Every trustee on the Jericho Board of Education asked the residents of this community for a vote of confidence. They got it. Some on a reform mandate. Some on continuity. All five chairs went to people who promised to do the job.

Then, when the State Comptroller's nine-and-a-half-year-old audit was sitting on the desk in front of them — when the District's own audited financials showed approximately $130 million in additional manufactured surplus in the post-audit years — when the question of whether the cap-evasion the State documented in 2014-15 was still in place was in their hands — they voted 5–0 on Proposition #3.

Same template as 2017. Same template as 2020. Same five chairs.

That is not a difference of opinion. That is a failure to do the job.

Read this part once and the whole vote becomes simple.

Proposition #1 — the 2026-27 school budget, $147,944,295. The teachers, the classrooms, the daily operating costs of educating roughly 3,100 students. A yes vote funds the schools.

Proposition #2 — authorizing up to $4,721,701 from an existing capital reserve. Money already collected. Specific named projects: window replacements, ceiling and lighting upgrades, plumbing and bathroom renovations, the Cantiague elevator, security upgrades, locker rooms at HS/MS. Honest accounting.

Proposition #3 — establishing a new $20 million Capital Reserve Fund. "Facilities Improvement Program VI." Ten-year term. Up to $5 million from the 2025-26 budget plus up to $10 million per remaining year until the $20 million is hit. The scope language is the same kitchen-sink list this newsletter has documented across every iteration since 2017.

Proposition #4 — the Jericho Public Library budget, $6,101,282. Funds the library.

Read those four together, slowly. A no vote on Prop 3 does not stop the school budget. It does not stop the capital improvements already paid for. It does not affect the library. It does not punish a single child.

It blocks the establishment of one new reserve fund. It does nothing else.

The schools open in September either way. The teachers get paid. The window replacements happen. The Cantiague elevator gets fixed. The library opens its doors. The kids go to school.

What changes is this: the District does not get a fresh, voter-approved, ten-year vehicle into which to dump the manufactured surplus that has been engineered out of every budget for two decades.

The mechanism the State Comptroller documented in 2014-15 — over-collect from residents, transfer the year-end excess into a capital reserve to keep unrestricted fund balance at the 4% cap, repeat — loses its sixth bucket.

The District already holds $53 million in restricted reserves on a $143.9 million operating budget. Voting no on Prop 3 forces a real conversation about what happens with the money already sitting there before more of it is engineered into a sixth pile.\

This is the question the Board and the administration do not want you to ask.

The District is going to manufacture another surplus this year. It is already engineered into the budget that is on this very ballot. The same line items the State Comptroller documented as chronically over-budgeted in 2016 — are still padded in the FY2026-27 appropriations. Whether voters approve Prop 3 or not, that surplus is coming. The question is what happens to it.

Here is what the law actually requires when unrestricted fund balance exceeds the 4% statutory cap. There are three options:

1.       Lower the tax levy the following year — return the over-collection to residents.

2.      Spend it on one-time educational expenditures — money in the classroom, not in a bucket.

3.      Fund a legitimate, documented reserve with a specific demonstrated need and a written policy.

That is the entire menu. There is no fourth option in statute.

For nine years, the District has used Prop 3 — over and over and over — as the fourth option. Establish a reserve. Sweep the year-end surplus into it. Reset the unrestricted line to exactly 4%. Wait three years. Establish another reserve. Sweep again. Repeat.

A NO vote on Prop 3 closes that escape valve.

The surplus is still coming. Without a fresh ten-year, $20 million bucket to dump it in, the District is left with the three legal options the State actually requires:

•         Option 1 — Lower the levy. That is exactly what the 4% cap was designed to force. Residents see lower taxes the following year. The State has been pointing at this option for nine and a half years.

•         Option 2 — Spend it on the schools. Hire teachers. Cut class sizes. Add programs. The District has been telling residents for two decades that more money is needed for the kids. Here is the chance to put it where the rhetoric has been.

•         Option 3 — Push the unrestricted fund balance over the 4% cap and trigger the State. This is the option the District has worked for nine years to avoid. If they choose it, they trigger the same finding the State Comptroller issued in 2016 — recalculated unrestricted fund balance exceeds the statutory limit — only this time with a prior audit on the record and a Corrective Action Plan that, by their own audited financials, has not been honored. That is the conversation the District does not want to have. It is also the conversation the State has been waiting to have for nearly a decade.

Pick any of the three. The residents win.

The only way the District wins is if voters approve Prop 3 and let the engineered surplus disappear into a sixth bucket without the conversation ever happening.

That is the entire game. That is what your vote ends.

Pick the word you want. "Cap-evasion." "Year-end transfer mechanism." "Engineered surplus." They all describe the same thing.

Money is over-collected from residents. Money is transferred at year-end into a reserve fund the 4% statutory cap does not apply to. Money sits there. Residents are asked to approve a sixth reserve to hold more of it.

The State of New York adjudicated this in 2016. The District agreed in writing. And every Board since — including this one — has voted yes. The reform majority. The holdovers. Everyone. 5–0.

If a private fiduciary did this with your money, there would be a word for it. The Board has stamped that word, by signature, across Proposition #3 on the ballot you will receive on May 19.

It is theft in plain sight. It has been on the ballot for nine years. It has been approved every time.

•         Proposition #1 (School Budget — $147.9M): Vote your conscience. The schools need to operate.

•         Proposition #2 (Existing Capital Reserve Spend — $4.7M): Money already collected, specific named projects. A yes is reasonable.

•         Proposition #3 (New $20M Reserve Fund — Program VI):  Vote No.

•         Proposition #4 (Library Budget — $6.1M): Vote your conscience. The library is the library.

A no on Prop 3 is not a no on Jericho. It is not a no on schools. It is not a no on teachers, or kids, or capital projects, or the library.

It is a no on the one line of the ballot the Board has used — for nine years, across every composition, on a unanimous vote — to take more than the District needs.

That is the whole vote.