Follow Up on the News

With $646,601 of State aid restored and additional cuts to the budget, voters will see a 6.47 percent levy increase, less than the initial proposal of a 9 percent increase.
The proposed budget will top $50.1 million, compared to the 2008/2009-voter approved school budget at $48.2 million. Ford warned that in coming years the budget will be difficult because the CPI (Consumer Price Index) could give a very low contingent budget calculation, resulting in a severe impact on schools.
Cuts to the district include four regular education teachers, two support staff, one special education social worker, two FACETS mental health counselors, the INDIE program, and one kindergarten class.
Other reductions include the general fund for school lunch, administrative clerical support, the board of education budget, and transportation.
Increased spending includes technology, BOCES services and additional homework help for High School students as outlined by the Strategic Plan recommendations. Ford said that overall programming remains rich in high school electives, honors programs, advanced placement, sports and a variety of clubs.
Board members Donna Flayhan, Laurie Osmond and Anne MacGillicuddy, however, expressed skepticism because their requests for additional information went unmet.
MacGillicuddy said $40,000 budgeted for new voting machines was not necessary and could help offset the $65,000 cost to keep the FACETS program in the school, which many spoke in favor of at a previous board meeting in March. The board was told it was mandated, but she said she contacted the Ulster County Board of Elections and discovered that only at the federal level are municipalities required to have new voting machines.
Osmond voiced concern over the FACETS cut, as well.
“People would have to drive to Highland, Ellenville or Kingston,” she said. “I know for a fact that there are people in this district living outside villages who do not have cars and these are often the people in the most dire financial circumstances which adds a lot of stress to lives.”
Ford said she spoke with Ed Brown, the Commissioner of Ulster County Department of Mental Health who runs the FACETS program.
“I’ve offered him a space to continue the program where we would do kind of a push off from both sides, we wouldn’t charge him for the space, and he wouldn’t charge us for the services since those services are actually supported by our taxes,” she said.
In a separate phone conversation, Brown said he spoke briefly with Ford on the proposal.
“We’ve just had a very limited conversation,” Brown noted, adding that no details had been outlined on the proposal. He also explained that the program is not fully funded by tax dollars, meaning revenue would have to be found either through Medicaid, private billing or other providers.
In a separate interview,he pointed out how at Onteora, FACETS social workers are accessible at the Middle/High School and on some days at Woodstock Elementary. Students and families are offered counseling during and after school hours.
Brown explained that students would be put at a great disservice if the program left the district, primarily effecting students on the western end the district.
“Onteora provides geographic accessibility and if students must come to Kingston, the children must be brought in by their parents,” he said, noting how this is not only disruptive to a student’s day, but takes away from a parent workday. Having it on site offers immediate services to a student without missing school or work. Brown also said their services are different from social work counseling. “Ours is a licensed mental health treatment service,” overseen by a psychiatrist, with counseling from social workers, he said. Students still must travel to Kingston for the psychiatric services. A mix of regular and special education students from all financial backgrounds utilize FACETS. It also provides medical treatment, a program the district does not offer. Long confirmed that district counseling is not a “clinical model.”
Resnick said she believed the elimination of FACETS and the social worker reflected declining enrollment.
“When you talk about FACETS or INDIE or some of those programs being changed or realigned, I think that has to do with real decline in enrollment that is perhaps going unrecognized,” she said, adding that the projection next year revealed 70 less students at the high school.
Osmond requested a vote to keep FACETS, either through restoring it in the budget or by exploring Ford’s proposal regarding its operation on a barter system. Trustees Resnick, Dan Spencer, Michelle Friedel and Rick Wolff defeated the motion. MacGillicuddy abstained, requesting more information. Osmond and Flayhan voted yes.
Osmond voiced anger over the $70,000 cut made to the INDIE program in contrast to proposed money folded into the Vision 21 program.
“I think it’s unfortunate that somehow these two programs are pitted against each other because I think both programs offer value to our district,” she said.
The board is expected to adopt a budget on April 22, with an additional meeting added April 16.
In other business, the board passed a resolution to ask voters to free up $350,000 that already exists in an appropriated fund balance to pay for cost overruns on the auditorium project. Voters approved the renovation of the auditorium in 2007, but construction costs have increased.
Related to the auditorium project, asbestos was found under the carpeting from the old tile floor underneath. The project is scheduled for completion over the spring break beginning April 6. The board also approved monies not to exceed $10,000 for the removal of asbestos in the roof of the Middle/High School.
The school budget, as well as a new and strategic plan presentation for the district, can be found on the district website at www.onteora.k12.ny.us. Three seats are open for the Board of Ed. Petitions can be emailed directly by contacting the District Clerk through the Onteora Website or picking one up at the Central Office.
Resnick said she would not run for a second term by explaining how the position took too much time away from her family, which includes two young children.
“I have enjoyed working with so many people these last few years,” she wrote in an e-mail this week. “I have tried to be a thoughtful and fair voice. I hope as we move forward that people come together in deep discussion to advance a vision that many can embrace.”

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Mister Civics

One current senior, Iannotti said, had asked for dibs on a box of macaroni and cheese from the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, given him by GOP fundraiser Julie Conway, an Onteora alumna who worked for years on former House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s staff. The box, he pointed out, was festooned with elephants and Bush/Cheney stickers.
“I just warned her,” Iannotti added, “that although possibly valuable on E-Bay, she shouldn’t try eating it.”
Then there were the bull and bear toys the teacher used in his civics classes to demonstrate the idea of up and down Wall Street markets, which he said he’d be passing on to Onteora’s advanced civics course teacher, Brian Connelly, along with a small voting machine.
“I’ve got closets full of t-shirts and posters,” he said, addressing what couldn’t be seen beyond his room’s walls full of bumper stickers and buttons, including some prized Nixon campaign paraphernalia. “I’ll leave what’s not taken by year’s end in a box for whoever takes over from me. And what’s not taken gets thrown away.”
In addition to teaching at Onteora for nearly three decades, Iannotti served as the high school’s departmental head for social studies for the past eight years, taught the district’s economics and government courses when mandated by New York state in the 1990s, and designed and implemented his highly popular integrated civics course as a means of giving his students an involved way of meeting state requirements that he feels has helped build up the school’s much-touted high-level of political participation in recent years.
Talking about how he got to where he is today, and what he plans to do after retirement in a few months, Iannotti displayed the matter-of-fact fairness and good humor his students of all political stripes have long praised him for… as well as a healthy dose of pride at his quiet accomplishments. Not least among them, an appreciation for his way of reaching, appreciating, and leading high school seniors where others have tended to fail.
Born and raised in Providence, RI, Iannotti describes his childhood and early school “career” in peripatetic terms before finally coming to Kingston where he graduated high school and still lives (albeit technically in the Town of Ulster), when his father found work at IBM. Later, he earned a B.A. in history from Oneonta State, and a Masters at SUNY New Paltz.
He started teaching at a small Otsego County school before moving to Miller Junior High in Kingston and Onteora in September, 1980.
What pulled him to social studies, first, and his innovative brand of civics, later on?
Iannotti described a period, from 1980 to 1993, when he taught history and served as a track coach at Onteora, spurred on by his own regiment of jogging picked up after graduating college feeling 60 pounds overweight. He took over the district’s cross country team from his predecessor, Bernie Stahl, who had initiated the award-winning program in 1952. He made himself a team player.
Then several things started to shift his life, Iannotti says.
Back in the late 1980s, the state mandated that high schools start teaching at least a half year course in economics. A few years later, they also mandated what has since become known as PIG, or a Participation in Government class.
When everyone in the department was polled to see who would take on the new courses, Iannotti came out the winner. In regards to economics, it turns out some undergraduate coursework in minor- and macro-economics made him more qualified than any of his peers in the field. As for PIG, it just so happened that the teacher was simultaneously growing more interested, at the time, in local government.
In 1993, Iannotti was appointed to fill out the term of a Town of Ulster councilman. It was at the same time that IBM, his father’s former employer, was moving out of the county.
“Call it a crash course in public policy,” he now says, looking back. “I appreciated, immediat ely, the integration of economics, politics, and social policy involved in the work, along with the need to generate something real and beneficial.”
Iannotti ended up serving out the term he was appointed to, the running and winning two more terms as a conservative Republican candidate, eventually serving from 1993 through 1999… as his town’s deputy supervisor, as well as councilman and ex-officio municipal police commissioner.
“It was over that six year period that the idea for my civics class was born,” he says. “I decided to alter the curriculum to address a lot of the things I was living outside the classroom.”
So how did his civics class get born from such humble beginnings?
“I wanted to put together a course that would look into the structure of government at town, county, state and federal levels, that also addressed macro- and micro-economics, that looked into business organizations and labor history, international trade and financial policies, monetary policies and the use of revenues at government level. That compared economic and government systems but also looked into the roles of interest groups, the media, and the courts – as well as what was involved in due process and the rule of law,” Iannotti says of the discussions he had throughout the mid-1990s with then-Onteora principal Frank Gorlesky about his planned course. “I wanted to discuss political parties and what the good citizen does in relation to the bad citizen, in terms of staying informed and active…I wanted a forum to which I could bring guest speakers from town boards and local businesses. And I wanted it to be more fun for the students.”
By 1998, Iannotti was given the go-ahead for his new civics course, which ended up augmenting the half year mandated courses well, giving students better chances at meeting the state requirements and easing the school’s scheduling of classes.
Now, 12 school years later, the teacher estimates that at between 100 and 120 students a year, he’s taught about 1400 kids in total. And seen some major shifts in the political and economic worlds along the way, as well as in the school’s own demographics.
“Back when we started the Republicans had solid control of the county legislature. The Dean Gitter project, which many of my students have written thesis papers on over the ensuing years, was still merely an idea, with none of the sides yet formed on either side of it,” Iannotti noted. “We’ve since been through three presidential elections, the Indian Mascot issue, and hosted a number of forums on campus, including a 2003 gathering on the Iraq War and a 2002 Meet the Candidates event for those running for school board at the time.”
Guest speakers who have come to Iannotti’s class have included two district attorneys for the county, Congressman Maurice Hinchey, legislators Dick Petro and Peter Kraft, Woodstock town justice Frank Engel, county attorney Josh Koplovitz, and several former students including Hinchey’s chirf of staff, Dan Ahouse, Conway, and New York Public Interest Group lobbyist Jessica Wizneski.
How had the student body changed over all these years?
“When we started, during the final years of Jimmy Carter, the district was much farther to the left than it’s been since,” Iannotti answered. “During the 2003/2004 years, things shifted to the conservative, although more recently there’s been a great deal of support for Obama. There’s been a great deal of oscillation…”
And what about student involvement in politics?
That, Ionnotti said, had shifted dramatically… from an earlier lack of interest in outside politics – a “collective senior ennui,” as he put it – to student voter registration percentages now being among the highest in the county. He pointed to annual student registration for the Harvard Model Congress, at which Onteora regularly has one of the largest delegations, to involvement in the high school’s Student Affairs Council and various political clubs.
Have the teacher’s own politics been effected by his teaching, as well as his students, over the years?
“It has made me somewhat more balanced to constantly see so many different sides to a subject,” Iannotti replied, after charting the amount of reading and other research he has kept up with regularly as part of his own preparations for the class. “I guess you could say I have moved toward the center…”
And his own future, following retirement?
“I don’t think I’m electable anymore,” he said. “The demographics have changed…”
Would he miss ONteora?
“I wasn’t enthusiastic when I was asked to teach them the first time but now I can’t imagine teaching any other kind of kid,” he said. “And I came to enjoy my daily drives on Route 28. It’s beautiful.”
Then he detoured, reading through his e-mails… from past students now teaching, or working in business and government, to those still in college, sharing their course curriculums with him.
“This won’t go away,” John Iannotti said, proudly. “These are all my friends, now.”

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Plant Those Gardens

Major droughts are hitting the western United States and Argentina, coincidentally the world’s largest producers of GMO crops (106 million acres in the US & 34 million in Argentina with third place China also facing drought), and famine looms on the horizon, threatening hundreds of millions of people with food shortages. As the Northeast is expected to receive above normal rainfall, suddenly people who never dreamed of planting a garden are starting indoor seed beds to shift outside when weather permits. The local grapevine suggests that this grassroots organic impulse is also happening here.
While it isn’t possible to project the true dimensions of this activity and there could be other reasons for reported lower than usual levels of seed supply, it is not difficult to foresee a potential major barrier to the home garden movement and to small farms and farmer’s markets in general.
According to a legion of organic food associations and alliances, the “Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009,” now being fine-tuned in Congress under the 2009 Omnibus Appropriations Act, could crush the regrowth of local food markets just as they’re starting to bloom. A “killing frost,” so to speak.
Called “GMO Proliferation Bills” by Stephen Lendman, a Research Associate of the Center of Research on Globalization and prolific Chicago-based journalist, HR 875, S425, HR 814 and HR 759 are batched bills, crafted by the industry–not the politicians, which organizations like the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and other critics believe are “vehicles to let agribusiness control the entire US food supply, destroy independent farming and end the production of healthy organic food.” Citing PASA’s study of the bill, Lendman notes that “code words like ‘traceability, source verification and best farming practices with proven scientific results’ will force farmers to tag every animal....and use drugs, pesticides and GM seeds.”
Lendman and other analysts find the bills’ “deceptively innocuous” text to be riddled with broad language which would embrace NAIS–the controversial National Animal Identification System– to tag domestic animals for monitoring by Global Positioning Systems (as part of the “Trace Act of 2009,” HR 814, now being reviewed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee) and provide harsh penalties for conduct infractions to be interpreted by industry “experts” (i.e., huge corporations like Cargill, Monsanto, ADM, etc. who have a past record of attempting to suppress organic competition to their GMO agenda.)
A careful examination of Section 103 of the sizable HR 875 bill suggests that the perspective of company officials, appointed by the US Department of Agriculture, would prevail in judging transgressions.
The large and complex bill would “criminalize organic farming without actually using the word ‘organic,’ in the words of one observer, and Section 206 is worded to include the produce from backyard gardeners’ “food production facilities” as subject to prosecution.. It will potentially effect even hunters who process game for personal consumption and seemingly violate the 10th Amendment by requiring individual state agricultural departments to enforce federal requirements.
HR 875 is also about seed control, with the agricultural giants demanding expensive storage facilities per line of seed, which organic farmers cannot afford, and detailed records for vital seed cleaning operations geared to regulations which don’t happen to include protection from GM contamination. If your stock becomes tainted with their patented pollen, you must pay them, of course.
Lendman observes that “reliable studies show that rats fed GM potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles, brains, damaged immune systems and showed structural changes in their white blood cells, making them more susceptible to infection and disease than other rats fed non-GM potatoes. They also had thymus and spleen damage, enlarged tissues, including the pancreas and intestines, liver atrophy and other serious problems.”
Such dire effects have been noted in numerous scientific studies and scientists, individually and in groups, have denounced the massive use of American consumers as guinea pigs to the extent that some 80% of processed foods being sold in this country contain GM ingredients. Critics point to a corresponding rise in health problems as the technology proliferated since the 1980s due to the industry’s skill at political lobbying They cite a 90% rise in diabetes within the last decade, the recently emerged, mysterious and horrific Morgellon’s disease which has halted song-stylist Joni Mitchell’s career, and numerous other ills on the growth chart.
Although you’re more likely to read about it at the Institute for Science In Society and similar websites rather than hear about it in commercial media, biologists like the internationally known Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Dr. Joseph Cummins have long been cautioning about “a technology that is widely acknowledged to be unreliable, uncontrollable and unpredictable” having been set loose in the marketplace.
Scientists such as Dr. Richard Strolman, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California in Berkeley, sees it as a “crisis” situation wherein we now know that genes exist in “interactive networks which have a logic of their own” but have unleashed a blind roulette food gamble with people’s lives.
“Monsanto knows this. DuPont knows this. Novartis knows this. They all know what I know,” he continues. “But they don’t want to look at it because it’s too complicated and it’s going to cost too much to figure out. The number of questions, the number of possibilities for what happens to a cell, to the whole organism when you insert a foreign gene, are almost incalculable. And the time it would take to assess the infinite possibilities that arise is beyond the capabilities of computers. But that’s what you get when you’re dealing with living systems.”
(It is my own contention, impossible to detail in an article this size, that we have already experienced a series of GM “mishaps,” deftly disguised as something else to protect the hundreds of billions laced into the industry).
Although spokespeople from government and the agricultural industry deny that these bills are a deliberate assault upon organic farming, the language in them leaves open that very possibility and the track record of the Ag monsters, filled with fraud and deception, is not reassuring.
One prominent campaigner against the bill, Linn Cohen-Cole, expresses direct and simplistic ideas about the timing of the legislation “...organic food and a rebirth of farming were winning. Not in absolute numbers but in a deep and growing shift by the public toward understanding the connection between their food and their health, between good food and true social pleasures, between their own involvement in food and the improvement in their lives in general, between local food and a burgeoning local economy... Slow food was right–limit your food to what comes from your region and from real farmers and slow down to cook it and linger over it with friends and family, and the world begins to change for the better.”
In the next issue, we’ll take a closer look at the provisions of the bills, their architects and implementers and how their potential impact is being perceived locally.

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A Jar Of Olives...
How Much The Woodchuck?
A Closer Look At The Inanities Of News

I just loaded two logs into the woodstove because the weather forecast is for cold, rainy weather for the next week. There is really nothing nicer than a woodstove’s warmth. Ours is in the living room, and it heats the whole house although the bathrooms are at the far end of the house, so grooming and daily constitutionals are a bit Spartan. This week of woodstove use will take us to a full half year of burning wood. The only time it went out was the delightful week we spent in Mexico Beach in the panhandle of Florida with cousins Sue and Roy. Who was it that said the Catskills have one month of summer, one month of spring, six months of winter, and four months of late fall? That person called it right this year.
My husband has turned into a woodchuck. He bought two tractor trailer loads of logs and is in the process of turning that mountain range of logs into hills and heaps of smaller wood pieces. He figures it will get us through two winters, Catskill style, in case the heating oil goes through the roof. As he was cutting logs into chunks, I was using the wood splitter, and we both stacked the truck to move the firewood up to the house. As I was hefting and throwing chunks of ash and oak, I began to count the number of times that wood would be handled before it actually produced some BTU’s of warmth. They say wood warms twice—once when you handle it and once when you burn it. Well, it isn’t twice. It’s more like seven or eight times.
Someone cuts the tree, then it is cut into chunks, then it is split, then loaded into a truck, then unloaded, then stacked, and then brought into the house. It’s finally loaded into the proximity of a stove and joyfully loaded into a woodstove. Our woodstove is the focal point of our living. Our chocolate lab Diva curls up on a pillow beside it; our cat flash stretches out on the bluestone hearth that our friend Jan Wullum designed when he built our fieldstone walls in the corner of the living room.
My husband was telling our grandson, who has been helping us with our “wooding”, that this would help him when he grows up and has to cut wood. Nicky and I both responded to that with, “Gramps, when Nicky grows up, woodstoves will be a novelty. People will keep warm with solar or wind or some other alternative heat source.” Let’s hope.
My joy this week has been connecting with former students out and about town. Check out www.kylewarrendogs.com to see the story of how Kyle became involved with K-9 training. I was delighted that Kylene Thomas is almost a neighbor in the new home she bought in Shokan. Kylene teaches in Saugerties. Nicky Chartrand made the Dean’s List. Evan Kellogg was driving heavy equipment along with his dad T. J. Kellogg building a driveway. I asked him if he would go into business with his father, and he replied, “No, I will be his competitor!” One of the joys of being a retired teacher in the district where I live is that I get to see the end product. I see Shannon Klitzel at Kasey’s Café and can joke with her and remember what a good writer she is. I get to enjoy the end product of a person I saw in Middle School as a “work in progress.”
Former students are graduates or about to graduate this year. Each teacher, each parent, each neighbor and each friend helps to shape them into the adults they will become. Judging by the young adults I am meeting, Onteora and Olive have done well by producing some fine grown-ups. I’m betting one of my former students comes up with a new and efficient way to produce energy. Until that time, I will continue to schlep wood around knowing that, in my old age, I can rely on some alternative fuel.