Levittown Union Free School District
One of the most complete district-wide school efficiency studies undertaken by VMC was conducted on behalf of the Levittown Union Free School District. This extensive and complex School District is located in Nassau County, in the center of New York’s Long Island. At the time Value Management Consultants worked with the district, it was composed of eleven school buildings servicing approximately 7,000 students, a large transportation facility and a maintenance building. In addition, numerous district resident students attended a large number of vocational and special educational programs both in and out-of-district. All of this required coordinated services and recordkeeping.
The District’s Board of Education was concerned about budgetary restraints and a staff that seemed to grow incrementally. As a result, they requested that VMC review the operations of its Business, Personnel, Data Processing, Security, Maintenance, Transportation, Custodial and Copying/Printing departments, as well as the activities of its District-wide non-instructional clerical support staff.
It must be noted that, over the years, the management of the Levittown Union Free School District had yielded outstanding fiscal results. When compared to similar districts in New York State, Levittown had shown significantly smaller budgetary increases, lower per capita school taxes, and low per pupil expenditures, while still maintaining academic standards. Notwithstanding this fine performance, the District faced difficult budget battles, and needed to reduce costs, without sacrificing service quality.
Immediately a staff of consultants with a collective lifetime of experience in each of the areas to be studied began its work. VMC’s efficient approach to this project both dictated and defined its scope in that it proved broad enough to capture sufficient data with which to extrapolate complete results, while being sufficiently compact to permit timely and cost effective completion. Well within schedule and budget, VMC presented its report to the District administration and the Board of Education.
Following accepted procedure, staff members in each department were interviewed, “site-samplings” of productivity were conducted, work standards were analyzed and compared, supervisory structure was considered, and inventory control was examined. At the conclusion of this process, a two dimensional model of the District’s departmental operations had been constructed, and could then be reviewed in detail for redundancy, bottlenecks and management controls, and technological means of increasing effectiveness. Each study area was reviewed as a distinct entity, and then, in the final analysis, as an integrated part of the whole.
As a result, by following VMC’s recommendations for a tightening of staff functioning, elimination of operational redundancies, and technological upgrades first year savings of $500,000 and three year savings approaching $2,500,000 were projected—along with a perceptible increase in service quality.