Follow Up on the News

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News Update:

At a press conference held in his Kingston offices about the nation’s growing worries about an imminent recession, and what the White House isn’t – and could be – doing about such matters, U.S. Congressman Maurice Hinchey replied to several pointed questions Tuesday, January 15, by noting new trepidation about the direction a compromise plan he helped initiate has taken.

In specific, Hinchey was quoted addressing the results of an Agreement in Principal brokered and announced by Governor Eliot Spitzer as being "much too intense" and talking of the Belleayre Resort’s claims for regional economic development as benefiting only "the investors and a few others."

"I see the billboards where they're talking about 525 jobs," he said. "Those are not real jobs. They're not full-time jobs."

Speaking from his Washington, D.C. office on Wednesday, January 16, Hinchey clarified the previous day’s statements by noting, “It’s not a change in tone at all… I’m not against what the governor wants to do BUT insistent that it all be done in the context of the State’s Environmental Quality Review Act laws. This all has to be looked at very carefully and a lot of people have come to the same conclusion as me that the density of development currently planned is just too much.”

In October, 2005, Hinchey proposed elimination of all construction on 1,216 acres on the eastern side of Belleayre Mountain, the better to protect the New York City Watershed’s sensitive Ashokan Reservoir basin. When Spitzer came to Kingston in September of last year to announce just such a compromise, along with that land’s agreed-upon sale to the state to be preserved as forever wild, Hinchey sent out a statement generally praising the compromise most felt had been based on his original proposal.

“I applaud Governor Spitzer for his leadership in developing a solution for the Belleayre Resort project that will help to create new jobs and spur economic growth while minimizing negative impacts to the surrounding environment and protecting the integrity of the New York City watershed,” Congressmember Hinchey said in that September 5 release. “When I introduced the lower build alternative for this plan as a starting point for these negotiations almost two years ago, I envisioned a final project that greatly resembled what was agreed to today… While this project represents a dramatic improvement from what was originally proposed, I still intend to follow the subsequent review process carefully, particularly with regard to its size and potential impacts on the hamlet of Pine Hill.”

This week, stressed his role as one of the initiators and original sponsors of SEQRA, the state’s environmental review legislation, as a means of noting that the resort project he’s been watchdogging for years now will continue to be the recipient of close perusal.

Did that mean he had been listening to project opponents’ complaints, summarized in a recent Article 78 lawsuit filed against all of the AIP’s signers, that the governor’s agreement process was somehow shortchanging the state’s review process?

Not at all, Hinchey said. Similarly, he noted that although there were also complaints that the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s service as lead agency on the resort as well as its own plans to expand its Belleayre Ski Center holdings seemed to be muddying the review process, “the process should work.”

As for other complaints, embodied in a recent Greene County legislative resolution protesting the AIP and Belleayre expansion as unfair competition with its own privately owned ski areas, all struggling, Hinchey said simply, “That’s something the state has to examine. I’m not part of state government…”

The jobs comments, he then added, had been made in the context of the press conference’s topic calling for tax cuts to aid lower and middle income families.

“I was talking about manufacturing and creative technology jobs when I was asked about what the resort would involve,” he said. “I said those sorts of jobs weren’t nearly as important in terms of overall impact, wage security, and benefits.”

Finally, asked whether he had given any thought to the appearance of the state investing in winter recreation at a time when Climate Change and its economic effects are becoming a key subject. Hinchey started by talking about his commitment to discussing Global Warming issues.

“One of the things I talked about yesterday was how important it is for us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, as well as how climate change is now among our most important economic issues to address,” he said. “That’s why I’m so vigorously pushing solar energy in the Hudson Valley.”

But that investment in winter embodied in the governor’s AIP?

“We know from recent experience, a foot of snow one week and it’s all melted a few days later,” he said. And then went silent.

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Spitzer’s Deal Questioned

Calmly We All Start Over

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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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“The forum will solely be for the two options,” said OCS Superintendent Leslie Ford, noting that other comments would be accepted only in written form. 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.

Climatic Discrepancies

A call to the Albany-based watchdog group Environmental Advocates this past week about the apparent disconnect being displayed in the call for climate change responsibility on the one hand, and Belleayre’s expansion on the other yielded a reference to the groups 2006 study, “Forecast for New York: Projected Global Warming Impacts and Next Steps,” as well as a promise that any discrepancies in state policy would be looked at closely.
“It is essential that the public and decision makers in New York understand the true risks posed by climate change,” read an introduction to that report, which highlighted the potential loss of New York’s ski industry, which holds the nation’s largest number of ski areas, in the coming two to three decades.
Further questions were referred, for the moment, to the new Spitzer-appointed Office of Climate Change and its director, Peter Iwanowicz.
Unfortunately, the fledgling entity has yet to get a website of its own, or even a web page from its parent state agency, the Department of Environmental Conservation. Repeated calls and e-mails to Iwanowicz, the former chief policy officer and a clean air advocate for the American Lung Association of New York State, got no answer as of press time.
In last summer’s “2007 Report to NYS Conservation Council from Office of Climate Change,” the new director noted that his office would, “Play a key role in carrying out the state’s program to reduce climate-changing emissions, and to adapt where warming is unavoidable… Most scientists today agree that the earth’s temperature is growing warmer, that this warming is most likely caused by burning fossil fuels, and that the climate changes from the increased temperatures threaten our resources and our way of life.”
Continuing, the state report noted how winter temperatures were up as much as 4.4 degrees in the past 30 years, Adirondack snowfall was down by 40 to 60 inches per year and an average of 20 fewer days with snow on the ground was being observed in some parts of the state, including the Catskills… Significant change in our climate also threatens New Yorkers’ economy and lifestyle. For this reason, Governor Eliot Spitzer has assigned urgent priority to understanding and mitigating global climate change, as well as to taking actions needed to accommodate warming that cannot be avoided.
As part of his job, Iwanowicz is set to be part of a four day conference unfolding at Fordham University next weekend, “Climate Change: Science, Culture and the Regional Response,” where he will augment talks about “The Gap between Science and Policy” and “Political and Cultural Response: The Problem of the Problem” by addressing “Impacts on the Hudson Valley” alongside a host of college professors, including one from Bard College.
Following the Fordham conference will be similar events at Ulster County Community College, SUNY New Paltz and Bard College as part of a nationwide effort involving over 1,000 colleges and high schools across the nation on Thursday, January 31, all part of the national awareness Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions for America days.
UCCC will host an educational Expo in the Student Dining Center on its Stone Ridge campus from 12 noon to 2:00 p.m on January 31 where local nonprofit environmental groups will be on hand to help lead discussions and hear concerns.On Friday, February 1, Bard College will participate via a daylong series of events, “Stabilizing the Climate in the 21st Century—Global Warming Solutions for America,” including panel discussions by 20 faculty members and community experts; an all-local harvest lunch; alternate vehicle demonstration; exhibition; film screenings ; theater presentation; and a “green democracy” roundtable with civic leaders and students.
The nationwide teach-in, billed as the largest such event ever, is also to include members of Congress via live, video-conferencing technology between campuses and Congress, and end with a “Choose Your Future” vote in which student, faculty, and community participants are encouraged to vote on what they think are the top five solutions to global warming from a list of 10 to 15 available starting Monday, January 21, at www.focusthenation.org. Results will be presented nationally in mid February.
So what’s happening in the Catskills to celebrate?
On the same day the new director of the state Office on Climate Change is addressing the effects of global warming in the area, his peer Judith Enck, the governor’s environmental consultant and the former director of Environmental Advocates , will be accepting a “Spirit of the Catskills” award on behalf of she and Iwamowicz’s boss, the governor. For vision regarding climate change? Hardly… for brokering a deal that will push the expansion of winter sports activities at state-owned Belleayre Mountain.
“I have had to learn to temper things and remind myself that I’m not a free agent,” said Ms. Enck in an interview with the New York Times last October, after she and the governor started coming under fire for their role in the local resort issue and other perceived missteps. “Now I have to approach things with a different style, and spend a lot more time looking at multiple sides of an issue.”
But not, apparently, all… quite yet.
As for the governor, he was also witnessed operating in at least two directions of late, siding with California and 14 other states, on the one hand, in a lawsuit against the federal Environmental Protection Agency for its .refusal to allow states to write tougher laws than them regarding emissions and signeing an Executive Order creating a Smart Growth Cabinet, which will review spending by and policies of state agencies to determine how best to discourage sprawl and promote smart land-use practices… to be chaired by Enck. Locally, the initiative is designed to look into the revitalizization of towns and hamlets along the Route 28 corridor.
“The challenge of climate change is upon us, and is clearly worsening with time,” he said in recent weeks, joining California’s lawsuit. “Immediate and aggressive action is needed, and the nation’s head environmental agency is not only sitting on the sidelines but denying states the ability to take necessary action.”
And on the other?
“First Lady Silda Wall Spitzer announces launch of ‘I Love NY’ winter tourism campaign and promotions,” read this week’s headlines on the governor’s website, noting a new program promoting “cosy inns” such as Kate’s Lazy Meadow, the Belleayre Lodge and Catskill Rose as well as its skiing. “Due to the importance of this vital industry to the New York State economy, the annual tourism budget has increased by 50% to over $22 million thanks to Governor Spitzer.”
While meanwhile, the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) is still trumpeting last summer’s Sustainable Slopes Annual Report pressing lawmakers to enact national legislation that will require aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions… as a means of saving its industry over the coming decades.
And the Union of Concerned Scientists, a sponsor of the coming teach in, notes, “Warmer winters mean trouble for New York, where winter recreation has long been an integral part of people’s sense of place. The communities and businesses dependent on revenues from cross-country or downhill skiing, snowmobiling, and, especially, ice fishing, could be hard-hit.”
Guess there’ll be much to talk about next issue… after the teach-ins. And after the Belleayre Snowball…