Survey Shows Majority Disagreement to Most Options for Seaford Avenue School Property

The results of November’s community input survey on what should be done with the former Seaford Avenue Elementary School property showed strong opposition to many potential proposals for the property.

Of the seven options included on the survey all but one featured a majority of respondents disagreeing in some form. The proposal on the survey that had the strongest disagreement was selling the entire property for a housing development, with 68 percent indicating being against that plan. The only proposal where a majority of respondents indicated some form of support for (51 percent) was for selling the building portion of the property for commercial use and keeping the athletic fields for district use.

The survey, which was conducted by the San Francisco-based market tools company Zoomerang, featured 626 online responses and 17 paper completions. A majority of those who completed the survey (57 percent) have one or more child in the district and 82 percent have called Seaford home for at least 10 years. Seaford Superintendent Brian Conboy revealed the survey results during the Jan. 6 Board of Education meeting at and said they will be published in the district’s February newsletter.

“[The survey] did tell us that the community is still divided on what should happen to that building,” said Conboy. “It is still an open-ended question.

Other options for the Seaford Avenue Elementary School property that received negative responses from those surveyed included selling the building for housing and keeping athletic fields (56 percent disagreement) and raising the necessary capital funds to attract a new tenant (62 percent disagreement). Another potential proposal that received a cool reception in the survey was selling the building on 2161 Seaford Avenue to a developer to create 55 and older housing units with 55 percent expressing disagreement toward it.

Seaford district officials conducted the survey in hopes of giving the Board of Education an indication of what residents would support for the property. Any proposal for the parcel would need to be approved in a referendum vote.

Conboy said one option the district is exploring for the property is trying to form a partnership with the Town of Hempstead similar to what the Plainedge School District did with the Town of Oyster Bay for its old middle school building in North Massapequa. Conboy has been in touch with Plainedge Superintendent Christine P'Simer to discuss how the district sold five of its eight acres on the former middle school property to the Town of Oyster Bay for athletic fields while utilizing the remaining land to build a gym for community use. Seaford district officials are scheduled to meet with Hempstead Town Supervisor Kate Murray next week to see if a similar arrangement should be explored for the former Seaford Avenue Elementary School property.

The Seaford Avenue Elementary School was closed in 1981 and served as the home of Five Towns College for the next dozen years before it was relocated to its current home in Dix Hills. The Nassau County Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) had been running programs in the former elementary school in recent years, but in early 2010 decided it no longer needed use of the 1939-built building. 

As a result of BOCES leaving the Seaford Avenue School property the district is losing out on $445,000 of revenue it had previously received each year for leasing out the facility. The cost of maintaining the vacant building is roughly $100,000 a year, according to district officials.