Nyack Picks New School Trustees

NYACK, NY — Nyack school district residents approved a 2022-23 school budget on Tuesday and elected two trustees to the Board of Education.

The $100 million proposed budget was approved with 79.4 percent of the vote, district officials said on Twitter at 10:45 p.m. The budget is a 9.6 percent spending increase over the current year and it comes with a 2.45 percent hike in the school tax levy. That is within the state's tax cap for the district so the budget only needed to be approved by a majority vote.

School board incumbent Michael Mark sought re-election while Trustee Terence Rock did not, and challengers Antonia Sambevski and Matthew Watson sought trustee seats. Mark and Watson won, officials announced.

The campaign was a battleground in the national culture wars. On Patch, Sambevski said she feared Nyack's DEI strategic plan would foster racial tension and cause students to be judged by their race and gender. "Racial equity is being infiltrated through every aspect of the school. However, Equity issues touch ALL students," she wrote. "The current board is looking to make Nyack into a pinnacle of wokeness in NYS, to bring Nyack into a global culture disregarding our own culture and traditions."

District officials did not announce results on two other propositions, to spend $4 million from the 2015 Capital Reserve for the Middle School/District Office Site Improvement Project and to increase the 2015 Capital Reserve by $5 million for future improvement projects.