Open Letter to Sara Richmond, President of New Rochelle Board of Education

Dear Sara:

First of all, let me congratulate you for letting in some light and air into the closed corridors of the New Rochelle School District. You and your new team have done much in improving transparency, information flow and I am sure that this will continue to grow in the months ahead.

Shortly, the School District will begin the difficult job of selling yet another school tax increase to voters throughout our City. I hope that you will see to it that the usual presentations are shortened if not shelved, so that community voices can be heard instead of the typical support statements by faculty and PTA membership. If we have learned little else this year, we have seen and heard the taxpayer in focus groups, tea parties and other venues crying, enough! Please ask your management team to respect the New Rochelle taxpayer during these critical times.

As we have recently seen in the Journal News, we live in one of the most expensive counties in the nation: one that has experienced the highest unemployment rate in New York State. Yet, I see no evidence from the Superintendent’s letter that he understands this. The thrust of his letter is essentially doing what the District deems necessary from the narrow perspective of its own stakeholders. He clearly does not understand the issue in the broader context of the community and its well being.

Sara, I know you get it intellectually; the issue is do you feel it emotionally. Can you go beyond the considerable hurdle of looking at this devastating scenario with eyes not tightly focused only on its effects on the District, but on the supporters of the District; the taxpayer?

Unlike other representative forms of government, a School District does not distinguish between users and non-users of its service. Federal and State Income taxes, for example, provide exemptions for various classes of usage; school taxes, on the other hand, do not look at how many, if any, children or users, a taxpayer may have. It does not look at differences in income levels. Indeed, it even subtly promotes the notion of non-ownership of property by not taxing the renter or lessee to any appreciable degree. So, it falls upon the property owner, many, many of them childless,or on fixed incomes, or otherwise, devastated by this economy. So, you have an extra moral burden to preserve and protect those in your community who, too often, disproportionally preserve and protect what you are empowered to oversee. The strategy of relying almost exclusively on system stakeholders to decide what the tax burden should be in 2010 is wrong! It is not community based and it does not represent the will of the people or, if you prefer, input from the taxpayer before the first line is drawn on the new budget plan. This burden should be shared; you have not been well served by the City Administration or City Council who seem to be actively avoiding partnering in a meaningful and known way to the community. Frankly current organizational roles and responsibilities are not enough to defend community neglect of this order and magnitude and the day is fast approaching when people will demand radical changes; changes in how a school board is constituted, how a property tax base is formulated, how tax strategies; especially around a commercial base line are derived and frankly, a planning process that eliminates the proliferation of non-taxpaying entities in prime real estate areas; especially since the available space is needed to grow and support the residential business strategies the City has obviously managed towards. Sara, not your problem in your role, but your responsibility as a good public servant to build into your oversight role as chair of the School Board.

Sara, given the economy and the absence of any inflation rate, the tax burden should be flat. If you are familiar with fairly recent reports by both Controller DiNapoli and ex County Executive Suozzo, you will see that they both endorse a system based on economic indicators. STAR itself ,is under attack in the State. The fall rebate has gone by the boards and you are aware that no COLA was given this year to SSA recipients. The oversight responsibilities rest on what you can control and not what you cannot control;not mandates, not federal or state funding, but in expense management, including union contracts.

The Board must begin to see its union contracts, by many dimension of financial management and control, are out of line. I respectfully urge that you cease to include FUSE representatives in pre-budgeting processing. Your relationship should be friendly but, it is by definition and design, adversarial. Your Superintendent is empowered to represent the taxpayer in negotiations to get the best and fairest value possible for taxpayers. PERB will substantiate that and, as a taxpayer, I would demand that to protect my property value and disposable income.

There are few parallels to what is paid to pedagogic union members, the variety of how such direct and indirect compensation is earned, and how little time relative to a given year, the salary and wage earners work to receive such pay and benefits. Like it or not, these are irrefutable facts even given the somewhat twisted value system we live under where a baseball player can earn $13 million a year and an executive in asset management can accrue a $5 million dollar bonus on top of a multi-million dollar salary and benefits package. Actually these are both more defensible given our system; we can refuse to attend baseball games and we can put our money under a mattress. We cannot avoid paying school taxes and we should not compromise on providing our children the best but most meaningful education possible under the circumstances.

You cannot and should not be held accountable for a broken system, but you can make a significant impact to help to add some perspective and yes, sanity to a bloated and broken system. I ask you to shift your paradigm over from the existing system to one centered on both the taxpayer and the student. I think you do this by changing how you look at what is needed to come up with a zero-based increase in this critical year. This requires courage of course, but also necessitates looking at things with a new focus and perspective. You can take comfort in the New York State Taylor Law for protection against unwarranted actions, precedent in the courage shown by UAW leadership when presented with the recent US auto crisis, as well as neighboring examples of other trustees in other towns and cities in our county who are faced with similar difficult decisions.

That focus should be a student-centered philosophy; not as heretofore defined as providing everything that sh/e may enjoy, but what sh/e will need to be successful in today’s complex world economy. To do this, you need to define Core– a relatively simple concept as both the federal and state governments are doing so for you — perhaps imperfectly, but with little ambiguity. A field of academics around English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and others are core — dance, theater, drama, athletics, shop, extracurricular activities, pre-K, and others,are not no matter how desirable to many in the community. You fund core to the hilt and begin to prioritize the others. You cut with a sharp knife those that fall furthest from core and that surely would include non-class functions as well. It runs antithetical to what you are all used to— but a philosophy of “its for the kids” does not hold up logically or fairly during these difficult times, What is most important for the kids is what helps them to succeed as functioning members of society in a complex world. If the less core centered items are desirable, then they must be funded differently — perhaps by user surcharge or specially funded renewable grants. We cannot have it all despite what the commercials tell us and, frankly, we should not. Sara, I would like to recommend as required reading for the board the March 8 issue of Newsweek and ask you read what Evan Thomas has written about our society as it evolves in the 21st Century. We are a selfish and broken people and since we broke it, we got to pay for it.

Of course there will be loud voices crying out for the restoration of lost classes, activities and teachers, and the loudest voices will be the students. Yet part of our responsibility as a community is to lead and set proper examples and not cave in to every demand. Again, it needs to be focused and prioritized – any parent knows that giving into every whim, even need, is counterproductive and likely damaging to the children. We need to pay as we go – you have a challenge in front of you in the years ahead as your capital infrastructure is stretched to the limit and that should, itself, be ample motivation to strengthen the budgeting process and more importantly, shift some of your considerable burden over to the politicians and the community where it belongs.

You have stewardship over more than a quarter of a billion dollar annual budget and this is daunting. I have been in these waters and they are deep. The old ways of doing things; the politics of hope and expectation from a broken state, a floundering federal government and antiquated property tax based system demand new ways of thinking and acting. At the risk of sounding overly philosophical, you have what amounts to a transcendental responsibility. You have a business; the old pedagogic labels and mindsets are no longer useful. In fact they are harmful given what I have said to this point.

I close with a note about Mr. Organisciak. I read recent script in the Journal News and Sound Report about his description of the sorry state we all face as well as the process followed in coming up with the 3.8% tax rate increase. Having already commented on the lack of logic and proper focus on how this budget process and content were derived, I was more than a little offended by his lack of ability to express even a modicum of concern over its effects on the taxpayer. He begins by attributing a modest 2% or so budget reduction as addressing what would be “wreaking havoc” on existing educational and service programs. Here Sara is where a someone skilled in business management; even at a someone cursory level; would take pause. You do not diagnose a significant breakdown by focusing on “existing educational and service programs.” What you do is broaden your horizons beyond “existing” and look at it multi-dimensionally. There are so many variables he misses using this approach; variables he might have considered if he included non direct stakeholders into his assessment; city officials, councilpersons, other professionals facing similar problems, and mostly, skilled business people and the voice of the people —- not afterward via a dog and pony show, but beforehand.

Yet, I think what disturbed me most was his characteristically inappropriate and flip response regarding his “surrendered 2010 increase.” He mentioned this rather trivial loss and added, “except for vacations and such things.” How unfortunate for us, not him. His contract, I am sure offers even more protection on collecting for accrued vacation, sick leave and other perquisites than even the contract with FUSE which is very generous in and of itself. He loses nothing! You might be aware of other Superintendents who made actually financial sacrifices to help the community. So I end with the hope that you educate this man in how to speak to the community and further, to respect the community by cutting out the fat from the dog and pony shows and after a brief presentation around the proposed increase, throw open the floor for questions.

My thanks for your open and generous nature and I am very sure that you and your new colleagues will make a meaningful impact on improving District academic results and taxpayer expense.

Sincerely,

Warren Gross