Thread about the New Paltz school budget vote on Tuesday

Over at the Gadfly.

My comments are long (some of them) and hurried.

But there is a point I wanted to reiterate here. One school board member thinks that I think the personalities of the board members are "zilch." That's not true, and I try to clarify:

I don't think that your personalities are zilch; I think that to get into individual personalities -- as in "Mr. X enlightens us this way, or Ms. Y avoids discussing B, or Trustee Z is an obnoxious obstructionist" -- is pointless and a waste of time. It would be to bark up the wrong tree.

The School District is a political machine in the form of a self-concerned bureaucracy and the board is window dressing.

Admittedly, such a point of view does diminish service on the school board. But that's still a side issue as far as I'm concerned, because there's a hell of a lot of money, mine and everyone else's in the district, that gets taken on a presumption that the School District is the prize bull of the community. I don't believe that it is the prize bull, and I don't think it really has all that much to do with the community, either.

Again, it's a political machine, set up to self-perpetuate for the benefit of its controlling interests. And the main controlling interest is now the teachers union, which is also the chief beneficiary of the School District.

Someone could argue that the "children" are the chief beneficiaries, and my response to that is that there are many things that could and would be done if that were true, including, in fact, the de-unionization of the School District and the removal of all the advantages that the unions have won for themselves in Albany.

The rent-seeking of public employee unions is now a notorious fact facing increasing public awareness across America. And the New Paltz School District is the prime example of where that is happening in this community. But not the only example.