Reflections on Board of Education Dynamics

Well, a Tranquil Month of May Will Be Welcome

Yesterday's 5 PM deadline, for submission of additional nominating petitions for the two Elwood Board of Education Trustee terms expiring this year, passed without any additional candidates.

Therefore, Joe Fusaro and Dan Ciccone will have no opponents on the ballot for the May 19th Election and Budget Vote.

Naturally it would be conjecture, since I never took Mind-Reading 101 in college, to give a single reason for this unopposed election. But it is both reasonable, and appropriate, to provide a few possible reasons, one or more of which is likely to be the predominant factor.

First, let's look at the momentum factor, for which there is ample evidence.

Joe and Dan first ran for election to the Board in 2003, and ran against two incumbents, one whom was a long-standing Trustee and the other a Trustee for merely one year. Both challengers were part of a movement to create change in the district, and each won election by comfortable margins, Joe Fusaro by 301 votes and Dan Ciccone by 138 votes.

In 2006 they were challenged by two candidates who were allied, to greater or lesser degrees, to other incumbent Trustees opposed to many of the reforms, and calls for accountability, that Joe and Dan were able to initiate when their 2003 election brought a reform majority to the Board. Despite some deplorable tactics aimed at maligning Mr. Fusaro, both Joe and Dan increased their margins of victory, Joe Fusaro to 319 votes and Dan Ciccone to 341 votes.

Now, a betting person might look at that trend, and consider that momentum, and ask “why do I want to expend all of that energy and time and still lose, and by an embarrassing margin?”

Second, let's look at accomplishments over the past six years, and imagine ourselves as a potential contender asking herself or himself whether there is good reason to even oppose these two incumbents.

Recognizing that any board of education can only set policy, and establish goals, and call for greater accountability, but are limited in their success by the cooperation and professionalism of those administrators which report to the board, Elwood's Board of Education has created much greater openness, candor, citizen participation, staff participation, and willingness to consider alternatives using a Best Practices philosophy.

The democratic initiatives, about which I have written before, have given greater opportunities to everyone to better understand what is happening in each Board meeting and to better participate in those meetings.

As an example, we now have the three “Board books,” which are made available to residents at the Regular Meeting, which have the non-confidential enclosures which the Board has before them; this information was previously unknown to residents, leaving a mystery of what the heck these people were talking about.

We also have two Residents Remarks periods at Regular Meetings, one at the beginning and one at the end, to give residents, or staff, or visitors, a better opportunity to comment before, and after, discussions or actions by the Board.

We also have five subcommittees of the Board, and several other District and Board committees, which allow participation by residents as well as, in the case of applicable areas such as curriculum, non-resident staff. But it is much more than mere participation, since these subcommittees and committees even flourish and depend upon the various talents of residents, thereby adding a broad knowledge base to what the Trustees and District Administration themselves bring to these various areas.

And I could go on, but this is enough of an illustration of what I regard as a second reason not to run in opposition to Joe or Dan, since they have, together with the other three incumbents, already done a great deal to bring greater democracy to Elwood, as well as bring a more holistic approach to improving education in Elwood through the creation of better dialogue with parents and other stakeholders.

Third, there was a flurry of interest last year, when the subject of a possible Full Day Kindergarten program, badly structured and even more badly unveiled by the prior District Administration, created so much emotion with so little intellectual rigor, that some people were persuaded to run for the Board of Education on what was effectively a single issue platform.

This year our Board of Education took control of the FDK consideration process early on, and imposed proper governance controls and accountability on the current District Administration, and made sure that it would be structured in such a way as to be fiscally responsible (it was far from that last year), and creatively organized to satisfy both those who wanted this expansion from Elwood's current Extended Day Kindergarten program as well as those who were concerned about having their children in a kindergarten program that would be beyond the scale appropriate for very young children.

If I understand the model correctly, it seems very close to the kind of creative and adaptive Full Day Kindergarten program which the Cold Spring Harbor school district created in recent years.

With our Board of Education now having accomplished that in the 2009/10 proposed school budget, there was very little reason for the aggressive FDK advocates in the community to throw opposing candidates up before any incumbent running this year.

So, for powerful momentum reasons, and for persuasive democracy and citizen participation reasons, and for preemptive single-issue focus reasons, there was more than enough there to persuade someone to decide to not run against Joe or Dan.

But, for whatever definitive reason that one or more persons so chose, we can be grateful that this District, and this Board of Education, will continue to have the very dedicated and innovative services of Joe Fusaro and Dan Ciccone for the next three years.

Our Board has many challenges, and many areas where strong and wise leadership will be needed as Elwood goes forward.

Sitting back on our collective haunches, and engaging in intellectual navel gazing, or mythologizing about some past glories, is not an option for our Board, nor for our administrative staff, nor for our teaching staff. Time does not stand still, and our students are facing greater and greater challenges in both the college experience as well as in the workplace.

Moreover, despite the fact that we the taxpayers directly pay for most of the expenses of running this district, with smaller and smaller support from the State (which comes from us, anyway, indirectly), we only get to choose the members of the Board of Education. We depend upon the Board to make the best choices possible regarding those hired to lead the District and to teach our children, and we wish them great success in these very challenging times.

Thank you so much to Mike Kaszubski, and Joe Fusaro, and Dan Ciccone, and Andrew Kaplan, and Patty Matos. They are a great credit to the people, and children, of the Elwood School District.

Jerry Hannon

Interesting Information About LI Teacher Compensation

In today's Newsday, on page A14, Newsday's education reporter, John Hildebrand, has an article titled "Teacher's pay posted on Web." You may also access the same story, though with a diffrent title of "Central Islip, East Islip school district wages posted," on newsday.com.

Mr. Hildebrand quotes from data which has been posted to the internet by a conservative think tank, the Empire Center for New York State Policy. They provide some startling information on wages paid to several teachers in the two districts, and these are just wages, without the accumulating value of pensions or current and future medical benefits.

Now, anyone reading either the article, or the data posted by the Empire Center, should recognize that there are probably still some teachers on Long Island, in some districts, that are underpaid; but, it would be irresponsible for anyone to ignore the excessive compensation outlined, and it points out the need for taxpayers in all districts to understand the compensation structures in their own school districts.

It sounds like it will soon be easier for residents of all districts to do that, since Mr. Hildebrand notes that the Empire Center "eventually plans to add similar information for all other school districts on its Web site: www.seethroughny.net."

You will already find some fascinating data, including labor contracts and payroll information for various school districts and other NY governmental entities.

Now, in the article, Mr. Hildebrand also provides comments from a representative of New York State United Teachers, who points out that the Empire Center is an arm of the nationally-known conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

Naturally, I would be no more likely to blindly accept the views of the Manhattan Institute, or its local arms, than I would blindly accept the views of the NY State United Teachers, or its local teachers unions.

But you and I have a right to factual information, so that we can understand the realities, and not be misguided by the myths, of compensation in both wages and benefits of our own school districts.

Take every opportunity to gather those facts, and make your own informed judgments about them, and do not let anyone try to cover up that information or mislead you by saccharine-like statments or by plays upon your emotions.

Jerry Hannon

Truth Trumps Fiction as Administrator Stays

Scarola EMS Principal Starting July 1st

Last night's Elwood BOE meeting was well-attended, and it was filled with people who rarely attend these meetings who had obviously been persuaded to come to speak on behalf of Pat Scarola, the former and long-time Elwood MIddle SchoolPrincipal.

Mr. Scarola had been promoted from his former position when the new Superintendent of Schools, Dave Cenerelli, took over from Bill Swart last July 1st. But Mr. Cenerelli had proposed, in his draft budget to the BOE, that the position of Ass't Sup't for Educational Services, which was the spot to which Mr. Scarola had been promoted, be abolished as part of the necessary cost-cutting measures to deal with the current economic crisis.

Unfortunately, and I personally witnessed this in some of the E-mails which I had received prior to the meeting, many people had been told, either directly by internet postings or by family or friends who themselves read such postings, that Mr. Scarola was going to lose his pension by being forced out just one year from when he had intended to retire.

The reality was far different than that, as was made clear at the PTA meeting on April 14th (joint meeting of Boyd, Middle School, Council), and repeated early in last night's BOE meeting.

Mr. Scarola had been eligible for retirement for several years and anyone familiar with pension systems, including the State's, knows that once you are qualified for retirement, those benefits cannot be taken away from you.

That was one major error being sent around via the internet and phone chains.

Additionally, since retiring one year later can mean an increased pension, the BOE, apparently sometime in March, had made an early retirement offer to Mr. Scarola, because of the elimination of his current position, so that he would not suffer financially as a result of these actions.

That was one major piece of information that was not being sent around via the internet and phone chains.

But even that significant error, and that significant omission, did not account for all of the gaps in understanding the reality of the situation.

What the BOE did not know, as was told to PTA members on April 14th and to the entire audience last night, was that Mr. Scarola did not want to accept that package.

Unfortunately, using the normal chain of administrative responsibility for any school district, the BOE was getting their feedback from the Superintendent, who was himself speaking with Mr. Scarola, and it was not until April 3rd that they heard from Mr. Cenerelli that Mr. Scarola was not willing to accept the incentive package that the BOE had offered.

At that point a series of direct discussions with Mr. Scarola, by various trustees, took place, and that set in motion individual discussions among the trustees, and finally an Executive Session - during the ten day Easter/Passover recess - to work out an alternative plan.

Since the current EMS Principal, Dave Klecher, had surprisingly announced on March 23rd his intention to resign his position effective June 30th, the EMS Principal slot was now going to be available for allocation. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, the BOE had another alternative regarding options for Mr. Scarola.

And that is just what has finally worked out over the past several days.

While it was great to see so many people energized, and willing to come to a BOE meeting to address an issue of personal concern, it would have been better if they were there on the basis of facts and the complete story, rather than misinformation and omitted facts.

But, it has all worked out well, and Mr. Scarola, a legend in his own time, will be continuing his historical role in Elwood, and for that we should be grateful.

Thank you to Mr. Scarola, and to his many friends and colleagues who spoke on his behalf or who asked good questions in advance of the meeting, and thank you to our wise and creative Board of Education for solving this dilemma.

Jerry Hannon

Interesting Speaker at Local Civic Organization Meetings

Over the past two nights, Mark Cronin, one of the co-founders of Concerned Citizens of Huntington, has addressed two civic organizations in Elwood; on Tuesday night he spoke at the Elwood Taxpayers Association meeting, and on Wednesday at the Old Chester Hills Civic Association meeting.

For anyone who may have missed the articles in Newsday, and in The Long-Islander, and perhaps it has appeared in other papers as well, Concerned Citizens of Huntington is a group which is promoting a change in the way the four non-Supervisor members of the Huntington Town Board are selected. At the present time the four members are elected on an "at-large" basis, where they run in the entire Town instead of running on a district, or councilmanic district, basis.

This has had the effect of promoting an expensive campaign, thereby limiting effective competition for these Town Board seats and also making it more likely that large contributors and other power brokers may have undue influence in the process.

It has also resulted in a Town Board which consists of five members of the local Democratic Party, and, in 170 recorded votes from 1/1/09 through 3/24/09, all 170 were unanimous votes by the Town Board.

And, if you imagine that might have been an aberration, in 2008 there were 729 recorded votes, and of those 721 votes were unanimous; I'll save you from doing the math, as that is 98.9% of the recorded votes.

Now, some of those votes are undoubtedly on mundane matters, so unanimity on those would be understandable, but anyone who attends Town Board meetings with some frequency, as I have done over the past several years, knows that there are numerous matters of substance as well as mundane matters which come before the Town Board.

99% seems a disturbing statistic.

Mr. Cronin also provided some very interesting statistics as comparison for our Town Board members who, on the current at-large system basis, are each theoretically representing about 200,000 people, since the population of the Town is just about that size.

In contrast:

(1) each member of the New York State Assembly represents approximately 130,000 people; and,

(2) each Suffolk County Legislator represents approximately 81,000 people.

Therefore, Mr. Cronin noted, a change to district representation, where four districts in the Town of Huntington would be created, would have each non-Supervisor member of the Town Board representing approximately 50,000 people, allowing the Councilman/Councilwoman to get to know his or her constituents better than they presently can, and allowing less money to be spent on the election for these positions.

Given that a Town is a lower level of government than a County, and that a County is a lower level of government than a State, it would also be much more logical to have the four non-Supervisor Town Board members representing 50,000 people.

Mr. Cronin advised that Concerned Citizens of Huntington is routing petitions to enable a ballot initiative for the proposal to convert to Council Districts, and that a minimum of 3,100 signatures is required. Also, signing the petition does not bind the signers to ultimately vote for the Council District conversion, merely to allow it to be placed on the ballot so that all Huntington residents can decide this matter for themselves.

The group was co-founded by Dennis Garetano (Republican) and Mark Cronin (Democrat), and it is now supported by individual Republicans, Democrats, Conservatives, Independence Party members, and Working Families Party members.

In fact, the only official "party organization" which seems opposed to the measure is the machine of the local Democratic Party.

Gee, what a surprise.

Before he departed, Mr. Cronin noted that Concerned Citizens of Huntington is not only non-partisan, as its structure and diverse party supporters makes clear, it is also a temporary organization which will go out of existence once the Council District structure for the Town of Huntington is a reality.

They will have no role in the selection of any possible candidates, and, indeed, they note that some of the present Town Board members could end up representing Districts in which they now reside. Of course, it is also possible that two current members could end up in competition, if they happened to live in the same District.

For my part, I feel that it would be very good to have each Town Board representative live in the same district that he or she was representing, just as we have for other legislative bodies in the County and State.

Mr. Cronin provided some very useful information and invited anyone to also go to their website (www.ConcernedCitizensofHuntington.com) for a more complete presentation.

Jerry Hannon

Study Affirms Actions By Elwood's BOE

The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) has an interesting website, with a number of helpful blogs.

One of these, its Whole Child Blog, covers a topic which Elwood's Board of Education has focused upon over the past few years, namely, the interrelationship of programmed physical activity and better learning by students.

Anyone who has come to most of the Elwood BOE meetings in recent months has even seen a demonstration (well, actually two) of the web video, used to enhance physical activity in the lower grades, which was created by Elwood's Department of Health and Physical Education and our Department of Technology.

That video has made Coach TJ Brocking a local "media star," who may one day be able to compete for attention with Hannah Montana, well, maybe in our small part of the world.

In a topic headlined "Exercise Linked to Attention and Academic Achievement," the April 7th posting begins:

"Researchers at the University of Illinois have found a positive link between physical activity and attention and physical activity and academic achievement in children. Children in this study were better able to pay attention and performed better on academic tests after bouts of physical exercise."

This is a short, but helpful, article and you will find links to related material on the ASCD website.

Jerry Hannon


http://www.wholechildeducation.org/blog/?storyId=261

What’s Wrong With this Town Government Picture?

Over the past few weeks there have been a terrific series of articles, and great photographs, in The Observer, which is the weekly newspaper covering primarily Northport and East Northport.

The topic has been the demolishing, without proper consideration or citizen input, and with questionable Town Board governance, of the central archway of the buildings at Crab Meadow Beach.

While the regional press, Newsday, and the other local paper, The Long-Islander (covering primarily Cold Spring Harbor, Huntington village, Centerport, and Greenlawn) and its sister publication The Record (covering primarily Northport, and East Northport, and Elwood, and Commack), have had some relatively brief information about these stories, it has paled in comparison to the revelations in The Observer.

In fact, as a subscriber to both The Observer and The Long-Islander (since The Record is like a poor cousin in its Town coverage), I can confidently say that the Long-islander group of newspapers has become much less of a home for true journalists since its 2006 sale to (I believe) a group affiliated with Congressman Gary Ackerman, Democrat of Queens and Nassau.

In contrast, The Observer has been a consistent home for investigative journalism, with Rob Morrison having done a terrific job for the first few years after I was “freed from the bonds of 70 to 80 hour work weeks,” and Publisher David Ambro now doing double duty as a first class investigative reporter.

It is Ambro’s determination, as a resident of the Crab Meadow area who witnessed what was happening, and as a journalist who understood where the Town Government was cutting ethical corners (if not, in fact, violating the law), which embarrassed our monolithic, in-lockstep, no-open-discussion, no-significant-disagreement, Town Board.

There was a series of court battles, which you can read about if you go to the library to read back issues of The Observer, but this was one of those damage-already-done battles, where truth and justice play second fiddle to what cannot be physically reversed, namely, the Town’s destruction of that archway.

The only concession, as far as I can determine, is that the Town will now do some kind of rebuilding of the central archway area; but this was an unnecessary action, which demonstrated that the current Town Board, much as I like some of them as individuals, did not respect the residents of the Town of Huntington, and was arrogantly doing what they did, because they felt they could get away with such cavalier action.

This is a sad experience for the people of this Town, including all Elwood residents, many of whom have taken their own kids to Crab Meadow (as my wife and I did when they were young), and all of whom have a stake in returning true democracy, and respect of law, to Town government.

Looking Beyond the End of Our Collective Budgeting Noses

We all know how difficult, even in historical terms, the American economy is for anyone without assured income with assured yearly increases, or without inflation-indexed pensions, or without any concern about what happens to the stock market and bond market effects upon pension assets.

For most Americans those kinds of assurances and protections can only be dreamed about. But, when those Americans without those assurances and protections also end up as the ones subsidizing other Americans who benefit from them, well that is a structure which needs to be changed.

Each year New York school budgets present one bit of reality which some cannot seem to understand. Those who continually seek to have radical cuts, “next year,” are not being realistic, since the cost structure for any school district includes personnel cost elements (roughly 70 to 75% of a typical budget) which are generally set years in advance, because of collective bargaining agreements.

There are other major cost elements, such as transportation and heating and electricity expenses, which are priced outside the control of a school district. But, these also have much less of an effect upon the cost of running any school district.

Therefore, when we perpetually look at “next year’s school budget,” we are myopically focusing upon cost elements largely out of the control of any school district, unless, that is, they choose to slash head count among teachers, administrators, and service personnel.

All school districts, including Elwood, need to take a long-range or strategic approach to budgeting. That means current analysis and advance planning has to be done by boards of education, and any financial advisory committees within districts, so that the costs of labor agreements, and benefit packages, can be better planned and more soundly negotiated.

But we also have a systemic problem related to the abysmal ignorance displayed by some sectors of the education bureaucracy, when it comes to imagining that all we need to do is to spend more money, and to find a way for either the local taxpayers, or the state taxpayers, or the federal taxpayers, to fund that.

Efficiency is never given much weight.

Accountability is, if anything, a curse to be avoided.

The extraordinary qualities of some teachers, and the relative failure of some others, is never to be recognized, much less differentiated in compensation.

In other words, enforced mediocrity and stifled innovation are the hallowed traits by which too many teachers unions and complicit district administrations and some boards constrain our educational system.

This is the time to not only think outside-the-box, but to put that thought process into action.

You may recall the disturbing Long Island statistic that was quoted in Newsday nearly two months ago:

"From 1998 to 2006, the Consumer Price Index went up 27 percent, and the real property tax levy for schools went up 72 percent."

In other words, friends, while the national economic crisis may have only emerged over the past year or so, the property tax crisis for Long Island homeowners has been emerging for over a decade.

Now is the time to not only address the short to medium term national and state fiscal crisis, but to also begin to address the long term affordability crisis for school districts and property taxpayers on Long Island.

Strategic planning for the major cost factors in school district budgets is the necessary first step in that process.

Jerry Hannon