Reasons
To Be Mad
You couldn't miss the thunk when the school budget went
down, and nobody mistook it for anything it wasn't.
A lot of people are really pissed off. They're pissed
off in Olive because the school board's likely to vote
for the large parcel bill in August, raising school taxes
50 percent or more. That's a good reason to be pissed.
They're pissed, not quite as much in Shandaken and Woodstock,
because the board didn't do that last year, and it cost
most people several hundred dollars they wouldn't have
had to pay. That's a good reason too. They're
pissed in West Hurley over the school closing, and who wouldn't
be?
People vote their anger because they can and they should,
but mostly because they can. In our society school district
budgets are the one and only place where you can go to the
polls and say no, I'm not willing to pay it. That doesn't
work with town, county or state government, and it doesn't
work with the federal budget or at the gas station.
But it does work with school systems and when it does, we
all understand nobody really wins or at least wins anything
they really want.
We're not going to try and insist that good schools
are a fair deal, or that they more than pay for themselves
over the lifetime of our kids and with enhanced property values.
We think both are true, but we don't expect anyone who
doesn't already understand why that is, to be open to
hearing it coming from us, or from anyone. We're not
prattleheaded enough to believe that either money alone buys
quality education, or that it doesn't help meaningfully,
because it does. If it didn't, people would wonder why
districts that spend a ton of money also tend to have very
high test scores and outstanding college placement histories.
We should though, agree to step back far enough to get the
whole of the picture in the frame, and to call things by their
right name. We have to start with the fact that the entire
system, the whole mechanism by which we fund public education
is totally screwed up. We are the only country in the world
that funds basic education on the basis of local property
taxes. Few people would even bother to try and argue there's
anything remotely fair or equitable about it. Wealthy communities
and wealthy kids benefit, less wealthy communities have to
make do with less, everyone knows there's a huge disparity
in the quality of education around the state and the whole
thing stinks. So why does it go on? Well in New York State
it's a reflection of the shift in population and political
power from the cities to the suburbs, with rural areas like
ours basically swept aside in the shuffle. In terms of funding,
we're pretty much in the same boat as city school districts
are, and this has been going on and getting worse for two
generations now. But it's not going to stay that way
forever. Because statewide, it's city schools that have
borne most of this inequity. And people there are pissed enough
about it that it's finally moved to the courts of New
York State. We believe that change and something far
closer to an equitable system of funding education statewide
is coming. But until it does, we're going to have to
keep muddling through.
Onteora is a good school district, and our current trustees
have, by and large, done a good job of focusing on education,
as they said they would. The budget the voters rejected was
one we thought worthy of support, though we understand why
the support's not there. We also understand there's
a limit to what the district's taxpayers can be expected
to bear, and we're functioning close enough to that
limit that very tight fiscal management is called for. We
don't know if a harder look at expenses could have kept
the West Hurley school open; possibly it could have. But we
don't think that would have made much difference in
whether the budget passed or not, because the large parcel
bill has created an adversarial dynamic between our communities
that's as unreasonable as it is artificial.
Putting aside for a moment the historical injustice of what
the reservoir did to Olive and its tax base, for Olive's
current taxpayers - and for all the taxpayers of the district-
a fair assessment of the Ashokan Reservoir would have had
the district receiving a fair level of payment, in total,
all along. The current assessment of the reservoir is of course,
ridiculously low. But equally ridiculous is that it's
NOT the City at this moment that's fighting to maintain
this. Oh they've been jerks, imperious jerks, on the
whole subject of paying fairly for years, but right now the
City's not the problem. Because they've said they
won't contest a reservoir reval by the state Office
of Real Property Services, and it's ORPS that's
refusing to deal fairly with Olive or with Onteora on this
matter. This isn't some bureaucratic screw-up or oversight,
this is the implementation of policy and we believe it comes
straight from the Governor's office. Why Governor
Pataki's doing this we have no idea, but it does seem
part of a pattern that suggests there's just not enough
votes or soft money in the Catskills to worry much about anything
that happens here. So if you want to be pissed at the City
for its historical position, there's good reason for
that. But if you're pissed over the impact of the large
parcel bill, and how it's now likely to hurt our kids
by forcing a contingency budget on us amongst the other things
it's doing, you may want to direct any thoughts you
might have to the governor, who could fix it with a phone
call, instead of our school trustees who can't.
We agree that school taxes should be assessed fairly amongst
all the district's towns. But until Olive's contribution
- especially the city's half - is valued and
taxed for what it's worth, the injustice of that will
yield us nothing but the antagonism it's created and
that no administrator or trustee at Onteora deserves to be
faulted for. Take issue with line items in a budget or with
individual discretionary increases? Sure. Insisting those
are the real problem here, that we can't buy.
