What experiences, skills or previous jobs will make you a competent board member?
First and foremost, my three years I’ve already served on the board. Accompanying that, the trainings that I received from the New York State School Boards Association — seminars I attended at the state conventions that are designed specifically to provide skills and experience to serving board members.
Also, the period when I was on the board was a time of great challenge and change — not only in our district but in the politics of school itself. We, of course, went through an extremely complex capital project, which was necessary and remains unsolved — because of the state of our buildings. That’s a challenge that continues to lie ahead of us in an unsolved state.
We also saw the onset of the massive budget cuts at the federal and state level, the disappearance of the stimulus bill and the instituting of the 2 percent tax cap. So the three years that I served on the board were a particularly valuable experience for what we’re facing right now. The solutions to those situations have still not been found.
Some of the skills that served me well the first time around — in the first election — are still with me. I have an economics degree. I understand public budgets. I’ve served in numerous town volunteer positions. I’m currently serving on the Government Efficiency Committee, with several seated town and village board members and Gerald Benjamin, Peter Fairweather and other paid and volunteer experts on those topics.
Obviously, that’s not just exploring ways to make government more efficient. That’s the kind of thing that everybody in government does every day. That particular committee is designed to look at the rapidly changing laws here in New York State — and see how they can best be exploited to provide tax relief to our taxpayers here in the district. So I’m already up and running on state law and how towns, villages and school boards and other taxing entities can coordinate together better to make full use of the financial incentives being offered by the state.
What do you see as the biggest challenge (or challenges) facing the district?
There are a number of things, and I think they can actually all be summed up within a single concept, which is that the overseeing legal agencies at the state and federal level — because of the ambitions of politicians in those arenas — are constantly and rapidly shifting the parameters under which public education operates.
One year it’s a tax cap. One year it’s testing. One year it is military recruiting. One year it is not even a 2 percent tax cap, but a tax freeze. The next year it’s Common Core. The next year it’s the “state tests were too easy and now we have to revise them and make them harder.” And then, ‘okay. We put too much emphasis on teacher evaluation in that particular test, so next year we’re going to put less emphasis on that.”
If you follow what’s happening in the agencies that are above the New Paltz School District — that set the basic parameters under which we operate — they’re changing like the wind. You need a scorecard to keep track of what’s going on.
I’m one of the people who keeps that scorecard, and I work with a lot of people in advocacy groups that constantly monitor what’s happening in those arenas and bring the changes and discussion of changes that are proceeding, new legislation, to my attention. Actually, it’s pretty close to real time while it is happening.
Another big thing our community has been sort of made aware of in a general sense because of Wilmorite, but it needs to view in a more extensive kind of way, is that one of the things that’s changing — it was changing under the radar for decades, now at least it’s on people’s radar screen because of Wilmorite — is that Albany has been responding to lobbyists’ attempts to carve out exemptions to the property tax for all kinds of people, other than full-time, year-round residential property holders.
We’ve heard over the last 30 years that the amount of state money coming to school districts has declined — from 60 percent to 40 percent. So now the ratios are flipped and the local tax base is paying much, much more of a share of operating a school district than it used to.
And on top of that, people need to start focusing in on even within the realm of the local property tax itself, that numerous private commercial interests have successfully paid lobbyists to carve themselves out of the property tax system altogether — even when they’re operating for profit locally.
We find those kinds of regulations in places like IDAs, obviously. We find that in other things, even for example in tax breaks that are given for senior housing — because “senior housing” is actually defined in New York State as anyone 55 or over. I would guess that about 50 percent of the kids currently enrolled in the New Paltz School District have parents 55 or older. So that’s a big problem that lobbyists have been able to carve out very profitable tax exemptions for commercial interests that operate within the jurisdiction of the school district, but they’re finding ways to skip out paying their share of the taxes.
Schools aren’t funded like passports. Schools are not funded as a user fee. You don’t pay for schools only if your kid is going to school. The reason for that is that schools are just much, much too expensive. It costs about $23,000 per student to educate a kid in New Paltz.
I have three kids, so you can do the math on that. There would be no point in me sending my kid to school if I had to pay for it as a user fee. I’d have to home school — so would pretty much everybody else who sends their kids to school.
So when the state starts doing things for commercial lobbies like saying, “okay. If you’re 55 you don’t have to pay the school tax,” “If you’re a farmer, you don’t have to pay the school tax,” “If you’re between the ages of 18 and 26, that the landlord that are building housing aimed at your age group don’t have to pay property tax.” You can see where this process leads. The field of people who have to pay the school tax is getting narrower and narrower.
Obviously, the school budget doesn’t go down. You still have to have teachers and buildings for 2,300 kids. So what is happening in that environment, gradually fewer and fewer people — the ones that don’t have highly paid lobbyists representing their interests — are paying a higher and higher proportion of the local school costs.
There are a myriad ways in which that’s happening in Albany right now. And the tide is with them, unfortunately.
So the school board basically needs to step up its game, as far as advocating for our local tax base. That’s the taxpayer problem. That’s the biggest problem facing our taxpayers.
The school board has to start taking a much more activist role in protecting their interests and making it clear that they’re protecting their interests — because those are the people who are going to vote on the budget. Those are the people who are going to vote to approve or disapprove your capital project. So you need to always be showing to them that you’re keeping full faith with their interests.
We also have, obviously, the Common Core. We have the state meddling in how we assess the teaching abilities of our own staff. And that keeps changing every year. So we keep spending way too much, incredibly expensive administrative time trying to figure out how to apply constantly shifting state teacher evaluation requirements. Those people should really be spending their time running the school district.
So the taxpayer isn’t getting their money’s worth out of that. The student isn’t getting their money’s worth out of teachers, because teachers are now being required — for the sake of their own teacher’s evaluation — to spend 7 percent of the school year teaching to the test.
What are your top two priorities if elected? How would you enact them?
These are two things that both have to be done. One of those is to protect the district’s revenue stream by protecting its tax base. Without protecting the revenue stream, this is all academic — if you’ll pardon the pun.
So the community perspective, from outside the school buildings themselves, we have to protect the revenue stream and make it sustainable over time. That’s that.
The other thing that’s inside the district, is to find a way to solve the long-term facilities challenges. This goes way beyond whether the buildings are in a state of physical decay, or whether they need to be maintained in a long-term way through continued patchwork. The other half of it is that just through changes in the marketplace, the way that educational programing is delivered — from suppliers to schools, from schools to students — is rapidly changing, due to rapidly changing technology.
Technology, in fact, is changing so quickly that it’s not really possible to make a facilities decision today that would theoretically facilitate better use of technology that would still be valid 10 years from now — even five years from now. This is a huge, huge conundrum that schools with aging infrastructure throughout the country are facing.
How do you design your buildings to incorporate better delivery of educational technology to educate your students, when that technology is changing so rapidly that no architecture you could design today would be valid five years from now?
One half of that equation is actually just to make the buildings safe and sound in the long run — and energy efficient and inexpensive to operate. The other thing we need to find a way to do is to make our existing structures less rigid. We have to build flexibility into them, so that they can easily and inexpensively be adapted as technology continues to evolve.
The solution to that is something that’s going to need an awful lot of creative work — and an awful lot of that work is going to have to be in the lobbying arena. We saw it in spaces back during the last middle school renovation attempt. No matter what your school district needs, you can’t have it unless the public votes to reach into their pockets and pay for it. It’s the only capital function of any taxing entity that operates that way.
If the Town of New Paltz wants to build a new police station, the Town Board can vote by a 3-2 majority. Only three people have to vote to make that happen. Two years from now, if you didn’t like one of them, you could vote to throw that person out. But you can’t make the police station stop being built. Three people would have voted for it, and the money would be on your tax bill.
We need to sort of motivate the public here to partner with the school board on making political changes that make it easier to for school districts to get funding to rebuild its infrastructure.
If they vote for me, what they’ll get — that they have not been getting from the two incumbents — is the choice to move the board more aggressively in a direction of advocacy. Advocacy continues to be the missing element.
Budget hearing meeting location
The New Paltz Board of Education meeting and public hearing on the budget will take place at New Paltz High School on Wednesday, May 7 at 7 p.m.
