenter told the Cold Spring Harbor board that kindergarten registrations have risen to 126, pushing the school to add a kindergarten section and the district to plan for two additional classrooms next year; each new classroom carries roughly $30,000 in equipment and materials costs.
A district presenter for Goose Hill told the Cold Spring Harbor Central School District board that current kindergarten registrations have climbed to 126, up from a projected 111, and the school will need to open an additional kindergarten section immediately and add, overall, two more classrooms next year.
The presenter said officials estimate furnishing and equipping each new classroom will cost about $30,000, covering desks, teacher furnishings, carpets and additional textbooks. "After we did all of the quotes ... everything rounds up to about $30,000 per class," the presenter said.
Board members asked how reliable the enrollment projections are and whether space exists districtwide. The presenter said projections are "pretty reliable" at this stage and that staff will reconfigure rooms districtwide and consider moving resource-room or assistant-teacher spaces to create classroom capacity. One board member asked whether the district can redistribute rooms across schools; staff said they will "take a walk" through buildings and find space where possible.
The presentation also described related budget increases supporting curriculum and enrichment: additions to materials for the Illustrative Math program, purchases of decodable readers, multisensory phonemic-awareness resources, and expanded after-school clubs such as Lego robotics. The presenter thanked the board for prior support that enabled regular visits from the Long Island Children's Museum and other hands-on learning experiences.
The item is a budget presentation; no formal vote on classroom funding was recorded during the session. The next step is continued planning for classroom reconfiguration and incorporating the $30,000 per-class provision into the final budget proposals.
