Budget, Capital Plan approved 3:1; OMCS budget fails
by Robert Lynch; May 19, 2026; (Updated May 20, 2026)
Sara Garner has never served on a Board of Education. But in Tuesday’s Ithaca School Board elections, Garner got more votes than anyone else.
In another low turnout election, Garner, Director of Community Nursery School in Ithaca, claimed the top spot in balloting for a trio of three-year board positions. Four candidates competed. Former, one-term board member Jill Tripp came in second. A current incumbent, Garrick Blalock, registered third.
A second incumbent competing for re-election, Madeline Cardona, fell out of the running, registering fourth. Cardona finishes a one-year term, having been elected in 2025 to complete the term of a member who’d resigned.
In a show of union power, the Political Action Committee of the Ithaca Teachers Association, the school district’s instructional bargaining group, had endorsed all three winners; Garner, Tripp, and Blalock.
Budget voting in the May 19 Ithaca City School District gave results that weren’t even close. Certified as final Wednesday, the $177.6 Million ICSD 2026-27 budget, its spending up five percent from that of the current year, breezed to approval, 2,666 votes (75.1%) to 882 votes (24.9%). A. $43.9 Million capital project package also won, 2,640 votes (75.4%) to 860 votes (24.6%).
Bus purchase and capital reserve fund measures also won by similar margins. Final numbers changed little from those reported election night.
The big wins Tuesday by Garner and Tripp signal a recast Ithaca Board of Education that may in the forthcoming year become more critical of current leadership and give greater attention to both budget economies and student performance.
Jill Tripp’s victory could also put her in line for leadership. Tripp could stand as a potential successor to retiring Board President Dr. Sean Eversley Bradwell.
Final results, released by ICSD Wednesday, put Garner in the lead with 2,925 votes, 186 votes ahead of second-place Tripp (2,739 votes).
Garrick Blalock garnered 1,946 votes in Tuesday’s balloting. Madeline Cardona trailed with 1,244 votes.
In the briefest of meetings, lasting but seconds, the Ithaca Board of Education certified the election results early Wednesday evening. A majority, yet not all board members attended.
****
Of the four school districts that reach into Enfield, only Odessa-Montour had budget trouble. Odessa Montour’s nearly $23.4 Million budget exceeded the state tax cap. It received majority support, 254 votes to 192 votes, a 57 percent majority approval, but fell short of the 60 percent supermajority required by state law to pass.
A district spokesperson said the Odessa-Montour Board of Education will convene Thursday, May 21, to weigh future options.
Two Odessa-Montour school board incumbents won new terms in uncontested contests.
Likewise uncontested were school board members Tanya Grove and Steven Daly in Trumansburg. Each secured new terms. The Trumansburg District Budget passed overwhelmingly, 293 votes (77.3%) to 86 (22.7%). A proposition in Trumansburg to purchase a pair of propane school buses won by an even larger margin, 286 to 73, a nearly 4:1 margin of approval.
In Newfield, a $28.2 Million school budget passed. The approval margin in Newfield paralleled that of neighboring Odessa-Montour, where the budget had lost. But since Newfield budget planners kept their projected tax levy just under the state’s tax cap—and only slight under, by less than $21,000—Newfield’s spending plan required only a simple majority to pass.
The Newfield school budget was approved on a vote of 227 votes (56.6%) in support, 174 votes (43.4%) opposed.
Three Newfield candidates sought the three open school board seats. Incumbents Jeremy Tenwolde (283 votes) and Missy Rynone (256 votes) secured three-year terms. Newcomer Christopher Hyer Jr. (209 votes) won a single-year position.
Sara Garner, the political newcomer, will take her seat on the Ithaca Board of Education this July most likely unwilling to accept the status quo. In fact, at least academically, she may shake things up.
“Over the past three years, I have seen a consistent pattern that concerns me deeply,” Garner wrote in answer to an Ithaca Teachers Association (ITA) questionnaire earlier this month. Garner said she was troubled by “a lack of accountability in leadership, declining math and literacy outcomes in our elementary and middle schools, and a Board culture that too often limits open, reflective, and data-informed decision making.”
Sara Garner singled out one noteworthy instance during the past year.
“In September, despite more than a hundred community members speaking out within a 24-hour period to ask the Board to delay or reconsider the vote to extend the superintendent’s contract, their concerns were not meaningfully addressed,” the top-polling ICSD candidates said in her answer to the ITA’s query. “That is not what responsive board leadership looks like,” Garner insisted.
Asked pointedly by the union whether she would have extended Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown’s employment contract into 2028-29, a decision the board’s majority made last fall, Garner answered, “I would have decided to postpone the vote on the superintendent contract extension based on feedback from the ITA and the community to do so,” she said.
Garner added, “Based on the information I have available to me right now, I would not have extended Dr. Brown’s contract.”
Of the four ICSD candidates, Sara Garner wrote by far the longest responses. That alone may signal the level of detail and particularity with which she’ll approach her elective office next school year. By contrast, Jill Tripp wrote among the briefest responses.
“I would have voted with the four members of the board who voted against the 4-year extension of Dr. Brown’s contract,” Tripp stated in answer to the same question posed to Garner. “This decision would have been based on my three years of observation of the superintendent’s performance,” Tripp stated. “In my opinion, it is time for a change in district leadership.”
Jill Tripp first won election to the Ithaca Board of Education in 2022. Her three-year term ended last year. She came in a close fifth in a crowded, seven-way race for four board seats in 2025. She lost to Madeline Cardona by 113 votes (Tripp got 2.238 votes; Cardona, 2,351).
Viewed positively by many taxpayers as a financial hawk, Jill Tripp often won their praise during her first term. Tripp proved cautious about spending, yet supportive of environmental initiatives like school bus electrification. She also led the drive to increase Cornell University’s contribution to Ithaca’s schools.
During a fractious July 2024 organizational meeting, held in a year when a school budget first lost massively at the polls, only to be retooled, trimmed, and approved on its second vote, Tripp tied Eversley Bradwell as members balloted for Board president.
Eversley Bradwell got four votes on the first ballot; Tripp four votes on the second, in neither case a majority. Only on the third ballot did incumbent Eversley Bradwell prevail. Nonetheless, the voting signified a split in governing philosophies. That division lives on to this day.
Two months from now, with Eversley Bradwell having departed and with new policies in place enabling multiple-candidate secret ballots, Jill Tripp stands a good chance of becoming the next ICSD Board President—assuming, of course, that she wants the job.
In terms of the budget, unlike in 2024, this year’s Ithaca School district offering never proved controversial. The $177.6 Million spending plan approved Tuesday will raise expenses by just over five percent. But by tapping into fund balance savings, the board contained the tax levy rise to just 3.4 percent, well below the state-calculated 4.18 percent tax cap for Ithaca.
A public hearing on the budget May 12 generated little feedback. The hearing lasted only 20 minutes. Four people spoke. Only one of them took direct aim at the budget. The others just posed questions or addressed peripheral matters.
That said, the budget that reached ICSD voters Tuesday got there only just barely.
At its April 14 meeting, only five of nine board members backed the spending plan. Member Todd Fox voted against the budget, holding out for a smaller tax increase. Three other members abstained—equivalent to a dissent—with each abstainer leaning upon one member’s complaint that administrators and board leadership had never allowed “substantive public discussions” at fully-attended meetings to allow “collective input” in budget development.
The grievances that generated those April abstentions may prove fertile ground to nurture the concerns that Sara Garner raised prominently within her ITA questionnaire responses.
Among the items ICSD voters approved Tuesday was funding to buy up to nine, full-sized buses, two of them wheelchair-equipped, and an additional, smaller, 30-passenger bus. Each would be a “low-emission propane” bus. None would be electric-powered.
The electric-versus-propane debate never gained traction as a controversy this election cycle. In fact, the bus proposition received little attention at all. District officials stressed beginning last year that current-generation electric buses impose limitations for use in the type of long-haul student transport that Ithaca practices. They also say the district’s Bostwick Road transportation facility lacks the grid capacity to power a fully-electric fleet.
And while New York State has a statute on the books demanding all newly-purchased school buses be electric-powered beginning in 2027, state budget negotiators may soon delay that mandate by at least five years.
The other big-ticket item for ICSD voters was the $43.9 Million capital project. Scaled back substantially from a $125 Million capital package rejected two years ago, the current multi-year capital program approved Tuesday would fund a generically-specified series of repairs and upgrades for such routine maintenance tasks as new roofs, repaved driveways, and modernized bathrooms.
One of the costlier capital projects that’ll become easy to notice in future years will be the installation of a $4.8 Million geothermal heating and cooling system to serve Ithaca High School and Boynton Middle School.
Gone from the capital package is the 2024 effort to rebuild the ICSD bus garage.
###