Morning Read: School vote tomorrow, read all about it
With school districts across the region set to vote on their budgets and their school board slates tomorrow, newspapers are offering a lot of information about the candidates, the spending plans, and the issues faced by these schools.
I take a beating whenever I point this out, but this is one of the things that newspapers do really well, offering bread-and-butter district-by-district information that few other news organizations (including NCPR) can provide.
The Plattsburgh Press-Republican has information about school districts in their chunk of the North Country on their Education page.
The Glens Falls Post Star has a special section, including candidate profiles and a very cool budget-tracking map.
Nathan Brown at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise looks at the Lake Placid election and Chris Knight looks at whether budget hearings held by school boards really mean anything.
And the Watertown Daily Times looks at a fierce battle in the Thousand Islands Central school district, with eleven candidates vying for four seats.
Remember to get out and vote tomorrow; and before you do, spend some time looking over the issues and the candidates. These newspapers have offered some great resources.
Reading the article in the Adirondack Daily Express, I can’t help but wonder if the time hasn’t come for a complete overhaul of the State Education Department and the Board of Regents. It just seems many of the problems within our education system here in New York lie at the feet of the State Education Department.
Whether it be the overly complicated and confusing graduation requirements, the entirely confusing and inequitable state aid formula, unfunded mandates passed along to local school districts, the crazy world of teacher certification, or the process for developing and approving annual budgets as touched on it the Express article. The greater the challenges we witness this past year with area school budgets, the more we hear many of them are created by the State Education Dept. Isn’t it time we consider serious reform at the State Education department itself? It just seems we’re concentrating on treating the symptoms and not the actual disease.
Vote YES and just remember this:
The proposed property tax cap is one more unfunded mandate.
Get rid of every unfunded mandate imposed on schools and local governments and you will see a big drop in your property and school taxes.
So few people vote in school elections. Maybe they should change school elections to the general eleciton day in November so that more people would vote on school budgets.
Scratchy, interesting idea but school starts in September (August, if you count extracurricular activities) and needs its budget set before early November.
good point
Massena has nine candidates for two, count ’em TWO positions on the BOE. The district will have lost about 50 staff positions over the last two budget votes (after today) and most of the BOE hopefuls are questioning the relatively low tax rate increase and lack of options and information presented during budget deliberations. Not sure anyone can do better than the current board to save teachers and programs. The problems are WAY above the powers of the local BOE.
I think many times people vote against school budgets because it is the only budget they get to vote on.
Wouldn’t it be fun if we could vote on the federal, state, county and town budgets?!