A reader just sent an email opposing my effort to vote down the 2020-21 New Rochelle School Budget.
She writes:
“Voting down the School budget will have no effect whatsoever on our school board or our administrators” (LM)
My Response (Robert Cox):
“As I have said many times, voting down the budget is a blunt tool but the only tool available to voters to address a rogue board and incompetent Superintendent.
If a voter thinks our school leadership is doing a good job then I would expect them to support the budget.
I do not — and I have spent the past 5 years working hard on three different school committees — then you can expect I would not support the budget.
Due to our failed leadership we have the worst reputation of any school district in NYS: violence, murder, stabbings, academic fraud, hate speech, rape, financial fraud, bribery and kickbacks, heroin dealers in our schools.
Shall I continue?
Our academic performance has plummeted. We were once ranked nationally, now we are at the bottom in the county, our test scores are in the bottom half of the state, black families and ALMS families are pulling their children out of the public schools.
Due to the havoc created by our rogue board (a term used among education professionals to mean a board operating as the executive, with an unqualified Board President, an amateur, not a licensed administrator running the school system).
If a voter wants to turn a blind-eye to all that (and more) they are free to do so.
(For the record, I have NEVER opposed the school budget – that would be people like Board President Amy Moselhi who made the exact case above just two years ago when she gleefully led the charge to vote down the budget. Karma is a …)
You are wrong to say voting down a school budget “will have no effect whatsoever on our school board or our administrators”.
Not only is voting down school budgets the path to effecting change on school boards and administrators around the state, you need look no further than 2018 in New Rochelle.
In the wake of voting down THAT 2018-19 budget there was a sea change. Jeffrey Hastie and Amy Moselhi took control of the school board, Chris Daniello was elected to the school board, Osborne was fired; the cabinet replaced, SROs were pulled out of the schools, we had failed searches for Superintendent, High School Principal, Assistant Superintendent and much more. A train wreck.
OF COURSE, voting down a school budget has an effect on school boards and administrators which is why they fear it and will do everything in their power to stop it.
The current ballot fraud underway is a part and parcel of a long tradition of voter suppression by the New Rochelle Board of Education. The goal is the same: run the school election on the QT to keep turnout as low as possible and gin up the vote at the school buildings to increase turnout among school parents (consumers of their product) and (employees (those on the payroll). This is why they have undermined Cuomo’s Executive Order to open up candidates getting on the ballot (we have 12 candidates not 2 despite them) and failed to deliver 48,707 mail-in ballots (as required by law).
Candidates are already talking up lawsuits for voter fraud in this election.
In the end, voting down a school budget is a VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE. In the case of Amy Moselhi and Laura Feijóo and the rest of the board it is a well-deserved NO as in NO MÁS.
If you agree click here: https://talkofthesound.com/2020/05/24/how-to-support-the-effort-to-vote-down-new-rochelle-school-budget/
It needs to be voted down for once and for all