What skills, experiences or qualifications do you have that make you believe you would make a competent member of the board?
Nothing really prepares you for what a difficult job this can be, and I think the best experience for me has been to just sit down and do it for three years. I didn’t really come to the table with much more than a willingness to learn and from the perspective of a working parent. I think I’m good at listening to my colleagues and trying to see things from their points of view. Really one of the hardest things about this is that you’re on a board with six other people — seven, really, because the superintendent, of course, works very closely with the board — and everyone has their own opinions and ideas and things that are important to them. Somehow you all have to find common ground if you want to accomplish anything. And it’s often a difficult road to get there. You need to keep an open mind and to respect everyone’s view, even if you don’t agree.
What do you see as the top three challenges facing the New Paltz Central School District?
First, our district, along with most other districts in New York, has been underfunded for going on six years now. Since 2009, we’ve lost $11 million in funding from the Gap Elimination Adjustment alone. Our foundation aid has also been cut, and the tax cap makes it impossible to make up the loss — even if it were fair that the burden was shifted to the local property tax.
So that’s our biggest challenge. How can we maintain our educational programs, and all the other things we offer like athletics, arts and music, and keep our class sizes down, when we’re getting less and less state aid?
So far we’ve managed to avoid deep cuts to the program by using our fund balance, cutting staff, looking creatively at things like transportation and entering into shared service agreements with other districts. But we can only get by on shoestrings for so long. Our fund balance is exhausted, and we’ve cut over 50 staff positions in the last five years or so.
We need to keep looking at everything from new angles and just finding a way to make it work for as long as we can, and hope the state will restore our funding next year.
The second challenge is the capital project. Now that the voters have approved it, the real work will start, and we have to make sure that everything goes smoothly. Most of the oversight will be the work of the Facilities Committee, and they’ll come to the Board of Education on a monthly basis with reports on progress and any problems or challenges that arise.
I have full faith in Tetra Tech, the architectural firm we’ve hired to do the work, and nothing but confidence in Luis Rodriguez from The Palombo Group, our construction manager. We’ll all be working closely together to ensure that it’s all done right, and on time, safely and with minimal disruption to our students.
The third challenge we’re facing is sort of wrapped up in the first challenge and that’s a loss of local control. State mandates for test-driven teacher evaluation are eating away at our administration and teachers’ ability to educate in a way they feel is appropriate for our kids.
Preparation for the tests takes up valuable instruction time, time that our students should be spending on learning. Instead, they’re spending it on meaningless tests that our teachers don’t even get to grade or use to help inform their lessons.
We are required by law to administer these tests and yet they’re useless. This is what the state is spending money on that should be funding our schools. It’s extremely frustrating.
If re-elected, what would be your top three priorities?
The biggest single job ahead will be keeping the capital project work moving toward completion.
That said, there is a lot of good work the board has begun in the last three years that I’d like to see continued and expanded. Particularly, we’ve worked hard to bring the challenges we face into the public eye, and have taken on an active role in advocating at the state level for our students and our taxpayers.
The resolutions and position papers we’ve adopted on big issues like testing and PILOT agreements have gotten a lot of notice.
