Follow Up on the News

Let Yourself Be Heard

The two options are a middle school either attached to the high school or converting Bennett elementary. The forum will include all of KSQ Architects’ recent analysis on the studies with costs. Both options would close an elementary school based on future declining population reports.
New demographic reports were released at the recent January 15 school board meeting with information given by KSQ that focuses on the year 2014, instead of their past target of 2011. Currently the whole K-12 district houses 1420 and according to Ford by the year 2014, student population will drop by 400. T
hree out of four elementary schools are open now, housing kindergarten-through-six grades, with the new proposal housing kindergarten-through-4. KSQ will not make recommendations on which model to use. All fields of curriculum will be discussed in terms of updated educational standards, the placement of the middle school and future capital projects.
The cost of proposed redistricting plans call for a total cost ranging between $70 million and $86 million, with the lowest figure representing the closing of Phoenicia School, and the new Middle School being part of the high school, the high figure showing Bennett as a new Middle School, and a middle figure of $75 million for the closing of Bennett but placement of athe Middle School in the high school building.
Estimated costs, at present, do not include new technology, athletic field, or closing of schools costs.

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Chipping Away At Deceit

The “intruder” on December 16th was Scott Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer during the first Gulf War who had become the head of the United Nations weapon inspection team in Iraq, and he was honoring a promise to visit the class of English teacher Donna Bryan in Coxsackie. Author of six books on recent military conflicts and producer of the documentary film “In Shifting Sands: The Truth About Unscom and the Disarming of Iraq,” Ritter had taped a radio program with Ms. Bryan’s class on November 28, which is scheduled to be aired on WAMC’s “Student Town Meetings” series during January, and pledged to answer student questions squeezed out of the program’s time constraints.
For Bryan, a West Shokan resident since 1998, the program was the third in the series she had participated in since the show’s inception in 2005.
“The New York State English Council has conferences every year with exhibitors of different educational programs designed to help teachers enhance their curriculum,” explains Bryan, who earned an undergraduate English degree from SUNY New Paltz in 2002 and a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Scranton early last year. “WAMC had a presenter there in November of 2005 with a program they were developing for teachers and their students as part of their Youth Media Project. For the program, the station’s Education Director, Maryanne Malecki, works with teachers and students on researching and developing an issue that’s important to them. Then, she’ll come into classrooms to rehearse them for presentation of the issue on the radio show.”
The first show using students from Ms. Bryan’s classes was on Corporate Control of the Media and was so well received that the program directors would return to her students as a source in future broadcasts.
“The guests were Danny Schechter, a journalist who had been on the inside of mainstream media (where he won two Emmy Awards as producer of ABC’s 20/20, emerging to independently produce films and books critical of the news industry), and Rex Smith, editor of the Times-Union in Albany, who argued that corporate control was a non-issue. His position was that corporate media takes an unfair beating from people because they are objective and they do try to convey the news but, of course, the evidence gathered by the students suggested otherwise.”
In February of 2006, students from one of Bryan’s classes were featured with three other area schools participating in a forum centered upon Byron Hurt’s documentary on the influence of Rap music on youth culture, “Hip-Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes.” The topic of the latest program in the series, however, was chosen by the Coxsackie students themselves.
“Over the summer, I had the students read an autobiography by Anne Hutchinson, a Puritan woman who defied the theocracy in Boston in 1638,” Bryan recalls. “She was banished from the colony and went on to found, with Roger Williams, what eventually became the State of Rhode Island. The way the kids had written about dissent after reading that book was so eloquent and they seemed to fasten on the idea that dissent was absolutely necessary to moving any democratic society forward that it just became a natural subject for them to research and develop for a radio show. Maryanne Malecki felt that Scott Ritter would be the ideal guest to discuss the topic with the kids and the other participant, who spoke very strongly about how civil rights are being eroded in this country in recent years, was a gentleman named Bob Keach, a lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union.”
Bryan speaks eloquently, herself, when asked about the tactic of using historical points of view in an English class, highlighting the difficulty of separating the literature of any given culture from its history “because most often writers, poets, essayists and social critics are writing about the times in which they live.” Effective and appropriate standards of language usage are, of course, key elements of involvement in one’s environment and culture..
“The ancient Greeks taught that rhetoric was absolutely vital for participation in public life,” Bryan observed. “The art of rhetoric naturally includes public speaking, an ability to interpret text and use language for various purposes; private and public. The object of having kids grasp this works toward an understanding of how language constructs our reality. It’s not just for private communication. It’s in every sphere of our lives.”
In George Orwell’s classic novel, 1984, which is part of her classroom curriculum, Bryan finds examples of the power of language in how a state with an interest in not keeping its populace well-informed is able to construct realities through the use of language or deconstruct and manipulate them. Her students are able to discern such tactics employed daily in corporate media, particularly in television, which Bryan lists prominently among obstacles which educators face in today’s environment.
“Mainstream popular culture has become the only culture and so much of it is very pointedly directed at kids that they become fully immersed in it,” said Bryan, who believes television undermines the ability to think in young viewers. In October, she invited media critic Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Media), to address a school-wide assembly on the techniques that language offers its users to maneuver opinion in a media structure designed to serve the needs of a corporate state. As a former mainstream television co-host himself, Cohen shared his experiences and advice about how to consider the ways in which our primary sources of information employ the use of image and language.
“We’re a very verbal society and it’s important to have an understanding of the language you speak in order to follow how thought and, by extension, our social realities are constructed,” notes Bryan, who voices the common concern among educators about the erosion of reading skills in a society that regards tv as an ever-present near deity. “The functional literacy rate in our country in the last five years has consistently been around 65%.
The definition of functional illiteracy is not being able to sequence events in a story; being able to read words without understanding them in context and infer meaning- to identify implicit meaning from explicit meaning. The flashy, quick-cut nature of all of the electronically transmitted information children receive tends to corrupt their ability to sustain the attention levels necessary for reading and thoughtful reflection.”
Bryan views the entrenched anti-intellectualism of some students, which teachers must confront every school year, as related to a corporately-instilled worship of money, celebrity and perpetually emerging technological products (like this season’s “shock & awe” taser that also plays music). She agrees with a huge and growing legion of teachers that a narrowed curricula of reading and math programs mandated by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law (celebrating its 6th anniversary this week in the face of a long overdue public revolt) can be applied at cross-purposes to a well-rounded and functional education.
It has, in fact, “wreaked havoc on educational quality” in the eyes of many.
While some might argue that the creation of educational curriculum is best left to transnational business interests that have captured the social order in recent years and desire to shape the perimeters of their own workforce, what appears to be a clear majority of teachers on the front lines are begging to differ and teachers’ organizations are offering evidence of the deception and corruption in the current approach to legislators across the country in an effort to repeal the law.
The global strategy of the test-makers and providers of the new educational materials has begun to meet similar resistance in other nations to which it has been exported by the half-dozen companies that control over 90% of the NCLB-associated market of products and services.
“Those who argue most enthusiastically for it are a handful of technology companies with political connections,” observes Bryan. “When you look at the bottom of all these efforts, it always leads back to some giant corporation who wants to sell more software, move hardware. Undoubtedly, young people need to know about technology but they already do. Nor is this the way to do it. The real agenda behind these initiatives isn’t education. It’s about making money.”
Indeed, the debate about NCLB, which draws its critics from every shade of the political spectrum- including the National Education Association (NEA) and, notably this month, a fresh flock of Republican lawmakers raising objections to an unprecedented big-brotherish federal intrusion into the classroom to “fix” schools by punishing them for failures to meet computerized standards of “adequate yearly progress” (AYP).
Critics contend that, once you blow the smoke off the trendy “edu-babble” of “data-driven” results and arrive at a factory-style standardization of education, the all-too-obvious ideological subtext of NCLB is the demolition of public education, the diversion of many billions in public funds for education into private pockets and the forced privatization of the school system. While largely neglected in major media, abundant evidence of these objectives and their effect on schools is available at websites like nclbchange.wordpress.com/, MilitaryFreeZone.org, RethinkingSchools.org, the excellent articles archive at NoChildLeft.com, Mandevilla’s comprehensive series at diatribune.com/bush-profiteers-collect-billions-nclb and numerous other teacher-sourced sites.
The roots of NCLB can be found in Douglas D. Noble’s paper on the New American Schools Development Corporation first published in 1992, also freely available on the World Wide Web and interested individuals can find the profit logic of over-stressing school systems with underfunded and unattainable goals of AYP explored in Naomi Klein’s recent book “The Shock Syndrome.”.
Bryan finds that one way to cut through a maze of indifference-producing corporatized fantasy enveloping young minds is to present them with something genuine with which they can identify.
“What I find is that when students are given something that’s real, when they have learned to analyze their own instincts, I see there’s a real thirst in young people to hear the truth from adults- parents and teachers, authority figures,” Bryan observes. “When they get a taste of hearing true and relevant facts from people like that and they realize that it’s possible to know how to know, their engagement to knowledge just triples. It takes off like crazy. Part of the reason for a passive lack of interest in reading, education and natural curiosity springs from social causes that are never part of the dialogue in current (NCLB) considerations- poverty, family issues, overworked parents, added to the values the business world wants to impose on education.
“When Scott Ritter spoke to the students, along with his experiences as a marine and all he had been through in Iraq, he shared his reverence for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as precious ideas to learn and internalize without undue fear to become engaged in their own civic lives. He told them that the truth was not something to be partitioned to a select few, that seeking knowledge is a right and a duty.”
Coxsackie-Athens is not presently on the 34 page 2006-2007 Schools Not In Good Standing “Accountability list” of school systems in New York compelled to “teach to the test” devised by software publishers or face punitive measures. But Onteora Central School District is represented. Bryan, who taught at Onteora as a substitute, taking leave replacement positions in English, Art and History before she began full-time teaching at Coxsackie-Athens and had also taught in a Montessori system in the late 1990s, takes a dim view of the costly regimen of increased standardized testing. Pouring billions into programs that don’t measurably improve anything beyond their maker’s bottomline has been a disaster for education. It may work well in a corporate boardroom, she muses, but in a classroom the requirements of NCLB replaces a child’s understanding of the historical context of their time and their potential with standards devised to NOT light their intellectual fuse beyond the inquisitive phrase “Do you want fries with that?”
The present writer has been privileged to closely follow accounts of the NCLB law’s impact in recent years through his relationship with the subject of this article and is indebted to her insightful and informative accounts of its daily influence in schools over that course of time.

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Scoping Time... Again

At the same time, the written comments put before the DEC included both a request from the Ulster County Legislature’s Environmental Committee to look more closely at the project’s investment proposals and secondary growth impacts, as well as a formal protest from Greene County on behalf of its Hunter and Windham ski resorts regarding the state’s unfair competitive practices at Belleayre, exacerbated by the current expansion plans.
The county comments suggested that the state pay closer attention to its own Comptrollers’ report on the project issued over a year ago, which questioned the Gitter proposal’s economics… during a time when the overall economy was in much better shape.
According to state Departmental of Environmental Conservation Region 3 Director William C. Janeway, whose department is overseeing the review process for Gitter’s project, and its own Belleayre expansion plans as “lead agency” under SEQRA laws, over 80 persons spoke for and against the joint proposals during two nights of scoping hearings held at the ski center in early December.
A request for quantification of the number of written comments received by the DEC to date as part of the process yielded a January 10 amount of “about 200 items,” with Janeway later adding on January 15t, “No new numbers but I would not be surprised if we get another 50+/- at the deadline.”
The proposed Gitter project, which involves two hotels, a gold course, spa, and ski center tie-in, plus major ski center expansion on the state’s part, will be largely based in Shandaken, and subject to the town’s Planning Board review… and approval.
By state law, the DEC must produce its scope of issues to be reviewed in its and the resort applicants environmental impact statements by February 1.
As for the lawsuit, has been filed by local citizens groups the Catskill Heritage Alliance and Pine Hill Water District Coalition, along with private landowners Benjamin and Edith Korman of Highmount
The suit, an Article 78 action seeking reversal of the governor’s AIP announced and signed at a press conference in Kingston on September 5, was filed in Albany January 3 by the Catskill Heritage Alliance, the Pine Hill Water District Coalition, and Benjamen and Edith Korman of Highmount against everyone who signed the AIP including Spitzer, the state Department of Environmental Conservation, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and a host of national, state and regional environmental groups. It alleges that the execution of the AIP was unlawful on 13 different points of law or “causes of action.”
“The declaratory judgment action seeks a determination that the Sept. 5, 2007, agreement in principal was entered into illegally, requires illegal action by the units of the governments of the State of New York, and requires the use of procedures that are illegal and therefore should be declared null and void,” wrote the plaintiff’s attorney, Robert H. Feller, of the Albany-based firm Bond, Schoeneck & King, in a 28-page document still awaiting final servings to each of its named parties.
“Any attempt by Petitioners to address these illegalities in the context of any administrative proceeding is futile because of the binding nature of the terms of the AIP,” reads the lawsuit, which also charges the signatories, from the state DEC to the governor, as having acted “in excess of” their jurisdictions by basically usurping the public review process supposedly assured by SEQRA.
The suit notes how the AIP was reached only after a coalition of environmental organizations, given “full party status” for commentary under SEQRA laws, kept several local members out of final review processes and subsequent negotiations led by Spitzer between Gitter’s Crossroads Ventures development corporation and project opponents, then including New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection.
In addition, the suit claims that the two organizations were caused injury by the manner in which the September 5 AIP “improperly limits the scope of the adjudicatory proceeding and the environmental review process under the State Environmental Quality Review Act (“SEQRA”) which is a part thereof, and, as a result, its rights with respect to continued participation in the adjudicatory proceeding have been adversely affected; creates inherent and unavoidable conflicts of interest for the decision-maker in the adjudicatory proceeding, making it impossible to obtain the unbiased decision to which it is entitled to as a party; creates illegal and improper procedures for resolving disputes that are binding on the decision-maker in the adjudicatory proceeding; and impairs its rights to participate in the public review of permits and entitlements that will be required” from the City, which had originally been seen as something of an environmental protector by the two groups at an earlier stage in the review.
The plaintiffs also claim that capital improvements committed to the Belleayre Mountain Ski Center under the AIP “improperly commit the state “to provide a benefit to a private party” representing “an unconstitutional gift of state funds.” The plaintiffs also claim the AIP “improperly performed the balancing of economic considerations” required by SEQRA, by making a finding of “significant economic benefit” from the project before such issues had been publicly reviewed.
The Kormans, who own the historic stone mansion built by America’s first great opera star, Amelita Galli Curci, in the 1920s, concurrently claim that the AIP threatens their rights to maintain a property purchased as a, “second home because of the physical beauty and tranquility of the site, the surrounding area, its isolation and its historic significance” by limiting their rights to oppose such a project in an open review process.
“The AIP illegally commits the agencies in the executive branch of state government and DEP to a course of action without first complying with SEQRA,” the action charges, noting that what the governor basically approved via his AIP was notably differently, and hence in need of its own separate review, from what Gitter had originally proposed years ago. “Any attempt by the Petitioners to reverse or modify in any significant way the decisions taken in the AIP is futile. Although the AIP references the fact that the Project is still subject to additional review and approvals, some of the most important decisions related to those approvals are already made in the AIP.”
Basically speaking, the dense document charges the Governor, and his many signatories, with having over-jumped their authorities and approved a project before its approval process could be starting, essentially denying everyone of their civil rights… an interesting case that will force the environmental, and populist hands of all involved.
Also named in the suit are: the state of New York, state Department of Health, state Department of Transportation, City of New York, Crossroads Ventures, Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, Natural Resources Defense Council, New York Public Interest Research Group, Riverkeeper, Theodore Gordon Flyfishers, Trout Unlimited and Zen Environmental Studies.
“We have not been served with the papers for this suit so it is premature for us to comment directly,” noted Crossroads Ventures Vice President of Public Affairs Paul Rakov when asked about the much-publicized new Article 78 action. “However, we join many local residents and business owners in being frustrated with this suit. For eight long years the area has been embroiled in a sometimes bitter battle regarding this project. Finally, some sunlight has been shone on it in the form of the Agreement in Principle. It is sad that a few people want to return our area to an atmosphere of animosity and legal wranglings.”
According to Janeway, the DEC cannot make any comments on the lawsuit at present. However, Spitzer spoke sharply about his continuing support for “the development plans at Belleayre despite concerns voiced by a few environmental groups” when visiting Kingston just before Christmas.
For more information on the proposed projects, go to:

http://www.dec.ny.gov/permits/6061.html

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A Jar Of Olives...
Today Is A Gift To Share

I took a mini-workshop with Sarah Stitham, an organizational expert who uses a REVAMP approach. One of those letters has to do with deciding what is important in our lives. What learned is that I wanted my home to be a comfortable, welcoming place and a safe haven for us. I did not want a showroom. I didn’t expect it to be hospital sterile with dogs and family members that step once on the welcome mat (or leap over it) and enter directly into my living room. My house is a place that is a calm harbor in a tempestuous sea. Both Bruce and I are out and about in the community living a day that never holds that “dull moment” for which we either yearn or dread.
Today is a gift. That is why we call it the “present.” This has been a month of learning that we are, indeed, out brother’s (and sister’s) keeper. With Judie Rank at Ten Broeck Commons, Maggie Kunkle at Golden Hill Infirmary, and with my aunt Helen at Mountain View, my days have been divided among the sick, hurt and dying. As I walk into each of these institutions, I am reminded of my own blessings and the fact that life is a gift, and a gift is to be given. There are lots of people out there who need that gift.
Eva Wesselman used to superstitiously say “Bad Rice” and throw rice over her shoulder. It was a way of saying, “Things are good for me; please keep it a secret so I don’t suffer misfortune.” Life, fortunately or unfortunately, deals us a pretty even lot of joys and sorrows. I guess that is why we try to balance out our fortunes and misfortunes.
We are, indeed, our brother’s keeper. For instance, Joe and Cheryl Kosarek have their own soup kitchen/meals on wheels going with a Shokan neighbor. Cheryl, who is a retired Family Consumer Science Teacher (used to be called Home Economics in my day), makes some fantastic soups for a neighbor in need of nourishment and friendship. Jim Ulrich gives his time to mentor a young boy through the RAP, Reservoir After-school Program, and Marilyn Wakefield tutors a young man in English and Spanish. If we have, we should share; if we can do, we should do for those who can’t.
Volunteers are those people who give of themselves without reward. Olive has some paid positions, but much of what goes on depends upon the good work of people who volunteer to serve. The Recreation Committee has added Lori Matteson and Linda Burkhardt to their members of Pat Tosi, Bill Melvin, Gino Sorbellini, Ron Harkin, Craig Grazier, and Patrick AKA “Cowboy.” The Planning Board, which meets the second and last Tuesday of the month, consists of Drew Boggess, David Jones, Helene Grant, Bob Tischler, Dave Sorbellini, Jim Konjas, and Ed Maldonado. All these volunteers have taken courses to prepare to hear all business of development in the Town. Vince Bruck, Ray Nichols and Bruce La Monda meet to monitor police activity. Sylvia Tinti is the energy behind the Onteora PTO for the Middle School.
Olive has more than its share of people who care for others. When someone among us hurts, we all feel that pain. Right now my heart is aching for the Ingram family. We are our neighbor’s neighbor, and while we share this time and space, we share each other’s sorrows and joys.

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