Tanya Marquette
Tanya Marquette. (Photo by Lauren Thomas)
Tanya Marquette has lived in Gardiner since 1981, and she raised her two children in the area. While her adult kids have graduated, her son and his family live in the school district and her granddaughter will soon be attending the New Paltz public schools.
Marquette runs her own business — an energy auditing and construction consulting firm that also does general remodeling contracting and home inspections. She’s lived in the New Paltz School District for nearly 40 years.
In recent years, she’s shown up to school board meetings a lot — often fighting for equity for minority students. She’s served on a few school subcommittees, including the superintendent’s Facility Advisory Committee, the Diversity Committee and the grassroots group Concerned Parents of New Paltz. She’s also a member of the Town of Gardiner’s Environmental Conservation Commission. Despite her volunteerism, Marquette has never held an elected position.
Q: Why are you running for school board?
TM: Having spent much of my adult life working on construction problems, planning and implementation, it has been very frustrating to see facility bonds put out to the community that miss the mark.
The $50 million middle school bond was defeated by 73 percent and drew the largest voter turnout ever. This recent bond and referendum on land buying was lost by 78 percent. That is a lot of time and work by the Board of Education and the community that missed the mark. It did not consider the communities finances, nor did it speak to the practicality of such a purchase.
We need a comprehensive district plan that presents to the community our education model and plan for development along with the facility needs to support that overall plan. Our facility development needs to feed the education plan, not vice versa.
Purchasing the land would have created facts on the ground that would have tried to force support for a plan not well articulated. This is not how to do development. Repairs are another story. We need better planning for ongoing maintenance. One possible solution is to utilize the recommendations for a district-wide task force made by the national task force on facilities and maintenance.
Maintenance should not be the hidden secret of our district until it becomes a major cost and stress factor for everyone. Other concerns include finding ways to balance the needs of our education program with the weakening finances of our community.
So many people have seen major reductions of their income, some through retirement but many through loss of jobs and businesses shrinking. I, myself, have seen the whole home inspection business decline significantly along with building. We need more creative ways to deliver high quality education.
Q: What are the top three issues facing the New Paltz schools, and if you got elected how would you address them?
TM: 1. A comprehensive district plan that encompasses the education model, a facilities plan that addresses our long-term education program and the financial process to pay for these.
2. Financial planning as part of the comprehensive plan. We need to think about being more active with other school districts and community organizations on creating a meaningful solution to the unfair property tax. We need to think about fundraising. Another idea is to work more intimately with the community and utilize its expertise instead of always hiring costly outside consultants. Again, the format of local task forces can be very powerful and needs to be explored and utilized.
3. Greater community involvement in planning that becomes part of the operational structure. People will volunteer if they feel their voice will count. Appointing three community people to the Board of Education facilities committee is a good start in this direction.
Q: This year school board members settled on a $50.31 million budget that would raise the tax levy by 4.4 percent. Would you have voted yes for that budget too? Why or why not?
TM: No. I think the budget pushes the envelope for many people’s finances. It was disappointing to hear some people tell the Board of Education to spend more money. I am happy that we have people whose finances are secure for them, but this is not true for too many of our residents.
I do believe we can continue many of our star programs if we bring the community into our planning and delivery in more open and creative ways. This will be cost effective and bring the school into the community in a win-win effort.
Q: After briefly promoting $12.3 million in fixes to the four school buildings – known as the “Health & Safety Bond” project — the board took it off May’s ballot. Do you support those repairs? Would you have approached the decision to remove that bond project differently?
TM: Yes, generally I do support those repairs. We need to view our facilities as our material investment and need to maintain them in the same way that we are concerned about our own homes.
Again, I would like to see more community direct involvement in planning and information sharing. If the community was involved in the planning of these proposals, there would be greater success. This is a situation where a school-community task force would have been very beneficial.
Personally, I would have to read the proposal in closer detail to see what cost saving changes could be made in how the work was scoped. I would hope to be intimately involved in reviewing planning and plans for these projects.
Q: New Paltz school board members are currently developing a long-term facilities plan that could call for the closure of two schools and a consolidation down to two campuses. It could also call for the closure of one school and a consolidation to three campuses. Do you support that consolidation? If not, how else should the district move forward?
TM: This is a difficult question. Consolidation sounds right. Fewer building, fewer bills, etc. However, the devil is in the details and those details can be sticky.
Consolidation will mean huge remodeling and building costs and disruptions. We need to lay out a long-term education plan, look at our projected building needs for this education plan, and then evaluate our current structures for meeting the needs of this plan. Included in this process we need to map out what a consolidation might cost us as well as provide for our education program.
As a fiscal conservative, I am reluctant to jump on a band wagon that has lots of shiny stars on it. I think back to the middle school $50 million bond that was supposed to be so green. In it were several items with 100- to 700-year payback. There was nothing ‘green’ in that except what we would have been paying out of our community pockets.
Q: How will your previous experiences help you if you got elected, and how would they be an asset for those who vote for you? In other words, why should people vote for you?
TM: Almost 40 years as a builder, with all my other certifications and trainings will definitely give a different perspective to the board that has been lacking for years.
Further, my background in health and nutrition will certainly provide understanding and direction in our nutrition and learning concerns. Then there are the years of teaching when I had my own school when my children were very young and later when I was teaching construction and life skills in the weatherization programs that I ran. These experiences give me hands-on experience in teaching and planning education program.
My environmental commitments have been practiced with the Gardiner Green Energy Task Force, as well as my current membership on the Gardiner Environmental Conservation Commission and my New York State training for my energy auditor certification.
And of course, we never have people from Gardiner on the Board of Education. I believe this would allow me to bring the perspective of school district residents from a significant portion of the district. As residents of Gardiner have stated when I have worked on other campaigns, they often feel very neglected in the district. I would imagine that the residents of the other towns in our district outside of New Paltz share those feelings, too.
And I do want to cite my experiences in working with many diverse people of widely different backgrounds and perspectives. I recall the superintendent’s Facility Advisory Committee that I co-chaired in the late 1990s that ended with the successful passing of the $13 million bond for repairs to our buildings. We had as diverse a membership from the community at large and the school district as you can imagine.
The experience of working in coalitions with different political and/or philosophical persuasions will be a boon for sitting on a board that represents many constituencies.
