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Long Island schools are…different. There’s some question as to how well
educated the students in them are, but there’s no doubt that the administrators
are as bright as buttons. What they can do with an expense account or a
consultant’s contract or a purchase of supplies beggars imagination. You have to
get up early in the morning to stay ahead of them. We have seen this in Roslyn
on the North Shore, one of the richest school districts in the country, which
I wrote about earlier in the year. Things have quieted down there now while
the district attorney and the defense lawyers prepare for the criminal trials
to come early next year.
On the South Shore in Hempstead, one of the poorest school districts in New
York State, however, things have been hotting up over the same questions as
those asked in Roslyn. They all boil down to one -- Where did the money go?,
which has one answer anyway -- It didn’t go to the kids.
Instead it went in many other imaginative ways. The school board members in
their thirst for more information on, I guess, how to be a school board
member, booked themselves $373,376 in charges for hotels, airlines, rental cars and
limousines. Apparently you can’t find out much about schools in L.I. You
have to travel to get the straight scoop. Orlando, Florida, is a particularly
fruitful place for educational expertise. So is San Francisco. Why Las Vegas
wasn’t visited I don’t know. The Roslyn people loved it.
Another pressing requirement of the school board was food and drink to keep
them going during their deliberations. They spent $304,303 on this. In their
pictures they certainly appear well-nourished, so it can’t be said that the
money was utterly thrown away. However, it appears that the school population
did not fare as well. In February of this year it was discovered that the
cafeteria program had run up a $1 million deficit and the children were being
served spoiled food.
As in Roslyn, many consultants were needed to keep things running smoothly.
As in the William Floyd school district, the obvious choice was a former
associate of the school, in this case the former board president, who cleaned up
more than $300,000 for part-time work over five years. The services of “temps”
at a lower level, for clerical work, were also required to the tune of $1.3
million.
What may be wrong with our local water out here is something I don’t
understand. It’s chlorinated, fluoridated, irradiated, vaccinated for all I know, and
still it doesn’t satisfy Hempstead. Instead the board there spent an average
of $63,000 per year for the last five years in buying bottled water for the
district. Well, I worked in offices where the water coolers were supplied this
way, so I could sympathize here, but on the other hand, the district’s
expenses were reported to be 22 times higher than the average for two counties. I’m
at a loss to explain the whole thing because personally I’ve never found that
the bottled stuff tasted any different than what came out of the kitchen
faucet.
As for the use of the cell phones supplied to every board member, don’t ask.
One star boarder racked up $528.84 in charges in one month. This covered a
total of 6,697 minutes and was the equivalent of spending five full days of
the month yakking on his cell phone. There was no known situation in any of the
five elementary and middle schools or the high school that demanded this
level of attention from the member. The schools were in fact closed, since the
non-stop chatter took place in August, 2003. But Mr. Parsley, the board member
in question, . had a busy summer. Between June and October he racked up three
other bills that were even higher than August’s. One day he made or received
88 calls.
The total cell phone bill for the five-person board came to $165,411 over
five years. That comes out to an average of $33,000 per person, or $6,600
yearly over the five years. That is misleading however. The average was greatly
skewed by Mr. Parsley, obviously a compulsive talker whom it was impossible to
shut up. He was also the one who explained everything neatly. “They never
told me I couldn’t use the phone for personal calls”.
It’s all a tale of woe, with touches of black humor, as when the board
president gives it as his opinion that “there was too much traveling by the board”
. He should know. He was out of town at a “conference” in Orlando when the
high school, with 1700 students, had to be closed for a week so an emergency
asbestos removal could be done to correct a previously botched job.
The high school population figure above is enough to tell you how the
problems have arisen. It’s much too big. A figure of half the number would be
reasonable. Many critics have looked at numbers like these and called them “
dehumanizing” for adolescents, reducing them to facelessness and anonymity in an
academic mob scene. So far as I know, no one has speculated on their impact on
administrators and board members. I think they’re affected too. Instead of
being Mr. Chips or “Sir”, the teacher, personally connected to every student,
they find themselves administering an impersonal machine grinding out lessons
for an alienated mass of students who resent being penned up in a factory
called a school. It’s hardly a wonder that the school staffs feel the same lack
of affection or responsibility for the machine.
Mass production techniques are particularly out of place in a ghetto area
like Hempstead. In its adjoining district, Roosevelt, things got so bad that it
became the first school district in New York to be taken over by the State
Education Department. There the same scenario as in Hempstead had been played
out. There was an oversized high school with a deteriorating plant, producing
an annual crop of underachievers, a wayward school board given to hiring their
relatives and arresting their colleagues, an eroding tax base, and all the
other indicators of oncoming disaster. It happened, the State moved in, and
now after a few years of trying to run the system better than the residents used
to, it is studying the possibility of closing it down altogether and
dispersing the students to neighboring districts, including Hempstead. There is a
problem with this, though; the neighbors don’t want them.
I don’t have a solution for all this, but I do believe there are two steps
that should be taken that would relieve some of the pressure. The first is to
introduce an option for same-sex education in place of compulsory co-education.
The arguments for this are so obvious that I won’t enumerate them here. The
second proposal is the one I pointed at further back in this piece; build
schools that aren’t mass production factories and don’t look like them
Re-connect the students with the school and with each other. Make them something more
than numbered interchangeable parts being processed through an assembly line.
Smaller districts will mean a closer connection of school board members to
their constituents, resulting in a closer watch on expenditures. Oh yes, the
cell phones can be taken away.
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