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3 TASK FORCE ON COMMUNITY SCHOOL
4 DISTRICT GOVERNANCE REFORM
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7 Task Force on Community School District
8 Governance Reform Developing recommendations
9 regarding the powers and duties of the
10 New York City community school boards
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18 Petrides Complex in Building K
19 715 Ocean Terrace
20 Staten Island, New York
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22 Monday, January 6, 2002
23 10:00 A.M. A.M.
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2 A P P E A R A N C E S:
3 MEMBERS OF THE TASK FORCE
4 ASSEMBLYMAN STEVEN SANDERS, Co-Chair
5 TERRI THOMSON, Co-Chair
6 ASSEMBLYMAN PETER RIVERA
7 ASSEMBLYWOMAN AUDREY PHEFER
8 ASSEMBLYMAN ROGER GREEN
9 ASSEMBLYMAN JOHN LAVELLE
10 RENEE HILL, Appointee
11 YANGHEE HAHN, Appointee
12 KATHRYN WYLDE, Appointee
13 ROBIN BROWN, Appointee
14 C. BUNNY REDDINGTON, Appointee
15 GERALD LEVIN, Appointee
16 VIRGINIA KEE, Appointee
17 JACK FRIEDMAN, Appointee
18 CASSANDRA MULLEN, Appointee
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2 SPEAKERS
3 PAGE
4 JAMES P. MOLINARO, JR. 12
Borough President of Staten Island
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DANIEL DONOVAN 28
6 Deputy Borough President
7 JAMES ANDERSON 39
Associate Director of SIEDC
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JOAN MAKRIS KARNA 53
9 Parent, CPAC Legislative Committee,
P.S. 30 School Leadership Team,
10 District 31 Leadership Team
11 ANNE MARIE CAMINITI 87
Director of Parent to Parent
12
JACQUELYN TRIPODI 104
13 District 75 Co-Chair
14 JOAN CORREALE 105
District 75 Co-Chair
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MARGARET RUCCI 123
16 Co-President of P.S. 48 and Petrides
17 DANA GUZZO 125
PTA President of P.S. 3
18
PAULA GIORDANO 126
19 1st PTA Vice President of P.S. 3
20 ASSEMBLYMAN ROBERT STRANIERE 129
21 LILA LEVEY 152
Staten Island Federation of PTAs
22
JOAN McKEEVER-THOMAS 162
23 President of Staten Island Federation
of PTAs
24
GAIL CURYLO 184
25 Member, New York City Public School
System
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2 SPEAKERS
3 PAGE
DAWN RUSSO 190
4
EUGENE PRISCO 194
5 Member, Community School Board
6 LINDA BARBATO 204
Past Co-Pres., Staten Island Federation
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JACOB MORRIS 213
8
MARIE CASTALLUCCI 225
9 Parent, Petrides School
10 LORETTA PRISCO 239
P.A.C.E.
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COUNCILMAN MICHAEL McMANN 249
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SALVATORE BALLARINO 271
13 Secretary/Treasurer of Community
School Board District 31
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TIMOTHY BEHR 281
15 Interim Acting Principal of P.S. 35
16 JANEY MORAN 296
President, South Shore Democratic Club
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PATRICIA LOCKHART 300
18 Teacher, P.S. 57
19 ROBERT HELBACH, JR. 307
For Senator John J. Marchi
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EDWARD C. JOSEY 318
21 President, NAACP
22 DONALD JULIANO 325
President, Retired School Supervisors
23 and Administrators of NYC
24 ELEANOR CONFORTI 335
Chairman, Community School Board
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2 SPEAKERS
3 PAGE
ELLEN BIRCH 355
4 Parent, P.S. 29
5 ALICE BRAUNSTEIN 369
PTA, Co-President of P.S. 4
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CECILIA BLEWER 378
7 CPAC
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2 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, good
3 morning to everyone. My name is Steve
4 Sanders. I am a co-chair of the Task Force on
5 Community School District Governance Reform.
6 I'm also chairman of the Assembly Education
7 Committee.
8 This is the fourth of a series of
9 five public hearings that this Task Force is
10 conducting around the city dealing with issues
11 that stemmed from the passage of the
12 Governance Reform Legislation in June of 2002
13 by the State Legislature. A lot of that
14 legislation dealt with a change in authority
15 and accountability. Much of it centered
16 around the mayor, the chancellor, the district
17 superintendents, but a significant part of
18 that legislation also dealt with local
19 community school boards.
20 The legislation indicated that the
21 school boards would be phased out by the end
22 of the current school year, which is June 30th
23 of 2003, but what the legislation also
24 provided for was a process to replace the
25 local community school boards with some other,
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2 some new and some other entities. As a result
3 of that decision by the State Legislature,
4 there was authorized the creation of a 20
5 member Task Force, ten of whom were appointed
6 by the senate majority leader, ten of whom
7 were appointed by the assembly speaker.
8 The Task Force's responsibilities
9 are to conduct these public hearings, to take
10 and to consider all of the testimony that we
11 hear, and we are hearing from literally scores
12 of ultimately hundreds of New York City
13 residents with respect to how the people of
14 the City of New York would like to see local
15 representation and community input best
16 expressed in a new structure of local
17 representation.
18 We were required to submit a
19 preliminary report on December the 15th, which
20 we did, outlining the activities of this Task
21 Force; and we are also required by law to
22 submit a final report with recommendations on
23 February 15th, which this Task Force, we will
24 again meet that deadline.
25 In the meantime, we are holding
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2 these public hearings. We are holding public
3 meetings, which we've had a number of, and
4 when the public hearings are completed in
5 Brooklyn on January the 16th, the Task Force
6 will have a series of meetings to come up with
7 those recommendations and come up with that
8 replacement of a community representation
9 structure.
10 Before the members who are here at
11 this time, members of the Task Force, give a
12 brief introduction of themselves, I just want
13 to turn to the co-chair of the Task Force on
14 Community School District Governance Reform
15 Terri Thomson for her comments and we welcome
16 Terri back from her surgery. The members who
17 were here know that when we had our public
18 hearing in the Bronx, Terri was by her bedside
19 convalescing after just having had the surgery
20 24 hours earlier and was participating by
21 phone in the hearings that we held in the
22 Bronx on December the 19th. And I think that
23 her stalwart efforts were really quite
24 remarkable and we certainly appreciate the
25 fact that she was with us telephonically and
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2 back with us in person today, Terri Thomson.
3 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you,
4 Steve. I'm much happier being here in
5 person.
6 The only thing I would add to what
7 Assemblyman Sanders said is that I think it's
8 wonderful that we are greeted here in the
9 great borough of Staten Island by our borough
10 president and deputy borough president. We
11 look forward to hearing your comments.
12 And now I'll introduce my
13 colleagues. John LaVelle you'll go first and
14 if you want to say a few words.
15 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: I would also
16 like to thank the borough president and deputy
17 borough president for starting the day off.
18 We really appreciate it.
19 I serve on the School Governance
20 Committee as well as the Education Committee
21 in the State Assembly. I'm hoping that this
22 room will have a lot more people in it as this
23 day progresses.
24 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Kathryn
25 Wylde?
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2 MS. WYLDE: Hi. Nice to be here.
3 Kathryn Wylde, from the New York City
4 Partnership. I imagine our colleagues will be
5 here.
6 MS. REDDINGTON: Good morning,
7 Bunny Reddington and I would also like to give
8 you a great big welcome and I appreciate that
9 you came out this morning, the borough
10 president, the deputy borough president, and
11 currently I'm serving as the vice-chair of the
12 Community School Board 31 in the most
13 beautiful borough of Staten Island. I have to
14 say that because everybody else did in on the
15 other boroughs.
16 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Cassandra Mullen
17 must have just stepped away, but she is here.
18 As Kathryn Wylde remarked, we do expect a
19 number of additional members of the Task
20 Force. We have been averaging about, I would
21 say, about 18 of the 20 members have been
22 present at each of the previous hearings and
23 it has also been our experience that as the
24 day progresses, more and more people come to
25 testify. And usually it has been in the
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2 evening session that we have scheduled.
3 By the way, I should make mention
4 of the fact that when we scheduled these
5 public hearings, we were mindful of the fact
6 that a lot of people would need to testify at
7 times that were convenient for working men and
8 women, for parents of children and that's the
9 reason why we scheduled these hearings in two
10 sessions; the session that take place between
11 ten and four and a second session in each
12 borough from 6 to 9. It has been our
13 experience that usually later in the day, as I
14 say, when people can get off from work and
15 fulfill their responsibilities at home that we
16 get the bulk of our testimony. We probably
17 expect that to occur again today.
18 We will begin with our testimony,
19 as Bunny Reddington said, in the beautiful
20 great borough of Staten Island. We are
21 delighted to be here and we are delighted that
22 the borough president of this great county,
23 James Molinaro, Jr. He is here with his
24 deputy. Mr. Borough President, thank you for
25 being here with us.
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2 MR. MOLINARO: Thank you. Thank
3 you and welcome to this borough of parks.
4 Thank you for this opportunity to present
5 testimony on the future of public
6 participation in the governance of New York
7 City public schools. First, let me express my
8 appreciation to the members of District 31's
9 community school board for their hard work and
10 advocacy efforts on behalf of our public
11 school children. They have been wonderful,
12 unpaid public servants, and I repeat unpaid
13 public servants, deserving of our heartfelt
14 thanks.
15 I also would like to commend Mayor
16 Bloomberg and the State Assembly on achieving
17 the passage of a remarkable and historic
18 legislation has provided the City of New York
19 with the opportunity to rethink how we
20 approach education. The dissolution of the
21 Board of Education and the creation of the
22 Department of Education will provide direct
23 accountability to and by the mayor for the
24 success or failure of our schools. I believe
25 that we should allow the mayor and the
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2 chancellor the opportunity to realize their
3 goals of increasing efficiency strengthening
4 classroom education, creating accountability
5 and engaging parents in the community at large
6 as stakeholders in our children's education.
7 In this borough we are privileged
8 to have an active and dedicated group called
9 the Staten Island Federation of PTAs. And,
10 believe it or not, it was started in 1927.
11 And they have continued to demonstrate the
12 commitment to their goals of promoting better
13 understanding between home and school and
14 striving to achieve the best possible life
15 through public education for all children.
16 They represent all of our public schools,
17 grades K through 12, general education
18 students as well as special education in our
19 alternate schools. They delegate assemblies
20 officers, standing committee chairs, and
21 president's council regularly addresses issues
22 such as curriculum, transportation, school
23 safety, funding, legislative matters, traffic,
24 zoning and many others, including diet for the
25 children in the cafeteria.
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2 Just to get off the testimony.
3 When you realize 75 years, now 76 years, this
4 organization has been intact. It's longer
5 than most nations have their governments
6 intact in the world nation so they must be
7 doing something right. That's why we are
8 proposing that this be a model going into the
9 future.
10 I believe that the Federation of
11 PTAs is the voice of Staten Island parents.
12 Every parent, whether a member or not, has
13 access to his or her school's PTA. The
14 Federation, in turn, has access to the
15 superintendent, to the chancellor, to the
16 borough president and his appointee to the
17 Panel for Educational Policy and to area
18 legislators.
19 It is due in great part to this
20 open communication and cooperative effort that
21 District 31 has achieved a standard in the
22 first quartile of all New York City school
23 districts in attendance. Teacher
24 certification and standardized test
25 performance. And, in addition, just last year
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2 in an independent survey conducted by the
3 Office of the Chancellor, District 31 received
4 the most positive response in the city with
5 the highest rating from parents in
6 accessibility and information sharing.
7 Therefore, I propose that the
8 Staten Island Federation of PTAs be a model
9 which should be replicated in the four other
10 boroughs as the most effective means of
11 engaging and increasing parental involvement
12 in their children's education. By following
13 the path set by the Federation, not only will
14 no child be left behind, but no parent will be
15 left behind either.
16 Thank you.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
18 very for your testimony Borough President
19 Molinaro. As is our process, I think that we
20 probably want to ask a few questions.
21 Ms. Thomson?
22 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I observed as
23 a member of the Board of Education that the
24 parents of Staten Island were always very
25 active. When there was an issue involving
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2 their schools, we would hear from them. They
3 didn't often have the opportunity to travel
4 down to Brooklyn to testify but we would hear
5 from them. So many of our communities across
6 the city struggle with parent involvement in
7 the schools. There are many districts and
8 many schools that really can't put together
9 active PTAs. How is it that Staten Island,
10 District 31, has been able to do that? What
11 do you attribute this to?
12 MR. MOLINARO: As I explained, the
13 Federation plays a very big part in that. I
14 have had many conversations on lack of parent
15 participation with my colleagues in
16 Manhattan. She's almost frustrated that she's
17 had meetings on a Saturday and 20 people would
18 show up.
19 So it seems to be an outlet here
20 for the parents to go to through their local
21 PTA, and the next level and the next level.
22 It was accessible to them. You don't get what
23 you want every time you go but there's someone
24 to listen to you and that's what you want.
25 You want somebody to listen. They're our
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2 stakeholders, you know what I mean? Our
3 children are 25 percent of our population and
4 they are 100 percent of our future. They are
5 very important, very important. And they're
6 successful.
7 For an organization to remain for
8 76 years, it must be doing something right.
9 They must be doing something right. Obviously
10 you can improve on that, maybe come up with
11 something else, but there has to be somewhere
12 where the parents feel they have some input.
13 Some become frustrated because they feel their
14 input is not listened to. You get that in
15 everything, but there has to be something.
16 I feel very confident because
17 people are trying new ways, you know, to show
18 the important of the education for our
19 children that's been lacking in a lot of parts
20 of the city. We just started a program for
21 children that are not going to go on to
22 college, give them a course so the banks can
23 hire them. Other children are falling between
24 the cracks, so we started our own program from
25 Borough Hall, pick some of these up from the
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2 corporations to tell us what they need just to
3 be a bank teller and what we should be
4 training them for outside the school system.
5 You have to stay on it. It doesn't
6 work by itself. Today you have a problem,
7 which most households have two parents
8 working. You can't devote the amount of time
9 you would like to devote. It's not willful
10 neglect. It's just the amount of time. You
11 get home, you get ready for dinner, for the
12 next day. Your son comes home and he wants
13 help with his homework. You don't have the
14 time to give to him. It's a whole different
15 society so I think we have to approach it
16 completely differently.
17 The school is a lot more important
18 today than it was years ago when I was growing
19 up and going to school.
20 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Assemblyman
21 LaVelle?
22 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: Mr. Borough
23 President, thank you for your testimony. You
24 know that I feel equally as strong as you
25 regarding the Federation of Staten Island, as
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2 a matter of fact, probably they are the group
3 that has taught me more than anyone since I
4 have been in this position in the State
5 Assembly. They are truly dedicated, although
6 they initially get involved for strong
7 personal reasons, their own child, they seem
8 to become advocates for all of the children on
9 Staten Island and they work very well with
10 you.
11 And I would like to compliment you
12 on your choice for the member to the advisory
13 panel of the Board of Education because her
14 roots are in the Federation and she's also
15 serving as chair so I would just like to add
16 those comments. Thank you.
17 MR. MOLINARO: That was a simple
18 choice on my part. I interviewed 12 people
19 and by far she was superior and I had to do
20 what was in the best interest for the
21 children, not what was in the interest of
22 politics or anything else. It was an easy
23 choice for me. It might have been hard for
24 other people to swallow, but so be it.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Wylde?
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2 MS. WYLDE: Mr. Borough President,
3 I was interested in whether you think that
4 there are other constituencies. You focused
5 on the parents and the Parent/Teacher
6 Association. Are there other constituencies
7 that you think should be represented from
8 community, the business community, et cetera,
9 in the school conversation and how do you
10 think that might relate to the way community
11 boards, for example, are structured?
12 MR. MOLINARO: You mean by
13 community board?
14 MS. WYLDE: By community board or
15 some relationship with community boards to
16 provide a broader community input into the
17 full situation.
18 MR. MOLINARO: Maybe other parts
19 of the city, it can't be by borough, like it
20 is in Staten Island. We have one school
21 board. I think if you left it the way it is,
22 you wouldn't be successful. In Brooklyn we
23 have two and a half million people. You just
24 can't do it. One board can't do the whole
25 thing. It should be broken up there.
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2 I think the business community is
3 very, very important to the education of the
4 children. They make the demands on what they
5 need. Everyone is not going to go to college
6 and we should recognize that. I recognize
7 that. Everyone is not going to college. You
8 do need people to drive trucks and you do need
9 other people to do other tasks. Let's prepare
10 them for it. If a young person wants to go
11 work for a bank, let's make sure they can add
12 the numbers correctly, that they can answer
13 the phone correctly. There is room for
14 business.
15 MS. WYLDE: How do they relate now
16 to the school board or the PTA Federation? Do
17 you see a relationship there now and is it
18 formal or informal?
19 MR. MOLINARO: Well, I think it's
20 informal. They should be more informed, I
21 believe, they should be part of it and their
22 ideas should be there. We've done it with the
23 economic development of Staten Island. We
24 brought the business in as to what do you
25 need, what are the problems, how can we help?
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2 We started a program of learning
3 need to read, which we are getting college
4 students that are in their senior year coming
5 to public schools and doing it to help make up
6 for what's lost. There's a lot of time where
7 you have to think out of the box. And
8 everything that you substitute for is not as
9 good as what you have. You shouldn't look
10 upon it and say, well, it's not as good as we
11 had, yes, it's not, but that's what we are
12 trying to do.
13 I commend you people for what you
14 are trying to do and I'm very confident that
15 you are going to do what is in the best
16 interest of the children. Period.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We appreciate
18 your confidence. We're going to need plenty
19 of that over the next month.
20 Ms. Reddington?
21 MS. REDDINGTON: What I would like
22 your opinion on is if whatever body we decide
23 on, you know, that we present to be decided on
24 that should take the place of the community
25 school board should it be an elected or an
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2 appointed body? What is your opinion?
3 MR. MOLINARO: I think what the
4 PTA is doing now with the alliance works
5 perfect. You could have elections. We had a
6 handful of people heading out for the school
7 board, I think even less of that. I think if
8 you follow the pattern that we have here, let
9 each school pick their PTA leaders. They are
10 the stakeholders in that school, so a parent
11 may not want to be on the committee because
12 they don't have the time. She should have the
13 opportunity to express her concerns, whatever
14 her concerns are, to her local PTA so they can
15 take them to -- so they can meet a constat
16 type of situation where all the ideas and all
17 the problems come to a head and say, well,
18 this seems to be a common problem in 25
19 percent of our schools. Let's look at it.
20 How do we cure it?
21 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Mr. Borough
22 President, I have one or two questions and I
23 think it stems from your, I think, very apt
24 observation with respect to the longevity that
25 the Federation of PTAs has been able to have.
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2 I guess when they were created, the headlines
3 in the newspapers were being made by President
4 Calvin Coolidge. Babe Ruth was playing
5 baseball in the Bronx and Jack Dempsey was
6 knocking out people in Madison Square Garden.
7 MR. MOLINARO: And none of us were
8 there.
9 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: So certainly I
10 think -- well, speak for yourself, sir. I
11 think that's true though.
12 I think your point is well taken
13 that the Federation of PTAs has not only had
14 this longevity but arguably success at least
15 in terms of the success, in part, is measured
16 by the confidence that the residents of a
17 school district have that their voices are
18 being heard and are being listened to.
19 My question to you is general but
20 it's this. Over the last 75 or 76 years since
21 the Federation was initiated, we have had in
22 New York City three, four, five different
23 systems of governance. We had total
24 centralization in the 1950's and '60s with a
25 school superintendent for the entire New York
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2 City school system. And then we had
3 permutations of decentralization starting in
4 1970 with the advent of local community school
5 boards.
6 How has the Federation of PTAs
7 interacted, I suppose, in the last series of
8 iterations with the local community school
9 boards? Can you give me a better sense or at
10 least a view of how has the Federation of PTAs
11 interacted with the local community school
12 boards and maybe the school leadership teams
13 to form some cohesive communication and
14 decision making of parental community needs on
15 Staten Island?
16 Sort of give me a picture of how
17 the Federation and the school boards as they
18 have existed have communicated and coalesced
19 with one another?
20 MR. MOLINARO: Well, I can
21 obviously only give you the Staten Island
22 version of it. The cooperation between the
23 two of them has been very, very good.
24 Problems were brought to the school board and
25 they listen to them. These were the
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2 stakeholders that were coming to you. They
3 were coming to you and saying, well, look, we
4 have a problem in our school, we have a
5 problem in here. Obviously if they want to
6 complain about the budget then they went to
7 the representative, the borough president's
8 representative who sat on the Central Board of
9 Education. But they were there. They were
10 the advocates for the children.
11 You have examples where a member of
12 the school board may not have had anyone in
13 the school at the present time. So their
14 concern was somewhat different. They didn't
15 know what was going on in the school. They
16 serve a very, very useful purpose.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: One of the
18 things that I know that this Task Force is
19 going to be grappling with when we get to the
20 point that we have to make decisions is to
21 take the various layers that exist now in
22 school districts, the various layers of
23 parental and community representation, whether
24 it's the parent associations or the school
25 leadership teams, you've got the local school
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2 boards now being phased out. You have in some
3 boroughs what's called a President's Council
4 which may be analogous to the Federation,
5 which is an aggregation of all the parent
6 association presidents, but you have a number
7 of layers of parental and community input now
8 and representation. And somehow we've got to
9 take this mix of representation and make it
10 more coherent than it is now without the local
11 community school boards or putting something
12 in its place.
13 So I'm just wandering how those
14 various layers on Staten Island work with each
15 other. For instance, do you know whether the
16 members of the Federation come directly from
17 the school leadership teams in some cases? Do
18 you take a member of the school leadership
19 team and that person gets on or participates
20 in the Federation?
21 I'm trying to look for a clearer
22 view because I know that Staten Island has had
23 a certain degree of success that you're very
24 proud of. So I'm trying to figure out how
25 your layers mesh with each other, and I guess
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2 what you would recommend to us in recreating
3 the kind of community input around the city
4 that will be necessary to insure community and
5 parental input and that their voices, in fact,
6 will be heard.
7 MR. MOLINARO: When I became
8 borough president I appointed my deputy as the
9 head of education for our office. I'm going
10 to have him answer some of those questions.
11 He deals with them, the Board of Education, so
12 Dan Donovan --
13 MR. DONOVAN: My name is Deputy
14 Borough President Daniel Donovan,
15 D-O-N-O-V-A-N. I testified before so I know
16 how to spell it.
17 Assemblymen, thank you for the
18 opportunity. We have been very successful on
19 Staten Island, and to answer Chairman
20 Thomson's question before why it is so
21 successful, I think our PTAs and our
22 Federation have been empowered on Staten
23 Island. I think that our educators are very
24 anxious to listen and we have given them the
25 avenues to do that. And I think they've seen
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2 that many of their suggestions have been seen
3 as constructive by the education community and
4 have been adopted in many cases.
5 I always thought that educators
6 should determine what curriculum should be.
7 These people have studied and have gotten
8 degrees in how to educate children so maybe
9 possibly, as Ms. Wylde said, the business
10 community should be involved in our education
11 of our children. Maybe they shouldn't
12 actually determine the curriculum maybe the
13 people like Mr. Davino and people who have
14 studied study education as a career should do
15 that. We have empowered our PTAs and our
16 Federation. Our superintendent, a wonderful
17 man, Christian Vigini, has done wonderful work
18 on Staten Island, has a direct line with the
19 president of the Federation and the members of
20 the Federation. Our PTA presidents are all
21 members of the Staten Island Federation of
22 PTAs.
23 So as the borough president
24 testified, if a parent isn't even a member of
25 the PTA but brings an issue to a PTA member,
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2 that issue is addressed with the PTA and the
3 PTA president will bring that to the
4 Federation. So the Federation will bring that
5 to the school district.
6 Not to belabor but, Ms. Wylde, when
7 you asked about the business community's
8 involvement in education on Staten Island, as
9 the borough president said, the business
10 community came to us and said we can't fill
11 jobs on Staten Island. We cannot find people
12 who have the basic skills that we need. We'll
13 train them about the specifics of our
14 industry. We can't get them with the basic
15 skills. They came to the borough president
16 and asked what can we do? He set up the
17 development corporation and we are going to
18 train 50 students. And the difference between
19 our program and many training programs are the
20 business community is guaranteeing the 50
21 jobs. We don't have to look for the jobs
22 after training is done. The jobs are already
23 there before the training begins.
24 But one of the things I think what
25 the business community can help us with, it
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2 happens in our office as well, the borough
3 president has asked me to review all resumes
4 that come into our office. When I see a typo
5 and I have a hundred resumes for one job, if I
6 see a typo, I go on to the next one. I just
7 don't have the time to go through, sift
8 through and do grammatical corrections on
9 someone who is trying to impress me to get a
10 job. If that's the care they took in
11 presenting themselves, what care are they
12 going to take in the work that they are doing
13 for us.
14 So the business community input,
15 not telling us what we should teach our
16 children because I don't think education is a
17 matter of trying to employ people. It's
18 allowing people to learn and teaching them how
19 to think, but since the ultimate end is
20 somebody going to a job interview for a
21 career, then the business industry's input in
22 helping of what they are going to be looking
23 for when those people come or are presented
24 before them is very meaningful to educators.
25 I believe I forgot your question.
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2 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I just wanted to
3 get a sense of how the Federation interacts
4 with the school leadership team, the members
5 of the school leadership team, ultimately then
6 serve in the Federation. I want to get a
7 sense of the cohesion that exists, if it does
8 exist, in terms of the layers of parental and
9 community input that exists right now.
10 MR. DONOVAN: I think what you said
11 is correct. I think the members of the
12 leadership team ultimately are probably -- you
13 know what happens when you hold a PTA meeting
14 or you hold a school leadership team meeting
15 or representatives from a certain school
16 appear at a Federation meeting, it's the same
17 six parents. They are members of the
18 leadership team. They are members of the PTA
19 and they are the representatives to the
20 Federation.
21 We have our problems in some of our
22 schools, too, Miss Thomson, that many of our
23 schools have very active PTAs. Many of them
24 don't also. In some of our areas we struggle
25 to have parental involvement in our school.
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2 Former Chancellor Levy tried to compel parents
3 to be involved in their children's education
4 by asking them to come to school to pick up
5 report cards and we couldn't get people to
6 come to pick up the report cards.
7 I think what the commission can do,
8 and we try to do here, is give people avenues
9 to give you an opportunity. And then we are
10 actually trying to encourage those people to
11 take those opportunities. It's difficult to
12 compel people to do it.
13 But, yes, Assemblyman, we do have
14 our members of our leadership teams, our PTAs
15 and our Federation usually interact so well
16 because it's usually the same people.
17 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: The PTA
18 president always has a seat on the leadership
19 team. That's written into the leadership team
20 policy. So there's a connection between the
21 leadership team and the PTA. The PTA, correct
22 me if I'm wrong, the PTA presidents are the
23 members of the confederation.
24 MR. DONOVAN: Yes.
25 ASSEMBLYWOMAN THOMSON: And how
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2 Staten Island is different from every other
3 district across the city is that in every
4 district across the city, there are
5 President's Council, just like a
6 confederation, where the PTA presidents come
7 together within a district. There's a body.
8 They may have committees. They have
9 leadership. They work with the
10 superintendents. They work with the school
11 board.
12 How Staten Island is different is
13 that your President's Council or confederation
14 also includes the high school parents, the
15 alternative high school parents, the special
16 ed parents, you know, all of the family of
17 schools where our president's councils across
18 the city, there is a President's Council for
19 the high schools in a borough and then each
20 district has a President's Council, which is
21 just elementary and middle school parents.
22 I don't know if you know the answer
23 to my question or if you feel prepared to give
24 me your thoughts. Today the school board has
25 very specific functions locally. They pass
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2 the comprehensive education plan for the
3 district. They work on zoning. They really
4 have a hand, which is a very important
5 function. They have a hand in deciding where
6 children are zoned, where schools are built in
7 a district. The school board has that
8 function, as well as having the power when the
9 parents come to them to advocate, as the
10 policy making board, they are able to do
11 that.
12 Now, the school boards go away June
13 30th. Part of your suggestion is that the
14 confederation play that role. Are you
15 suggesting that they assume those functions of
16 things like policy setting and zoning or do
17 those functions go away locally and stay at
18 the central level?
19 MR. DONOVAN: I think you could
20 ask Ms. Reddington, zoning is probably the
21 worst job that they have, determining zoning.
22 MS. REDDINGTON: We have one
23 January 15th.
24 MR. DONOVAN: We're fortunate
25 though to open a new school this coming
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2 September and they will have to go through
3 that chore.
4 But, no, I think those issues
5 should remain locally. They may need the help
6 of educators though as well. The
7 superintendency certainly should have an input
8 where our school should be, how it should be
9 zoned.
10 But, yes, I think that the
11 Federation, along with the superintendency of
12 the school district, could assume the duties.
13 Since borough president has taken place,
14 myself and an assistant of mine, Marcia Meyer,
15 have visited somewhere between 30 and 35 of
16 our schools on Staten Island personally.
17 We've met with administrators. We've met with
18 parents, we've met with students and we've met
19 with teachers.
20 We have found something very common
21 in what you've just said. We found the
22 transition from low grades, elementary school
23 from 5th grade to 6th grade going into
24 intermediate school very smooth because it's
25 one superintendency. The transition from
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2 intermediate school to high school seems to be
3 a greater transition, a more difficult one.
4 We've met with elementary school teachers who
5 have said that they have gone to the
6 intermediate school where the graduating
7 classes were going to and went over each
8 student with the new principal who would
9 receive those and I had asked the principals
10 of the intermediate schools, do you do that
11 same thing with the high schools where your
12 children are going to and they said no. It's
13 a different superintendency.
14 So the K through 12 superintendency
15 or the smoothness of the K through 12
16 organization seems like it is something that
17 we are doing here with the Federation because
18 everyone is a member, as you said.
19 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: We spoke
20 earlier with the principal, Mr. Petrides, in
21 an official context and he spoke to us about
22 the benefits of the K through 12 and their
23 great success with this complex.
24 MR. MOLINARO: Well, I'm an
25 advocate for K through 12 educational complex,
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2 like the one we're trying to build at Marsh
3 Avenue, all in one area but that's many years
4 from now, but I do feel on your question there
5 that we'll eliminate the school board. We
6 should keep as much responsibility as possible
7 to local parents. You can't take away
8 everything that the school board is doing.
9 It's not going to play out.
10 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well,
11 Mr. Molinaro, we first of all appreciate and
12 thank you very much for your testimony this
13 morning. I think that we know that the
14 circumstances of education on Staten Island is
15 one that you are justifiably proud of and we
16 will probably look to you and to some of your
17 cohorts on Staten Island for advice as we go
18 along, but we thank you so much for being here
19 this morning and we wish you only the best of
20 luck during your continued tenure as borough
21 president of Staten Island.
22 MR. MOLINARO: Thank you. It was a
23 pleasure to come here and our goal is the
24 same. Maybe the methods of getting there
25 might be a little different but our goal is
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2 the same, the education of the children.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you.
4 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you.
5 Our next speaker is James Anderson,
6 Associate Director of SIEDC, Staten Island
7 Economic Development Corporation.
8 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Good morning.
9 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Good morning.
10 MR. ANDERSON: Good morning. My
11 name is James Anderson, Associate Director of
12 the Staten Island Economic Development
13 Corporation, acronym, SIEDC.
14 Staten Island Economic Development
15 Corporation is pleased to have the opportunity
16 to present testimony concerning the future
17 public participation in the governance of New
18 York City's public schools. SIEDC would also
19 like to extend our thanks to Assemblyman John
20 LaVelle for notifying us of this important
21 hearing today.
22 The Staten Island Economic
23 Development Corporation, a not-for-profit
24 corporation, has served the borough of Staten
25 Island since 1993. Through city and state
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2 programs the organization provides technical
3 assistance and services to an average of 3,000
4 businesses a year. SIEDC has developed an
5 extension relationship with the business
6 community of Staten Island.
7 SIEDC's success has been built by
8 long-term effort and insight of key business
9 and community leaders from a variety of
10 industries. Their common goal is to expand
11 the economic base of Staten Island to the
12 infusion of capital investment and job
13 creation. SIEDC's 23 member board has also
14 created and added a 16 member business council
15 to further the input from the business
16 community and develop new programs and
17 services to meet the challenging demands of
18 tomorrow's economy and labor force.
19 In this effort a need has presented
20 itself over and over again the establishment
21 and continued development of an improved
22 working relationship between the business
23 community and the educational system. The
24 mission of this improved relationship would be
25 to insure that our children become well
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2 trained, job ready students with a broad range
3 of customer service skills.
4 The SIEDC believes that the
5 reorganizing of the governance of the New York
6 City public schools provides the opportunity
7 to strengthen the vital ties of education and
8 work force training with immediate employment
9 opportunities yet an employment opportunities
10 and the continuing support services necessary
11 to meet the demands of our fast changing work
12 force.
13 SIEDC would like to recommend the
14 strategy of including business representatives
15 to the school governing board to assist in
16 developing the necessary policies and programs
17 that will insure future employment
18 opportunities and make them a reality for our
19 children. It has been our experience that
20 including sources of input with the practical
21 viewpoint at the levels of development from
22 the grass roots of an idea to the finish
23 drafted program of policy is the best formula
24 for success. I stand by my statement.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
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2 much.
3 Ms. Thomson?
4 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: What role
5 would you envision for business persons
6 serving on this governing body?
7 MR. ANDERSON: Again, SIEDC
8 believe the presence of having a business
9 representative on the school board is to get a
10 better understanding of the development of the
11 programs and policies and curriculums, and
12 then hopefully to provide that practical
13 insight, but more importantly, be a
14 communicating conduit to the business
15 community.
16 As we have stated before the prior
17 testimony, there's been an active working
18 strategy to create better training labor force
19 programs for the business community. And time
20 and time again it seems that the local
21 business, the mom-and-pop operation, whether
22 it be a retail or services, would have a
23 revolving door with students that have
24 graduated out of high school immediately into
25 the work force because of our growing demands
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2 of economy that an 18 year old doesn't have
3 the opportunity sometimes within their family
4 to continue their education and is thrown into
5 a work force without the job readiness.
6 When the businesses are frustrated,
7 it is because of a lack of understanding.
8 They would hear of trade or skill training
9 programs in a McKee, in a Tottenville that are
10 extremely good, well structured and produce
11 students that are trained in the trade and
12 then usually are targeted to industries that
13 may take them outside the Staten Island
14 community and yet there is a percentage of
15 students graduating every year that, if they
16 are not in those programs, are trained in the
17 ABCs, trained in the 123s but not trained on
18 basic job skills and yet they are the first
19 ones to encounter working for work force that
20 the business community is frustrated because
21 they in turn have to spend a lot of time in
22 training and sometimes know that training is
23 out of the fold of what they need to be
24 productive for that business to survive and
25 they don't have that time.
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2 We feel that the business
3 representative would be able to communicate
4 how the curriculum is set up and give a
5 practical insight and then also induce
6 stronger business involvement and
7 understanding and use of these programs.
8 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I think across
9 the city where we've seen businesses engaged
10 with the school system particularly in
11 particular fields or trades it really does
12 work when there's that input. I can remember
13 years ago hearing stories of programs in
14 schools where there were no jobs when you
15 graduated because that's a program that's out
16 of date but today I think there are
17 opportunities for businesses to provide that
18 feedback. So that's just one role, the role
19 of advising the school system about what are
20 the skills, the relevant skills for jobs
21 today.
22 Would you also see that person, the
23 business person, serving on this governing
24 body as someone who could act as the advocate
25 for the schools with the business community
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2 with the idea of bringing support to the
3 school system?
4 I know particularly in a borough
5 like Staten Island where you may not have the
6 wealth of industry that you might have in
7 downtown Manhattan or downtown Brooklyn, would
8 you see this person as being the advocate for
9 bringing resources into the school? Is that
10 another function that would make sense?
11 MR. ANDERSON: Yes, absolutely.
12 And I think, again, Staten Island's position
13 in having one district offers the best model
14 that you could put this into a working order
15 to develop what that advocacy can be. If you
16 were in Brooklyn, Bronx or Queens, where it
17 would so diverse, it is hard for anyone to be
18 a true advocate for all industries whereas in
19 Staten Island being we are looking at 11,000
20 to 13,000 registered businesses and the strong
21 suit of Staten Island is in the retail and
22 services. If you were to ask the Department
23 of Labor, they would tell that traditionally
24 Staten Island has a well educated work force
25 and also their work force has gone from
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2 outside the Staten Island economy simply on
3 the basis of demand of higher salaries where
4 they are available in Manhattan, whereas I
5 think in the past events that we've seen, the
6 ratio of Staten Islanders that have avoided
7 Manhattan, whereas our economy being in retail
8 and services is driven.
9 We are buffered by either up or
10 down indicators of the economy or labor force
11 that we are buffered because we are a
12 self-generating economy. And the advocacy,
13 the advocate, could definitely tap into this
14 retail and service and kind of using the
15 organization, such as our organization, or the
16 chamber, the local networking groups really
17 can get the needs pinned down and at the same
18 time be able to communicate through these
19 groups and reach these 11,000 to 13,000
20 businesses and come up. We are looking at
21 increasing percentages of the children that
22 fall outside their skill programs, reaching
23 the children that are forced for other reasons
24 to be induced into a labor force that is fast
25 changing, that a business needs to have a job
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2 ready student ready to produce for them
3 immediately.
4 So I think that, yes, that is
5 definitely another reason.
6 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Reddington?
7 MS. REDDINGTON: I would just like
8 to share being on the community school board
9 and also working as the Director of Volunteers
10 at our local Staten Island University
11 Hospital, I had the pleasure of working with
12 some of the programs, such as Learn at
13 Tottenville and a nursing program student,
14 nursing student at Curtis. What I found is
15 the invaluable experience for me to
16 communicate to the teachers who are in charge
17 of those programs because we did learn that
18 they were not ready for the work force in many
19 of the areas that are not educational, such as
20 signing in and signing out and cheating. And
21 we would say this is not acceptable in the
22 work force.
23 There are so many avenues of
24 instructing them to be job ready. So I had a
25 very positive experience and interchanging not
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2 only with the students but with the teachers
3 in charge of the programs. And I will tell
4 you that many successful students came back as
5 nurse's aids. We have some young students in
6 our communication department. So it pleased
7 me to see that that whole interaction with one
8 of the largest institutions on Staten Island
9 and the largest employer of Staten Island, we
10 were able to do that. I think it's invaluable
11 to have someone on that board that has that
12 business sense to relay to the principals and
13 the people who make policy.
14 MR. ANDERSON: The SIEDC back in
15 1997 had hired a consultant to provide a work
16 force study that we have a publication in. We
17 need to present it to you, get you copies of
18 it, but not to single out any single thing,
19 but there is a lot of working programs that
20 trained the labor force after the school and
21 on Staten Island it is very successful but
22 they are all in different circles. We found
23 one deficiency in the whole process, is none
24 of them, the circles, joined together and knew
25 what the other one was doing and that was
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2 defining of the work force to say we have to
3 find a way to bring these circles together.
4 What better way than to start prior to the
5 introduction into the labor force of having a
6 high school to be able to sign in, to sign
7 out, to have these job ready skills done by a
8 teacher.
9 One of the other things in this
10 statement is the fact that we realize that the
11 success of the educational system is built on
12 the academic successes that they've had and
13 also in the previous testimony, the strongest
14 of having parental involvement, but what we
15 are asking is a two-way street and the
16 business community realizes that. They
17 realize from small to medium to large, they
18 have to step up and join in.
19 You have successful nursing
20 programs. You have IT technical programs out
21 there that are usually induced by
22 corporations. And being on the job service
23 employment community JASAC at the Department
24 of Labor, we had 22 members between the work
25 force and business reps. It was funny that
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2 one of the computer businesses said what good
3 is it if the school systems are going to have
4 a SISCO or ABC corporation come and do a
5 specific training that they will fund but it's
6 for their platform or their particular product
7 or service and that same student maybe doesn't
8 land a job with that corporation but goes to
9 the ABC smaller computer service and doesn't
10 know how to use the screwdriver to open up a
11 computer.
12 That's where the breakout is. It's
13 a two-way street. The business community
14 would like to have that representative on the
15 board for these policies, and at the same time
16 as the borough president and deputy borough
17 president said, programs that they put up the
18 jobs at the end of that is very key to that
19 formula.
20 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Mr. LaVelle?
21 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: First I would
22 like to thank you for giving testimony today
23 and to compliment SIEDC for what it does for
24 Staten Island and I thought it was very
25 important that we hear from the business
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2 community and that's why I faxed the notice to
3 you. Did I fax the borough president for the
4 Bronx testimony?
5 MR. ANDERSON: Yes.
6 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: In that
7 testimony he recommended that basically
8 borough boards and that the parents would be
9 elected at the school level and send a
10 representative to this borough board and then
11 that the borough president would select people
12 from the business community and from different
13 interests in the community to serve on this
14 borough board and that would oversee
15 education.
16 Did you guys get to read that and
17 what did you think of that proposal?
18 MR. ANDERSON: I reviewed it very
19 quickly. Ceasar had read it. We feel that
20 that is a successful way of formulating with
21 regard to the end result of that
22 representative hopefully, again, having that
23 communicating back to the business community.
24 In other words, they need to be a
25 participant. They need to realize it's not
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2 just to be on that board to provide insight,
3 and on the back end to make sure that that
4 reaches the whole community, specifically on
5 Staten Island, or in the other boroughs, but
6 to the organizations to that we all have an
7 understanding. We agree with that.
8 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: Thank you.
9 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well,
10 Mr. Anderson, we very much appreciate your
11 being here I know on short notice. We're
12 indebted to Assemblyman LaVelle for making
13 sure that you knew about today's proceedings.
14 Just looking at your letterhead and the
15 luminary members of the business community
16 that participate in Staten Island Economic
17 Development Corporation, we understand that
18 your testimony is obviously based on the views
19 shared by the many very important business
20 entities that SIEDC represents.
21 And I think that you can also be
22 assured of the fact that this Task Force
23 understands the importance of business and
24 public education collaborations, and I think
25 the questions that were asked of you this
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2 morning certainly went to the direction to
3 insure that when we are able to make our
4 recommendations, that we incorporate the very
5 important participation of the business
6 community. After all, the product of the
7 public education system is only as good as
8 their possibility to enter the work force at a
9 meaningful level with the skills appropriate
10 for the needs of the 21st century.
11 We thank you very much for being
12 here and for advising us. Thank you.
13 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Our next
14 speaker is Joann Makris Karna, a parent at
15 P.S. 30 and also a member of CPAC Legislative
16 Committee.
17 MS. KARNA: Good morning and
18 welcome to Staten Island on this extremely
19 snowy morning, although it's not sticking.
20 I'm going to go ahead and read my testimony
21 and I'm a little nervous so if I flub it, just
22 read from the paper.
23 My name is Joan Makris Karna. I'm
24 a proud parent of two children at P.S. 30.
25 I'm a member of the CPAC Legislative
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2 Committee, member of the P.S. 30 school
3 leadership team, a member of the District 31
4 leadership team and past president of District
5 31 President's Council.
6 Today I would like to present a
7 position paper developed in connection with
8 other CPAC members and some of my personal
9 views on governance.
10 The members of CPAC believe that
11 the representative bodies replacing the school
12 board should not have a merely advisory
13 capacity but instead have the following
14 powers.
15 Periodic and regular access to all
16 district budgetary and curriculum related
17 information.
18 The right to review, evaluate, sign
19 off on and, if necessary, veto the district's
20 annual budget and comprehensive educational
21 plan.
22 The right to review the district
23 supervisor's performance on an annual basis.
24 The right to participate in the
25 process of planning the district's education
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2 policy and the right to demand that the
3 district supervisor deliver a report every
4 month at the representative body's public
5 forum.
6 The members of CPAC believe that
7 the representative bodies replacing the school
8 boards should consist of parents of students
9 attending schools in the district,
10 representatives of community organizations in
11 the district, pedagogical staff members who
12 reside in the district.
13 The representatives of that body
14 should consist of a majority of parents, be
15 elected by their constituencies, except for
16 the representatives of the community
17 organizations who should be selected by the
18 local community planning boards.
19 The members of CPAC also believe
20 that the geographic boundaries currently used
21 to define the school districts should be
22 changed to conform to the boundaries of the
23 community planning board. The boundaries
24 should change every ten years just as planning
25 boards do to conform to the latest census
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2 information and there should be equal and fair
3 representation of the school population within
4 the district.
5 There are certain organizations
6 that are strong components of the current
7 system and they should not be changed. Those
8 are PA or PTA organizations within a school,
9 district president's council, a citywide
10 organization of elected president's councils
11 such as CPAC is today.
12 This completes my summary of the
13 CPAC position on the governance issue. I
14 would now like to turn to my personal views on
15 school leadership teams since they seem to be
16 a key element of any future plans. In a
17 nutshell, parents need to be trained and
18 empowered so that they can completely
19 participate in the management of their
20 children's school.
21 At the moment you happen to be
22 sitting in District 31 where for the last two
23 years the leadership teams have received no
24 stipends and no dollars to assist their CEP
25 efforts. The district leadership team has
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2 tried to bring various training programs to
3 the team but with no budgets this has been
4 extremely difficult.
5 The school-based teams throughout
6 the district vary in their levels of success.
7 As a whole, the district, particularly at the
8 middle school level, could be doing a lot
9 better. Our elementary school scores suffered
10 last year, in some cases by as much as ten
11 percent because of mass preparation periods
12 where hundreds of students were gathered into
13 auditoriums instead of receiving classroom
14 instruction. If we had a stronger school
15 leadership team structure in place, perhaps
16 parents could have communicated their concerns
17 at a school-based level and principals might
18 have taken some corrective action.
19 We all knew these were difficult
20 times so we tried not to complain when the
21 2001-2002 budget was cut 13 and a half million
22 and that's why these mass preparation periods
23 had to take place.
24 But imagine my consternation as a
25 district leadership team member when the dust
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2 settled and the district ended last year with
3 a $3.8 million surplus. Again, if the teams
4 had received true budget training, not the
5 galaxy 2000 charade conducted here in 1999, we
6 could have monitored the situation more
7 closely and put a stronger plan in place in
8 2002-2003.
9 I really do not wish to engage in
10 finger pointing or Monday morning
11 quarterbacking but I do want to place into the
12 record that if teams are not trained in key
13 issues, such as curriculum alternatives and
14 budget, they will be powerless to improve
15 student education, which is why we are all
16 here in the first place.
17 I believe that if principals are
18 being trained as leaders and teachers receive
19 professional development, parents particularly
20 need a large infusion of premium on how to
21 understand what's going on in their children's
22 school.
23 The Urban League tried hard to
24 reach out to parents but their program was not
25 school specific and, in my view, did nothing
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2 to help parents understand safe standards and
3 how they translated into classroom instruction
4 and budget dollar allocation. In short, you
5 can allocate funds for principals and
6 teachers, how about putting together a parent
7 leadership institute that would be school or
8 even district specific so that parents could
9 receive a real education on how to be a member
10 of a school leadership team.
11 I thank you all for your time
12 today.
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: First of all,
14 thank you very much for that testimony. It
15 was very well delivered, very well constructed
16 and very well delivered.
17 I also just want to mention, I was
18 remiss in not mentioning the arrival a few
19 moments ago of Assemblywoman Audrey Phefer
20 from Queens and Assemblyman Peter Rivera from
21 the Bronx.
22 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you very
23 much for your testimony. It was really very
24 concise and very detailed.
25 Just a clarification. You're a
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2 member of CPAC. Is this the CPAC formal
3 division?
4 MS. MAKRIS: What happened is the
5 past president of the President's Council can
6 stay on the legislative committee so it's a
7 nonvoting position but we organize lobby day.
8 We also try to work very hard on putting
9 together this testimony, the CPAC members and
10 polling them at the November and December
11 meetings.
12 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: So this is the
13 official CPAC position.
14 MS. MAKRIS: My understanding is
15 this is what we polled CPAC members on, and I
16 don't think anybody in CPAC would disagree
17 with what we have here.
18 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Assemblyman
19 LaVelle?
20 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: First of all,
21 I would like to thank you. I think that your
22 presentation was very, very good. I'm very
23 happy that you brought with you CPAC's
24 position on this. I also what like to point
25 out that Joann was at a meeting in Manhattan.
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2 MS. KARNA: And I'll be in
3 Brooklyn, too.
4 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: Unfortunately
5 I won't be. That's the only meeting I will
6 miss.
7 The school leadership team thing,
8 first of all, your personal views were also
9 very, very good. I've been hearing a lot
10 about the school leadership teams in our
11 discussions but the major problem with the
12 school leadership thing is that the parents
13 tenure on it is so short-lived whereas the
14 other members, you know what I mean, their
15 child is out of the school, that's it.
16 MS. KARNA: Well, actually, I think
17 most parents serve for two to three to four
18 years depending on --
19 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: And how do
20 the teachers and the principal and the --
21 MS. KARNA: It depends on the
22 school. This year in Staten Island you had a
23 lot of retirement both of principals and of
24 UFT members. We have a very senior UFT
25 population here so there was a significant
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2 turnover, not in every school, agreed, but I
3 also feel like there's a dynamic that takes
4 place in the leadership team. If I can tag on
5 to your question, which is very often the
6 principals and the faculty are very
7 knowledgeable of the standards and sometimes
8 bordering on arrogant on their discussions on
9 the CEP and curriculum and very often parents
10 feel intimidated.
11 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: That's my
12 point. And being that there's a turnover,
13 more frequent in the parents than in the
14 educational end of it, I feel that it's being
15 dominated more by the educators.
16 MS. KARNA: And as a member of the
17 district leadership team that has to go around
18 and visit up to, I guess I visit about seven
19 different schools, a liaison of seven
20 different schools, you are absolutely right,
21 Assemblyman LaVelle, in some cases the parents
22 speak up. They are there, they are equals.
23 In other cases, their voices are not being
24 heard.
25 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: That's why I
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2 particularly like the idea of a parents
3 institute. That's a very, very good idea.
4 Thank you.
5 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Phefer?
6 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: Just for
7 clarification and maybe -- I apologize, I
8 missed a little of the borough president --
9 MS. KARNA: I missed the whole
10 thing.
11 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: All right,
12 but you know. You are living here.
13 The CPAC and the Federation, tell
14 me the differences.
15 MS. KARNA: A very big one. I
16 shouldn't say a very big one. I should say
17 Staten Island is a very unique culture and
18 sometimes what works for us doesn't work in
19 the rest of the city. What you have had
20 happen on Staten Island is the chancellor
21 recognizes President's Council. On Staten
22 Island, for whatever reason, parents got
23 together and decided that the Federation was
24 going to be a better representative of them.
25 And I believe in the early '90s Federation
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2 sent no money to President's Council, to CPAC
3 rather.
4 When Joan McKeever-Thomas became
5 president of District 31 President's Council
6 in the late '90s I believe she realized that
7 Staten Island had a group in the city so she
8 started coming to CPAC meetings. She then
9 graduated out of District 31 and became the
10 head of the Federation.
11 The key difference is to be a
12 member of President's Council, you have to be
13 president of the PTA. To be a member of
14 Federation, you just have to be sent by your
15 school or a parent of a child in the school.
16 You don't have to hold an elected office in a
17 PTA.
18 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: I have to
19 can my colleague. Did he not say that the
20 presidents of the PA were automatically on the
21 Federation? So that's why I was confused.
22 MS. KARNA: My understanding is
23 almost all of them do go but having read
24 Federation bylaws, and I suggest you ask Joan
25 McKeever-Thomas, the president of that
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2 specifically, my remembrance of the Federation
3 bylaws is that it's really just three
4 delegates and three alternates from each
5 school, usually the PTA president will go, but
6 sometimes --
7 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: But she
8 doesn't necessarily have to sit on the
9 decision making body of the Federation?
10 MS. KARNA: She does not sit on
11 the executive board, no, because I could tell
12 you I was a past PTA president. The first
13 year I was a PTA president I would go to
14 Federation general assembly meetings and I was
15 not on the executive board and can't be
16 elected an officer of Federation until you
17 serve on the executive board.
18 It's kind of like a dual running
19 track, if you will, but the president and
20 President's Council participates in
21 Federation. I did two years ago when I was
22 president of the President's Council. Gail
23 Carillo who is the president of President's
24 Council this year, I believe, participates.
25 They are on all the mailings from the
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2 community school board I think Ms. Reddington
3 will confirm.
4 It's just that we really have a
5 kind of different structure here and that's
6 what evolved and made sense. One of the
7 things that I hope is at some point a
8 chancellor recognizes it. Federation is not
9 officially recognized by the chancellor. 8660
10 makes no reference to a Federation for Staten
11 Island, and I felt for some time if you were
12 going to have an organization representative
13 of parents in a borough, the chancellor ought
14 to at least give us some recognition.
15 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: Give the
16 Federation some recognition.
17 MS. KARNA: Exactly. He should
18 acknowledge the faces and that they represent
19 a parents constituency, but that wasn't my
20 battle to fight. Perhaps Joan McKeever-Thomas
21 is a member of the panel on education policies
22 taking it up with them. So that's something
23 maybe you'll clear up later.
24 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: I didn't
25 realize that Staten Island also had a
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2 President's Council.
3 MS. KARNA: Oh, yes, and there's
4 one for BASIS also, which is the high schools
5 that are part of Brooklyn and Staten Island.
6 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: My question
7 is: How are the functions different of
8 President's Council and the Federation?
9 MS. KARNA: President's Council
10 really tries to help presidents with governing
11 their body. When you become a PTA president
12 you have to do things like sign the permit to
13 open the building, arrange for the school
14 safety officer, serve automatically on the
15 leadership team, so you have to learn the
16 Alphabet Soup, that's the Department of
17 Education that's out there, and fund-raising.
18 Here on Staten Island we are very blessed in
19 most of our schools in District 31, and very
20 successful. Most of our schools have raised
21 like -- I would say it's not unusual to have a
22 school or PTA raise $50,000. My home school,
23 if we didn't raise 50 a year we would be,
24 like, and we buy the books, we buy the
25 furniture. We buy a lot of things.
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2 But in any event, they focus on
3 helping the president. Federation focuses on
4 more general things, like, they do toy drives
5 for underprivileged children. They help
6 people with the parliamentarian procedures,
7 like rewriting the bylaws. They try to hold
8 parents and gather information on how they
9 feel on different issues, like the future of
10 community school board, like attending
11 community school board meetings.
12 So they kind of dovetail. It's
13 just that president's council very clearly
14 wants to help presidents because we do do,
15 like Assemblyman LaVelle said --
16 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: I like all
17 legislative breakfast also, which is nice.
18 MS. KARNA: Yes. In a way
19 Federation sort of takes the role that
20 President's Council does in other districts.
21 So, I'm sorry, perhaps I went on
22 too long.
23 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: So the
24 powers that you want CPAC to now have in the
25 recreation --
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2 MS. KARNA: That was citywide CPAC
3 members, district president's council,
4 presidents or chairs, from the five boroughs.
5 I am anticipating that Ms. McKeever-Thomas
6 will bring you some kind of paper from
7 Federation. This year I had too many things
8 going on in my life to attend Federation as
9 well. I have a first grader who needs a lot
10 of help and a fourth grader who is severely
11 hearing impaired and I was worried more about
12 the statewide test, in all honesty. I picked
13 citywide as opposed to Federation but next
14 year, who knows.
15 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: The other
16 thing, in one of CPAC's -- so I guess we will
17 ask the person because it talks about the
18 boundaries changing every ten years, just as
19 planning boards do, and planning boards
20 haven't changed.
21 MS. KARNA: Well, this was a CPAC
22 recommendation. We felt based on the census
23 there was redistricting or realignment or
24 might be.
25 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: It may be
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2 suggested because they don't change.
3 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: That was an
4 interesting point that I missed about the
5 changing according to the community board
6 lines. That would end up with you having
7 three districts on Staten Island. Would you
8 be advocating for that?
9 MS. KARNA: CPAC felt that that
10 coexistence might make more sense. I can tell
11 you running a district of 43,000 kids, which
12 is what District 31 is now, begins to be a
13 little unmanageable, from a parent's
14 perspective.
15 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: I just found
16 that interesting. I was surprised to hear
17 that on Staten Island.
18 MS. KARNA: But to get the
19 official Staten Island position, you are going
20 to have to ask Miss Joan McKeever-Thomas.
21 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: Thank you.
22 CHAIRMAN SANDERS:
23 Miss Reddington?
24 MS. REDDINGTON: Joan, thank you
25 for your testimony. I have no doubts that you
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2 would do fantastic because you presented many
3 times to the school board and you've done a
4 great job.
5 Joan, we've worked very hard as a
6 school board to not have north shore/south
7 shore type of mentality and we take pride in
8 that that we try to incorporate all of Staten
9 Island because we are a one borough board.
10 In redistricting to the three
11 Assembly districts or the three planning board
12 districts that we now have, what I fear when I
13 hear this is only that we would then have
14 south shore, north shore and mid-island and a
15 separation of what we've worked so hard to
16 keep as one.
17 MS. KARNA: And I understand you
18 don't want divisiveness because especially in
19 a borough our size of about 450,000 people,
20 cohesion is a little easier than a place like
21 Brooklyn or Queens or Manhattan, but I believe
22 what CPAC was trying to say and perhaps what
23 you ought to consider is, it's not so much
24 divisiveness of north shore versus south shore
25 but there are a lot of different issues north
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2 shore versus south shore.
3 For example, of the title one
4 schools, I think almost all of them are in
5 Assemblyman LaVelle's district and some of us
6 parents feel that there are social issues that
7 have to be addressed before a kid can open a
8 book and start learning to read.
9 I was at P.S. 44 the other day for
10 their leadership team meeting and one of the
11 teachers said she was shocked when one of the
12 little girls in her class said shelter is a
13 synonym for home, because they have kids that
14 live in homeless shelters. And so maybe if
15 the districts were smaller, they would say,
16 okay, we need to focus more on social things
17 like making sure the kids get breakfast,
18 making sure the kids have a warm coat, making
19 sure that the shelter issues and the social
20 issues and school psychologist are up to speed
21 and those issues are kind of different from I
22 know they are diametrically opposed from what
23 we face at 30.
24 At 30, which is where my children
25 go to elementary school, my kids sleep in the
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2 same bed every night, they get a breakfast but
3 they have issues in terms of academics because
4 we have no gifted and talented program in
5 District 31. We are the only district in the
6 city without it.
7 My feeling, Ms. Reddington, is
8 perhaps if you could make the units a little
9 smaller, there might be some ability to focus
10 on different issues but I agree with you, the
11 community school board has tried very hard to
12 make sure it's not the north versus the south
13 and the Civil War all over again. And I'm not
14 in any way encouraging that that's what would
15 happen. I'm just saying if the group was
16 smaller there could be a better focus on
17 issues that could be resolved perhaps a little
18 easier. Just an idea.
19 MS. REDDINGTON: Thank you.
20 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I just have one
21 follow-up question with regard to part of your
22 testimony. You had indicated that in the
23 elementary schools, that the test scores had
24 gone done by as much as about ten percent, and
25 part of that you attributed to the fact that
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2 there were these, what you referred to, as
3 mass preparation periods where hundreds of
4 kids would gather in an auditorium at the
5 expense of additional classroom instruction.
6 And you indicated that if the
7 school leadership teams had been stronger,
8 more informed or more participatory then maybe
9 that concern could have been voiced and
10 something could have been done about it.
11 First of all, I just wanted you to
12 elaborate a little bit about these preparation
13 periods and what happened.
14 The other part of the question, if
15 you forget, I will remind you, the other part
16 of the question is: I just would like to have
17 your view about the status of the school
18 leadership teams as they exist on Staten
19 Island. Why do you think they are not as
20 strong as they ought to be?
21 MS. KARNA: Last year was a very
22 difficult year for all of us, especially after
23 9/11. Before 9/11, District 31 had been told
24 that it had to cut 13 and a half million
25 dollars from its budget because Chancellor
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2 Levy had to do a very large budget cut based
3 on what Mayor Guilliani had told him. So the
4 superintendent said, well, either we lose 38
5 assistant principals or we lose the "F" status
6 teachers I believe in 22 schools. And parents
7 said, you know, the assistant principals are
8 probably more essential to school safety, et
9 cetera, and maybe we can get the money up
10 later. Then 9/11 hit and it was like, okay,
11 you guys are really going to lose 13 and a
12 half million dollars.
13 So the superintendent, I believe,
14 was in a very difficult position and he said,
15 okay, we're going to keep the AP jobs but in
16 the 22 schools where there is an "F" status
17 teacher doing reading instruction, science
18 instruction, math instruction, social studies
19 instruction, test preparation in those
20 schools, and I believe the district
21 superintendent could provide you with a list,
22 we're going to take the kids that would
23 normally be taught by the "F" status teacher,
24 it could be four, five or six classes, put
25 them in the auditorium and have the assistant
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2 principal teach a lesson.
3 And in some schools the assistant
4 principal, like, I think if you look at P.S. 3
5 scores, I think that happened there and I
6 don't think they were impacted negatively.
7 At P.S. 30 we chose to live without
8 an assistant principal. We have 900 kids, 14
9 doors, a 70 year old school safety officer
10 that Assemblyman LaVelle knows very well, but
11 we said we're going to live without an AP.
12 The principal may kill himself but, you know,
13 that's life, and we kept our "F" status
14 teachers. In the other 22 schools they
15 didn't. Some of those schools the scores went
16 down. P.S. 4 -- I don't have the whole list
17 in front of me again. I would suggest that
18 you ask the superintendent for what kind of an
19 evaluation he did on that.
20 My theory and, again, it's in the
21 personal part of my testimony, it's my theory,
22 is that if parents realized there were more
23 alternatives or if they understood the
24 budgeting process better, in other words,
25 here's what your fixed costs are. Here's what
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2 the UFC says people have to get. Here's what
3 the CSA said and here's your salary, which is
4 basically a fixed cost, it's your light,
5 building, fixed cost, and then here's your
6 variable costs. I come from a business
7 background so I look at things that way.
8 Maybe parents would say, you know what, forget
9 ordering the new fourth grade math series this
10 year. The kids didn't do so bad last year.
11 Let's get that "F" status teacher back to help
12 the kids study the book better.
13 That is my theory that perhaps if
14 the parents had been more empowered or more
15 aware of what the alternatives were they could
16 have done that. Stead it was kind of like the
17 district made the decisions for us and in some
18 cases the principal said, no, we're not going
19 to live that way, we're going to do something
20 different. And in other cases the principal
21 said, okay, that's kind of the deal we're
22 dealt.
23 What I think caused consternation
24 was when the year ended there was a budget
25 surplus. That's what I think caused a lot of
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2 people to be concerned.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: In your
4 experience was it more a lack of communication
5 and important information that the school
6 leadership teams could have had to be more
7 involved or was it a lack of training for the
8 members of the School District 13 to be really
9 fully participatory?
10 MS. KARNA: I think if you look at
11 successful leadership, I believe we have some
12 on Staten Island and many throughout the city,
13 a lot of it starts with the tone of the
14 principal. If the principal wants to empower
15 the UFC and the parents and the community to
16 be part of the success story, then that
17 happens.
18 If the principal decides he or she
19 is going to play dictator and they are
20 terrified because they could get fired if the
21 school doesn't perform well, then the
22 leadership team kind of meets once a month to
23 talk about cookie sales. We talk about the
24 uniforms, dress uniform code. We talk about,
25 you know, the shoveling of snow. We don't
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2 talk about general stuff.
3 I think the first thing is the
4 attitude of the leader of the leadership team,
5 which more times often than not is the
6 principal because he or she is the leader of
7 the building.
8 Second of all, I think there has to
9 be better communication channels, Assemblyman
10 Sanders. I think right now I'm a member of
11 CPAC. I'm a member of the district leadership
12 team. I read the New York Times and I find
13 out more there about what Chancellor Klein is
14 doing than from CPAC or from emails we get
15 through the system. And I don't fault the
16 chancellor for trying to govern and
17 legislate. I think he needs to govern. He
18 needs to rule the system. But it would be
19 nice if instead of reading it in the Times I
20 could read it on an e-mail the same morning.
21 He doesn't have to give us advance notice.
22 Then I think the third thing is
23 elementary schools here on Staten Island,
24 again, I'm commenting from any own experience,
25 I think they've gotten the message about the
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2 standards. You have E class that is a very
3 powerful tool for kindergarten and first grade
4 parents so that they can, at first grade, say,
5 holy cow, the kid doesn't know the sound.
6 That's how we found out my daughter is
7 severely hearing impaired because she didn't
8 know the sounds, she and a lot of other
9 people, or they have some other learning
10 disabilities, like dyslexia or something like
11 that. You have E Pal at the second and third
12 grade level.
13 So you begin to understand all of
14 this and then you have your third grade
15 citywide that kicks in, the fourth grade
16 statewide that we're all terrified of and then
17 the fifth grade citywide again to help us
18 parents and help the teaching staff and you
19 have tools that grow where people can put
20 together lesson plans. Parents will be able
21 to see that, too.
22 At the school leadership team level
23 I don't see it being made all that easy for
24 parents to digest that. I haven't had a hard
25 time with it because in all honesty, I had a
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2 kid that was almost deaf so I figured if I
3 didn't learn what all this alphabet soup was
4 to fight for her I wouldn't have learned it,
5 but I also had a lot of business experience
6 and an advanced degree. I don't know if every
7 parent is that lucky. That's why I thought
8 the parent leadership institute would be
9 something worthwhile considering to help all
10 of the parents. You know, I'm not a rocket
11 scientist. I don't have a PhD. If I could
12 figure it out, I think most people could.
13 And I don't know if you want me to
14 talk about teams specifically on Staten Island
15 that I liaison to? I guess I want to go back,
16 too.
17 They work in schools where the
18 principal has really made it a focus of making
19 it work and empowering the constituencies.
20 Sometimes the school is doing great but
21 parents really aren't all that knowledgeable
22 or involved or understanding. So I think it's
23 going to take time, too, and it's going to
24 take more of a focus on leadership teams from
25 the district. In other words, cutting the
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2 stipend two years in a row, cutting the budget
3 that the teams had to that allocate, that took
4 a lot of wind out of people. Sending us to
5 the Galaxy 2000 training, you know, here they
6 are pumping us in '99 saying you're going to
7 learn about budget, you're going to manage the
8 budget and you're going to understand the
9 budget.
10 So I go with my little slide rule
11 and my little calculator figuring I'm going to
12 put this into a model. They're going to give
13 me the financial statement, a balance sheet.
14 I'll get the income statement. I'll be able
15 to understand this and they say, okay, line A
16 is tax levied money. You really don't have
17 much to do with that. Line B is an average
18 teacher's salary but you don't have average
19 teachers here on Staten Island so they have 19
20 years experience for the most part.
21 So I just kind of felt like there
22 wasn't that much of a push. It's almost like
23 the district superintendent has to become an
24 ogre about thou will implement these
25 successfully and I will give you the resources
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2 to implement them. Sometimes the resources
3 haven't follow the directive.
4 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Thomson?
5 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Have the
6 school leadership team members ever been
7 surveyed or polled for how they see the
8 leadership team functioning? Have you ever
9 been asked officially?
10 MS. KARNA: I believe that Cynthia
11 List from the central board every year sends
12 out a questionnaire that we have to respond to
13 so that people can comment on whether they are
14 happier, not happier, whether it's working.
15 From the district leadership team perspective,
16 I know all of us on the team have reached out
17 to our schools to say to them, well, what's
18 working, what's not. And I want to give Scott
19 Miller, who is a deputy superintendent a
20 plug. I don't know if he's sitting behind me
21 but I want to give him a plug because even
22 though he is the deputy superintendent and he
23 doesn't have the control of the resources that
24 perhaps the superintendent does, he's tried
25 very hard to empower us on the district
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2 leadership team and to empower schools
3 wherever he can. I think he's got the
4 religion.
5 We've asked for training for
6 different things and we've tried to do
7 different things, you know, but sometimes when
8 you have no budget, it's kind of hard to say
9 to people, bring your coffee, bring a sandwich
10 and come to I.S. 27 because that's the only
11 place we could meet for free, right?
12 People are like -- Napoleon said
13 the army marches on its stomach and that's
14 very true for leadership teams. You kind of
15 need the fear to get it.
16 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Reddington?
17 MS. REDDINGTON: Or the school
18 board member buys breakfast.
19 MS. KARNA: Right, that's right.
20 We all go to those.
21 MS. REDDINGTON: Joan, one of the
22 things that I came across as a liaison to
23 I.S. 24 and to the feeder schools were that
24 many of the principals felt that many of the
25 things that they wanted to implement with the
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2 funding from leadership were not on the menu
3 of items and they felt that many of the
4 programs that they thought would be so
5 important for their particular schools, which
6 is what we are about, leadership in our own
7 particular schools, what works for us. And
8 so, therefore, they were very disappointed
9 discouraged and they said, well, the money is
10 not -- they want to use the money for what
11 they want, not for what we want.
12 MS. KARNA: See, I think that in a
13 way Scott Miller, the deputy superintendent,
14 his hands were tied because he kept going back
15 to the central board to say, what can I spend
16 the money on? And on Monday they told him
17 this and on Wednesday they told him that and
18 on Thursday they told him the other thing, so
19 poor Scott, I think, just kept drawing the
20 corral closer and closer and more and more
21 narrow.
22 And I agree with you,
23 Ms. Reddington that I think we could have had
24 more success had there been more latitude on a
25 school basis for what people wanted to do with
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2 the money.
3 I mean, my feeling is if you look
4 at P.S. 31, which is the new school, it is
5 probably the poorest school we have on Staten
6 Island because of the neighborhood that it's
7 in, you know, those people said, you know, we
8 want to buy every parent a t-shirt so they
9 come to a PTA meeting to find out about E
10 class or what's going to happen on the fourth
11 grade state wide tests. You know what? I
12 think you should let them spend a thousand
13 dollars to buy t-shirts for the parents to get
14 them to a PTA meeting.
15 Yes, you know, it doesn't directly
16 relate to the CEP but it does bring parents
17 into the polls. I think that of Scott Miller
18 had gone to the central board and asked that
19 question first they would have laughed at him,
20 and second they would have called Mr. Vigini
21 and said what are you people smoking on Staten
22 Island.
23 I think you have to understand that
24 sometimes the local people may want to take a
25 chance. You have to take a leap of faith
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2 here. Central board sometimes, they don't
3 want to take the leap.
4 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
5 very, very much for having joined us here this
6 morning. As I said earlier, your testimony I
7 think was very well structured and very well
8 delivered and, frankly, we very much
9 appreciate the insider information that you
10 were able to provide us.
11 MS. KARNA: And you'll probably get
12 a lot more.
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, a lot of
14 what we rely on is what actually happens in
15 practice, not in theory. You gave us a very
16 good education. Thank you.
17 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Anne Marie
18 Caminiti, director of Parent to Parent.
19 MS. CAMINITI: Good morning,
20 everyone. The only reason I typed what I
21 typed was because they had asked for written
22 testimony. I'm going to read from this but
23 there is a lot of personal interest that I
24 need to put into it.
25 Just to give you a little bit of
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2 background, although I know some of these
3 people.
4 Assemblyman Sanders, nice to see
5 you again.
6 I am the parent of three children.
7 I have a 16 year old son who went to public
8 school, K through 8. I have a fourth grade
9 student in a District 31 school and I'm the
10 parent of a 13 year old multiply handicapped
11 child who is educated through District 75.
12 I have been a PTA president. I
13 have been president of Staten Island
14 Federation of PTAs. I am currently the
15 program director of Parent to Parent which is
16 a state funded resource center for families
17 who have children with disabilities. And, as
18 most of you know, that is my forum, education
19 and special education, and I have a lot to say
20 when it comes to special education. Although
21 this is not what I'm really addressing this
22 morning.
23 Here we're asked to give testimony
24 on our feelings on the community school
25 board. If there is a future for community
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2 school board, we don't know yet, there is a
3 tremendous amount of restructuring going on
4 with the Department of Education and a lot of
5 it seems to be speculation. A lot of it is
6 rumors on what's happening, on what's not
7 happening.
8 To the topic at hand, not too long
9 ago we had a change in the school governance
10 for community school board, and the major
11 responsibility that was given to them was
12 reevaluating the superintendent, rethinking
13 his or her contract, naming schools, holding
14 liaison meetings, holding calendar meetings,
15 hopefully being available for any questions
16 that the parents had.
17 The fact is that what is most
18 important to remember is that this is an
19 elected group of individuals. Community
20 school board members must be held accountable
21 to the constituency they represent, which
22 includes families of the students that are
23 being educated.
24 Whether or not a specific parent
25 voted in the last community school board
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2 election doesn't them prevent them from
3 attending calendar meetings and expressing
4 their concerns. This was the only venue the
5 community had. Whether we spoke as parents,
6 students as members of the community, we had
7 the opportunity to do so. If there was a
8 subject that was a hot topic, and New York
9 City has had many, there was somewhere to go
10 where people would listen. Most importantly,
11 this was the only avenue that would insure
12 that the concerns being addressed, there was a
13 mechanism in place to follow through.
14 Fact. The meetings were public.
15 Public agenda meeting is not only a place to
16 speak but to listen. We don't educate in a
17 vacuum, or we shouldn't. If there are issues,
18 isn't it better to address them collectively
19 and to listen to them collectively. Doesn't
20 it make sense to provide a forum for issues
21 and concerns as well as success stories that
22 we have, that they be shared.
23 Fact. The seven member board has
24 also been dissolved. That's done. That's
25 finished. That was the only other place
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2 parents had to go and be heard. I've done it
3 many times, stood in front of that seven
4 member board and discussed issues that were
5 very relevant to the education on Staten
6 Island, and people stood up and listened to
7 the things that we had to say.
8 High school issues were heard at
9 the central office. District 75 issues were
10 heard at the central office. Now that
11 community school board is obsolete and the
12 central office is closed, what's left? Please
13 don't tell me City Hall.
14 We have over one million children
15 in this city and we are taking a system that
16 is operating at a very low performance and
17 instead of identifying whether specific
18 changes need to be made, we're blindly
19 chopping. There's talk of more parent
20 involvement, but I just heard the Office of
21 Parent Advocacy and Engagement is being
22 closed.
23 There is discussion about replacing
24 the community school board with parents only.
25 How do we identify parents? What is a
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2 parent? How do we identify an objective
3 parent? This is an extremely subjective topic
4 that we are discussing this morning. If this
5 board is appointed, whom does that appointed
6 officer report to, the appointor or the
7 community?
8 Do you remember tax without
9 representation? It was a very large issue
10 with this country when we were looking for
11 independence. We are being held to tax
12 without representation. We need
13 representation. We need representation from a
14 global perspective.
15 This is a very global perspective.
16 We do not only educate one type of child. We
17 do not only educate a certain group of
18 children. We are an extremely diverse
19 community, and it is going to remain that way
20 so we need to have a completely diverse
21 outlook.
22 If we have representation at the
23 table, we better have that representation
24 reporting back to us and where better to have
25 that than in this building. In this complex,
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2 not this building because there are a hundred
3 people outside that are lost so if you are
4 wondering where everyone is, they're trying to
5 find where the back of building K is. I have
6 been in this building for six years, I didn't
7 even know there was a building K. I will
8 remember to thank Mike Davino for that.
9 Remember, representation has to be
10 elected by the people it represents. That's
11 what this country stands on. If the community
12 school board is going to be dissolved, it has
13 to be replaced and you ask with what? Elected
14 individuals who are stakeholders. Everyone in
15 this community is a stakeholder in public
16 education.
17 Elected individuals who are
18 knowledgeable.
19 Elected individuals who are mindful
20 of the potential of public schools.
21 Elected individuals who are able to
22 assist this community in maintaining
23 excellence and if we can't maintain
24 excellence, let's find a way to at least
25 achieve it.
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2 Elected individuals who listen to
3 parents, educators and the community on issues
4 that matter to the community, not the
5 Department of Education, not City Hall, not
6 elected officials who are appointing these
7 people.
8 We have to be willing to discuss
9 these matters again and objectively. I don't
10 have any answers. I would like to participate
11 in helping to find those answers and I
12 appreciate the time given to me and I thank
13 all of you for your commitment to public
14 education.
15 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, we thank
16 you very much for your testimony,
17 Ms. Caminiti, and we may have some questions.
18 Ms. Thomson? Ms. Wylde?
19 MS. WYLDE: One of the things we've
20 been looking at is the model of community
21 planning board to district boards now, which
22 are appointed by elected officials.
23 MS. CAMINITI: Yes, elected
24 officials.
25 MS. WYLDE: And at least in some
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2 communities, the experience is that those
3 function quite well and are probably
4 representative of the various characteristics
5 of the community.
6 MS. CAMINITI: Can I ask what you
7 base that on, that it's functioning well? Is
8 that from community input?
9 MS. WYLDE: Yes, that's from
10 working with them, having been on one.
11 MS. CAMINITI: Can I ask you, do
12 you truly believe that an appointed committee
13 can maintain the objectivity and the ability
14 to truly do at hand what needs to be done
15 without any fear of retribution or annoying
16 someone at Borough Hall or City Hall that it's
17 not the right thing to do?
18 MS. WYLDE: Well, there are plenty
19 of examples of those that resigned when they
20 thought that they couldn't. So, yes, I do.
21 MS. CAMINITI: Thank you.
22 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I think we just
23 had some role reversal.
24 MS. CAMINITI: Sorry. It just
25 happened.
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2 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: You did that
3 very deftly, turned things around.
4 Ms. Thomson?
5 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Anne Marie,
6 thank you for your testimony and for your
7 advocacy on behalf of the children.
8 You have three children. It sounds
9 to me, you said one child is with special ed,
10 District 75. It sounds like one might be in
11 high school superintendency so you really
12 cover pretty much all the issues because you
13 have a child who is under District 31 where
14 you have a school board. Your other two
15 children you don't have a school board to go
16 to.
17 Could you talk a little bit about
18 the difference? Should there be this
19 intermediary before central or should there
20 not? Talk about your experience.
21 MS. CAMINITI: I'll tell you, I
22 began my involvement in education when my
23 oldest son was in kindergarten. What was
24 great about community school boards, and I'm
25 not saying that community school boards are
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2 the begin all and end all of our
3 representation, but it was somewhere that you
4 could go to sit in the audience and listen to
5 what everyone was saying, whether it pertained
6 to your child or not.
7 My son struggled in school until he
8 was in high school. I was PTA president at
9 his school. I was very involved
10 educationally.
11 My younger daughter, who is
12 multiply handicapped, went into a District 75
13 program immediately.
14 When Ramone Cortinez became
15 chancellor, he did something wonderful. He
16 contracted five professors at NYU to create a
17 project to look at the viability of District
18 75 and are we doing the right thing by taking
19 children out of their peer environment and
20 educating them. I believe the word is
21 segregated environment, which we are trying in
22 this country to avoid. And he looked at the
23 amount of money spent on that. I think the
24 first thing we need to do in education is not
25 look at dollars because education is not an
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2 expense but you need to look at the success of
3 it.
4 I feel very strongly that the
5 population that we have in the City of New
6 York is here to stay. Who we're educating
7 right now in public school are going to be
8 adults, and they are going to have to work and
9 educate families of their own so I think we
10 need to rethink how we look at education
11 because historically we don't do preventive
12 medicine and we don't do preventive
13 education. We wait until the very last minute
14 and then, boom, we're hit with something and
15 then we say, we should have dealt with that a
16 long time ago.
17 I'm getting off the point.
18 District 75 issues could not be
19 brought to the District 31 Community School
20 Board. So the first thing I said to the
21 community school board when I was president of
22 Federation is why are we able to come here and
23 talk about issues affecting District 31 but
24 parents of District 75 children don't have
25 that opportunity? We have to go to Brooklyn
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2 and speak to the seven member board.
3 Now, it's very hard to go to 110
4 Livingston because people kept jumping up and
5 down. You never knew who anyone was. It took
6 me years before I realized who was who because
7 as soon as someone got up, someone else sat
8 next to you, but they paid attention and they
9 listened. And when Staten Island asked for a
10 District 75 representative, we got one. And
11 that's what happens when you have people who
12 are elected and held accountable. You come
13 and you tell them time after time after time
14 this is what you need and eventually if it's
15 the right thing to do, they will do it.
16 Maybe I'm being naive, but I
17 believe in that because that was the
18 experience that I had.
19 This is a very large city. I don't
20 think one man can be chancellor for this
21 department. I don't think one seven member
22 board can be in charge. I think it's not
23 possible.
24 So to have decentralization at an
25 involvement level and have various community
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2 boards, community school boards, appointed
3 officials, individuals, how ever you want to
4 call it, I think it's very important.
5 I am still a parent in District
6 31. I will be here for another five years.
7 Does the community school board work up to
8 it's capacity and potential? At times.
9 Is there a way they can be more
10 effective? Absolutely.
11 The only person that can hold
12 elected individuals as community school board
13 members accountable are the people who elect
14 them, and it is up to the community to make
15 sure that they go and they speak and they
16 listen and they share. I don't think it can
17 be turned over to City Hall or Borough Hall or
18 anywhere else that they can say this is what
19 you have to do because you cannot serve two
20 masters. Even the Bible says that, and excuse
21 me for putting that into a public school
22 forum, but it is written, "Man cannot serve
23 two masters." So if you are going to work for
24 the people, you are going to be elected for
25 the people, by the people, even Abraham
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2 Lincoln thought that way, that that's the way
3 it has to be done.
4 You want parent involvement. Okay,
5 what's parent involvement? Parent
6 involvement, a parent being home with their
7 children, doing homework and making sure they
8 do what they are supposed to do. I guess so,
9 because I never did that. I was always at a
10 community school board meeting and PTA
11 meetings and everywhere else trying to do
12 everything.
13 So you're going to have global
14 thinkers, subjective thinkers. Everybody is
15 different. That's why we are a public school
16 and that's why everybody has strengths and
17 everybody has -- I don't want to say
18 weaknesses. Everybody knows their limits.
19 There are those of us who have no limits, and
20 I believe -- not again.
21 I know I'm going on a tangent but
22 I'm trying to get all of my thoughts and
23 feelings.
24 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: It's been very
25 helpful. As the Assemblyman said before,
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2 that's why we are having these public
3 hearings, so we can hear from the
4 stakeholders, from the people who are on the
5 street, in the schools understanding what's
6 going on.
7 As we go about our work, we will
8 come back with a recommendation for what will
9 replace community school boards. Were we to
10 come up with an entity, you know, some sort of
11 body at the district level, would it also make
12 sense to have such a body for District 75 and
13 for high schools? That's my question.
14 MS. CAMINITI: Yes, you have to.
15 I mean, as much as you want a seamless
16 education and you want a seamless process, you
17 can't have one person do everything. You have
18 to have certain people that have certain
19 talents and certain strengths but at the same
20 time they have to be willing to play nice.
21 We are in a seamless education
22 building, and the first thing you tell young
23 children when they come to school is you have
24 to play nice with everybody and you have to
25 get along. Well, we need to do that as adults
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2 in education because, you know, the kids are
3 watching, whether you know it or not, and we
4 are the biggest influence that they have and
5 they need to know that we're serious about
6 education. We are fighting over -- the mayor
7 wants control, which I'm 150 percent against.
8 I have gone on record to say that and I don't
9 have a problem saying that. I don't think
10 that we should have given City Hall control of
11 the Department of Education. That is just my
12 personal feeling. I think we need a lot of
13 parent involvement but there are all sorts of
14 different parents and different philosophies
15 on what parent involvement is. There are
16 parents who don't believe going to a PTA
17 meeting is going to make them better involved
18 in their education, and they're probably right
19 for that parent, but there are parents like
20 myself who want to jump in with both feet and
21 be totally immersed in it so we can share
22 ideas.
23 You have my number. Feel free to
24 call me, and I thank you very much.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Reddington?
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2 MS. REDDINGTON: I just want to
3 thank you, Anne Marie, for your commitment to
4 the students of District 31, for all that
5 you've done as past president of PTA and for
6 all that you continue to do for all of the
7 students. Thank you.
8 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, we thank
9 you very much for your input and your very
10 passive insight, Ms. Caminiti. You can be
11 sure we will take heed of all of the advice
12 and all of the recommendations you've made for
13 us this morning.
14 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Joan Correale,
15 I hope I pronounced it correctly, Correale,
16 and Jacquelyn Tripodi together.
17 MS. TRIPODI: We're doing this as a
18 team because we co-chair District 75.
19 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: Steve and I
20 are used to you doing this together.
21 MS. TRIPODI: Well, we have to be a
22 team, otherwise we can't work together for our
23 children.
24 I'm Jackie Tripodi. I am a
25 co-chair for District 75 Special Education
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2 with the Staten Island Federation of PTAs.
3 I'm also the first vice president for P.S. 32
4 where my daughter is in general education.
5 I'm the president of P.S. 37 PTA where my son
6 is in a District 75 self-contained school and
7 I like doing this.
8 MS. CORREALE: Hi. I'm Joan
9 Correale. I'm also co-chair for District 75
10 Federation of PTAs committee. I'm also a
11 board member of the Grace Foundation which is
12 a foundation for children with autism and I am
13 the political liaison for that foundation. I
14 also have a daughter in a District 31 school
15 as well.
16 MS. TRIPODI: We're here to address
17 when you're changing governance for the
18 community school board, we would like for you
19 to consider, and I know Anne Marie just spoke
20 on this but we need to give our little twist.
21 The children that have severe special needs
22 need representation on this board as well. We
23 need to go to a meeting that is not at 400
24 First Avenue to hear what is being worked on,
25 what is being addressed within our district.
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2 Whether it's going to be District 75 or
3 District 31 or a BASIS, children with severe
4 special needs need to have a voice. They need
5 to have representation and they need to hear
6 reports for the administrators. I don't want
7 to go to a meeting and have someone say, well,
8 there's so and so in the audience that can
9 take your problems. I'm not here for just
10 problems. Believe me, if I have a problem,
11 we'll go.
12 We need parents to be able to go,
13 to sit down and get a report on what's being
14 done for their children in those districts.
15 We have issues concerning related services
16 which we have met and spoke about previously
17 which still go unresolved. We have children
18 not getting related services that are mandated
19 by their IEP. We can go to a community school
20 board but they throw their hands us up. They
21 can't help us. Especially if it's District
22 75, we can go to them, but if you're going to
23 replace community school board, we need a
24 board in place that will be not only
25 accountable but will be able to give us the
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2 answers. It will be able to report, you know
3 what, this is what we are doing for children
4 with severe impairment who can't walk. We're
5 implementing a new type of program. This is
6 what I hear when I go to District 31
7 meetings. I would like to hear them for my
8 son as well.
9 Do you have anything to add on
10 that?
11 MS. CORREALE: No, you said it
12 perfectly.
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me just say,
14 first of all, how delighted -- in a way how
15 delighted I am to see both of you again.
16 MS. TRIPODI: You missed us.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, we've had
18 an opportunity to converse through the good
19 offices of Assemblyman LaVelle on several
20 occasions, some in Albany, some right here on
21 Staten Island. I have always found that the
22 two of you are extremely articulate and
23 persuasive advocates for children with
24 disabilities and as I think both of you know,
25 Assemblyman LaVelle, myself and others have
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2 been trying very hard to put the people and
3 the policies together so that the related
4 services and the implementation of the
5 necessary services for children whose
6 education is pursuant to an individual
7 education plan occurs on a timely basis.
8 I know that hasn't happened yet. I
9 want both of you to know before we open this
10 up to questions that in part the purpose of
11 this Task Force and the purpose of these
12 hearings is to finally have in place a system
13 that will respond quickly and effectively to
14 the needs of parents and their children's
15 needs to receive the education that they are
16 entitled to. I don't think it's speaking out
17 of turn to say that the meetings that have
18 occurred between yourself and Dennis Walcott
19 and some other officials of the New York City
20 Department of Education have been useful, but
21 I know that we haven't arrived yet at the
22 result which we're all hoping would have been
23 in place at the beginning of the school year.
24 So having said that, I just want to
25 thank you again for being vigilant and for
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2 being so generous with your time and your
3 advice and I want you to know as we begin some
4 questions here that the needs of children who
5 have special needs, who have disabilities, is
6 something that we are very, very cognizant of
7 and will certainly be part of the overall mix
8 of things when we make recommendations. Thank
9 you for being here.
10 Any questions? Ms. Thomson?
11 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I have a
12 question but I think you've answered it. It's
13 the same question I asked Anne Marie.
14 As we grapple with this decision
15 about what should we be putting in place to
16 replace the community school board, should
17 there be such an entity, separate entity for
18 District 75?
19 MS. TRIPODI: Absolutely. We need
20 to have representation not only at the table
21 to listen to our concerns but we also need
22 somebody at the table who is going to report
23 on what's being done within the district. I
24 don't want to hear a rumor from another parent
25 that says their implementing a millimethod in
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2 K, one and two but they're not going to fifth
3 grade in a particular district. The
4 millimethod is a method that they're using in
5 P.S. 37 to help children that are severely
6 autistic. Now, we need to address all of the
7 children's needs and not just have somebody
8 listening as a sounding board, and quite
9 frankly, I don't want lip service. I want
10 something to be done that's going to
11 accommodate the children in our district,
12 whether it's going to be District 75 or even
13 District 31 for that matter. We have children
14 in District 31, special education, that
15 parents have to go to impartial hearings just
16 to get the simple things to have their
17 children accommodated and have an appropriate
18 education. This is no longer acceptable.
19 If we're going to put something in
20 place, we need to put something place that is
21 going to be accountable for all of the
22 children on Staten Island, not just your
23 general ed, and I have a general ed student.
24 By no means am I not advocating for them. You
25 will hear more testimony today in that
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2 component than you will for the children with
3 special needs, which is why we really do need
4 a very, very strong voice here.
5 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Should parents
6 be part of this?
7 MS. TRIPODI: Absolutely.
8 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Should they be
9 appointed, elected by general election or
10 should they be elected by parents?
11 MS. TRIPODI: I think elected by
12 parents. If you go by general election, it's
13 going to be who's who, let's say hi and who's
14 popular. I'm not very popular. I wouldn't
15 get that.
16 You will find an appointment will
17 then be just somebody who has to adhere to the
18 person who appointed them. I don't want
19 that. I don't want something who is going to
20 be there that's done as a favor. I want
21 somebody who wants to be there to really make
22 a difference for our children and they don't
23 have to be the most, most popular person in
24 the PTA. It needs to be somebody who is going
25 to be diligent and active just to make sure
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2 that this will get done, somebody who is going
3 to follow through and have carryover.
4 MS. CORREALE: Somebody like
5 Jackie.
6 MS. TRIPODI: No, I don't want it.
7 I'm busy.
8 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you.
9 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Assemblyman
10 Rivera?
11 ASSEMBLYMAN RIVERA: If they are
12 elected, how long should their term be?
13 Should it be the way we have it right now or
14 should there be a shorter term?
15 MS. TRIPODI: My understanding is
16 right now they have a three-year term. A
17 three-year term is fair enough for a turnover,
18 in my opinion. If you go two years, the first
19 year someone is getting their feet wet. The
20 second year somebody is getting to know what
21 is going on. The third year they have it down
22 to a science.
23 What I think could be done is that
24 you should have a type of transition period,
25 in my opinion, in which there is an overlap so
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2 that the people who are currently in place
3 could educate the ones that are coming in. I
4 don't know, it's kind of a silly idea, but so
5 that this way there is no breakdown in
6 communication. I can go in as PTA president
7 and nobody told me what's going on, I'm
8 starting from scratch. You're wasting time.
9 MS. CORREALE: Possibly in January
10 of the year before their term stops.
11 MS. TRIPODI: Does that answer your
12 question?
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me ask one
14 sort of broad question. This Task Force is
15 grappling with the issues that help to
16 restructure local community and parental input
17 in a way that would be better than what we
18 have now. We're doing this because we are
19 required by law to do this. It was part of
20 the governance law legislation that was passed
21 in June of 2002.
22 Before I consider or before we as a
23 body consider what would be better than what
24 we have, I want to better understand from your
25 perspective why it is that the current
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2 structure, when I say "the current structure,"
3 the layers of representation that currently
4 exist as the leadership teams in every
5 school. There's a President's Council.
6 There's a Federation of Staten Island PTAs.
7 There is the local community school board.
8 But with respect to children who
9 have special needs and special challenges,
10 certainly those whose educations are pursuant
11 to an IEP you have found, and you represent
12 hundreds of other parents on Staten Island,
13 that you are unable to get the attention and
14 to get the action that was needed to insure
15 that your children received an education on a
16 timely basis.
17 So my question to you is: From
18 your experience, why is it, if the thesis
19 behind my question is true, why is it that
20 with all these layers of representation you
21 are unable or I guess none of the layers that
22 existed were able to respond to your
23 children's needs? Why is that so and what
24 should we do structurally to make sure that
25 kids who are District 75 kids have the
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2 representation of the parents of those
3 children who have a representational need?
4 MS. TRIPODI: In my experience, now
5 my son gets what he needs because if my son
6 doesn't get what he needs within the first few
7 days of school I will file an official
8 grievance with the State Education Department
9 and I know to do that. Because I am diligent
10 in insuring that my son gets his needs, he
11 gets them.
12 However, mom, who I met in the
13 mall, asked me how does my son get his speech
14 therapy who hasn't gotten it in months, has
15 gone through the principal, has gone through
16 then, we have Kevin McCormack here on the
17 island who is diligent, he tries, but the
18 answer to your question is that there are too
19 many people passing the buck up the ladder and
20 then by the time you get to the top of the
21 ladder nothing gets done because now there's
22 no money. We have to wait. We don't have
23 enough personnel. You know, Mrs. Tripodi, we
24 don't always have enough OTs. You know, the
25 IEPs are wonderful in idea but, you know,
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2 there isn't the financial backing and then
3 they start crying that they don't have the
4 money to support our children.
5 If we have somebody on a board that
6 can say, you know what, let me see if I can
7 get this contract out for the RSA. We've had
8 to go for an RSA, and we went over this back
9 in Albany, the time line for a child to get
10 serviced is almost five months because you
11 have to go through this department, that
12 department. You need to have somebody who is
13 going to make a steadfast decision who can do
14 their job. If you keep going, you go to OCRS,
15 that the Office of Contractual Related
16 Services, which all the districts now are in
17 charge of, I have to go to District 75. You
18 try and get Garth White on the phone. I will
19 give you his number. You will get a machine.
20 You can try to email him. He will get back to
21 you. It goes back and forth. It took three
22 months for my son to get an adaptive chair
23 this year and the only reason he got it as
24 quickly as he did was because I pursued it
25 with the deputy superintendent.
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2 There are too many layers in my
3 opinion. This is my opinion solely. This
4 does not reflect the Staten Island Federation
5 of PTAs. This is my opinion. There are too
6 many layers of people who can do, maybe do,
7 should do, oh, I don't know if I have
8 authority over that, let me go look and then
9 it goes back to the superintendent who says,
10 you know what, this mom is a pain in the you
11 know, let's just give her what she wants, but
12 the parent who doesn't make that, not all
13 parents can be as diligent, that doesn't mean
14 those children don't have rights and it
15 doesn't mean that those children's needs
16 should not be accommodated because that parent
17 cannot make the noise that I can make or that
18 Joan can make or Anne Marie can make.
19 These children, and I say all these
20 children, have a right to get their services
21 implemented. We need a superintendency. We
22 need a task force that is going to say, and I
23 don't mean task force, I mean a school board,
24 whatever it is you want to call it, borough
25 school board, community school board,
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2 whatever, we need somebody on that board that
3 is going to be able to say, you know what,
4 Mrs. Tripodi, let me see how I can help John
5 Smith get his services in time and not, well,
6 let me get back to you, get back to you, get
7 back to you. It's five months.
8 So does that answer your question?
9 MS. CORREALE: Can I add to that
10 specifically?
11 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Sure.
12 MS. CORREALE: My son is still not
13 receiving OT. It took until about two weeks
14 ago for me to even get an RSA and that was
15 because I crashed a meeting and confronted
16 Garth Brooks --
17 MS. TRIPODI: Garth White.
18 MS. CORREALE: Garth White, and it
19 still took about a month for the RSA to come
20 in. That was only when I went to impartial.
21 Now the professionals working with
22 my son are questioning whether I should have
23 my son on medication for his hyperactivity
24 which could be addressed if he was receiving
25 the OT but he has not received that since
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2 September. So it really is a vicious cycle
3 and these children are really -- it's a
4 disservice to the children, and I agree with
5 Jackie wholeheartedly that there are way too
6 many people who can say, well, it's so and
7 so's job. Now that I have the RSA there's
8 still not a therapist.
9 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me just ask
10 you this. When you hear rumors, as we have
11 heard, that Chancellor Klein might be moving
12 in the direction to recommend a dissolution of
13 District 75, is that a good thing from your
14 point of view or not a good thing?
15 MS. CORREALE: I would like to
16 answer that. I think that as long as the
17 children receive their services, I don't
18 really care what it's called. However, the
19 rumor that I'm hearing now is that the
20 children who are in inclusion programs will be
21 absorbed into the general ed schools that they
22 are now attending. That frightens me because
23 those children will now have new school based
24 support teams to deal with, new therapists to
25 deal with and I don't think that it does a
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2 service for the children because the schools
3 that are now in control of these small
4 programs are distributed throughout different
5 schools on the island. They're so much more
6 informed about how to deal with these children
7 and how to educate these children.
8 The principal of the school that I
9 know that my son attends didn't want the class
10 there in the first place. Now if he is going
11 to be in charge of that class, I think they
12 look at even less intentions.
13 MS. TRIPODI: Can I address that
14 very quickly because I have two different
15 opinions on that. As a parent it's regardless
16 what district services my son. My son's IEP
17 will be what it is and he'll get what he
18 needs.
19 As a PTA president of a District 75
20 school, I need to express concern for this
21 because I have parents who cannot make sure
22 that their child's IEP is appropriate. I have
23 parents who receive services in District 75
24 that they would literally have to go to
25 impartials for if they were in District 31.
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2 So for those parents I would have to express
3 concern with having District 75 dissolved
4 because the District does address their
5 needs.
6 A lot of my children come to school
7 in an ambulance. We lost a child this year in
8 the beginning of November. One of our
9 students passed away. We have critically, we
10 have seriously ill children in District 75.
11 To have them absorb in the local district, I'm
12 not saying that they won't be able to, because
13 I can't make that presumption. I would say
14 that it would be difficult for them to really
15 seriously and appropriately take care of these
16 children. It would raise a concern.
17 As a PTA president I need to
18 express that because I do feel that that
19 program and those programs are specifically
20 trained to take care of a lot of the children
21 that are in District 75.
22 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, we thank
23 you very much for being with us. I think the
24 last time we had a meeting I had expressed the
25 hope that I wouldn't have to see you again,
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2 but what I meant by that was that we would
3 have resolved all the issues and all the
4 problems. Obviously there is still work to be
5 done and as long as there is work to be done,
6 we're very grateful that you continue to
7 inform us as to what the right path to take
8 is. We appreciate it.
9 MS. TRIPODI: Thank you.
10 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: May I just
11 ask a question?
12 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Yes,
13 Mr. LaVelle.
14 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: It does not
15 have to do with your testimony.
16 Did Dennis Walcott ever get back to
17 you?
18 MS. CORREALE: No.
19 MS. TRIPODI: No, but he is coming
20 to P.S. 37 tomorrow I heard.
21 MS. CORREALE: And I'm planning on
22 being there.
23 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: Thank you.
24 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
25 much.
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2 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Margaret
3 Rucci, co-president of P.S. 48 and Petrides.
4 MS. RUCCI: Hi. I'm basically a
5 novice at community school boards and what
6 they're about. This is the first year I'm
7 serving as president on two PTAs and I'm in a
8 type of catch 22 where I'm in District 31, and
9 again, at Petrides where there is basically
10 no -- it's a chancellor school.
11 I've been to a few community school
12 board meetings and basically I didn't know
13 what was going on. I felt no continuum. I
14 walked away -- I'm don't mean to be mean or
15 rude. I walked away with nothing.
16 What I would like to see in place,
17 and we can call it the same name or whatever,
18 representation from parents as you might have
19 suggested, to have them elected to the
20 position because obviously those people are
21 going to be the ones who want to participate,
22 with the overlap I thought what Jackie and
23 Joan said were great to have them overlap, but
24 also people representing each component and
25 that's where my Petrides feelings come in
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2 where we have an executive board and two
3 presidents but we have someone representing
4 the lower school from K to five. We don't
5 have a pre-K. We have someone representing
6 the middle school and someone representing the
7 high school and I guess if District 75 does
8 not become part of or someone representing
9 those children, and not just one person, I
10 think two people. This way my co-president
11 and I, we're very different, yet we work very
12 well together. We both have our own
13 personalities. Hopefully that would be
14 something that different types of people will
15 approach the bench and then work together.
16 That's all I have to say.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I think we have
18 no questions but we certainly appreciate your
19 advice, your input and the work that you have
20 been doing at P.S. 48 and Petrides. It's very
21 important and it's very important for us to
22 have on the record your experiences.
23 We thank you.
24 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you.
25 Paula Giordano and Dana Guzzo?
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2 MS. GUZZO: Hi. My name is Dana
3 Guzzo. I'm the PTA president of P.S. 3 here
4 on Staten Island. I'm also the mother of
5 three children currently attending second,
6 third and fifth grade. With all the changes
7 taking place in our school system, I am
8 pleased to have this opportunity to speak with
9 you today.
10 I'm aware as of June that the
11 community school board will be disbanded. My
12 concern is what will take its place. In my
13 opinion, parents need a forum in which to
14 voice their opinions and concerns. I feel a
15 new board should be formed similar to the
16 community school board consisting of parents
17 with children in the school system.
18 As a president of P.S. 3 PTA I have
19 the opportunity and the privilege to attend
20 monthly delegates meetings and President's
21 Council meetings. The knowledge, dedication
22 and spirit of the parents that attend these
23 meetings always impresses me. It is parents
24 like these that should make up the new group.
25 No one knows what children need more than
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2 their parents.
3 Please let's not forget to keep
4 these parents actively involved for the sake
5 of their children. Thank you for the
6 opportunity to speak to you.
7 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you.
8 MS. GIORDANO: Hi. My name is
9 Paula Giordano. I am the first VP of P.S. 3.
10 I am also with the Federation, the Staten
11 Island Delegate Federation. I have been
12 around for a while.
13 We are here today to listen to many
14 different views for many different things. We
15 do know that parents, as Mrs. Guzzo had said,
16 a community school board needs to be there
17 because when things happen, like, a lot of
18 changes occurred over the Christmas break and
19 I was reading about them in the newspaper.
20 Maybe if there was a group there with parents
21 with children in the school system, I would
22 have found out a little sooner than maybe
23 reading it in the paper, whether they were
24 conjecture or truth. It was hard to tell the
25 difference sometimes in some of those
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2 articles.
3 So I think it is extremely
4 important that we have a group, especially
5 with regards to Staten Island being in
6 District 31, being its own district, that we
7 need to address our concerns, our problems or
8 they could come back and give us information
9 from time to time, that would be really
10 wonderful, instead of reading it and not
11 knowing where it's coming from. It's always
12 good to get information from a good source
13 before we repeat it to our PTAs, before we
14 give it back to our parents.
15 There was one thing that really
16 concerned me. I listened to our Chancellor
17 Klein have an interview on the radio, and as
18 always, he is sitting there saying that the
19 parents and the children are first, but when
20 all these changes occurred, as a parent and my
21 job didn't even know it either, none of us
22 knew. So I would like to try to get back to
23 what our chancellor is saying. If the parents
24 and the children come first, maybe we should
25 be involved in some of the decisions that are
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2 made for our district and our school system.
3 Thank you.
4 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
5 very much.
6 Ms. Thomson?
7 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: When you
8 talked about the model for replacing school
9 boards and said that parents of school
10 children currently in the school system should
11 be part of that governing body or board,
12 whatever we call it, should they be elected by
13 the general population? Should they be
14 appointed by an elected official or should
15 they be elected by parents?
16 MS. GUZZO: I think they should be
17 elected by parents.
18 MS. GIORDANO: I forgot to mention,
19 it's also in my testimony, the Federation is
20 putting forth their suggestion for a
21 resolution which was passed in Federation,
22 which gives it a beautiful breakdown. I
23 support it wholeheartedly as a lot of the
24 parents in Federation. It explains that,
25 because I know with the community school board
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2 their elections were done at a different time
3 so a lot of times you didn't get people coming
4 out to vote. So in that resolution it also
5 stated to please do it at the same time
6 elections are made. So the resolution is
7 phenomenal. It will be read to you I think by
8 the Federation which breaks everything down
9 rather nicely.
10 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you.
11 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
12 both very much for arriving here today and
13 informing us of your views and for your years
14 of service on behalf of the children on Staten
15 Island. We thank you very much.
16 MS. GIORDANO: Thank you.
17 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Next is
18 Assemblyman Straniere.
19 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Thank you
20 for being here in Staten Island this
21 afternoon. I have been to every building in
22 this complex and I never was here and I can't
23 imagine a more remote location.
24 Steve, I know you're no stranger to
25 Staten Island or this complex because you were
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2 here five years ago when we had a discussion
3 at that time about improving the quality of
4 education. My colleague, John LaVelle, has
5 worked very closely with me not only in the
6 two years he has been in Albany but then we
7 served together on the Secession Commission,
8 which is I guess on sabbatical right now.
9 We gave a lot of time and
10 attention, and, Bunny, I've always enjoyed
11 working with you on the school board and my
12 colleagues from the Bronx and Queens are
13 welcome.
14 This is an issue that certainly is
15 paramount to the people of this borough. Just
16 about a year ago I held here a forum with the
17 members of the school board, with the
18 superintendent, with the parent-teacher
19 associations and discussed many of the issues
20 that are before you today. The outcome of
21 those discussions were we should be talking
22 about increasing the role and power of our
23 elected school board and not decreasing it.
24 Steve, you and I have had many
25 discussions over the years about how we can
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2 best elect people to the school boards. I
3 have sponsored a series of bills over the
4 years, some with Senator Marchi. I believe
5 John is also a cosponsor as Mrs. Connolly was
6 in the past. Certain bill would give Staten
7 Island a sense of autonomy as an independent
8 district.
9 A lot has changed in the last
10 year. With the changes that we have made, you
11 have certainly been a leader in implementing
12 changes that I think we all agree having all
13 voted for these changes are going to improve
14 education performance and accountability in
15 our system.
16 That being said, I believe school
17 boards do play an important role in this
18 city. I favor five borough school boards, and
19 I had introduced legislation about a year ago
20 to at that time on an experimental basis let
21 Staten Island be an independent school board.
22 We do elect our school board borough wide and
23 I'm suggesting that that's the appropriate
24 model for all five boroughs. It reduces the
25 administrative cost. It reduces the cost of
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2 elections, yet allows parental input. It
3 provides a forum. It provides an opportunity
4 on a regular basis for discussions and because
5 people are elected, I think there is value in
6 having members of school boards elected,
7 rather than appointed.
8 Since we would be dealing with
9 borough boards, I have proposed cumulative
10 voting, and you and I, Steve, have discussed
11 this over the years as a way of insuring
12 minority representation, which is very
13 important, and I might point out that Staten
14 Island has always had minority representation
15 on our school board under the current system
16 and we're very proud of that. We're proud of
17 the diversity that the election process has
18 brought to our school boards.
19 We're also proud of the fact that
20 we never had any sense of corruption in our
21 school boards here. What we have are nine men
22 and women who have been committed to working
23 hard and with what I think is a very bankless
24 uneconomical assignment.
25 I know Barry Kaufman is one of my
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2 community reps, is a very valued member of the
3 school board and I know all of the members
4 over the years. In the 22 years that I've in
5 the Assembly, I've enjoyed working with each
6 and every one of the elected members of this
7 board. I think it's important that they are
8 elected and that there is parental input.
9 Now, if we wanted to further cut
10 down on the cost of elections, I'm suggesting
11 perhaps we consider a four year elected term
12 in the off year, which is the coming year,
13 meaning the year before a presidential
14 election, when there are very few elected
15 offices that we really fill in the City of New
16 York. We have a district attorney here in
17 Staten Island. Some of the other boroughs, I
18 believe, have district attorneys. Sometimes
19 there will be a special election or two, but
20 it is not a crowded ballot.
21 Since we have now extended -- this
22 is not the first time we have extended our
23 elected school boards for a fourth year. The
24 idea of a four year elected school board on a
25 borough wide basis, when I call that the year
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2 before the presidential election, I think
3 would have merit, it really wouldn't clutter
4 the ballot and it would perhaps provide an
5 opportunity for the candidates as they do in
6 this borough to discuss their positions and
7 proposals on improving education, education
8 accountability.
9 We've had a history of great
10 effective superintendents chosen by our school
11 board, so I think the idea of recommendations
12 that come from the school board to guide the
13 chancellor, to influence the mayor to
14 strengthen education performance and
15 accountability is something I strongly favor.
16 As I say, Steve, I have a series of
17 bills over the years. I'll be reintroducing
18 those bills. I'm not saying they are the last
19 word but I think they provide a framework and
20 a forum for discussion in maintaining elected
21 positions that I think are important to the
22 city.
23 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well,
24 Assemblyman Straniere, Bob, my good friend,
25 first of all, I am delighted that you are here
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2 with us this afternoon. I must say that as I
3 was trying to make the trip from Manhattan to
4 Staten this morning in a great deal of
5 traffic, I was beginning to reassess my
6 position on Staten Island secession, but
7 having been here now for about three hours
8 this morning and having listened to the advice
9 and the intelligent comments from so many
10 people from Staten Island, I still believe in
11 the notion that it's good to have one city and
12 I'm happy that we do. And I'm happy that we
13 are here.
14 I just want to say that even though
15 you and I haven't always seen eye to eye, and
16 I highlight that, because on many issues we do
17 see eye to eye. I don't think any two people
18 or any two public officials ever are on
19 agreement on everything. I just want to say
20 that your constructive participation over the
21 many years that we have been privileged to be
22 colleagues together is something that I have
23 not only enjoyed but benefitted from. You and
24 I have had many discussions about education
25 for many years, and I don't mind saying for
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2 the record that some of the changes that were
3 enacted in the governance law passed by the
4 Legislature in June of 2002 were subjects that
5 you had advocated for many years. And I just
6 want to say that your involvement, your
7 participation has always been something that I
8 think has been to the overall benefit of all
9 the children of New York City, and especially
10 those that you represent on Staten Island.
11 One question I have I guess. Your
12 recommendation to this Task Force goes in -- I
13 won't refer to it as one extreme because I
14 think that there are a variety of different
15 permutations that are reasonable, that are
16 possible, all of which this task for is going
17 to consider. The one that you had mentioned
18 this morning that you advocate as one that
19 would, in essence, reduce the number of school
20 boards from 32 to five.
21 We have heard testimony that sort
22 of goes in the other direction as well. And
23 not assigning any great merit to one or the
24 other, I just want you to sort of critique the
25 two various proposals.
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2 The other that we heard sort of
3 goes in an opposite direction is one that
4 would make, to some extent, coterminous school
5 boards with planning boards. As we know,
6 there are 59 local planning boards and there
7 are those who have advocated that community
8 representation would be best served if we
9 actually made the areas of the boundaries
10 smaller, so some have recommended making them
11 coterminous with planning boards.
12 Yours goes to a larger area of
13 representation. They both have merit but I'm
14 curious to know why you have sort of
15 gravitated towards the larger model as opposed
16 to a smaller model.
17 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Those are
18 very fair questions, Mr. Chairman. Let me
19 first state that Staten Island being one
20 single district is something that has worked
21 very well for this borough. There are elected
22 members that see their responsibilities as not
23 limited to any particular neighborhood or a
24 particular section of Staten Island but they
25 look at our entire borough and they make their
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2 recommendations and in the past have allocated
3 resources through a constituency that is an
4 entire island rather than pitting neighborhood
5 against neighborhood. So that's our
6 experience and it has worked well. And I
7 might add we would be I guess the second
8 largest district in the state if we were
9 standing alone with the number of students and
10 schools that we have here.
11 Steve, one of the issues you and I
12 have grappled with over the years is the fact
13 that the lines for the school districts were
14 created over 30 years ago in 1969. Every
15 three or four years when the subject of new
16 school boundaries and elections have come up
17 we have always been stymied in our ability to
18 reapportion, if you will, those districts. In
19 fact, the last debate was really more of a
20 discussion because you say we tend to have the
21 same objective in mind and sometimes we have
22 different points of view in how we get there.
23 We know how difficult it has been
24 in 30 plus years to even change existing
25 districts. We haven't done it every ten years
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2 like we do with legislative districts. That
3 becomes a problem. We are a city that's
4 undergoing great change and movement of
5 communities and the rebuilding of new
6 communities and so many new people coming into
7 our city. We have the highest number of
8 immigrants now in one hundred years. I think
9 over 40 percent of the people now in New York
10 City were born outside the United States.
11 We're absorbing something like 25,000 plus
12 children every year coming into our school
13 system.
14 We have fiscal considerations that
15 we cannot ignore. We have the mayor having
16 articulated a policy or point of view to
17 eliminate all school boards as wasteful,
18 excessive and not adding to education,
19 accountability or performance. I disagree
20 with that point of view and I expressed that a
21 year ago to the mayor when actually John
22 LaVelle and I had lunch with Mayor Bloomberg
23 here in Staten Island his first Saturday in
24 office when we began the discussions on school
25 boards.
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2 So I don't think organizing school
3 districts would really serve the purposes and
4 the objectives that we want to achieve in our
5 own experience in how difficult this is. I
6 think five elected boards, if you want perhaps
7 more than nine members in the larger boroughs,
8 I'm willing to support whatever the
9 legislators of the other boroughs need that's
10 appropriate for their borough.
11 If the decision would be that the
12 legislators in other boroughs want more than a
13 single school district for their borough, I
14 think you ladies and gentlemen are in the best
15 position to determine. In fact, Queens with
16 almost three million people, Brooklyn with
17 almost the same, Bronx a million and a half,
18 Manhattan with a million seven, a million
19 eight. So perhaps a nine member school board
20 doesn't provide enough diversity to the
21 election process for the larger boroughs. So
22 if you wanted to elect perhaps some more
23 people of the additional neighborhoods, I
24 still prefer a single board for each borough
25 for the reasons I've outlined.
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2 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: And that board
3 would be an elected board?
4 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: An elected
5 board, yes. Again, I think the time to do
6 those elections, Mr. Chairman, would be the
7 off year when there are very few other
8 positions being contested on the ballot. We
9 have essentially a clean ballot, and there is
10 the opportunity then for people to really
11 focus on the men and women their going to
12 elect for the school board because I know in
13 this borough the only election we have is for
14 the district attorney and sometimes we'll get
15 a judgeship where there might be a special
16 election. That's okay, too, but it's
17 essentially a clean ballot.
18 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: So you would
19 elect do it for four year terms and you would
20 do it in the fourth year, the off year in
21 November?
22 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Yes.
23 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Okay, great.
24 Ms. Thomson and then Mr. Rivera.
25 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Are you
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2 suggesting that there be five independent
3 school districts?
4 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: No.
5 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: It would still
6 be the same chancellor. It wouldn't be a
7 giant leap at all for Staten Island because
8 Staten Island has one board now but certainly
9 for the other boroughs across the city, it
10 could look as if it's a diminished role for
11 the community and the parents. If you had,
12 you know, eight boards and now you only have
13 one board to go to.
14 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: What's
15 preferable to the mayor is having no boards.
16 And as I said perhaps you would want to elect
17 more than nine people, or whatever the number
18 is, in the larger boroughs so you could
19 accommodate a little more diversity within the
20 boroughs but I still think the borough boards
21 for the limited powers that we give them are
22 the way to address education accountability
23 import and parental involvement in effective
24 matters.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Mr. Rivera?
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2 ASSEMBLYMAN RIVERA: You're not
3 suggesting, just to follow up on a questions
4 that you were just asked, that we eliminate
5 the current system that we have now, which is
6 the system that replaced the old Board of Ed,
7 but that continues to exist that instead of
8 having local school boards, we have borough
9 boards, am I correct?
10 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Yes.
11 ASSEMBLYMAN RIVERA: Now who would
12 these borough boards interact with? Would
13 there be a super superintendent that they
14 would interact with or would they interact
15 with the current -- forgetting about Staten
16 Island for the time being. As you know, in
17 the Bronx we have about eight or nine separate
18 superintendents and the same is true of almost
19 every other borough, if not more.
20 Would this borough board interact
21 with each of these superintendents or would
22 they interact with a borough commissioner?
23 What would be the --
24 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Well, there
25 has been some suggestion, my colleague, that
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2 we are going to have I guess a deputy
3 chancellor for each borough. At least that's
4 what's been spoken about.
5 ASSEMBLYMAN RIVERA: Would you
6 favor that?
7 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Well, that
8 seems to be the direction of where we're going
9 policywise so we ought to give it a chance.
10 The idea of having a single deputy chancellor
11 for each borough, in this case it's our
12 chancellor -- I mean, our superintendent
13 rather, who I think performs that function
14 very, very well.
15 So my reference point in how to
16 have effective education planning and policy
17 accountability is based on my Staten Island
18 experience but I recognize the fact that other
19 boroughs with larger populations and perhaps
20 more diverse neighborhoods may have other
21 accommodations, such as when you deal with the
22 fact that you have eight superintendents I
23 guess now. Whether that's going to continue
24 or not I guess is somewhat of an open
25 question.
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2 ASSEMBLYMAN RIVERA: So you would
3 centralize all those superintendencies?
4 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: I'm not
5 making those decisions. I think that's a
6 decision that's going to be made by the new
7 chancellor and the mayor as it seems to me
8 they attempt to consolidate the accountability
9 in fewer individuals for accountability
10 purposes. So I think that's where they're
11 moving, to eliminate the idea that we're going
12 to have I guess 31 different district
13 superintendents in the city. I think the
14 direction is to have five in the city from
15 what I read, from what I hear.
16 These are not moral issues. These
17 are things that experience perhaps teaches us.
18 We see maybe this will work a little better.
19 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Reddington?
20 MS. REDDINGTON: Yes. I would like
21 to thank you very much for coming and
22 testifying. I've been reading an article in
23 the local paper about the future of our
24 superintendent, and one of the questions that
25 I have and many of the parents that I have
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2 been inundated with the phone calls about,
3 what is going to happen when you put in the
4 single superintendent or the deputy
5 chancellor, or whatever the name might be,
6 that person is not knowledgeable of the
7 elementary level or the intermediate level and
8 if it is a lower level superintendent even,
9 they are not knowledgeable of the high
10 school.
11 My question to you is: When we
12 generalize all of that into one person, I
13 would imagine, and the phone calls that I
14 receive, that the parents will feel that they
15 are not being serviced.
16 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Well, we do
17 have a history in the city of differentiating
18 our elementary and our high school level for
19 supervision and supervisory personnel. I
20 think there is value. I think the high
21 schools are quite different in the nature of
22 the student body, the programs, the objectives
23 than our elementary schools.
24 Whether we have, in fact, a
25 district superintendent or a deputy chancellor
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2 for high schools in each borough, that makes
3 some sense to me, to differentiate it from the
4 elementary schools.
5 MS. REDDINGTON: You would be in
6 agreement because right now they want to just
7 put one in.
8 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: I think
9 that there is a difference. I was a
10 substitute teacher in elementary from
11 kindergarten through senior high school but
12 being a teacher is not being an
13 administrator.
14 The idea of having a deputy
15 superintendent or deputy chancellor or
16 superintendent for the high schools in each
17 borough and another one for the elementary
18 schools makes sense to me, at least on paper
19 until you can show me otherwise.
20 MS. REDDINGTON: Originally my
21 question was going to be the school board or
22 the borough boards that you are advocating, we
23 as a school board member have lost much of our
24 power since 1996. We were able to do so much
25 more. And to be very honest with you,
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2 whatever our constituency wanted, this is what
3 we did. This is why we were elected.
4 So now what I ask you, if we bring
5 back borough boards, if that's the way we go,
6 what you empower these boards or are we going
7 to be another type of board that we sit there
8 and we ask our parents to dep because we --
9 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: When I had
10 to cast that vote in 1996 to diminish the
11 power of our boards, I did it very, very
12 reluctantly. If you recall at that time, I
13 said to our school board, to our PTAs, our
14 board works well, but we have 31 boards in
15 this city and we sort of have to have one size
16 fits all in this case. I was disappointed
17 that we had to make those changes to diminish
18 the power of our board.
19 When I held my forum a year ago
20 here at the complex, all of the testimony I
21 got was that we should be strengthening the
22 powers of our board rather than diminishing
23 them. I think we can find a happy medium that
24 gives the board more powers than they have
25 right now but perhaps less than they had
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2 before.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We've been
4 joined by Robin Brown who has a question.
5 MS. BROWN: My question is just
6 thinking about the roles that superintendents
7 currently play. It just reminds me of a
8 conversation that took place with a parent
9 last week. The parent had an issue and she
10 was not able to go to the board because the
11 community school board does not have those
12 type of powers. She went to the
13 superintendent's level and the superintendents
14 report directly to chancellors. She made
15 phone calls to the chancellor's office and was
16 politely told this is operator number five and
17 the chancellor does not take calls from
18 parents.
19 So if we're thinking about --
20 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: They don't
21 take them from legislators all the time
22 either.
23 MS. BROWN: Well, that's another
24 story, but anyway, just thinking about this
25 and putting this into perspective, we do one
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2 borough board. I'm actually from Brooklyn and
3 Brooklyn currently has 12 community school
4 districts and one high school, actually two
5 high school superintendents because they're
6 part of BASIS and also Brooklyn Heights
7 schools.
8 I was just thinking, if you make
9 this one board how do you address the needs of
10 so many through one board and also
11 understanding through the conversation that
12 took place last week with this parent, that
13 superintendents do play some sort of role and
14 there has to be some sort of power retained at
15 the local community level. How does this one
16 borough fit for communities that have so many
17 diversities?
18 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Well,
19 Robin, I think you are making the case for
20 continuing our local school boards so there is
21 this forum, there is this opportunity. I know
22 here in Staten Island our school board members
23 all are assigned a certain number of schools
24 that they are responsible for. And so the
25 parents in those schools have a school board
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2 member who they can go to directly when they
3 have an issue or a problem.
4 What I was suggesting was that in
5 the larger borough perhaps you want more than
6 nine members elected to your borough school
7 board because there is more diversity and the
8 boroughs are so much larger and the number of
9 students and schools you have to deal with.
10 My experience and my point of view
11 here is in Staten Island and a nine member
12 elected school board works well for our
13 community. What I had said was I would defer
14 to my colleagues in the other four boroughs as
15 to what they believe works best for them.
16 What I'm suggesting is basically elected
17 school boards, the election be held in the off
18 year on the regular ballot and that we empower
19 the school boards to do what they are doing
20 and perhaps a little bit more because that
21 again was based on a forum that I held a year
22 ago with the parents and members of the school
23 board in this borough.
24 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
25 much, Bob. Once again we, as always, we have
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2 appreciated your insight, look forward to
3 working with you during what will undoubtedly
4 be a very challenging year but hopefully we
5 are all up to it collectively.
6 ASSEMBLYMAN STRANIERE: Thank you
7 all, and Steve, again for your leadership in
8 education. The children and all of the city
9 really are enriched by your commitment.
10 And Co-chair Thompson, thank you
11 for your fine work.
12 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: We would like
13 to invite Lila Levey who was scheduled to
14 speak this morning and then we'll take a short
15 break and return with the next group of
16 speakers who have signed up now.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Before
18 Miss Levey begins could we have a little quiet
19 in the back. Even whispers tend to resonate
20 all the way up front, so if we could have your
21 attention and please keep the conversations
22 very, very quiet.
23 MS. LEVEY: I first just want to
24 thank you for the opportunity to hear me. My
25 name is Lila Levey and I represent or one of
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2 the people who represents the Staten Island
3 Federation of PTAs. For anyone who doesn't
4 know what that is --
5 MS. THOMSON: Well, we know now.
6 MS. LEVEY: -- it's the umbrella
7 group that covers every single PTA on Staten
8 Island with no exceptions, all levels,
9 District 75, et cetera.
10 We came up with some resolutions
11 with regard to what would replace community
12 school boards and I'm just going to read
13 them. This will be quick.
14 Whereas, children and their parents
15 are the ultimate consumer of public school
16 educational services and are immediately
17 affected by the quality of these services and
18 the parents of public school children must
19 therefore necessarily assume an integral and
20 indispensable role in decision making at every
21 level of public school system.
22 And, whereas, the Staten Island
23 Federation of Parent Teacher Associations has
24 recognized as and acknowledged to be the sole
25 duly elected and fully representational voice
EN-DE REPORTING, A Spherion Agency
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2 with the parents of the public school children
3 on Staten Island now, therefore, be it hereby
4 resolved that the Staten Island Federation of
5 Parent Teacher Association support the
6 development of borough boards furnishing
7 parents, educators and administrators a local
8 presence and an ability to influence education
9 decisions.
10 It is further resolved that the
11 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
12 Associations require that at least half plus
13 one of the members at any borough board be
14 parents of children currently enrolled in a
15 public school of that borough.
16 And it is further resolved that the
17 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
18 Associations require that candidates for seats
19 on the borough boards be elected thereto at
20 triennial elections held on Election Day in
21 November, voting being on voting machines in
22 accordance with the provisions of title two of
23 article seven of the election law, each voter
24 being entitled to cast one vote for each
25 candidate to a maximum of, we're not sure how
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2 many votes, with voters being unable to cast
3 more than one vote for any one candidate. The
4 X number of candidates receiving the greatest
5 number of votes when ballots are counted in
6 accordance with the provisions of article nine
7 of the election law being elected.
8 And it is further resolved that the
9 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
10 Associations support the imposition of term
11 limits on borough board seats with members
12 having the right to run at the completion of
13 their first three-year term for no more than
14 one additional three-year term.
15 It is further resolved that the
16 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
17 Associations require that any citywide or more
18 than one borough superintendency be within the
19 jurisdiction of a borough board thus causing
20 District 75, BASIS, alternative high school
21 and the chancellor's district schools be part
22 of the boroughwide governance process.
23 And it is further resolved that the
24 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
25 Association require that the borough boards be
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2 granted full and complete budget and
3 curriculum related information for all
4 districts, superintendencies within their
5 purview.
6 And it is further resolved that the
7 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
8 Association support the right of the borough
9 boards to review, evaluate and approve or veto
10 the proposed annual budget of all districts
11 within their purview.
12 And it is further resolved that the
13 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
14 Association support the right of the borough
15 boards to review, evaluate and approve or veto
16 the annual proposed comprehensive education
17 plan for all districts within their purview.
18 And it is further resolved that the
19 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
20 Association requires that the borough boards
21 be responsible for the selection and
22 evaluation of district superintendents whose
23 appointments and evaluation shall continue
24 under current processes thus insuring that the
25 parents of public school children continue to
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2 be represented in the appointment and
3 evaluation processes.
4 And it is further resolved that the
5 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
6 Association support the right of the borough
7 board to participate in the process of
8 planning the educational policy of all
9 districts within their purview.
10 And it is further resolved that the
11 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
12 Associations Association support the right of
13 the borough boards to require that
14 superintendents deliver a monthly report
15 regarding the state of their districts at the
16 borough board's monthly public forum.
17 And it is further resolved that the
18 Staten Island Federation of Parent Teacher
19 Association insists and demands that any new
20 governance plan, statutes, laws and/or
21 regulations leave in place and intact as they
22 now are Parent Associations, Parent Teacher
23 Associations, President's Council, the
24 Chancellor's Parent Advisory Committee, School
25 Leadership Teams and the C30 and C37
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2 Committees for selection of supervisors and
3 superintendents.
4 I thank you.
5 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
6 very much for being here with us this morning.
7 I heard much testimony already about the work
8 and the effectiveness of the Federation and we
9 may have a question or two.
10 Ms. Thomson?
11 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I guess the
12 second resolve, at least half plus one of the
13 members be parents of children currently
14 enrolled in the public school. Who should the
15 other members be?
16 MS. LEVEY: I would imagine it
17 would be anybody who pays taxes in the
18 borough, in the area that the borough board
19 covers.
20 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: But both would
21 be elected by the general public, not the
22 parents elected by parents?
23 MS. LEVEY: We talked about that.
24 I believe that we, and I might be corrected on
25 this, that we came down on the side of the
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2 general public electing all members.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I would, just
4 for the sake of the record, as they say, this
5 issue has come up of the voting method and a
6 more direct method of voting to replace
7 proportional voting methods that we had for
8 the last three years. This has come up at
9 other hearings that we have had and one of the
10 things that I just mentioned for the
11 edification of the witnesses proposing the
12 direct voting of the public is that we
13 actually, "we" the Legislature, several years
14 ago tried to reform the system of voting to
15 get away from proportional voting to get to a
16 more direct form of voting where people voted
17 for an individual and the individual who got
18 the most votes, like most elections, were the
19 winners.
20 The voting system has to be
21 approved by the Justice Department. Certainly
22 the voting system in Manhattan, Brooklyn and
23 the Bronx is under the jurisdiction of the
24 Voting Rights Act. And interestingly enough,
25 the Justice Department made a ruling that the
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2 change that the Legislature had adopted,
3 signed into law by the governor, would
4 actually be violative, in their view, the
5 Justice Department's view, of electing
6 individuals from minority constituencies and
7 invalidated the direct form of voting and made
8 a ruling that proportional voting actually
9 wasn't promoting the greatest diversity and
10 possibility for minority representation.
11 So I only say that because we all
12 have to be mindful of the fact that when it
13 comes to a voting system, that not only has to
14 be ultimately approved by the Legislature but
15 it has to be approved by the Justice
16 Department. And their ruling two or three
17 years ago surprised many of us when we
18 actually tried to get to a one person, one
19 vote system.
20 So that's something we all need to
21 be mindful of.
22 MS. LEVEY: May I just ask a
23 question?
24 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Certainly.
25 MS. LEVEY: Is there any appeal
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2 from the Justice Department decision?
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Is there an
4 appeal from it, no, there is not. That is the
5 ruling unless, I suppose, somebody wanted to
6 bring a case before the United States Supreme
7 Court and that was not tried, but aside from
8 that, there is no appeal from the Justice
9 Department's determination on these matters.
10 MS. LEVEY: Thank you for
11 clarifying that.
12 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, we thank
13 you very much and, again, I just want to
14 observe that we have heard much about the
15 Staten Island Federation today, and we thank
16 you for the work that you have done with that
17 very important organization.
18 We have several additional people.
19 Let me just mention that we are going to hear
20 from Joan McKeever-Thomas and I think one or
21 two parents who had arrived as few minutes
22 ago. After that we are going to take a short
23 recess for lunch so everyone can make their
24 plans, but let me go to Terri Thomson.
25 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Joan
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2 McKeever-Thomas.
3 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: Good
4 afternoon, everyone. My name is Joan
5 McKeever-Thomas. I am president of the Staten
6 Island Federation of PTAs and a Staten Island
7 parent representative to the Department of
8 Education's Panel for Educational Policy.
9 I would like to take a few minutes
10 of your time to express my opinions concerning
11 the dissolution of community school board. My
12 first point is that there must be a
13 replacement for the school boards at the local
14 level. The New York City school system is too
15 large not to have a local presence where
16 parents and community can come and voice
17 their educational concerns that will be
18 addressed in a timely fashion.
19 Many times issues arise that are
20 time sensitive and an answer is needed
21 immediately. If parents no longer have a
22 voice at the local level it will only
23 exacerbate matters trying to navigate the
24 larger system to get the answer or the help
25 needed. It could very easily compromise their
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2 child's education and we see all too often how
3 every moment matters in trying to educate our
4 children.
5 The next point I would like to
6 address is that this new local board to be
7 created needs to encompass the entire public
8 school system on Staten Island. No longer is
9 it plausible to have a board that only
10 addresses the issues at the elementary and
11 intermediate schools. The present community
12 school board's purview is thus and it has
13 created problems in the past. This point was
14 hammered home on Staten Island when there was
15 no place for the parents of District 75
16 students to go locally to speak about issues,
17 problems and concerns. District 75 parents
18 have been forced to go to First Avenue in
19 Manhattan, and parents of alternative setting
20 schools and high schools needed to go to 110
21 Livingston to address the old Board of
22 Education when they had a question or a
23 problem.
24 The Staten Island Federation of
25 PTAs fought for years against this
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2 discrimination and finally last year District
3 75 supervising principal Kevin McCormack was
4 assigned to attend community school board
5 meetings. Whether right or wrong and for a
6 variety of reasons, the reality of the
7 situation is that citizens of Staten Island
8 have difficulty traveling to other parts of
9 the city. Parents of students in citywide
10 programs now have a voice on Staten Island and
11 are greatly relieved.
12 The next point to be addressed is
13 that the composition of this new board should
14 be an odd number and needs to be predominantly
15 parents. Who is best to serve the children of
16 our public school system than the parents who
17 live it every day. Parents are more sensitive
18 to the workings of the school system because
19 they see first hand what works and what
20 doesn't.
21 However, I feel there are other
22 people out there who have valuable experience
23 to offer in this newly created board and
24 should have the opportunity to do so. Whoever
25 serves on this new board needs to be closely
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2 monitored. And a system of accountability and
3 evaluation is crucial for the success of this
4 new endeavor. No longer can a community
5 school board or its replacement be the spring
6 board for people who have hidden agendas or
7 just trying to further their own personal
8 careers at the expense of our children. No
9 longer can it be tolerated that when a member
10 is elected or selected that they can sit back
11 and do nothing because now the job is theirs
12 and they can't be touched.
13 This new Department of Education's
14 goal is to make sure that everyone, students,
15 parents, teachers, administrations, districts
16 will now be made accountable. The mayor and
17 the chancellor have stated that the new DOE is
18 about children first. We must make sure that
19 anyone or anything remotely tied to the
20 Department of Education is accountable also.
21 However, all of this will be a mute point if
22 this new team has no teeth or power to
23 advocate on behalf of our children.
24 If the members of this new board
25 are to be elected, it should be done in
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2 November and follows the same rules as any
3 other election. In the past, having the
4 voting in May using proportionate voting made
5 the process confusing and probably was the
6 major reason for absentee of voter turnout.
7 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Of course, I
8 agree with what you said also.
9 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: Finally,
10 there has been a lot of discussion about using
11 the members of the local school leadership
12 teams to make up a composition of this new
13 board. I have my reservations about this
14 plan. School leadership teams were created
15 to give more autonomy to the individual
16 schools and to elect teams who work
17 collegially in determining the educational
18 path of that school.
19 School leadership teams can work
20 but not without a lot of support, nurturing
21 and a budget. As the rest of the city, school
22 leadership teams in State Island are working
23 but not at the same level in every school.
24 It is not consistent at all.
25 Lately the fad seems to be look to
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2 the members of the school leadership teams to
3 fill the gap wherever needed. I question the
4 wisdom of using school leadership teams in
5 their present form to supply the person power
6 for these new teams.
7 On Staten Island this is the second
8 year in a row, due to budget cuts, that school
9 leadership teams have had access to no money,
10 either for stipends or for training and
11 materials for the team. If using school
12 leadership members to fill in at this local
13 level becomes a reality, it can only happen
14 successfully with a great deal of mandated,
15 and I stress mandated training, and
16 professional development to make any of these
17 team members capable of taking on a new task
18 like this one.
19 It seemed only a short time ago
20 that everyone was very interested in
21 reflecting the diversity of each school and
22 this rarely, if ever, enters the picture at
23 the school leadership team level.
24 I thank you for your time this day
25 and I wish you luck as you gather your
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2 testimony and make your final report and
3 recommendations. Please keep in mind that
4 the decisions made will directly and
5 indirectly impact our most precious commodity,
6 our children as they make their way towards
7 becoming the future of this great country.
8 Thank you.
9 ASSEMBLYMAN SANDERS: Thank you
10 very much.
11 Assemblyman LaVelle?
12 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: Joan, thank
13 you very much for coming. I would like to say
14 the borough president started our morning off
15 and his testimony was basically asking us to
16 follow a model of the Staten Island
17 Federation.
18 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: Kudos to the
19 borough president
20 .
21 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: I think that
22 the penalty could use, being you are the
23 president of the Federation, could use a
24 little bit of an education from you about the
25 Federation. Can you tell us very briefly the
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2 history, how it is structured, et cetera.
3 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: The Staten
4 Island Federation of PTAs is 76 years old. It
5 started in 1927 when eight mothers in hats and
6 gloves got together and for ten years had to
7 meet secretly because the Board of Education
8 was not happy with them doing that until they
9 were finally recognized and could come out in
10 public. From that moment on they have been
11 fighting for the education and for the need of
12 the children on Staten Island, and many of the
13 same things that they were fighting for back
14 then, we are fighting for today, new schools,
15 overcrowding, that kind of a thing.
16 Our Federation is based on we
17 encompass every school on Staten Island,
18 including Petrides, which is a chancellor's
19 school. Anyone outside District 31 and the
20 district and BASIS superintendencies, the
21 District 75 alternative setting, chancellor's
22 district, we allow six delegates, two
23 delegates for alternates from every school.
24 We have monthly delegate assemblies where
25 presidents and delegates come with their
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2 issues. They come to find the latest
3 information. The officers in the executive
4 board worked tirelessly throughout the month
5 to go to every meeting to get the most
6 up-to-date information to bring to the
7 delegates. And then, in turn, hopefully, the
8 presidents go back and give that information
9 to the local level.
10 We are different from President's
11 Council, although I must say we are not, and I
12 use this term loosely, recognized by the old
13 Board of Education. We are extremely
14 respected throughout the city and are getting
15 more and more phone calls each day, just like
16 this, people asking how they make up the
17 composition, what we do, because it works a
18 heck of a lot better than President's
19 Council. We also do have President's Council
20 on Staten Island which are part of the
21 Federation and we work hand in hand. They go
22 to the CPAC meetings and whatever and report
23 back. So we work very much side by side for
24 the parents and the children of Staten Island.
25 ASSEMBLYMAN SANDERS: Robin Brown.
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2 MS. BROWN: I just have a question
3 in terms of the parent groups. Where do you
4 go usually to receive information to share
5 with other parents?
6 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: From the
7 Federation level?
8 MS. BROWN: From the Federation
9 level.
10 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: We make sure
11 that we get information from CPAC, thank you,
12 Robin. We also are constantly speaking with
13 legislators on any kinds of meetings that are
14 going on in Staten Island in the different
15 districts. That is where we get our
16 information.
17 MS. BROWN: You mentioned that you
18 have representation from every school on the
19 island. How do you go about making sure that
20 you have representation from every school on
21 the island and making sure that every part of
22 the island is heard from at your Federation
23 meetings?
24 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: We make sure
25 by the fact that we have been doing this for a
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2 very, very long time. This year what I have
3 instituted is my officers are liaisons. We
4 have a group of liaison schools, kind of like
5 a community school board does. So we are
6 always in contact if they are not coming to a
7 meeting. If they have a problem, they know
8 that the parent presence in Staten Island when
9 it comes to education is Federation. They
10 have our phone number. We just started our
11 new web site and so it's known on Staten
12 Island of where to get the information, so
13 it's kind of a two-way kind of communication.
14 MS. BROWN: In terms of getting
15 issues resolved, do you go to your community
16 school board? Do you go directly to the
17 superintendent or do you go --
18 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: It depends on
19 the issue, it depends on the question. The
20 Federation also has monthly meetings with our
21 superintendent, of District, with our
22 superintendent of BASIS. We glean from many,
23 many different ways to get issues done. We'll
24 go to our legislators. John LaVelle has been
25 extremely wonderful to the Federation and
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2 helping us in our cause.
3 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you so
4 much for your work on behalf of our children
5 and thank you so much for your testimony and
6 your work in the Federation.
7 We are grappling with what does the
8 structure look like in the end. What would we
9 recommend. There's no foregone conclusions
10 here. We're really open and we're listening
11 across the city.
12 On one hand do you say the group
13 should be, the body should be predominantly a
14 majority count and they should be elected by
15 the general public.
16 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: That's what
17 Federation's view is. That's why I did not
18 want to read the resolution, because I do have
19 selection and election I know where
20 Assemblyman Sanders was saying about
21 proportionate voting and it becomes such a big
22 problem, but we really do need to preserve
23 that diversity, so wonder if we really should
24 do an election or it should be a selection
25 process where we could also insure diversity,
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2 because diversity seems to be tossed to the
3 side here.
4 My real concern also though is what
5 is on paper and what is reality. You know,
6 I've been doing this over 11 years now and I'm
7 sitting here with my son home sick so I could
8 do this. So we really do need to get down to
9 the nitty-gritty now. And we've got to do the
10 right thing by the case. It's not a pat
11 answer or a statement, although I will be
12 saying it on my death bed I'm sure. But we
13 need to -- the reality is that accountability
14 seems to be the buzz word of this year.
15 Parents need to be accountable and that's an
16 issue that truly needs to be addressed by the
17 new Department of Education.
18 But we need something that is very
19 time sensitive also. You know, I don't want
20 to see somebody elected and then can't get
21 them out because they're not doing their job.
22 I mean, right now we have someone on our
23 previous school board for a variety of reasons
24 is not being sensitive to what is happening.
25 We still have this year that we need to live
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2 through and we need to be right there for our
3 children. So maybe a selection process might
4 be a better thing because then we could have a
5 tool where someone is not doing what they are
6 supposed to be doing, we could get rid of them
7 and get somebody else who would.
8 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I guess when
9 you talk about selection -- let's talk about
10 the models. There's election by the general
11 public. There is election by parents, PTA
12 presidents, borough president's council or
13 whatever doing the election and then there is
14 appointment or selection by whoever, again,
15 whether it be, again, a parent or an elected
16 official.
17 The second part of your statement
18 talks about, and you just mentioned it as
19 well, people with hidden agendas who are there
20 for their own personal careers. I'm reminded,
21 it just sort of popped into my mind a week or
22 two ago, of when school boards first came
23 about and in my neighborhood there was
24 slates. There was a democratic club slate.
25 There was the Yeshiva slate. There was the
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2 Catholic school slate. There was a UFT
3 slate. I don't know that that was really what
4 anybody ever intended to happen. It became a
5 very political process and you voted the slate
6 depending on your loyalty. Since then, of
7 course, there's been a lot of changes and I
8 think especially in the last four or five
9 years, there was probably less interest by
10 people of running in many districts across the
11 city. You have nine members and eight people
12 running for that seat and that was
13 problematic.
14 Anyway, I'm going on and on.
15 How do you look at that when you
16 have the issue of election that you have these
17 other issues out there and sometimes when the
18 elections get you to where you don't want to
19 be, you might have people who are
20 disingenuous?
21 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: I think a lot
22 of it is an education on the part of we need
23 our educational system to be about our
24 children. It can't be about politics. It
25 can't be about people's careers and all that
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2 kind of stuff. And I know, I mean, this is
3 what we've talked about always for years, that
4 if we can only get that into the mind set of
5 everyone, I think we would really be running
6 on all jets.
7 I don't have the answers, but I see
8 the way, you know, we have community school
9 boards right now for three years at a time,
10 proportional voting in May. I know my first
11 go around I was like, okay, this is what I
12 have to do, in May you've got to do this. A
13 lot of people don't think like the way the
14 mothers in this room do.
15 So if it's going to make it easier
16 in November a straight election, but then you
17 get into the politics of it all and that
18 really needs to go by the wayside. The
19 children need their own union or something
20 here because they are the least -- they are
21 the ones that always go by the wayside.
22 I don't pretend that with all these little
23 titles I have to know the answer but I would
24 just like to see some kind of selection
25 process that is very time sensitive that if
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2 someone is not doing their job, they're gone.
3 You know what, we at Federation,
4 you know, we do our thing. Our PTAs are
5 mandated to death, and if an executive board
6 member does not do their job, you're out. I
7 want to see the same thing here.
8 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Reddington,
9 then Ms. Brown.
10 MS. REDDINGTON: Thank you very
11 much, Joan for your testimony and for all your
12 hard work that you do for all the children of
13 Staten Island.
14 Joan, one of the things you said,
15 you know, we're trying to make decisions on
16 what works, what doesn't work and how can we
17 incorporate this into this new body that we're
18 going to hopefully have and I know that on
19 Staten Island I feel that one of the things
20 that you elaborated on is the fact that there
21 is a tremendous amount of communication and
22 you and your staff, you know, and your
23 executive voice, I know you have people who
24 attend our advisory meetings, school board
25 members have. Mine happens to be cafeteria
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2 transportation, which are always very well
3 attended because of the tuition. Most parents
4 are concerned what they're eating and how are
5 they getting to and from school.
6 I know that we want to share our
7 communications with the other boroughs and
8 we're trying to figure out how is that going
9 to be done. One of the questions that I have
10 is how do we share making sure that every
11 school has representation? I know they do
12 because they are always there and I see them,
13 but how can we share that with the other
14 boroughs?
15 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: That's true.
16 The bottom line is, even though we have good
17 communication and we do have very good
18 attendance at our delegate assemblies, our PTA
19 meetings are still, you know, I'm a member of
20 the Curtis High School PTA. We have 2,700
21 students. At high school we have 50, 60
22 people at a meeting, which is phenomenal, but
23 when you think, there's 2,700 parents out
24 there.
25 We are never reaching the parents
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2 that we need to reach. And there really needs
3 to be a change of mind set that everybody has
4 to -- parents -- we just came from our
5 executive board, we could still be there for a
6 couple of days talking about how parents
7 really do need to take the reigns now and take
8 back control of their children to be a part of
9 this educational system.
10 I mean, parents are not involved
11 for a variety of reasons. It's not just
12 because they work. It's many, many, many,
13 many reasons. We have not figured out how to
14 really do that parent involvement piece,
15 because if we did, we would be millionaires in
16 the Bahamas somewhere with drinks with
17 umbrellas.
18 MS. REDDINGTON: I agree, Joan.
19 And one of the platforms I remember going on
20 ten years ago was the fact to give parents the
21 right to decide
22 on what they want for their children.
23 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: What we use
24 right now, our organization has a delegate
25 which is a newsletter that goes out to about
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2 400 people. We just started our web site
3 which we will be doing ribbon cutting ceremony
4 in April trying very, very hard to work on
5 that.
6 We have a delegate assembly. We
7 have community meetings. We are very
8 sensitive to President's Council, make sure
9 that they get to CPAC, whatever other
10 information we are not hearing about.
11 We feel we have covered everywhere,
12 but, again, we are not. I believe the amount
13 of outreach that has gone out for the children
14 for a storm for tomorrow evening, I'm
15 really -- I started out being worried about
16 it, coconvening the meeting. Now I'm very
17 interested to see how many parents come
18 because the amount of outreach has been
19 phenomenal, phenomenal.
20 It is an issue that we always are
21 grappling with.
22 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Brown?
23 MS. BROWN: My only question was
24 about equity and equity is different from
25 being equal. Usually equity would be a filter
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2 that would work. You give a little more to
3 those who are more needing. There are some
4 who have proposed borough boards for making
5 community school districts coterminous with
6 community planning boards. On Staten Island
7 you have five --
8 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: Three.
9 MS. BROWN: I'm sorry, three
10 planning boards. Do you think that if that
11 was the vote, people were to go in terms of
12 looking at districts, making it coterminous
13 with the community planning boards would have
14 an effect on the issue of equity in terms of
15 schools and in terms of moving to an
16 eventually greater achievement?
17 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: I've had this
18 argument with my husband a couple of times.
19 I'm not sure. Again, talking about equity is,
20 again, a mind set. We can't many times get
21 parents to PTA meetings or get parents to -- I
22 don't know if we'll get them to -- you know,
23 when a parent says to you, oh, we have
24 community board, you know, you get to a point
25 like you want to take your marbles and go
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2 home.
3 I don't know if that would be any
4 better. That's why we're still arguing at
5 home.
6 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We hope this is
7 not a cause for any serious marital
8 difficulties.
9 We want to thank you very much for
10 your testimony here this morning, for your
11 hard and effective work as a leader of the
12 Federation and we also want to thank you for
13 having provided us with your most recent
14 newsletter, which we found a very informative
15 tool.
16 MS. MCKEEVER-THOMAS: Thank you
17 very much.
18 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Terri Thomson is
19 going to invite the last two of the people who
20 have signed up and then we are going to take a
21 brief recess and we'll return for the balance
22 of the day session.
23 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Gail Curylo.
24 Were you bringing somebody with you? Was
25 there another person?
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2 MS. CURYLO: No.
3 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: So it's just
4 you, okay. Welcome.
5 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Just so we don't
6 slight anyone, was there anyone else who had
7 signed up before today to testify?
8 (No response.)
9 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you.
10 MS. CURYLO: Thank you. Good
11 afternoon. My name is Gail Curylo. I've been
12 an active member with the New York City public
13 school system for the past 12 years in many
14 capacities. Currently I am the PTA president
15 of P.S. 36 in Anadale, President's Council
16 chair of District 31 and proud member of the
17 executive board for the Staten Island
18 Federation of PTAs. I'm a member of the
19 District Leadership Team and the School
20 Leadership Team for P.S. 36.
21 I'm not here to dwell upon the past
22 as the past is just a learning experience for
23 future change. My testimony today is about the
24 soon to be ended community school boards and
25 to express the need for continuum of healthy
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2 and needed dialogue between a local community
3 based school board and the district
4 superintendent.
5 The following is my rationale for
6 believing this dialogue is essential.
7 First, as parents and educators, we
8 must first pass the mirror test. Our children
9 go to school every week day for one purpose,
10 to learn. It is first the responsibility of
11 the child to be prepared and attentive in
12 school, to do homework and study.
13 Second, we as parents need to
14 nurture our children, give them reinforcement
15 and make sure they are well prepared to tackle
16 this educational endeavor.
17 The mirror test is simply the act
18 of looking in the mirror and self-judging we
19 as parents. How am I doing? I do not expect
20 the Department of Education to take this role
21 over, but with some minor changes to the
22 system, we can help parents help their
23 children and have more self-confidence.
24 Second, after we assess ourselves,
25 we need to see how we can help our children
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2 improve on all levels of learning. This city
3 has been built on mediocrity. Students get a
4 grade of 70 and they system said he or she has
5 passed. I never hear of the system saying,
6 how do we get our children to improve to
7 grades of 80s and even 90s. Mediocrity is not
8 acceptable. The two main issues are as
9 follows.
10 A. Is the problem the child's or
11 the parents'? Many times we are not honest
12 with ourselves and give ourselves passing
13 grades, when in reality we are failing. This
14 I do not expect the city to become the parent
15 and this problem has broader implications.
16 B. Is the problem the school,
17 teacher or system? This is the area I want to
18 focus on and that leads to my third point.
19 Chancellor Levy is trying to effect
20 fundamental changes to a system that has been
21 mediocre at best and some would say is
22 failing. Without hearing the voices of a
23 local school board, these changes will not be
24 as effective as they can be. Staten Island's
25 needs are different than the needs of schools
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2 in Brooklyn or Queens. Within Staten Island,
3 the needs of the North Shore are different
4 than the South Shore. We need to voice our
5 concerns and needs to an effective leader who
6 is accountable for our or their actions.
7 We want to have this dialogue for
8 the issues I have mentioned in my second point
9 above. We are not satisfied with mediocrity
10 and I know you are not as well.
11 What I recommend is to have a local
12 school board consisting of an equal group of
13 parents with children currently in the school
14 system, teachers, principals and community
15 activists meet with the district
16 superintendent every month and discuss the
17 issues within that local school community. I
18 believe all issues should be put in writing in
19 descending order of importance. This issues
20 list should also be cc'd to some authority
21 within the Department of Education. I believe
22 that the district superintendent should
23 respond in writing to every item raised. The
24 response should be made within a 30-day period
25 after the receipt of the issues write-up. We
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2 want this Department of Education and district
3 superintendent to be accountable to its
4 constituents, our children.
5 We need to learn from the past.
6 Mediocrity should not be acceptable. I
7 believe that an effective dialogue with the
8 school districts is pure positive and makes us
9 all accountable to raising the bar and not
10 wallowing in our past. I urge you to keep the
11 dialogue and meetings alive.
12 Lastly, since New York City's
13 communities have so much diversity with
14 different needs, we need to keep the groups
15 small to be effective. Let's all be
16 accountable so that the Chancellor can make
17 the progress he has set out to make.
18 Thank you.
19 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
20 much for being with us this afternoon.
21 Ms. Reddington?
22 MS. REDDINGTON: Thank you, Gail,
23 for your testimony and for all that you do for
24 our children.
25 I have a question, Gail. You
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2 mentioned that you would put principals and
3 teachers on this board. Would you input or do
4 you feel -- my feeling is many years ago,
5 because you worked for the Board of Ed you
6 couldn't be on the board for the reasons of
7 conflict of interest. I just wonder where
8 that came into play for you.
9 MS. CURYLO: Okay, well, I feel in
10 order to make the system work, we need input
11 from
12 all the different areas of education. I feel
13 principals have a very big say in what goes on
14 in the schools and the teachers have one of
15 the most important parts, because they are the
16 ones who are teaching our children, and of
17 course parents, especially this group of
18 parents here, who are very well educated in
19 what's going on in our schools and our
20 children, and whether it's in some kind of
21 advisory capacity or decision making capacity,
22 I feel principals and teachers have to be
23 involved in some kind of local board that has
24 to do with decision making of our children if
25 you want it to effectively work.
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2 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We are indebted
4 to you for your advice and for your hard work
5 and thank you for being here.
6 We are going to take a lunch
7 recess. Then the men and women of this panel
8 who have been here since early this morning
9 need a bite to eat.
10 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Dawn Russo
11 will be the last speaker until after lunch.
12 MS. RUSSO: Good morning, everyone.
13 It's so nice to be here. When I first sat
14 down to figure out what I was going to do with
15 this testimony, I thought of something that I
16 heard in a movie I watched over the holidays
17 and that was Forrest Gump. I don't know how
18 many of you have seen that, but Forrest Gump's
19 mom always said that life is like a box of
20 chocolates. You never know what you're going
21 to get.
22 As you could see
23 from being here on Staten Island, we don't
24 want a box of chocolates. We want a couple of
25 bags of Hershey Kisses and Hugs, so that's why
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2 we are all here and so much for that.
3 Dear Panel Members, Staten Island
4 is in a position which is logistically,
5 demographically and geographically
6 to truly benefit from a local forum for
7 parents to address issues and problems related
8 to the education of our children.
9 I am here today in the spirit of
10 urgency and anxiety to attest to my belief and
11 agreement with the resolution set forth in
12 Staten Island Federation testimony. With
13 specifics regarding voting, elections,
14 appointments and overall structure, our
15 recommendations are also being stated by many
16 others that are not directly involved in the
17 educational community.
18 I am glad to see that members of
19 the community are participating in this
20 process, a realization that education is not
21 just for those with children in the system.
22 Education of our children is a
23 vested interest in the entire community now
24 and in the future.
25 My point goes to the infrastructure
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2 responsibility once the local entity has been
3 established. Roles shall be established with
4 direct, specific and identified activities
5 related to the academic success of all
6 children. Accountability shall be monitored
7 monthly through established channel of
8 assessment that warranted a positive or
9 negative action to the point is the person
10 doing their job on a consistent basis.
11 A channel of accessible
12 communication between the local representative
13 body and constituents must be provided and,
14 again, monitored for consistency. We should
15 never hear from any member, no report, and
16 anyone at anytime should be able to access and
17 confirm information on the activity of any
18 member. These members must involve themselves
19 in innovative and creative contribution to
20 positive academic programs as well as a true
21 outreach and follow-up to engage parents,
22 especially those who, for whatever reason,
23 have up to now naturally participated in
24 decision making regarding their children's
25 education.
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2 This goes to your question before.
3 Above all, we need the
4 representative body here where we can share
5 the burden of helping our children meet their
6 greatest potential as future citizens in our
7 community.
8 Thank you. I trust that with all
9 the time that you've been spending, that once
10 we do find out what's going to be going on,
11 parents will have a continuum but as always,
12 an evolution of this process that will never,
13 ever be truly set in stone. It's something
14 that we'll always be able to make better than
15 today. Thank you.
16 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
17 much, Ms. Russo.
18 MS. RUSSO: Enjoy your lunch.
19 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
20 much for your testimony.
21 The time now by my watch is 1:35.
22 We will resume with our schedule at exactly
23 2:30.
24 (A recess was taken.)
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Okay. We can
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2 all settle down, find our places. We are
3 going to reconvene.
4 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Some of other
5 panel members will be joining us.
6 MR. PRISCO: Okay, fine. Good
7 afternoon, although my remarks say good
8 evening. Originally I was scheduled to speak
9 this evening but I had a cancellation in the
10 schedule and thought you might like to go home
11 a little early.
12 I am a community school board
13 member for the last three or four years,
14 however, my remarks and my thoughts are
15 exclusively my own and I do not represent
16 community board 31.
17 For over 30 years I have been
18 fortunate to serve and observe the New York
19 City education. I've been teaching for more
20 than 30 years. I was the high school PA
21 president of John Dewey High School for two
22 years, the first male high school PA president
23 in New York City and finally as a community
24 school board member.
25 I, therefore, have seen the system
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2 from several paradigms. I know that over the
3 last few months you've heard various testimony
4 throughout the city concerning the
5 construction of this entity replacing the
6 community school board. I also know that you
7 have been exposed to numerous ideas as to who
8 should sit on these boards for want of a
9 better term. I don't wish to add to this
10 plethora of ideas about parent councils,
11 regional boards, district leadership teams.
12 I really only want to speak to you
13 about one aspect of the whole process, and
14 simply put that aspect is this, that all or at
15 least some of the members of this newly
16 constituted board should be elected by the
17 public. The public that pays the taxes that
18 fund public education and the ones who have
19 the most to gain or lose if the system fails
20 or succeeds in terms of the general citizens.
21 Specifically I mean direct election
22 the way school board members stood for
23 election, whether it's six percent voted for
24 us or three percent, doesn't matter, we stood
25 and expressed our ideas, at least I did and
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2 other members in this community did, not
3 appointed by borough presidents, not elected
4 by a school leadership team, not selected by
5 elected officials, with all due respect.
6 All of these forums are what I
7 would call indirect democracy have created in
8 New York City certain bastions of power run by
9 people that no one ever elected. Recently we
10 saw the MTA in its tremendous power. Who
11 elected them? Oh, oh, right, the majority are
12 appointed by the governor. Then we saw the
13 broken confidence and corruption of the school
14 construction authority. Who elected them?
15 Oh, the mayor and the governor appointed
16 them. Ask the average person if they know
17 anybody on these boards. Today we have
18 another instance of the kind of thinking that
19 goes on at the MTA. Who selected them? I
20 believe we will soon see the Emergency -- I
21 was around in 1975. I remember the Emergency
22 Control Commission. I remember Felix Roland.
23 I remember 12,000 teachers being put into the
24 wood chipper. Who elected these people? Oh,
25 yes, they were appointed by other people.
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2 I believe a certain number of --
3 too many instances, the lives of New Yorkers
4 are shaped by men and women who no one ever
5 elected. The permanent guard. The invisible
6 government.
7 We don't need another such
8 creation. Now, I believe a portion of these
9 members of whatever you create should stand
10 for, they should speak about their educational
11 philosophy, their vision for our schools and
12 their backgrounds that would make them good
13 members. I'm not a fool. I know that most of
14 the powers that belong to school boards have
15 been eviscerated. In fact, one of the
16 questions here is what is really left?
17 I believe that they can serve a
18 real educational mission, and my wife will
19 give testimony representing PACE has a very
20 detailed presentation concerning who ought to
21 be on these boards and what their functions
22 will be. But as I indicated, I believe the
23 only way that these boards can truly reflect
24 the diversity of our people and educational
25 philosophy, we've had tremendous clashes of
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2 educational philosophy. I can tell you, I
3 live right here on Staten Island. Whether it
4 be about what meeting programs, the basic
5 education, AIDS education, et cetera. When I
6 think of diversity, I just don't mean men and
7 women of color or ethnic groups, I mean also
8 where do you stand on the educational
9 paradigm, what do you believe is an
10 educational approach. We almost had a civil
11 war here over children of the rainbow, but we
12 won't get into that.
13 I'm aware that these are limited
14 powers, but I still believe if properly
15 constituted with at least a portion standing
16 before the public and saying this is what I
17 believe, this is why you should elect me, this
18 is what I wish to carry out, then I believe
19 possibly these boards could be one of the key
20 ingredients to moving this system forward.
21 I thank you for coming to Staten
22 Island. I thank you for listening to me and I
23 hope you and other members who will read these
24 remarks give some consideration to my thinking
25 on this topic. Thank you.
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2 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Not that easy,
3 you don't get away that easy.
4 MR. PRISCO: I have no problem
5 answering questions.
6 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I just wanted
7 to say we'll make sure that all of our task
8 force members get a copy of your comments.
9 MR. PRISCO: I appreciate that.
10 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Assemblyman
11 LaVelle?
12 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: I just for
13 the record want to clarify our position. What
14 you are saying is some portion of whatever the
15 body will be should be elected because, as I
16 indicated, I have no idea where we'll go but I
17 have a feeling we might want to, for instance,
18 if we wanted to have the parent
19 representatives on this, they would have to be
20 elected by parents.
21 MR. PRISCO: Right, by the parents.
22 School based teams and leadership teams, but
23 a portion at least of ordinary citizens. We
24 have had some, yes, I'm not going to stand
25 here and talk to you about merits or demerits
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2 of existing school boards, this one or
3 others. This community has also had some
4 spectacular
5 school board members, Dr. Sandolf, Mrs. Levey,
6 men and women who came before the public,
7 presented their ideas and were elected, but at
8 least a portion of whatever you create, a
9 portion, it is my judgment, even if it's a
10 small percentage of the public comes to vote,
11 I still believe that there should be that
12 opportunity. That's my personal belief.
13 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: As a member
14 of School Board 31 you have gone through the
15 election process that has existed in New York
16 City. Two questions. One is what is your --
17 given the fact that you are a strong adherent
18 for part of the process to continue to be a
19 public election, what is your view of the
20 proportional voting system that has been in
21 existence and do you have any views with
22 respect to the time of the year that the
23 election will take place.
24 MR. PRISCO: Well, the proportional
25 system, as you know, from studying it has led
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2 to slate arrangements. In fact, I'm honest
3 enough to admit that the organization that I
4 was part of slate, we had cards that were
5 designed so that when people went out, they
6 vote to transfer over. You have to learn if
7 you wish to elect people -- however, our
8 platform was a
9 16 platform where people were interviewed and
10 given the position based on a series of
11 questions concerning where they stood on
12 questions like superintendency in the
13 district, AIDS and other programs, so it
14 wasn't just an ad hoc arrangement based on
15 real people interviewing.
16 I've reached a point where I think
17 people should just stand for election.
18 The only thing that is problematic and I know
19 it's been presented why not do it election day
20 is there must be a way to keep political
21 parties and others out of the process when
22 it's on general election.
23 One recent -- when I gave
24 testimony, some of Mr. Moroney's questions
25 were these were only five percent. Well, he
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2 was elected in a special election at only six
3 percent of the vote. Special elections by
4 general never break the seven or eight percent
5 mark anyway, so I know it's very hard and I
6 know sometimes it's hard to get citizens whose
7 youngsters are no longer in school really
8 involved in thinking about I ought to be
9 there. I also have gone to upstate
10 communities. I go to a school board meeting
11 and I see hundreds of people.
12 I know that there's tax questions there so
13 lots of people show up. I've sat here and if
14 it wasn't for the relatives of school board
15 members who were coming, of a principal or AP
16 appointment, it's the same three faces all the
17 time. I've been doing this for a long, long
18 time. I've been active for a long time and
19 I'll openly admit, I supported
20 decentralization. I did. I believed it. I
21 thought it was a way of empowering the
22 problems, and I know what became of it. I
23 know how it was taken to the cleaners. I know
24 what it became and it's hurtful for me as
25 someone who supported that to see what it can
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2 do.
3 But I think there is an opportunity
4 now because you know you can't swim to the top
5 until you hit the bottom. Well, maybe because
6 things got so bad. We now have, I believe, an
7 opportunity.
8 I also believe, and I will be on
9 the record stating it that all the good will
10 in the world without the resources, and that's
11 why I've been a member of the campaign for
12 fiscal equity for many years and have School
13 Board 31, as a matter of fact, has signed on.
14 Without the resources, I believe no matter how
15 much will power we have, I know why Mamaroneck
16 succeeds and we don't. When I did my masters
17 degree, one of my teachers took me to Great
18 Neck to observe a class and then took me to
19 intercity Brooklyn. You don't have to be a
20 genius to understand the differences there.
21 And when you see the resources, I have a
22 friend who was a teacher and assistant
23 principal now in the Hamptons. He gets a 21st
24 kid in the class, he creates a new class, no
25 exception, no where's your building, there's a
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2 new class. He spends $18,000 a kid. We
3 expunge our special ed and spend about seven.
4 We can't play on that feeling, so resources, I
5 hate to say it, along with the will power.
6 I taught in NES schools when we
7 had 17 kids in the class in 1966. Then I
8 taught four years later with 35 in a class. I
9 knew the difference from being a guiding light
10 to small numbers of kids and then being a
11 group manager. These are just my personal
12 views.
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We very much
14 appreciate those views and your service on the
15 Board 31. Thank you very much.
16 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Linda Barbato,
17 past co-president of Staten Island
18 Federation.
19 Did I pronounce your name
20 incorrectly?
21 MS. BARBATO: It depends. My
22 husband says Barbato, I say Barbato. We need
23 levity here. Believe me, we do.
24 First of all, I want to thank you
25 for being here and thank you
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2 for giving me the opportunity to speak. As I
3 wrote, I was former co-president of the Staten
4 Island Federation of PTAs. I was a former PTA
5 president of Tottenville High School. I was
6 the former president of the Staten Island
7 BASIS President's Council and a member of the
8 chancellor's parent advisory committee. So
9 I've been around the block a few times.
10 I had no idea that I had to
11 register or have 25 copies so I come
12 empty-handed. It's very hard for me to
13 specifically say what you should and should
14 not be doing. There are so many ways to
15 tackle this. I would like to throw some
16 suggestions and take it how ever you like.
17 Community school boards in general
18 have not been that efficient. However, I hate
19 to paint them all with the same brush because
20 there have been many wonderful ones. Staten
21 Island has been more the exception than the
22 rule, but we've had our problems as well. To
23 have them all elected, all appointed, is not
24 going to work. I do believe there needs to be
25 combination of both.
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2 I talked to some people. It has
3 been suggested that maybe we could have the
4 district superintendents appoint one person,
5 district superintendent, high school
6 superintendent and District 75. We need to
7 have someone representing parents of those
8 children with special needs.
9 We once talked about this many
10 years ago about having representatives coming
11 from each council and district. That way you
12 get different pockets represented because what
13 happens is you have the same people coming
14 from the same background and the same mold and
15 then there are others that feel they are left
16 out. You need to be all inclusive to the
17 extent possible. You need to not only have
18 your minorities but you need to also get
19 people who could speak multiple languages so
20 that when someone has an issue, they feel
21 there is a person there who is more in tune
22 with their needs. That is very important
23 because I am a strong believer in that it
24 doesn't matter how much resources you have.
25 You can have the best state-of-the-art school,
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2 the best administration, the best teachers.
3 When the whole environment is lacking, when
4 the parent feels there is nowhere they can go
5 to get help or the child is disenfranchised,
6 you lose.
7 To have it all parents, I disagree
8 with it. There are many people in the
9 community who are not parents, who have been
10 involved in many different ways in education
11 who should be a part of that as well.
12 I do not want to see political
13 appointees. I believe that we really need to
14 try to get politics out of there. It
15 shouldn't matter whether you're democrat,
16 republican, conservative, independent.
17 The key is we have to find out
18 what's in the heart. Why do people want to be
19 on this new revised community school board, if
20 you will.
21 My brain is literally fried trying
22 to think of so many ways. I will say this to
23 you. You do need something in between. Most
24 PTAs, if that are run efficiently, and some of
25 them are not, they are the ones that the
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2 parents should go to. I always ran my PTAs so
3 efficiently I felt as if I was Dr. Ruth. They
4 called me on everything, and I included --
5 especially the high school level when you have
6 football parents here and the baseball parents
7 and the marching band parents. I tried to
8 bring them all in. If you have a problem,
9 come to me.
10 PTAs can usually do a lot more than
11 administrate and I used to tell Michael
12 Alatondo, use me and abuse me. I can do and
13 say what you cannot, but sometimes they don't
14 work that way.
15 The parents feel very left out.
16 They become a click, PTAs. So you need to
17 have someplace else for them to go. That
18 would be where, if you want to use the word
19 community school board, would fit in.
20 I always complain, why do we not
21 have anybody from high school. You know, if I
22 had a problem in high school I had to go to
23 the superintendent. I didn't have community
24 school board members to go to. The same thing
25 with District 75, they are really out of the
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2 loop. When they have issues, they have no
3 place to go.
4 So I feel that you can have a
5 combination of appointed and elected. You
6 might consider doing it in certain sections
7 where each council district has their own
8 election process. This way you get a broad
9 spectrum throughout the borough and it doesn't
10 become one group that comes to this area
11 that's on this board.
12 Other than that, I really don't
13 know what else to say. I wish you all luck,
14 and if I could help out, most people know who
15 I am, we would be more than happy to.
16 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We very much
17 appreciate your being here and giving us the
18 benefit of your experience and some of your
19 advice.
20 Do you have any questions?
21 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I asked
22 earlier this morning and I think you answered
23 it, but I just want to say it out loud. We've
24 heard a lot here on Staten Island, especially
25 from parents of children in District 75 who
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2 have not had a place to go.
3 In the other boroughs we've heard a
4 lot from high school parents who also, because
5 there are no boards for the high schools and
6 no specific boards for District 75, those
7 parents have been frustrated.
8 And what you suggested and others
9 suggested this morning is that whatever we do,
10 we have to make sure that there is something
11 for District 75 and for high school.
12 MS. BARBATO: Absolutely. Only
13 because as being a PTA president of a high
14 school and being Federation co-president, I
15 had the access. A lot of parents, they don't
16 have a clue. They don't know the chain of
17 command or they are overwhelmed by it and they
18 feel there is no place to go. The same thing
19 with parents who don't speak English. Many of
20 them, it's not that they don't care. They feel
21 very awkward. They are embarrassed. Nobody
22 understands their language, their culture. It
23 would be nice to have a broad representation.
24 I mean, in a perfect world it sounds great but
25 with the representation we have, we have to do
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2 the best we can.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me just ask
4 you a last question about school leadership
5 teams. You've been in the system. You have
6 seen the system obviously before the advent of
7 school leadership teams. You've probably had
8 some interaction over the last couple of years
9 or so with the emergence of school leadership
10 teams.
11 I would just like to know generally
12 your view as to whether school leadership
13 teams have made a difference, is something we
14 ought to work on. What are your thoughts
15 about them?
16 MS. BARBATO: In some schools it's
17 probably been very beneficial. In many
18 schools they just can't get them up and
19 running. The buzz word was consensus, and if
20 you could get everybody to come to a
21 consensus, we would be very happy.
22 When you get different groups of
23 people representing different entities, you
24 have the principal, you have the teachers, you
25 have the parents. They are all trying to get
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2 on the same pages, it can be a power
3 struggle. There was no difference with the
4 school based management decision making.
5 I spoke to one assistant principal
6 who, I won't say the school, but he's telling
7 me he's part of the leadership team and thank
8 God he's getting off the end of this year, and
9 he was composing a letter to all the parents
10 about some of the issues and the cuts and what
11 classes were offered. And the subject of the
12 leadership team meeting was the typographical
13 errors that were in the notice. That, to me,
14 is not a good thing, and he is livid. He is
15 livid.
16 I used to sit at meetings where we
17 talked about the state of the bathrooms. It's
18 six of one, half a dozen of another. Some of
19 them work very well. Some of them don't, but
20 I will say. This has been brought about. I
21 do not feel that the school leadership team
22 should replace community school boards. Leave
23 the leaderships where they are. Do something
24 else, because that was another idea that was
25 thrown around.
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2 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
3 very much for being here, whether it's Barbato
4 or Barbato, thank you very much.
5 MS. BARBATO: Thank you so much for
6 your time.
7 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Jacob Morris?
8 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Why don't we
9 just pause for a moment as some of the other
10 members have returned.
11 Let me just mention, Mr. Morris,
12 since we have had the benefit of your
13 testimony at a previous hearing, we will ask
14 you to please confine your remarks to five
15 minutes it is basically our policy to allow
16 everybody to speak once and then if they feel
17 they need additional time to submit written
18 testimony, but given your valiant effort to
19 come all the way to Staten Island and our
20 fairly light schedule at this moment, we
21 certainly didn't want to turn you away but we
22 would ask you to confine your remarks to about
23 five minutes, please.
24 MR. MORRIS: Thank you, Chairman,
25 for the additional time.
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2 I feel that what I've worked on is
3 valuable. I hope you have copies regarding
4 the emergency census on school governance. Do
5 you have your copies?
6 I have some supporting documents
7 which I think the Task Force will find
8 extremely useful. One is a report from the
9 Center for Excellence in New York City
10 Governance that was put together by Vidiarian
11 Cooper, I believe, at the Wagner graduate
12 school, and it ties in to particular major
13 points that I made in my plan, which is a very
14 specific plan which deals with a lot of the
15 problems that are, as we discussed, are very
16 complex but I feel that my plan addresses
17 basically just about every objection and
18 problem that the task force needs to address,
19 including the Department of Justice oversight
20 and review of minority representation.
21 If it's possible, I would like you
22 and Terri, in particular, to have this excerpt
23 of the report from the Center for Excellence.
24 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Whatever you
25 want to leave with us, we'll make sure all the
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2 members of the Task Force have copies.
3 MR. MORRIS: So I'll start with
4 this, and the other I have just one copy but I
5 will leave it with your assistants. And this
6 is 19 page report that was done by the
7 American Association of School Administrators,
8 a nationwide report, and it's quite recent. I
9 just pulled it down this weekend. I was
10 really heartened that the new scholars put
11 this together, who have tremendous experience
12 in school board governance nationwide.
13 Basically it reflects some of the
14 same insights that I have in my two-page
15 presentation, which is basically that the best
16 performing school districts in the United
17 States, the superintendents in the school
18 boards are very well trained. They have
19 continuing professional development and they
20 work together as quality leadership teams.
21 And so it's from their issues and insights
22 section. It's called "Thinking Differently.
23 Recommendations for 21st Century School
24 Boards/Superintendent Leadership Governance
25 and Teamwork for High Student Achievement,"
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2 which I like to say is what we are here for,
3 is student achievement for our children.
4 I titled this "The Emerging
5 Consensus on School Governance." Basically,
6 as I stated before, any plan that we develop
7 should build on the foundation of the existing
8 school leadership teams. I then go on to say
9 the management structure and the participatory
10 structure must be in alignment, and again, if
11 you look at the report from the American
12 Association of School Administrators you'll
13 find that they have found in their studies
14 nationwide that the most successful school
15 districts in achievement nationwide function
16 as quality leadership teams with continuing
17 professional development for the team members
18 and the school board members work as a team
19 with the superintendent.
20 You will find this extremely useful
21 when you actually finally develop your report
22 to the State Legislature, and I'm looking
23 forward to that.
24 The purpose of the school and the
25 governance structure is to facilitate the
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2 development of an environment that optimizes
3 the growth, learning and academic confidence
4 of the child. Academic performance.
5 The objective of the Task Force
6 should be an optimum structure, nothing less.
7 Now, number two ties in with the
8 report from New York University's Wagner
9 Graduate School, Center for Excellence, which
10 is the fundamental unit of school governance
11 is the school, which I found out after I wrote
12 mine. It was nice to be validated.
13 Number three, this again builds on
14 what is already put into place in 1996 and
15 started to get implemented in 1998, which you
16 had a critical role in, which is the
17 representative body of all the schools'
18 constituencies in the school leadership team.
19 Number four, the first
20 responsibility of school leadership members is
21 to communicate with communication and
22 represent the concerns of their constituencies
23 and their total school community.
24 Number five, the ability of school
25 leadership team members to do their jobs would
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2 be facilitated by certain types of training
3 and then, again, I will refer to the report
4 from the AASH as to specifically, and they
5 have specified specifically what kinds of
6 ongoing professional development work for the
7 functioning of quality teams.
8 Number six, the optimumization of
9 communications is the indispensable ingredient
10 that enhances the awareness of possible
11 choices for responsive, intelligent decision
12 making.
13 Ultimately, as I said earlier,
14 power is not the goal. Intelligent decision
15 making is what this is really about. We're
16 going to get away from power struggles, I
17 hope, and move into what it takes and now I'm
18 talking about organizational science, which is
19 certainly well-established in the corporate
20 world. Peter Drucker, all these studies about
21 organizational systems, again, it comes down
22 to intelligent decision making. It doesn't
23 come down to power struggles.
24 If you make good decisions, then
25 there's no problem, and that certainly is the
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2 case with teams. Then certainly if you are
3 making good decisions, who's complaining?
4 It's only when there's stupid decisions being
5 made at the top in the power structure, then
6 people complain because they're saying stuff
7 is going wrong. And certainly with the system
8 in the present state that it is, things are
9 going wrong.
10 The school leadership teams
11 maintaining the content of the school web
12 site, I feel that this deals with the
13 technology component which certain members of
14 the Task Force are very, very deeply involved
15 in. The school web site would enhance
16 transparency and if you happen to be
17 responsible for getting information about the
18 school on to the school's web site, as I
19 discussed, whether it's the leadership team
20 minutes or who's the faculty advisor for the
21 chess club or when there's tutoring services
22 after school and who's doing what in what
23 classroom, all that's posted, not to speak of
24 homework and email for the teachers.
25 Everything else, that it is possible to put on
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2 the school web site. For those that don't
3 respond to an email system, for those who
4 don't have computers, if the leadership team
5 is responsible for this communication role,
6 those that are responsible for knowledge have
7 a form of power.
8 If you look at the reality of a
9 meeting, if somebody knows what's going on,
10 they get asked, say, Ms. Smith, what's going
11 on with the school play, the principal asks,
12 or how ever it might be. Defined
13 responsibility leads to accountability.
14 Save money. This is moderately
15 critical, especially in this time of budget
16 crisis. Improve accountability and eliminate
17 overlap by consolidating functions. There is
18 much too much overlap on the individual school
19 level in regards to redundant committees. All
20 these functions and responsibilities should be
21 consolidated under the purview of the school
22 leadership team, C30 process, school safety
23 committees, consolidate the functions.
24 Eliminate overlap citywide.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me say here
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2 I'm either going to need you to summarize your
3 conclusions or just read through the rest of
4 the text because we have to -- you are well
5 past the five minutes.
6 MR. MORRIS: I basically boil down
7 the name of this plan to the web site 18 to
8 one three tier plan. So I ask the question,
9 why are we stuck with the present awkward size
10 and structure of school districts in this de
11 facto system which it is a de facto system, a
12 sacred cow, and then I have, you know, see the
13 analysis and the New York University report.
14 The school districts, they are
15 unwielding, so I make the point, if kids fall
16 between the cracks at 32 to one, and the
17 present size of school districts is 30 to 60
18 to one for a school superintendent, that's
19 ridiculous. If kids fall between the cracks
20 in a class in a defined location in a
21 classroom at 32 to one, we know we have
22 failing schools at 30 to 60 to one. No school
23 district should have more than 18 schools and
24 then that leads right to the next thing, which
25 is three tiers.
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2 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Why don't you
3 summarize the three tiers, okay?
4 MR. MORRIS: Basically the three
5 tiers works out to there's 1,200 schools. You
6 divide 1,200 by 18, you come up with
7 approximately 67 districts. You divide 67
8 districts by five boroughs, which I would make
9 analogous and contiguous to the existing high
10 school districts, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan,
11 the Bronx and BASIS, which includes Staten
12 Island. You wind up with 14 district
13 leadership teams for every one borough,
14 quotation marks, super team or third tier
15 team.
16 So then I get into the tiers, which
17 is tier one, 18 schools per district,
18 represented by better trained school
19 leadership team members responsible for the
20 input and content of the school web site.
21 Each school electing a member of a school
22 leadership team on parent-teacher night with
23 notice that should deal with Department of
24 Justice guidelines in terms of minority
25 representation and certainly enhanced
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2 percentage of turnout. Pretty simple, but it
3 would work.
4 And my discussions with various
5 staff attorneys at the federal level have led
6 me to believe that this would pass muster, by
7 the way.
8 Tier two, the district leadership
9 teams, the DLTs, would meet monthly, again,
10 and then again back to the AASH report with
11 the defined training and the ongoing
12 professional development. And any meetings
13 would be subject to the open meetings law, not
14 the training sessions, the meetings would be
15 subject to open meetings law.
16 Responsibility for the district web
17 site would be shared, and time allotted on the
18 agenda for parents and teachers to bring
19 school issues to the attention of the team.
20 Day-to-day management, of course, is the
21 purview of the district superintendent.
22 Then tier three, the borough
23 advisory panel would incorporate the new
24 borough superintendent who would meet monthly
25 with representatives who would be elected from
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2 within their respective district leadership
3 teams. Also each bureau president could and
4 probably I'm sure would designate a
5 representative to the borough panels in a
6 public forum.
7 And I give final responsibility for
8 the training academies, borough training
9 academies. I wouldn't have it optional about
10 training. If you are going to be on a team,
11 then you want to be confident. You want to
12 feel trained.
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well,
14 Mr. Morris, we appreciate seeing you again.
15 MR. MORRIS: I can tell.
16 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We have come to
17 know you pretty well over the last month or
18 so. Seriously, I know that your views that
19 you express are well thought out and
20 considered very carefully. We would
21 appreciate your leaving with us the supporting
22 documents that we can -- I feel they will be
23 quite useful.
24 I can assure you that when we begin
25 to distill the information from these
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2 hearings, that we will be referring to your
3 information often very seriously.
4 MR. MORRIS: Feel free to call me.
5 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We shall, and I
6 actually mean that.
7 MR. MORRIS: I'll leave these with
8 Anne.
9 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you. We
10 will make copies and distribute them to all
11 members.
12 MR. MORRIS: I'm so glad I made it
13 to Staten Island.
14 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Marie
15 Castallucci, parent at the Petrides School.
16 MS. CASTALLUCCI: Good afternoon.
17 Thank you for coming here today and allowing
18 us to do this. I apologize for not having a
19 written statement. I wasn't going to testify
20 until I was here earlier today.
21 I just want to give you a little
22 bit of background. My daughter is a junior
23 here at the Petrides School and I have been an
24 actively involved parent since 1990. I have
25 been in every position on a PTA including
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2 co-president when my daughter was in fifth
3 grade of her elementary school.
4 At that time I had occasion to work
5 very closely with the community school board
6 because my daughter's school was severely
7 overcrowded. And in the best interest of the
8 children, we needed to do something right
9 away. So they worked tirelessly with me and
10 with the other parents in our school to have
11 the school rezoned, which was something that
12 was unheard of in this district for many, many
13 years. They were there for me. They answered
14 my questions. They had my home phone number.
15 We were constantly on the telephone. I spent
16 more time with them than I did with my
17 husband. We succeeded and we did what was
18 best for the children at that school. We had
19 the school rezoned.
20 The reason that I'm here today is
21 there must be a panel. There must be a place
22 for parents to go. There must be some sort of
23 a body for parents to go to bring their
24 concerns and I feel very strongly that it
25 needs to be an elected body, not selected, not
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2 appointed. It must be an elected body.
3 I also wear another hat, which is
4 why I didn't testify this afternoon, I'm one
5 of the parent liaisons to District 31 and I
6 represent the title one schools, the parents
7 that are not coming out here and speaking to
8 you and I feel very strongly that whatever
9 body replaces the community school board needs
10 to really be a cross-representation of the
11 parents in each and every borough or district
12 or how ever it's go to be represented.
13 We need to insure that the parents
14 of our title one schools have a say-so as to
15 who is their parent representative on this
16 board, and the parents of our alternative high
17 school have representation, not that they
18 themselves have to be a representative, but
19 that they will vote, that they have a say-so
20 in who is representing them and who is our new
21 board, whatever it may be.
22 I feel very strongly because they
23 are the underdog. They are the people that
24 are not coming out here speaking to you
25 today. Thank you for your time.
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2 MS. BROWN: I have one question.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: First of all, we
4 thank you very much for being here and for
5 deciding that you wanted to participate in
6 these proceedings. I can assure you that we
7 very much appreciate your views based on your
8 experience and your many, many years of input
9 on a variety of levels and I think we do have
10 a couple of questions.
11 Ms. Brown?
12 MS. BROWN: I asked this question
13 earlier. Do you feel that equity would be
14 better achieved leaving the district one
15 district? Like some people proposed or others
16 proposed making it coterminous with community
17 planning boards. If there are three on Staten
18 Island do you think that's title one schools
19 which have more of a voice that way or --
20 MS. CASTALLUCCI: That's a tough
21 decision. That's really a tough thing to
22 say. I don't know if they had their own
23 planning board if that would make it any
24 better if they would come out. I know that
25 you are very actively involved. You know what
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2 I'm talking about. They're not here. They're
3 not testifying, and we've also really pushed
4 it because the chancellor is coming for his
5 children first. I hope they have their own
6 reasons. It's just traditionally they don't
7 for whatever reason. They have their own
8 reasons.
9 I don't know that that would be the
10 answer. I've been out of District 31 for a
11 while. My daughter goes to the Petrides since
12 6th grade, so I'm in a K to 12 situation. I
13 happen to like it very much. It works. I
14 think that the experience she's getting here
15 is phenomenal. It should be everywhere.
16 Every single school should be like this.
17 Every single school should have the
18 opportunities that are offered here at
19 Petrides. But also as a parent from Petrides
20 coming from District 31 and always having a
21 place to go speak I don't have anyplace to
22 go.
23 The Petrides School is part of it's
24 own district. It doesn't belong to District
25 31 so we can't bring our concerns to the
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2 community. We could and they listen to us,
3 but there is not really much they can do for
4 us. That's why I feel very strongly.
5 Whatever board or committee replaces the
6 community school board needs to be inclusive.
7 If it's here on Staten Island, it needs to
8 represent everyone on Staten Island, all
9 parents and all children, District 75, BASIS,
10 District 31, Petrides School, whoever it is
11 that we have here on Staten Island, we need to
12 have represented so we can go and speak to
13 whoever that board is.
14 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I guess the
15 challenge here is if you were to have an
16 elected board, you can't go into the voting
17 booth and insure that you have that equity,
18 insure that you have diversity as a title one
19 parent survey elected. That's the challenge.
20 That's really the tough part of it. You feel
21 strongly that there should be parents and that
22 they should be elected. Should they be
23 elected by other parents or should they be
24 elected by the general population?
25 MS. CASTALLUCCI: I don't know. I
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2 don't like the system as it existed before,
3 the community school board elections. I
4 absolutely hated it. I didn't think there
5 were enough people from the education
6 community, who are the stakeholders. We are
7 the consumers. We are the people that that
8 board serves. I didn't feel that enough
9 people came out and voted, which obviously
10 shows citywide.
11 I don't know. Should the parents
12 elect their own parents? That might be a good
13 possibility but we need to make sure that -- I
14 know we can't insure that there's
15 representation for the title one schools but
16 maybe insure that the word gets out and that
17 people really know that this board is their
18 representation, that this is who they need to
19 go to. I'm doing this for District 31,
20 reaching out to those schools for the past ten
21 years. It's a tough job. It's very tough to
22 reach those people but we have to try. We
23 can't stop trying and that's what I'm afraid
24 of.
25 I'm afraid if it's an appointed or
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2 selected group of people, they're not going to
3 have anywhere to go.
4 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: The work you
5 do as a parent liaison in the district is so
6 important. It really is.
7 MS. CASTALLUCCI: Thank you.
8 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Million dollar
9 question. How do you get -- you represent the
10 title one parents. How do we reach out? How
11 do we engage those parents so that they are
12 speaking out and talking about what their
13 children are not getting?
14 MS. CASTALLUCCI: They have to be
15 empowered and they have to feel that their
16 voice matters, and it's a difficult job. It
17 really is.
18 Myself and the other parent
19 liaisons from District 31, we actually go into
20 those schools. We sit with them. We talk
21 with them on the phone, the PTA president,
22 parents and the school, and we just keep
23 encouraging them. That's what it takes, a lot
24 of encouragement, a lot of hand holding.
25 Sometimes I have to pick them up and bring
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2 them to meetings, if that's what it takes.
3 We have to just reach out and give
4 it every opportunity. Tomorrow we have buses
5 picking them up at their schools. Will those
6 buses be filled? I don't know, but we've done
7 everything we can to let them know that they
8 need to be on those buses, that the buses are
9 there for them. We just have to keep on
10 trying. And the million dollar question is:
11 Have you reached them? One at a time. That's
12 how we reach them.
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me just ask
14 one further question. As I know you know,
15 when decentralization was first established
16 some 30 years ago, the school board's
17 authority, purview of their authority was the
18 elementary, the middle and junior high schools
19 with the thought that at some point down the
20 road the high schools might be incorporated
21 into the jurisdiction of the school boards.
22 For the most part, that never happened.
23 You indicated in your remarks to us
24 that you like the idea of K through 12. Would
25 you just give us a little more elaboration as
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2 to why you think that works?
3 MS. CASTALLUCCI: Actually, what I
4 see here is a model of collaboration and
5 teaching across the grade. This particular
6 school, the staff comes in for the month of
7 July and they do curriculum mapping and I
8 actually came here for another meeting. I was
9 a witness to it. They actually have the
10 curriculum mapped along the whole corridor of
11 the first floor for kindergarten to 12th
12 grade. And the teachers from the high school
13 are sitting down with the teachers from
14 kindergarten talking about what the children
15 need to have when they reach 12th grade. It
16 works. I see it working. My daughter is
17 living it. I'm a parent watching it happen.
18 I also see high school students
19 sitting down and tutoring elementary school
20 students. There's projects that happen across
21 the grading between the elementary and
22 intermediate schools. Of course there is a
23 lot of separation, too, because you don't want
24 kindergarten children in the bathroom with
25 12th graders. So there is a lot of separation
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2 as far as that's concerned.
3 I see what happens when the
4 curriculum is integrated from K to 12. It
5 works. It really does because the children
6 are very much prepared for the intermediate
7 school when they come out of the elementary
8 level and they are very much prepared for high
9 school when they leave the intermediate
10 level. It's not a school, it's a level here.
11 It's K to 12.
12 So I actually see it working.
13 There's a lot of advancement for those who
14 want it. There are a lot of after school
15 preparations for tests and regents and also
16 remediation for those who need it. But it
17 also happens with the students themselves.
18 The older students work together with the
19 younger students to help prepare them, to give
20 them their expertise, and it really, really
21 worked. I can see that its successful here.
22 It's only one school.
23 So if it's working here in one
24 school, and I'm not saying each school should
25 be K to 12, but if the district is K to 12, I
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2 think it will integrate all across.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: You've seen a
4 continuity that exists where the current or
5 the old system that was sort of an abrupt end
6 at the 8th grade or the 9th grade and that
7 didn't seem to work as well in terms of your
8 experience as opposed to educators working
9 together, planning for hopefully pre-K right
10 through high school, right through 12th grade,
11 you can see that work.
12 MS. CASTALLUCCI: I can show you an
13 example outside of the Petrides School. The
14 8th grade students on Staten Island and I
15 don't know how it is across the rest of the
16 city, but the 8th grade students in each
17 school they're offered different advanced
18 courses. For example, they may be offered
19 biology in 8th grade or they may be offered
20 earth science or they may be offered advanced
21 math sequential, well, now it's math A. There
22 is no continuity.
23 So now you have these children who
24 have come from different intermediate schools
25 all going to the same high school and none of
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2 them are taking the same courses. One may
3 have taken bio. Another one may have taken
4 earth science. Another one may have taken
5 math A. Now they get to high school, now it
6 becomes a nightmare for the high school
7 staffers. How do they place these children in
8 courses?
9 So that's where I see that K to 12
10 could work because it would be across the
11 island. Everyone would be on track taking the
12 same courses. I'm not saying they should all
13 take advance courses. I don't think that they
14 can, but if the intermediates were all
15 offering the same courses, then the high
16 schools would be prepared for those students
17 when they get there. They would all have bio
18 or they would all have earth science or they
19 would all have math A, so when they get to the
20 high school, the high school knows that every
21 student coming out of immediate school was
22 prepared to move on to the next level,
23 chemistry or whatever it is.
24 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Not to nitpick
25 too much, but on Staten Island it probably
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2 works best because Staten Island is their own
3 school district. Once you get into some of
4 the other boroughs that have multiple school
5 districts where youngsters might go to an
6 elementary or junior or middle school and then
7 end up in a high school in another part of the
8 borough or even another part of the city,
9 unless all the curriculums in all the
10 districts somehow were aligned, you might
11 still have the same problem of youngsters in
12 the high school without, the word you and I
13 both agreed was a good word, the continuities
14 because you wouldn't necessarily have the
15 symmetry when you have kids in one district
16 attending elementary schools but then
17 attending high school in another district.
18 But, as I said, that's probably, to
19 some extent, overly at this stage of the game
20 micro managing your thought which is that to
21 the extent we can promote continuity and we
22 can align a student's education from one level
23 to the next to the next without the kind of
24 artificial breaks that, in your experience,
25 that is worth testing.
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2 Any other questions?
3 (No response.)
4 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
5 much.
6 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Loretta
7 Prisco?
8 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We've had the
9 benefit of your husband's testimony earlier.
10 I will not comment on the fact that you've
11 decided to appear separately and I don't want
12 to get into anything that's in a sensitive
13 area.
14 MS. PRISCO: We don't always agree
15 on things.
16 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I just want you
17 to know that he spoke very highly of you.
18 That's all I'll say.
19 MS. PRISCO: I guess I'm supposed
20 to say the same of him.
21 Members of the Task Force, good
22 afternoon. By way of introduction, please
23 allow me to tell you about PACE, the Parents
24 Action Committee for Education. We are an
25 educational advocacy group that has been in
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2 the business since 1974. We brought the
3 school board to Supreme Court twice and was
4 successful in getting judgments against them
5 for violations of the open meetings law.
6 We have played a role in school
7 board elections since 1980 and in the last
8 three elections successfully elected two
9 members and were closed to getting a third.
10 That doesn't mean that we are not critical of
11 school boards.
12 For the purpose of discussion we
13 will refer to the governing bodies to be
14 designed and defined by the State Legislature
15 in a new decentralization law as boards. We
16 also realize that elements of the following
17 discussion have been taken into consideration
18 under the new governance law but we feel it
19 worth repeating so as to underline their
20 importance and to make sure that in the next
21 couple of months they aren't eliminated.
22 Before proposing any
23 recommendations for governing boards, there
24 are several givens as we see it. The present
25 system is corrupt, mired in nepotism,
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2 patronage and scandalous behavior. Supposedly
3 some components of the decentralization law of
4 1968, for instance, not holding school board
5 elections on Election Day, forbidding
6 political parties from endorsing candidates,
7 was put into place to remove partisan politics
8 from the governance of schools. However, as
9 long as there are jobs and contracts tied to
10 the governing of schools, there will be
11 partisan politics involved.
12 No matter what shape, form or
13 structure boards take as long as they have
14 power, there will be machines attempting to
15 wrestle that power. Machines take all forms,
16 political parties, ideological groups and
17 groups that serve self-interest and
18 self-preservation. These machines, once in
19 power, will permit only token democracy while
20 making every attempt to keep all others out of
21 the real decision making process.
22 Change for the sake of change will
23 not necessarily improve education. No matter
24 what shape, form or structure boards take,
25 they will require well intentioned men and
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2 women committed to the improvement of schools
3 and instruction and the creation of a
4 democratic school system which supports
5 educational justice and equity.
6 With this being said, we propose
7 some guiding principles for consideration and
8 then we'll propose a structure. In order to
9 minimize nepotism, patronage and corruption,
10 we would like to think about boards being
11 completely removed from the process of hiring,
12 firing and the granting of contracts, that all
13 aspects of all governing individuals and
14 boards must be publicized, conducted in the
15 public eye and open to the public and the
16 Department of Education's scrutiny.
17 The election process must give a
18 level playing field to all candidates.
19 Election to office should not depend upon a
20 candidate's ability to fund an election. The
21 process of selection must be an electoral one
22 open to all members of the community served.
23 In order to best serve the children
24 and communities of our diverse city, boards
25 must serve distinct and discreet communities.
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2 Borough boards, as some have suggested, are
3 far too large for true representation. The
4 roles that members the board play should be as
5 diverse as the needs of our children. It
6 cannot be expected that any one member have
7 expertise in all necessary areas.
8 However, the election process must
9 make an attempt to seek members in all areas
10 in which boards are granted a role. The
11 election process should not be subject to
12 slate takeovers of boards. That by their very
13 nature do not serve the diversity that exists
14 within all communities. Now that there is
15 mayoral control of education we have grave
16 concern that the ups and downs of electoral
17 politics will reverberate in the educational
18 system. It has the potential of being
19 subjected to the educational beliefs of anyone
20 elected mayor for four years. The system
21 should be permitted consistent policy and long
22 range planning.
23 Now a suggested structure. The
24 proposed structure seeks to eliminate
25 corruption, establish democratic
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2 participation, enlist those with expertise to
3 serve as guardians and advocates of students
4 and encourage trust and equality between the
5 different levels of governments.
6 As far as the election process, no
7 candidate should be allowed to spend money on
8 an election for the board. All exposure to
9 the community via literature, the internet and
10 public access television should be established
11 by the chancellor and the central
12 administration with equal access to everyone.
13 Each region should elect a board of
14 members that serve as our ombudsmen for the
15 communities. The person seeking election
16 should be running as experts in particular
17 areas critical to children's well being. The
18 election should be structured so that a board
19 will have an equal number of members, experts
20 in fields of education, finance, health and
21 social work, as well as the same number of
22 persons to serve as parent members.
23 The election structure should
24 insure that the parent members represent the
25 geographic economic racial and ethnic groups
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2 within the communities.
3 The functioning of the board.
4 Rules and regulations should be clearly
5 defined and encourage democratic participation
6 in the operations of the board. The board
7 should meet one to two times a month. Meeting
8 dates and times should be widely published and
9 meetings open to the community. If boards are
10 serving a large geographic area, location must
11 be considered. All minutes must be published
12 and distributed. Requests for coverage should
13 be made in local papers and cable television.
14 The board should not be involved in
15 the recommendation or actual hiring or firing
16 of any personnel or the granting of
17 contracts. The role of the board should be as
18 a sounding board for the superintendent, the
19 eyes and voice of the community, advocate for
20 children, and providers of expertise in the
21 areas of finance, education, health care,
22 social services support and parent meetings.
23 To build trust in the support
24 structure at all levels, the spirit of the
25 relationship between the boards and the
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2 chancellor and the central administration
3 should be one of partnership and mutual
4 support.
5 School leadership teams and PTA
6 should submit minutes to the board. A
7 representative or representatives of each
8 school leadership team should meet as an
9 assembly with the board on a regular basis. A
10 representative or representatives of each
11 board should then meet with the chancellor and
12 the central administration as an assembly on a
13 regular basis.
14 Again, the meeting should be
15 regularly scheduled, publicized, open to the
16 public and have published minutes. A court of
17 appeals should be established to hear
18 complaints from individual schools and local
19 boards.
20 I've been involved in education I
21 guess as a teacher since 1962. I can't tell
22 you how many chancellors, I can't even name
23 the number of chancellors that I've seen come
24 and go and basically nothing has changed in
25 our classrooms. Changing of governance,
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2 levels of accountability, boards and
3 structures alone will not improve education
4 for our children. If we are successful, we
5 need to eliminate the greed and corruption
6 that has plagued our system. We need a
7 renewed dedication to children not to
8 re-election.
9 Long range planning, not subject to
10 the changing political whims of election.
11 Commitment of resources not subject to the ups
12 and downs of Wall Street. Good professional
13 development, a serious reduction in class
14 size, elimination of overcrowding and a major
15 infusion of support for the social issues
16 facing our children and their families. Thank
17 you.
18 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well,
19 Ms. Prisco, we thank you very, very much. I
20 think you maybe even outdid your husband. It
21 was a very good presentation.
22 Ms. Thomson?
23 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Your husband
24 is currently a school board member?
25 MS. PRISCO: Yes, he is.
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2 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Oh, boy.
3 MS. PRISCO: My comments about the
4 nepotism and the patronage is not meant to
5 condemn every school board member. Certainly
6 since I've been involved 1974, with pay, there
7 have been some wonderful school board
8 members.
9 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Is PACE a
10 Staten Island organization?
11 MS. PRISCO: Yes, it is.
12 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I guess my
13 comment is that I thought in 1996 the power to
14 hire, fire and grant contracts was removed
15 from school boards.
16 MS. PRISCO: Yes, and in my
17 comments I did say that while some of this
18 discussion has already been covered by past
19 decentralization laws, I felt it necessary to
20 underline it because my fear is in the next
21 couple of months the Legislature, you know,
22 people with a different political point of
23 view, that might be eliminated from the law.
24 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We want to thank
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2 you very much for having joined us today. We
3 appreciate the family testimony. I think
4 between you and your husband we got the entire
5 universe of ideas and thoughts. Thank you.
6 MS. PRISCO: Thank you.
7 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Council member
8 Michael McMann?
9 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: Good
10 afternoon. I made it under the wire. I want
11 to just start by saying I commend you all for
12 finding this room. I've lived here all my
13 life and I never knew this building was here
14 so it's quite a kudo to the Committee to be
15 able to find this.
16 I also have the privilege to follow
17 my neighbors, the Priscos.
18 Thank you. On behalf of the People
19 of Staten Island, I want to thank you for this
20 opportunity to present testimony on the future
21 of parental and community participation in the
22 governance to the New York City public school
23 system.
24 My name is Michael McMann and I'm a
25 city council representative for the 49th
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2 council district here on Staten Island. I'm a
3 relative newcomer to government having just
4 marked my one year anniversary in office.
5 However, it's quite clear that the issues with
6 which we grapple presently, namely how best to
7 allow direct parental and community
8 participation in a school system that serves
9 over one million children has plagued our
10 school's performance and is one that my
11 predecessors, I should say our predecessors,
12 and I know that Mr. Sanders dealt with this
13 issue in government and have dealt for a very
14 long time. I've worked here for nearly a
15 century or more. I don't mean to imply that
16 you've dealt with it for nearly a century or
17 more.
18 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: It feels that
19 way, Councilman.
20 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: I understand
21 that. My point simply being that this is an
22 issue that has kind of come and gone in a
23 reciprocal fashion. I think you know that
24 more than I do.
25 Surely to those who designed a now
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2 outgoing system of elected community school
3 boards, it appeared at least on paper that
4 this system was the best way to provide the
5 engagement of power and to allow for
6 efficiency in education with a connection to
7 the communities. It now seems that this
8 system has been declared a failure and we see
9 to how best structure a new system as we move
10 forward with the Department of Education now
11 being under the control of the mayor.
12 Although the former system may not
13 have succeeded the goals that it sought to
14 achieve I believe are still laudable. We must
15 allow for community participation and parental
16 engagement if we are going to be successful in
17 making our schools the best that they can be
18 for our children.
19 The exigencies of modern day life,
20 including limited resources and the increased
21 demand regarding work load on parents
22 certainly make our task all the more
23 imminent. We must do this at a time when the
24 public has little confidence in our school
25 system and the stories about waste, corruption
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2 and ineptitude within that system are legion,
3 but let me just say that I am not one who
4 always believes these stories. There are
5 problems but there are also many wonderful
6 success stories, many of which I have seen
7 myself by visiting the schools within my
8 district.
9 I think we all agree that we must
10 do better. Without question, the task that
11 you undertake is a formidable one but also an
12 extremely vital one and we applaud you for
13 your efforts and hard work in this regard. We
14 need to establish a system that allows for an
15 integration of ideas, concerns and
16 understanding of the process amongst the
17 parents, community leaders, teachers and
18 administrators and government officials. I
19 believe the best way to achieve that goal is
20 to develop a system that adheres to some very
21 basic principles. These must include
22 openness, accountability and responsiveness to
23 the people whom the system is established to
24 serve, to wit, our children.
25 Certainly some form of parent
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2 council must be established to allow a
3 mechanism for the parents to be directly
4 involved in the education of their children.
5 In addition, I support the proposal
6 put forth by Borough President Daldolfo Carion
7 of the Bronx for making calls for the
8 establishment of borough boards for education
9 planning to allow for the integration of
10 planning for our schools.
11 To be sure the greatest issue faced
12 in my district regarding education is the lack
13 of building space and the lack of planning
14 over the last decade. Moreover, there have
15 been recent proposals to integrate the
16 different school districts by allowing a K
17 through 12 district, and this is something
18 that I support.
19 Here on Staten Island we have one
20 very large school district, and I would
21 suggest an overall superintendent as well as
22 deputy superintendents for the elementary
23 schools, middle schools and high schools but
24 all working to have a district wide
25 integration of the school improvement efforts,
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2 for the establishment of parental
3 organizations and a restructuring of the
4 school district, we will then be able to focus
5 on the problem of school planning and the
6 zoning issues which can be tackled by the
7 aforementioned borough board for education
8 planning.
9 Borough President Carion has
10 proposed that these borough boards be chaired
11 by the borough president and be comprised of
12 the presidents of the parent councils, the
13 supervising superintendents and additional
14 representatives from the community at large.
15 I would also submit that the
16 borough planning board should include the city
17 council member or members effected by those
18 borough boards. On Staten Island, for
19 instance, that would include the three city
20 council members on that borough wide planning
21 board. The establishment of this board would
22 allow for a much better planning mechanism
23 than currently exists. It also would help
24 establish clear priorities for not only
25 classroom curricula and service delivery but
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2 also future construction and expansion needs.
3 Again, I can't underscore how much
4 that sort of physical planning aspect is
5 missing. I don't know about the rest of the
6 city, but certainly here on Staten Island it's
7 an issue of great, great concern that there is
8 no planning mechanism for the building of
9 schools and in any way integrated in any
10 planning mechanism.
11 I also ask you to be very mindful
12 of the circumstances for our children with
13 special needs. We must devise a system that
14 allows for the maximum level of integration
15 possible without losing sight of the needs of
16 our special children and their parents, I'm
17 sure you are very well aware that there is a
18 lot of talk about District 75 being
19 eliminated, being consolidated and that
20 certainly would be a loss, I believe, and I
21 hope that this panel considers that and I'm
22 sure you consider it in all your work with the
23 education committee.
24 In conclusion, I would like to once
25 again thank you for coming to Staten Island
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2 and for all the hard work you are doing to
3 make our schools more effective. We all agree
4 that the goal of providing the best possible
5 education for our children is one of the most
6 important things that government can do. By
7 organizing parental involvement and creating a
8 borough board that would allow for planning
9 after restructuring the school district, I
10 believe that we will have the tools in place
11 to make this possible.
12 I believe that with the
13 establishment of mayoral control of the
14 Department of Education, we have made great
15 strides for providing with poor accountability
16 in our school system.
17 I also believe that those foregoing
18 suggestions will add to the mix of openness,
19 parental engagement and effective planning.
20 Once again, I thank you very much
21 for allowing us to participate in this very
22 important process. Thank you.
23 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, Council
24 Member, we are indebted to you for not only
25 your service on the City Council but for
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2 taking the time to give us the benefit of your
3 insight and your advice.
4 I congratulate you on your election
5 a year ago.
6 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: Thank you.
7 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Even all the way
8 in Manhattan we hear wonderful things about
9 the work that you are doing on behalf of the
10 residents of Staten Island and on the City
11 Council for all of New York City, so I want to
12 certainly let you know as a colleague in
13 government of yours that you have already
14 become very well regarded among the people of
15 the City of New York.
16 Miss Brown?
17 MS. BROWN: I just have one
18 question. In terms of your proposal, you want
19 integrating of the school districts by
20 allowing K through 12. How does that work
21 citywide? And I'm just thinking about the
22 borough of Brooklyn. This has been an ongoing
23 problem for us.
24 We don't have enough high schools
25 and actually by doing this it would eliminate
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2 choice for students in that particular
3 borough.
4 What recommendation would you make
5 to alleviate that?
6 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: First, thank
7 you for the kind words, Mr. Chairman.
8 Miss Brown, I'm not sure how it
9 would eliminate choice. Would that mean --
10 MS. BROWN: We don't have enough
11 schools. Actually, there are certain clusters
12 of communities within the borough that would
13 be left with no high school if we were or
14 maybe one high school if we were to look at
15 integrating all of the school districts into
16 one in a particular borough.
17 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: I think what I
18 meant was within certain districts to
19 integrate from the bottom to the top so that
20 perhaps in Brooklyn you would have a certain
21 amount of districts but you wouldn't have a
22 separate basis which is the Brooklyn, Staten
23 Island high schools and then the elementary
24 schools and the intermediate schools
25 separate. The way it is now, you have two
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2 separate administrative operations going on.
3 I don't mean to make one school district for
4 the whole borough of Brooklyn. That would be
5 unwieldy.
6 Staten Island now does have one
7 school district which is very close to being
8 unwieldy. It's really too big, but I didn't
9 want to get into breaking that up but what I
10 meant was that the superintendent of schools
11 for District 31 should be the superintendent
12 for everything from K to 12, and the same
13 would hold true in Brooklyn. I apologize. I
14 don't know how many school districts there are
15 in Brooklyn, but there should be a sort of
16 bottom to top integration or the
17 superintendent should be in charge of the high
18 schools and the elementary and the
19 intermediate schools in his or her district.
20 And that certainly doesn't mean that a student
21 can't go across district lines, depending what
22 the needs are, but I think it would make for a
23 better integration.
24 I understand that solution may be
25 fit better for Staten Island because we are
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2 sort of one geographic unit and I don't know
3 the details of where the different high
4 schools are located. It could see it could be
5 a problem but I think it could work somehow to
6 have a better integration because I know a
7 City Council member, maybe I can just give you
8 an example. We were lucky enough to get
9 through this terrible budget crisis. There
10 was some money available from a prior act that
11 allowed for the locating of computer upgrades
12 or the building of computers in schools. We
13 had to deal with two totally separate
14 administrations to place those computers in
15 the elementary schools versus the high
16 schools. It was very difficult to do on a
17 high school level as opposed to the elementary
18 school level or the middle school.
19 There was no integration. There
20 was no integration into the curricula that
21 they were using and the physical plant and it
22 just seemed it would be a better idea to have
23 that K to 12 integration.
24 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Thomson and
25 then Assemblyman LaVelle.
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2 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I just want to
3 say, I think we could probably hold the whole
4 city like Staten Island because you're
5 geographically separated. You have one
6 district. You have high schools that your
7 children feed into. It works so well here.
8 It is just such an easier model.
9 But as Robin said when you grapple
10 with Brooklyn where children don't necessarily
11 go to zone schools, they may go to schools in
12 Manhattan or in Queens or at the other
13 boroughs, there wouldn't be that natural
14 articulation from middle school to high
15 school. They could go to middle school in one
16 district and end up in an entirely different
17 borough going to high school. I think that's
18 the difficulty with what we have to do, that
19 we have to think of the whole city.
20 But I think Staten Island, from
21 everything we've heard here today, just has
22 this wonderful model of one community, one
23 district, high schools within the district.
24 You have the parent federation. You don't
25 have that in the other boroughs. It's sort of
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2 a different model for us.
3 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: But even within
4 the separate districts, I mean --
5 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: We have some
6 districts in Brooklyn that don't have a high
7 school.
8 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: I see. I get
9 the point. I didn't realize that.
10 We have this assumption that things
11 are spread out geographically proportionate
12 through the rest of the city and obviously
13 that's not the case. I mean, there are
14 children from Staten Island who travel to
15 different parts of the city to go to high
16 school. The point being that their
17 administration should be in the district that
18 they are in.
19 We just have this problem with this
20 sort of dual administration I think high
21 school to K through eight.
22 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: Thank you,
23 Mike, for coming to testify today.
24 And, Steve, thank you for your
25 comments to Michael because I think they were
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2 well deserved.
3 I'd like to bring up a dialogue
4 with you regarding some of the testimony that
5 we've heard regarding community planning
6 boards being more or less a model for maybe
7 what we would want to replace school boards
8 with. In those discussions one of the things
9 that came up is we have 59 community planning
10 boards in the City of New York and we have 30
11 something school districts in the City of New
12 York. Another thing that I threw in was we
13 have 51 council members in the City of New
14 York.
15 I thought something that we might
16 want to discuss is to make all of them united
17 so that you have the same number, and I
18 thought the way to do that would be 51 council
19 members so that for each council member that
20 council member would have a community planning
21 board and community school districts. I also
22 happen to think that that would allow the
23 people within those communities to have an
24 advocate for them, not only on all the issues,
25 but also the budget matters.
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2 But that is well beyond this Task
3 Force's capabilities because that would
4 require a charter revision and also as the
5 census is done every ten years, all of those
6 boundaries would change accordingly.
7 I was just wondering if you had
8 some comments on that point.
9 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: Again, for
10 Staten Island that's a very easy question to
11 answer because my council district is very
12 close to being coterminous with my community
13 board district and with my precinct so that I
14 have three of the four elements are in place
15 right now. And to have the sort of community
16 education board or planning board as part of
17 that would work splendidly. I think it's a
18 great idea.
19 I don't know how it would work in
20 other parts of the city because it's true. I
21 don't know if you know how it would work so
22 easily but I think it's a great idea because
23 it does make the administration of my office
24 is much easier because I really have the
25 community board is almost exactly the same
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2 aligns and the precinct is very much exactly
3 the same, so we kind of work together and were
4 able to do that and having the planning board
5 for I think the education and really for
6 education input to be able to be a channel for
7 parents and for the community and to work on
8 sort of the physical planning, not to think
9 really that we would get involved so much with
10 the education part of it. That's what
11 professional educators are for but to allow
12 those other things I think would be a
13 wonderful idea and I think that's something
14 that's worth looking into.
15 And it would, I guess we're looking
16 for a dramatic increase in the school boards.
17 For planning I guess not as much for
18 Department of Education Administration. The
19 DOE now has 31 boards. It would have to be
20 done it conjunction with them but certainly it
21 would work and certainly having one board for
22 all of Staten Island in terms of managing it
23 is a little too big. I think that district is
24 a little too large. It's certainly a good
25 idea and, again, would work wonderfully in the
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2 Staten Island model. Let's see about the rest
3 of the city.
4 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Reddington?
5 MS. REDDINGTON: Welcome. Mike,
6 would you -- that board, the school board,
7 what is your opinion? Should it be elected or
8 appointed since planning boards are
9 appointed?
10 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: I would do it
11 under the model to be with an appointee. The
12 borough president would be on it so he or she
13 would be elected and the City Council person
14 would be on it. He or she would be elected.
15 Then I would have appointees.
16 I don't think having -- I hope I
17 don't burn too many bridges here but the
18 school board elections in theory, although
19 they were a very good idea, didn't work very
20 well, just because the participation level was
21 so low. And the powers that this board would
22 have would be much lesser, as I understand it,
23 than what the old community school board would
24 have, at least under the sort of marking
25 model.
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2 So I would have it, as I described
3 in my testimony, either the borough president
4 or representatives or the City Council or
5 representative, the presidents of the parent
6 council, so, in effect, they would be elected
7 by the parents' council and there may be a few
8 other people who would come by way of position
9 or election by sort of representative
10 elections as opposed to recollections.
11 My impression was that the school
12 board elections didn't work. The turn out
13 what so low that they would either have to be
14 held on Election Day or done away with, but
15 the way they were held in the past just didn't
16 work.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Thomson?
18 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: The model of
19 the borough board, are you suggesting that in
20 the other boroughs, because in Staten Island
21 we really have only one board anyway, in the
22 other boroughs that that would be the only
23 entity? Would there still be local governing
24 bodies or boards and then one big borough
25 board?
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2 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: Yes. I think
3 it would have to be more along the district
4 model that Assemblyman LaVelle was talking
5 about, to look to do it by district and
6 thereby then it would make more sense to do it
7 by council district or at least across council
8 lines, so you would have maybe one or two
9 council members depending on where the school
10 district runs and then -- you want it to be a
11 little more local than one per borough. You
12 certainly can't have one per borough in
13 Brooklyn and in Queens and even in the Bronx,
14 so it would have to be more on a district
15 level.
16 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Miss Brown?
17 MS. BROWN: I'm just thinking about
18 some of the other boroughs. I'm not just
19 thinking about Brooklyn. The Council members
20 in Brooklyn where they overlap three or four
21 community school districts that have a piece
22 of three to four community school districts
23 and again your thinking about the issue of
24 representation.
25 I guess if you go with that model,
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2 one huge borough board, how do you get the
3 needs of the, I don't know, the parents who
4 are sending their children to schools in the
5 these districts that overlap and if, in fact,
6 would there be a need for a superintendent and
7 exactly what role that superintendent would
8 play and the powers the superintendent would
9 have in relation to the borough board.
10 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: No. I would
11 think in terms of a planning group per
12 district, so for each district you would the
13 borough president or representative, the
14 Council member or members as it may be.
15 As it is with community boards now,
16 I understand that we are unusual in that we
17 are almost coterminous here but not totally
18 coterminous so there are many areas where
19 there are two Council members who cover the
20 community board, so I would think that you
21 would have to have a planning board per
22 district would be the better way to do it, as
23 is the case now with the community school
24 board, but have a Council representative or
25 two or three. If it is so, I didn't realize
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2 that there might be a community school
3 district that has five or six Council members
4 in it, then I've described something that
5 might not be so wonderful in that situation.
6 It would have to be looked at. I understand
7 the problem then. We would have to look at
8 making things more coterminous but certainly
9 to have the input from those organizations as
10 we planned.
11 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well,
12 Councilman, we thank you so much for your
13 very, very thoughtful testimony and for the
14 candid give and take that we were able to have
15 with you today. I would only reiterate that I
16 think the people of Staten Island were very
17 smart and very lucky in their decision a year
18 ago.
19 COUNCILMAN MCMANN: And I think all
20 the children of New York State are fortunate
21 and lucky to have you leading the Assembly
22 Committee on Education as you've done for so
23 long and for this panel to be working so
24 hard. I think that we are very, very well
25 served.
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2 And as we know, it's not easy, but
3 I think the end result will be well worth it.
4 Thank you very much.
5 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Salvatore
6 Ballarino, secretary/treasurer of Community
7 School Board District 31.
8 MR. BALLARINO: Members of the
9 panel, thank you very much for hearing my
10 testimony. Welcome to Staten Island even
11 though I know you had to pay a $7 toll.
12 I've heard so many comments I don't
13 even know where to start.
14 First of all, as an elected person
15 of the school board, I had gotten votes from
16 all over Staten Island, not just from one
17 community but from the whole island, from the
18 north shore to the south shore.
19 As far as comments in the past
20 about members of boards being corrupt and
21 taking payments for favors, that without
22 saying is absolutely wrong. Anybody that does
23 that should be in jail, but then if you look
24 at the United States Congress, there was a
25 congressman who was caught stealing from the
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2 United States Post Office and they didn't
3 disband the whole Congress, they just sent
4 that one person to jail. I can't see because
5 of a couple of school boards or a couple of
6 school board members being corrupt that all
7 the school boards should be taken apart.
8 What process or what you will use
9 or what you will come up with to replace the
10 school boards I have no idea, and I won't even
11 try to offer a selection because as far as I'm
12 concerned, it should stay the way it is.
13 As far as the comments about low
14 turn out at elections, everyone knows, and you
15 can go and check it out at the Board of
16 Elections, at special elections you only get
17 25, 30 percent of the vote, whether it be a
18 Council election, an Assembly election or a
19 state senate election, so that argument
20 doesn't hold water at all.
21 As far as being in charge of
22 personnel and having power over appointments
23 for personnel, personally I don't want it. I
24 don't want anybody to point their figure at me
25 and say why did you appoint that person
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2 because that person's a jerk or they are not
3 doing their job or they're not the best for
4 the children. Let the superintendent appoint
5 the person, whoever it is. It's not my job.
6 Don't look at me. Why should the
7 superintendent, even now, with the C30, be
8 forced to take selections that teachers and
9 parents and PC 37 people put together and
10 out.
11 There have been cases where they
12 have eliminated good people because those
13 people were too tough on them. The
14 superintendents should appoint the best people
15 to do the job. If that appointee is bad, well
16 then it's on the superintendent's head. It
17 shouldn't be on the school board's head.
18 We weren't hired to do personnel
19 appointments. That's the superintendent's
20 job. We were hired to be the eyes and ears of
21 the community, to know what the community
22 wants and report back to the superintendent.
23 That's what we are here for.
24 As far as allocation of classroom
25 seats, I've heard that on an equal basis.
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2 Here on Staten Island we have received three
3 schools, two out of the budget and one Mayor
4 Giulliani was kind enough to give us the money
5 for. Having sat on Federation's construction
6 panel, on the executive board as construction
7 chairman and sitting on District 31 for the
8 last ten years as construction chair, I have
9 had almost overall overview of all the
10 construction of schools and classroom seats on
11 Staten Island.
12 I have sat on the borough
13 president's construction task force and I'm
14 considered by many to be the most
15 knowledgeable person in the district when it
16 comes to school seats. I have people from the
17 Advance call me at work and ask me questions
18 and they want to know if I was reading from a
19 piece of paper and I said, no, I don't read
20 out of paper, it's right in the back of my
21 head.
22 So were the seats allocated
23 fairly? Yes, because they were based on the
24 population of the schools in the surrounding
25 area at the present given time. What
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2 transpired after the money was allocated and
3 the school was set in motion in a particular
4 neighborhood and other neighborhoods grew,
5 well, if I had a crystal ball then I would be
6 genius and I wouldn't have to have a regular
7 job I could just do that.
8 As far as a K through 12 continuous
9 education in one school, do you realize the
10 money that you are talking about? Think about
11 the money that you're talking about that you
12 would have to outlay to do a K through 12
13 school. You would have to retrofit all the
14 bathrooms. You would have their locker
15 rooms. The cost would be prohibitive, very
16 prohibitive. I don't think the State
17 Assemblyman or the State Senate or the
18 governor would be willing to outlay that kind
19 of cash to do that kind of a job.
20 Should one superintendent be in
21 charge of everything with deputies on every
22 level to coordinate curriculum? Possibly.
23 That might be a solution, but to retrofit
24 every school to do a K through 12 is wrong
25 because it's just not going to work. It's
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2 cost prohibitive.
3 We're looking for dollars now and
4 you want to talk about doing hundreds and
5 hundreds of thousands of dollars, either that
6 or you're going to have a urinal and you're
7 going to have a milk box along side of it like
8 they did here at the Petrides School when they
9 first got into it. It was a college setup.
10 So we're talking about a lot of money. That's
11 very prohibitive.
12 You know, I will speak for myself
13 only because I know there are other board
14 members that spend a lot of time on their own
15 doing their job. As far as I'm concerned, and
16 I don't think any person in the Federation
17 would deny the fact, that the job that I do is
18 a 24/7 job. I've gone out on Sundays to check
19 out jobs. I've climbed on roofs. I've
20 climbed in basements. I had parents that
21 wouldn't send their kids to school unless I
22 went into the school to go check it out to
23 make sure. It's light outside now. If I told
24 the parents it was dark outside and someone
25 from the Board of Ed told them it was light
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2 outside, they would say, no, it's dark
3 outside.
4 The parents don't trust the Board
5 of Ed because they have never been told the
6 truth, not ever. As far as the central Board
7 of Education running things, look at Lafayette
8 High School. You remember Lafayette High
9 School in Brooklyn. The district attorney's
10 office had to go there today to see what they
11 can do to straighten out the school. District
12 21 begged them to let them run the school and
13 they told them no.
14 Should the school board be in
15 charge of everything? Yes, because then they
16 will know, they'll put a field down in time
17 for high school. The will put a gym down.
18 They have a couple of months. They have to
19 rip up the gym floor because it wasn't put
20 down right. I'd be darned if I was on the
21 board or on the board during my tenure they
22 put that floor down and that floor wasn't
23 right, I would make them rip it up before they
24 put it down.
25 It's one thing to be appointed to a
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2 position and sit on a panel and talk to people
3 and it's another thing to be an elected
4 official to sit at a table and discuss things
5 with these people. Suppose the Assemblymen
6 were all appointees and you have no power.
7 You have no say. It's one thing being an
8 elected official. I sat at the table as a
9 parent and I sat at the table as elected
10 official. The people on the other side of the
11 table have more respect for you when you're an
12 elected official than if you are just an
13 appointed person. Today you're there and
14 tomorrow you're gone but as an elected
15 official, if you're doing your job the way you
16 are supposed to and advocating for the
17 children the way you're supposed to, you will
18 be there when that term is up and the term
19 after that is up and the term after that is up
20 and on and on and on.
21 Mr. LaVelle, Mr. Sanders, I'm sure
22 that if you gentlemen were not doing your jobs
23 you would not be there.
24 I think I covered all the comments
25 that I heard and my thoughts as a school board
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2 member.
3 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, first of
4 all, we very much appreciate the ability to
5 have your insight and your many years on the
6 school board here on Staten Island. And I
7 know that your views are passionate and
8 informed by your many years of experience.
9 Let me just make one very brief
10 comment because I know you were exercised by
11 it and I just wanted to clarify, I think, what
12 the discussions were earlier. I don't think
13 that the proposal that was discussed between
14 the Task Force and one of the witnesses was to
15 take schools themselves, K through 12, the
16 schools themselves, I think the person who was
17 testifying was testifying to the view that a
18 school district that had purview over K
19 through 12 and the purview didn't stop at the
20 junior high school and the middle school level
21 as it commonly does today, that it would be
22 better to have it all under one umbrella.
23 Certainly I think your comments
24 were correct that to think about having to
25 change the physicality of school buildings to
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2 accommodate kindergartners would be cost
3 prohibitive and not the right policy.
4 I just wanted you to know that that
5 was what that person was talking about.
6 MR. BALLARINO: Just to sum up one
7 other point, there's been talk in the past
8 about splitting Staten Island into two school
9 districts because one district is so big.
10 First of all, it works. We have less
11 personnel governing District 31 than districts
12 in Manhattan and Brooklyn who have less
13 students and have more personnel governing the
14 same district. And also it has been thought
15 about and talked about many times about
16 dividing Staten Island. No body on Staten
17 Island wants to be divided and then you will
18 end up having mass movement from one end of
19 the island to the other end. The perception
20 of the people on the other side will say the
21 schools are going to be better on the other
22 side because it's a separate district.
23 That's been tried. I remember one
24 gentleman running for a board office he had
25 mentioned it. I said do yourself a big favor,
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2 don't even breathe it because if you breathe
3 it, you are an automatic loser.
4 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
5 much for all of your comments and your years
6 of public service.
7 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Timothy Behr,
8 interim acting principal of P.S. 35.
9 MR. BEHR: Good afternoon. I would
10 like to welcome you to Staten Island. I also
11 had extreme difficulty getting to this room to
12 find out where you were. I thought you were
13 hiding from us, but I've been on Staten Island
14 for 16 years and I couldn't find.
15 I would like to introduce myself.
16 I'm Tim Behr, interim principal at P.S. 35.
17 I've been an educator in District 31 for the
18 last 15 years. My main purpose for being here
19 today is to say I thought community school
20 board for District 31 was a valuable asset for
21 my tenure throughout the district. I find it
22 to be a wonderfully liaison between the
23 district personnel, school administrators, the
24 teachers, parents, students and the community
25 at large. They offer quite a bit of services
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2 for public school spirit week where the whole
3 entire Staten Island community gets involved,
4 comes to the schools and comes to the district
5 to see one team all together in a community.
6 Our district is unique. I find our
7 board to be quite effective in communicating
8 as the eyes and ears of the entire school
9 district and that we are a high performing
10 district because of the contributions of the
11 community school board.
12 I like the idea of the borough
13 boards, if we had to change something, and
14 breaking it up into three council members,
15 three districts on Staten Island, I think
16 that's a viable option, including members of
17 the board who still want to be involved with
18 the education process of the island.
19 I'm short. I'm brief. I'm mainly
20 here to say I support what the district has
21 done, what the community school board has done
22 for our district. I hope in some capacity
23 they are able to stay involved in our school
24 district for the remainder of the district.
25 Thank you.
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2 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you, sir.
3 MR. BEHR: Have a good afternoon.
4 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: No, I have one
5 for you.
6 MS. BROWN: I have a question.
7 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We've had some
8 discussion back and forth today and at some of
9 the public hearings about leadership teams,
10 and most of what we have heard, which I tend
11 to concur with based on my own experience and
12 what I have heard from parents in school
13 districts that I represent, is that the
14 success or lack of success of a school
15 district to a large extent is predicated on
16 the attitude and the view of the principal
17 that has to, of course, interact with the
18 other stakeholders on the school district
19 team.
20 There are some principals who feel
21 that the existence of a school leadership team
22 is a hindrance, an annoyance and provides the
23 most minimal interaction with those leadership
24 teams. And then there are other principals
25 who feel that they are an asset and having the
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2 input from a variety of other stakeholders,
3 parents, business people, teachers is useful
4 and there is a spirit of collaboration.
5 So my question to you is: Based on
6 your experience as a principal in that
7 capacity, what are your overall thoughts of
8 school leadership teams and where should they
9 end up in whatever new paradigm that we try to
10 create in terms of the community and parental
11 input?
12 MR. BEHR: Well, the main asset of
13 the school leadership team, from my point of
14 view and from my experience now with this
15 school is that I am the educational leader of
16 the school. I feel that the bottom line stops
17 with me. I want to hear all the input of what
18 is said from all constituents, have them
19 involvement because a better school has more
20 parties involved and more opinions are
21 involved, what's best for the school, starting
22 with the demographics of the school, the
23 academic performance of the school, the budget
24 of the school, population and what can
25 actually be done within the school using all
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2 constituents as well as the community school
3 board representative on the school leadership
4 time.
5 I find them valuable to the extent
6 that their input can improve academic, social
7 or emotional performance at the school, but as
8 you said, a lot of it depends on the principal
9 and what he wants done, what is the agenda.
10 My agenda at my meetings is to make the school
11 as best as possible academically and to make
12 kids like coming to school. It really depends
13 on what each individual principal has for
14 their school. Can it work? Yes, but based
15 the constituents and what is hopefully going
16 to get done and there is no hidden agenda that
17 what is addressed is what is getting done.
18 MS. BROWN: I have a question.
19 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: My question has
20 prompted questions. Ms. Brown?
21 MS. BROWN: In reference to your
22 school leadership team, how many people do you
23 have presently serving on your school
24 leadership team?
25 MR. BEHR: 16, 18 should they come.
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2 MS. BROWN: Your parents are there
3 and engaged on a regular basis?
4 MR. BEHR: On a regular basis.
5 MS. BROWN: Do the parents have
6 input on your school's CEP or do they work on
7 all aspects?
8 MR. BEHR: They are involved in the
9 DEP, the district educational plan, and also
10 the school educational plan and, yes, they are
11 involved with their input and we just
12 revised --
13 MS. BROWN: What aspects of the
14 plan do they work on, the parents, at your
15 particular school?
16 MR. BEHR: Academic reforms, grant
17 writing.
18 MS. BROWN: So they're not just
19 working on the parent issues.
20 MR. BEHR: No, and we also
21 incorporate in my school, in particular, a
22 large parent volunteer program to prove
23 academic performance. There is a lot of input
24 of what parents come in, exactly what they are
25 going to do and where they could get the
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2 resources to utilize and to improve school
3 performance.
4 MS. BROWN: If you were to
5 categorize your school as a level one school,
6 level two school, level three school --
7 MR. BEHR: Level four.
8 MS. BROWN: In which community is
9 your school on Staten Island, on the north
10 side north, south side?
11 MR. BEHR: North shore, five
12 minutes from here, right off Club Road.
13 MS. BROWN: Thank you.
14 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, we thank
15 you very much and obviously presiding over a
16 level four school is an accomplishment that
17 you need to be congratulated for. That is
18 what we aspire to for all of the 1,100 schools
19 of New York City. You have achieved it and we
20 appreciate all your accomplishments. We thank
21 you for being here.
22 MR. BEHR: Thank you. Thank you
23 for listening.
24 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: The time now is
25 4:30. We have completed our list of witnesses
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2 for the day session. The evening session,
3 which we have a list of eight or nine
4 additional speakers who have signed up. We
5 will commence a little bit later. We will
6 reconvene at 6:15.
7 (A recess was taken from 4:30 p.m.
8 to 6:15 p.m.)
9 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Good evening,
10 everyone. Thank you for being here. We are
11 happy to be here. This is the Task Force on
12 Community School District Governance Reform.
13 My name is Steve Sanders. I am a
14 co-chair of this Task Force. To my left is
15 Terri Thomson, who is the other co-chair. I
16 just want to spend a few moments, as we do at
17 the beginning of each of our sessions, to
18 explain why we are, what we are doing and
19 pretty much what the schedule and the ground
20 rules will be for this evening's session.
21 As most of you know, the
22 Legislature in June of 2002 enacted some
23 rather sweeping changes and reforms for the
24 New York City school system. Many of those
25 changes gave greater authority and
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2 accountability to the mayor, to the chancellor
3 and to the district superintendents.
4 The legislation also indicated that
5 at the end of the school year, as of June 30th
6 of 2003, the local community school boards
7 that were enacted some 30 years ago would
8 cease to exist. However, the legislation that
9 was passed did not eliminate local
10 representation or parental input.
11 What the legislation did was to
12 seek a replacement of community
13 representation, hopefully one that would be
14 even better than that which has existed over
15 the last 30 years, and to that end the
16 legislation caused the creation of this task
17 force, a 20 member task force, ten of whom are
18 appointed by the senate majority leader, ten
19 of whom are appointed by the Assembly
20 speaker.
21 We are required to hold public
22 hearings around the city. The legislation
23 required that at a minimum we hold one public
24 hearing in each borough. This is the fourth
25 hearing that we have held. We started in
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2 Manhattan on December the 10th, I think, and
3 then we traveled to Queens on the 12th of
4 December, the Bronx on December the 19th. We
5 are delighted to be here on Staten Island
6 today, and we will conclude the hearings on
7 Thursday, January the 16th in Brooklyn.
8 The legislation required that we
9 submitted a preliminary report on December the
10 15th to the governor and the legislature,
11 which we did, indicating the activities of
12 this Task Force and our progress, and the law
13 requires that by February the 15th, this Task
14 Force must make a recommendation to the State
15 Legislature and the governor concerning our
16 recommendation for replacing local community
17 school boards. As I say, these school boards
18 were being phased out by the law, not
19 community representation, and certainly not
20 parental input.
21 It is our purpose to hear from as
22 many residents of the City of New York, public
23 officials, parents, students, professionals,
24 citizens who want to give to us the benefit of
25 their experience, their wisdom, their insight,
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2 their recommendations, which of course we are
3 listening to very carefully. And those
4 suggestions will certainly be a part of our
5 deliberations when we conclude these public
6 hearings and begin our phase of the
7 consideration of a new proposal, which as I
8 indicated earlier we will present to the
9 Legislature and the governor on February the
10 15th.
11 We have sought as best as we could
12 during a relatively short time frame to make
13 these public hearings as accessible as we
14 possibly could. To that end, each of these
15 hearing dates in each borough have been
16 divided into two separate sections; one during
17 the daytime that has run pretty much from ten
18 in the morning until about 4, 4:30 in the
19 afternoon, and then understanding as we do
20 that many people who want to offer their ideas
21 and their testimony to this task force are
22 either parents or working men or women who
23 find it easier in fact to come to such an
24 event during the evening hours, we have
25 scheduled an evening session for each of the
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2 five boroughs, and that is where we are right
3 now.
4 We have already heard from I guess
5 about 80 or 90 individuals around the city,
6 close to one hundred, and we expect that we
7 will have an interesting session tonight
8 followed by our last session in Brooklyn.
9 Before I ask each of the members of
10 the Task Force who are here tonight to briefly
11 introduce themselves and tell you a little bit
12 about themselves, I want to turn to my
13 co-chair, Terri Thomson, who I think has some
14 opening remarks as well. Terri?
15 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you,
16 Steve.
17 Welcome. Thank you for being here
18 tonight, for letting us hear your concerns.
19 We had some wonderful testimony this morning
20 and this afternoon from the parents and
21 community residents of Staten Island. I think
22 we learned a lot today. We learned a lot
23 about your community and some of the unique
24 needs of the citizens of Staten Island.
25 I want to assure you we are here to
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2 listen. There are no decisions made about
3 what the meaningful role will be for parents
4 in the community and our education system.
5 That's what this hearing is all about, to hear
6 what you have to say and get your ideas.
7 I would like to start with my left
8 and ask Assemblyman John LaVelle to say a few
9 words.
10 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: I'm
11 Assemblyman John LaVelle, I represent the 61st
12 Assembly District, which is basically the
13 north shore of Staten Island. I serve on the
14 Education Committee of the State Assembly and
15 I served on the previous school governance
16 committee.
17 I would also like to say I'm very
18 proud of Staten Island today because we did
19 have good participation in the morning and the
20 afternoon sessions and I expect the same will
21 happen this evening, too. Thank you for
22 coming.
23 MS. REDDINGTON: Good evening. I
24 am Bunny Reddington currently serving as vice
25 chair of Community School Board 31 and I also
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2 would like to say that I'm very proud of the
3 attendance we've had today due to the
4 inclement weather and I thank you very much.
5 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: Good
6 evening, Assemblywoman Audrey Phefer. I
7 represent the south shore in the Rockaway
8 Peninsula.
9 MS. BROWN: I'm Robin Brown,
10 Chancellor's Parent Advisory Council, which is
11 a representation of the 32 community school
12 districts, six high school federations,
13 District 75 and District 85.
14 MS. WYLDE: Kathy Wylde with the
15 New York City Partnership, the City's business
16 leadership organization.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me just for
18 the record, I actually just spoke a little bit
19 in my opening remarks. We have actually thus
20 far heard from about 115 people around the
21 city. I think we are off to a pretty good
22 start in getting a very good representative
23 sampling of the views of people around the
24 city.
25 I'm also happy just to indicate
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2 that we have had the testimony at each of the
3 hearings from the borough president
4 representing each borough that we have been in
5 so far, and we were very, very pleased that
6 the Borough President Molinaro was our lead
7 witness this morning, and we had a very good
8 exchange with the borough president.
9 So without further adieu as they
10 say.
11 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I just wanted
12 the add that Council Member McMann also spoke
13 a little while ago and we will submit for the
14 record the statement of Senator John Marchi
15 that was just received. He is not here so --
16 oh, we do have a speaker. We will be calling
17 on him in a few minutes.
18 The first speaker is Janey Moran.
19 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I would just
20 like to acknowledge the presence of City
21 Council Andrew Lanza who will be submitting
22 written testimony to the Committee but he
23 thought he would sit in for a little while to
24 listen to some of the testimony from other
25 Staten Islanders so I would like to thank the
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2 Councilman for being here.
3 MS. MORAN: Good evening. I
4 welcome you all again here. I'm sure you were
5 welcomed many times over to Staten Island.
6 Thank you for coming to our borough, and a
7 special welcome and hello to Assemblyman John
8 LaVelle, who is a good friend to education on
9 Staten Island, and Bunny Reddington, who is
10 also a wonderful friend and a long time
11 partner to the education community on Staten
12 Island.
13 My name is Janey Moran. I am a
14 former PTA president of both P.S. 4 and
15 Tottenville High School and a former executive
16 board member of the Staten Island Federation
17 of PTAs. For the past ten years I have been
18 employed by District 31 and I currently serve
19 District 31 as a parent liaison. This kind of
20 defines where I have been for a lifetime,
21 actually, two lifetimes; the educational
22 lifetime of both my children, who have now
23 gone on to higher education after receiving
24 their educations in Staten Island public
25 schools.
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2 For over a decade I have been
3 attending monthly community school board
4 meetings as an involved parent. Today I am
5 still attending those same meetings
6 representing Assemblyman John LaVelle and
7 still today concerns and issues related to
8 both the inside and the outside of the school
9 building are discussed. Problems have been
10 confronted, head on at times and times and
11 sometimes merely listened to. Many success
12 stories can be reported due to the
13 intervention of Staten Island community school
14 boards.
15 Aside from the issues on safety,
16 curriculum, meeting performance standards, to
17 name a few, the community school board has
18 been host to paying accolades to both students
19 and staff members deserving the recognition.
20 Sounds pretty good, wouldn't you say?
21 It seems that the overwhelming
22 consensus is to keep a board of some type in
23 place, somewhat resembling what we currently
24 have. As part of the team that helped work on
25 the resolution put forth by Staten Island
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2 Federation of PTAs, I urge this Task Force to
3 seriously consider the merits of that
4 resolution.
5 Election and term limits are
6 discussed in that plan. Also serving all
7 Staten Island schools, not just District 31
8 schools are put forth. Please pay close
9 attention to some of the changes offered,
10 election versus selection, voting in November
11 versus voting in May, the continuance of
12 proportional voting to insure a clear
13 representation of all populations involved in
14 Staten Island's educational community. All
15 are vital considerations.
16 Reformation of our education system
17 lies in your hands. Some of you played a role
18 in giving the mayor control of our schools.
19 If this turns out to be the magic silver
20 bullet, then you have acted wisely. The next
21 phase is now upon you and you must decide what
22 will replace community school boards if
23 anything at all.
24 Please carefully pick and choose
25 from each clear suitable plan given to you.
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2 Making decisions like this might seem like
3 business as usual but, remember, the commodity
4 of this business is not a product that can be
5 bought or sold, built or rebuilt. It is a
6 child and his or her education. Please heed
7 the advice of this business' greatest
8 stakeholders, the parents of Staten Island
9 public school children.
10 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Moran, we
11 very much appreciate your testimony. Before I
12 ask if there are any questions, let me simply
13 assure you that nothing about these
14 proceedings is business as usual. We share
15 your great sense of importance and urgency in
16 the task of insuring that the appropriate kind
17 of community representation that we hope will
18 ultimately promote greater educational results
19 will be the result of these proceedings, so we
20 very much appreciate your testimony.
21 Questions?
22 (No response.)
23 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
24 very much.
25 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Our next
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2 speaker is Patricia Lockhart, a teacher at
3 P.S. 57.
4 MS. LOCKHART: My name is Patricia
5 Lockhart. I happen to be a parent, a teacher
6 at P.S. 57, belong to the UFT Political Action
7 Committee and I'm a community advocate for
8 numerous local groups and organizations,
9 including active involvement in my PTA at my
10 job.
11 I had great difficulty writing this
12 testimony because I feel we are now in a
13 public educational system which is
14 disempowering. The Board of Education was
15 taken over, school boards dismantled,
16 scheduling arranged and C30 process altered.
17 Our Board of Education workers, principals and
18 superintendents can now be removed at any
19 time.
20 For the sake of improvement, it
21 seems like the new Board of Education just
22 changes policies without warning. It appears
23 like most decisions are now left to the
24 discretion of the mayor, chancellor and the
25 superintendent. What happened to our rights?
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2 The school board was originally
3 created in 1969 to provide parents with the
4 right to receive outside professional
5 oversight of the Board of Education. Even
6 though over time the school boards had lost
7 their power, the Staten Island group never
8 seemed to lose their ability to fight for the
9 rights of our schools. During Staten Island
10 meetings it was obvious that our board was
11 kept updated on Board of Education policies,
12 funding issues and district projects.
13 I feel that the Board of Education
14 would best be served by a triple team
15 approach.
16 Number one, a parent and student
17 team. This team would include parents and
18 students, representatives from each school
19 student board, PTA and/or or leadership team.
20 Two, a Board of Education team.
21 This team would include Board of Education
22 representatives, such as the chancellor,
23 superintendents, principals, unions and school
24 personnel, such as teachers, para aids, school
25 based support teams, custodians, et cetera.
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2 Three, the professional consultant
3 team. This professional team would be similar
4 to a board of directors. This team would
5 consist of a diversified group of elected
6 volunteer consultants with a stipend from an
7 outside agency to avoid conflict and it would
8 include college education professors, lawyers,
9 accountants, construction specialists,
10 psychologists, concerned community groups.
11 These proposed local teams would be
12 expected to work on specific school issues,
13 such as curriculum, supplies, standards,
14 personnel. These local teams would then elect
15 district reps to meet with the new Board of
16 Education. These proposed district teams
17 would also be expected to focus on decisions
18 made and related to capital funding, vendors
19 and school construction matters. Special
20 attention should be made in those areas.
21 All decisions made by local and
22 district teams would also require a reasonable
23 voting process. The most important aspect of
24 this process is to insure that the rights of
25 school personnel, parents, students and the
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2 community are respected and treated as one. I
3 believe the team approach is designed to take
4 into consideration the components necessary to
5 bring about improved educational change.
6 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
7 much for your testimony, Ms. Lockhart and your
8 observations both as a resident of Staten
9 Island and as a teacher in the school system.
10 Does anybody have any questions?
11 MS. BROWN: I have a question.
12 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Brown?
13 MS. BROWN: I have one question.
14 In regards to these teams, are they each
15 separate teams or do they coexist at all?
16 MS. LOCKHART: Well, it would be
17 separate teams that would work together. It
18 would be separate teams that would work
19 together, but it would take into consideration
20 all aspects, not just one aspect, not just the
21 professional point of view or the Board of
22 Education point of view or the parents' point
23 of view. We take into consideration in a
24 holistic view.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me just ask
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2 you one question. Your testimony, which was
3 very clear and I think very understandable,
4 did not touch on the issue of school
5 leadership teams, at least to the extent of
6 any observations with respect to how they may
7 be operating and where you feel they might fit
8 into a restructured community representation
9 scheme.
10 Do you have any views that you can
11 share with us about the school leadership
12 teams?
13 MS. LOCKHART: I can speak for my
14 school leadership team. It works well. We
15 work together and we involve the students and
16 the staff in many aspects of what we do. Even
17 though the team discusses everything, they
18 still come back to us all the time and ask for
19 our opinion. I find that very helpful. And
20 they always are sending papers around from
21 class to class to write down any concerns and
22 issues we have in our classroom or in the
23 building.
24 So it seems like everyone is
25 involved and that's an important component to
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2 make things work. As far as the school
3 leadership team, I put them in as far as part
4 of the triple team approach, I put them in the
5 first section, which would the parent-student
6 team.
7 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: So your
8 experience with school leadership teams is
9 that they are valuable and that they are a
10 useful component of whatever overall structure
11 we come up with.
12 MS. LOCKHART: Absolutely.
13 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Do you serve
14 as the parents' representative at your child's
15 school or are you a teacher representative at
16 P.S. 57?
17 MS. LOCKHART: Right now my
18 daughter is 20 years old, and I have been in
19 the PTA since she's young. Now I'm very
20 involved with the PTA at P.S. 57.
21 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: But you don't
22 serve on the school leadership team of P.S.
23 57?
24 MS. LOCKHART: Sometimes,
25 sometimes.
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2 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Do you have a
3 school leadership team at P.S. 57?
4 MS. LOCKHART: Yes.
5 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Is it 50
6 percent parents?
7 MS. LOCKHART: Yes.
8 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Do the parents
9 participate?
10 MS. LOCKHART: Yes.
11 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: They are
12 involved in the creation of the CEP, they have
13 a meaningful role that they play?
14 MS. LOCKHART: Absolutely. The PTA
15 is in the building all the time. They are
16 very involved, and I work very closely with
17 the parents on community events on weekends as
18 well because I'm involved with educational
19 programs on weekends as well.
20 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: But you're not
21 one of the members of the school leadership
22 team?
23 MS. LOCKHART: No, I visit. I'm a
24 very active person.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Lockhart, we
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2 thank you very much for being with us tonight
3 and for all that you have done and are doing
4 for our public school system. Thank you very
5 much.
6 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Robert
7 Helbach, Jr., counsel for Senator John
8 Marchi.
9 MR. HELBACH: Good evening, ladies
10 and gentlemen. I have a written statement
11 which the senator asked me to read to you
12 tonight, if that's okay.
13 Thank you for the opportunity to
14 present my views on school governance reform
15 to this Task Force. I am pleased that two
16 members of our Staten Island community,
17 Assemblyman John LaVelle, and my nominee Bunny
18 Reddington are part of the 20 member team
19 assigned to recommend and develop the terms of
20 the reorganization and restructuring of the
21 educational system in New York State or New
22 York City.
23 As you are well aware,
24 accountability for the eight to $12 billion
25 assigned yearly to the New York City Board of
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2 Education is uppermost in the minds of New
3 Yorkers who want the best for our 1.1 million
4 students. It is for this reason that the
5 legislature and governor enacted a major
6 change in the New York City education
7 governance last year by giving the mayor of
8 New York City control of the system. While
9 none of us expects a miracle cure for all the
10 ills plaguing the Board of Education in a few
11 short months, we must do everything possible
12 to ensure that change in governance will
13 translate into real and tangible improvements
14 in our public schools.
15 School governance has been an issue
16 for legislation for the past 45 years. Since
17 I have been in the legislature for all of that
18 time, and then some, I believe that I can give
19 a historical perspective to this issue which
20 might prove useful to you in your
21 deliberations.
22 For the most part, there appeared
23 to be general satisfaction with the public
24 schools until the 1960's. In that decade the
25 school system was beset by a series of crises,
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2 including overcrowded classrooms, crumbling
3 school buildings, a teacher shortage, high
4 numbers of high school dropouts, declining
5 academic achievement, and scandals involving
6 school system employees.
7 In 1961 the situation seemed so
8 serious that the then governor, Nelson
9 Rockefeller, requested that the State
10 Legislature remove the existing Board of
11 Education and directed Mayor Robert Wagner, to
12 name a new nine member Board of Education.
13 The new board was drawn from nominations made
14 by a select screening panel of civic and
15 educational leaders. To increase citizen
16 participation, the Legislature also ordered
17 the revision of local school boards whose
18 members were to be appointed by the new Board
19 of Education but whose powers were advisory.
20 During the 1960's, spending for
21 education doubled, although enrollment
22 increased only by one fifth. The per pupil
23 expenditure was higher in New York City than
24 in most other large cities and in many suburbs
25 as well. Despite these efforts, serious
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2 academic failures continued to be reported
3 throughout the school system.
4 Over-centralization and the isolation of the
5 Board of Education's central headquarters
6 staff from children, parents and even the
7 teachers and principals of the schools made it
8 impossible for the system to meet the changing
9 needs of the students. The general public's
10 increased dissatisfaction with this system
11 combined with the minority community's anger
12 and frustration with the Board.
13 In 1967 various plans were advanced
14 for decentralized experimental school
15 districts. In that year the State Legislature
16 made certain New York City School Aid
17 conditional to the submission by the mayor of
18 a decentralization plan. Mayor Wagner
19 appointed an advisory panel, headed by
20 McGeorge Bundy "to formulate a comprehensive
21 school decentralization plan."
22 The Bundy report maintained that
23 decentralization was essential if the City's
24 public schools were to be improved. At that
25 point decentralization was opposed not just by
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2 the Board of Education but, ironically, by the
3 UFT as well. As the chairman of the senate
4 committee on the affairs of the City of New
5 York. I was designated as the legislative
6 point man to work with Majority Leader Earl
7 Brydges and Assembly Speaker Tony Travia on
8 the school issue. Interim legislation, which
9 I sponsored, was adopted. It directed the
10 mayor to appoint four additional members to
11 the nine member Board of Education and
12 required the Board of Education to delegate
13 some functions to the existing 25 local school
14 boards which up to that time had been purely
15 advisory. The legislation provided that the
16 final decentralization plan was to be
17 submitted to the State Legislature by March 1,
18 1969.
19 Meanwhile, in May of 1968 when the
20 Ocean Hill, Brownsville governing board
21 attempted to transfer 19 teachers and
22 supervisors out of the district, it entered
23 into open conflict with the UFT. The union
24 responded by boycotting the district for the
25 rest of the school year. When school opened
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2 in the fall, the governing board tried to
3 replace all 350 teachers who had gone out on
4 strike in the spring and the UFT had sponsored
5 the longest and probably one of the most
6 bitter school strikes in American history.
7 That action closed almost all schools in the
8 city and fueled racial and religious
9 animosities. By March 1969 the Board of
10 Education, the Board of Regents, the UFT and
11 assorted community groups each submitted
12 different decentralization plans to the
13 legislature.
14 Finally, the Legislature passed and
15 Governor Rockefeller signed a school
16 decentralization bill in April 1969. This
17 legislation created 31, later 32, community
18 school boards which were given primary
19 jurisdiction over elementary and junior high
20 schools. The measure also created a central
21 board and a chancellor. It was hoped that
22 decentralization would help make the school
23 system more responsive to the concerns of
24 local communities. However, as we are all
25 well aware, even with decentralization, much
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2 of the basic bureaucratic structure remained
3 intact.
4 In the 1970's and 1980's the
5 Legislature made some minor changes to the
6 New York City School Governance. In 1989 when
7 I was appointed as the chairman of the
8 temporary state commission on New York City
9 School Governance, the mission of the
10 commission was determined to study and make
11 recommendations concerning the effectiveness
12 of the governance of the school districts in
13 meeting the needs of the children in the
14 school system. We were also asked to examine
15 the strengths and weaknesses of the system and
16 assess alternatives to that system. Those
17 recommendations did not, however,
18 significantly change the role of community
19 school boards.
20 Today we have come full circle with
21 authority centralized in the mayor and the
22 community school boards reduced to a purely
23 advisory role. However, that advisory role
24 can and should be meaningful. We must be
25 careful not to assume that removing local
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2 boards will be a panacea for a successful
3 Board of Education. I was one of only a few
4 legislators who voted against the school
5 governance law in 1996 because I felt that it
6 took almost all power regarding education out
7 of local boards.
8 Then, as now, I think it is a
9 mistake to completely eliminate the local
10 school board. It should continue to serve as
11 a vehicle where educators parents and the
12 community can air ideas and concerns about how
13 the school system is functioning. Local
14 control must be a part of any workable
15 solution. Local boards offer the best
16 continuing means of attacking our many school
17 problems. I have consistently authored
18 legislation that would establish a quasi
19 independent school district for Staten Island
20 that would provide for allocation of funding
21 directly to the borough based on an overall
22 percentage basis.
23 I have sponsored legislation for
24 the past several decades that would
25 effectively dissolve the central board of
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2 education and transfer the responsibility to
3 the borough school district. I have pressed
4 for the passage of a proposal to make the
5 Staten Island school district separate from
6 the New York City school system because the
7 performance of our students and teachers
8 points to the wisdom of autonomy. I remain
9 steadfast in my position as a strong proponent
10 of self-government. Accordingly, I recommend
11 that some vehicle for local community input be
12 fashioned, one which will reinforce and
13 complement the changes coming in the future.
14 I will be willing to supply you
15 with as much of the historical documentation
16 that I have, if asked. I encourage you to be
17 students of the history of this issue so we
18 can be spared from repeating our past
19 mistakes. Thank you.
20 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I want to, first
21 of all, thank you for being here tonight. I
22 want to say in my eight years as chairman of
23 the Assembly Education Committee, I have more
24 than just on occasion referred back to the
25 Marchi Commission Report from 1991, I guess,
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2 was the year it was issued. Assemblyman
3 Angelo Deltoro was the co-chair of the
4 Commission and at that time chairman of the
5 Education Committee in the Assembly.
6 I just want to acknowledge the
7 input, the participation and the contributions
8 that Senator Marchi has made to public
9 education for, as you indicated, over four
10 decades. I really don't think that a
11 discussion on the future of public education
12 in New York City would ever have been
13 completed without at least hearing and being
14 reminded of the views of Senator John Marchi,
15 which in my view his name is synonymous with
16 education reform, progressive education
17 reform, and even if all of his recommendations
18 over the years have not been accepted by the
19 State Legislature, he remains, I believe, on
20 the cutting edge of the Board of Education
21 thinking and good practices for public
22 education policy.
23 So I don't have a question, but I
24 hope that you will communicate to Senator
25 Marchi that, as a matter of fact, his views
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2 present as well as past are closely examined
3 certainly by this member of the Legislature
4 and this Task Force, and I can assure that it
5 will be taking into close consideration as
6 this Task Force tries very hard to come up
7 with a proposal, a formulation for effective
8 community representation, and as you
9 eloquently stated, be mindful of the past as
10 though we will not repeat the mistakes that we
11 made. Thank you for being here.
12 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I too want to
13 add my gratitude to Senator Marchi for all
14 he's done for public education. This is a
15 wonderful, historical incentive and I would
16 like to take him up on his offer. All of our
17 committee members were provided copies of the
18 Bundy report. What happened way back then,
19 and perhaps Senator Marchi, I'll contact you
20 just to see if we could find out after that
21 report, what was the debate? What was the
22 dialogue? Why weren't those recommendations
23 implemented so it would be really interesting
24 to hear that.
25 MR. HELBACH: I'm sure the senator
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2 will be happy to provide you with as much
3 background as he can.
4 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Great. We
5 will be calling you.
6 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
7 much.
8 Edward Josey, president of the
9 Staten Island branch of the NAACP.
10 MR. JOSEY: Thank you. My name is
11 Edward Josey. I am the president of the
12 Staten Island branch of the National
13 Association for the Advancement of Colored
14 People. We have been on Staten Island for 77
15 years, and the association itself is 95 years
16 old. Included in our mission is the
17 monitoring and working to improve the eduction
18 of our youth. Our greatest accomplishment was
19 the 1954 Brown versus the Board of Education
20 decision.
21 Under Mayors Giulliani and
22 Bloomberg, the ground work has been laid to
23 abolish New York City Board of Education and
24 has been replaced by the New York City
25 Department of Education. The community school
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2 board that was created in 1969 with the hope
3 of giving parents more input into the
4 education of our children is going to be
5 limited this year.
6 A concept called "Children First"
7 is a new agenda for the public schools. At
8 the same time, it has been reported in the
9 Staten Island schools, kindergarten through
10 the senior in high school could be merged into
11 one district. This merger is reported to be
12 part of a larger citywide plan to consolidate
13 school districts. Performance awards might be
14 given to those who excel and principal of low
15 school could be released of their duties.
16 With this drastic change, it might
17 be a while before any positive results are
18 realized.
19 The new school system is still a
20 public school system. It should not be run
21 exclusively by the mayor and the chancellor.
22 The public school system should create a
23 system that includes and valves the input of
24 the parents, concerned citizens, community
25 leaders, business leaders and the students
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2 themselves. Since we are dealing with an
3 equal opportunity employer, the ethnic
4 breakdown of the teachers and the principals
5 of the Staten Island schools should be looked
6 at and you will see a very tremendous shortage
7 of African-Americans holding these positions.
8 This must be corrected.
9 Thank you.
10 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you for
11 being here with us, Mr. Josey. I've remarked
12 at the previously three hearings that we have
13 held that the NAACP has been exceedingly well
14 represented at each of those hearings. We
15 have had chapter presidents from each borough
16 that have attended our hearings and have
17 offered, I think, very insightful and
18 important testimony and recommendations.
19 Clearly the work of the NAACP for
20 well over half a century in the area of
21 education, civil rights, fair housing policy
22 and practices is renown. So we very, very
23 much appreciate having the very strong input
24 that we have had at all of the hearings by the
25 NAACP. We very much appreciate your being
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2 here tonight.
3 Ms. Brown?
4 MS. BROWN: Hi. My question is:
5 You have an education committee within your
6 chapter?
7 MR. JOSEY: Yes, we do.
8 MS. BROWN: Do you work with
9 schools within your area?
10 MR. JOSEY: We do have some input.
11 Like, for example, IS 49 over the past year
12 have been attending meetings with the PTA and
13 also to gear up a program that more or less
14 gets kids to go to college.
15 MS. BROWN: I'm guessing that the
16 parents that you work with at these schools,
17 they participate in the school board
18 meetings?
19 MR. JOSEY: School board meetings,
20 I would say participation could be better,
21 because basically speaking, I'm speaking about
22 the African-American community, the
23 participation is not that great.
24 So now there has been a concern of
25 the past few years as to why the PTAs do not
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2 attract certain people, so that's something
3 that has to be worked out as well.
4 MS. BROWN: There has been like two
5 thoughts today, keeping or creating borough
6 boards or changing the district lines so that
7 it's coterminous with community planning
8 boards, which would mean that there would be
9 three planning boards. There are three
10 planning boards on Staten Island.
11 Would that help any with parent
12 participation, just thinking about the schools
13 that you work with and the parents that you
14 work with, would it give parents more of a
15 voice or do you think it would diminish their
16 voice having district lines coterminous with
17 community planning boards?
18 MR. JOSEY: Well, let me put it
19 this way. The south shore, they have their
20 concerns. The north shore has our concerns.
21 Now, primarily speaking, I would say that the
22 north shore has been neglected. Perhaps we
23 don't have the new schools like the south
24 shore does. A lot of people say that's
25 because of the growth on the south shore.
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2 There's growth on the north shore as well.
3 So someplace along the line there
4 is some breakdowns, some lack of respect or
5 just not concerned about the people in that
6 school system right now, so that has to be
7 corrected.
8 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Assemblyman
9 Roger Green, who was unable to be here today
10 at today's hearing, but has attended the
11 hearings in Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx
12 asked a question of each of the
13 representatives of the NAACP, so let me ask a
14 question that he would have asked of you.
15 The question relates to the issue
16 of whether your chapter or the NAACP generally
17 would have a feeling about community
18 representation, elected or appointed. Some of
19 the models that have been suggested would
20 provide for community representation selected
21 by some entities within the community, perhaps
22 by parents who have children in the schools,
23 perhaps by elected public officials. Other
24 models of community representation would
25 preserve or in some respects change the manner
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2 of direct voting for school board members or
3 whatever entity succeeds the local community
4 school board.
5 Do you, sir, or does the chapter
6 that you represent have a position with
7 respect to the maintaining of the voting
8 process as opposed to some other form of
9 community selection? Well, at this point now
10 we have not taken a position, but just going
11 back over the history of the voting concerns
12 for the school board is very poor because it's
13 something else almost insignificant, the
14 amount of people that come out to school board
15 elections to vote.
16 When you start appointing people,
17 the people who are appointed, we would have to
18 look at their concern of overall community.
19 If there are people appointed to various
20 positions all through the years, there's
21 people elected through the years. And in both
22 cases these people have come under scrutiny
23 for not doing what the community felt they
24 should be doing.
25 It's hard to make a blanket
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2 statement is an appointed person better than
3 an elected person or vice versa because at
4 this point now they all seem to have some sort
5 of downfall because there is still a suffering
6 Board of Education.
7 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Like your
8 colleagues from the other chapters in some of
9 the other boroughs, we want to thank you and
10 the members of the NAACP for your time, for
11 your participation for so many years in public
12 education issue and for the many successes
13 that the NAACP has led for social justices for
14 so many years.
15 MR. JOSEY: Thank you.
16 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Donald
17 Juliano, president of Retired School
18 Supervisors and Administrators.
19 MR. JULIANO: Good evening.
20 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Good evening.
21 MR. JULIANO: The Staten Island
22 chapter of the Retired School Supervisors and
23 Administrators of New York City public schools
24 RSSA, welcomes and is appreciative of the
25 opportunity to offer our recommendations to
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2 the Honorable John LaVelle and Ms. Bunny
3 Reddington, Staten Island members of the New
4 York State panel on school governance.
5 Certainly the rest I apologize for not having
6 all the names on this submission.
7 Our consistency of over one hundred
8 members of our Staten Island chapter, and over
9 6,000 members of our RSSA claim a most unique
10 vantage point in the process of analyzing the
11 current governance structure, evaluating it in
12 terms of past practices and future feeds, and
13 proposing a road map for advancement and
14 reorganization. What other group can speak
15 from the perspective of our members who, in
16 most cases, were themselves educated in New
17 York City public schools, taught the New York
18 City public schools and served as principals,
19 assistant principals, supervisors and
20 administrators in these very same schools and
21 I might add in all boroughs.
22 We are not Johnny come latelys and
23 we can speak without fear of a chancellor's
24 reprimand. The temptation is almost too great
25 to divert from the topic at hand, school
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2 governance, to such questions as why are all
3 guns trained on the principal? Is it because
4 he or she is the easiest of targets or why is
5 it that the principal and the principal alone,
6 who is held accountable for school achieve.
7 And how in the first place can a principal be
8 held accountable for improving instruction
9 when every action taken by the Department of
10 Education, almost by design, if not by
11 indifference, serves to prevent the principal
12 in carrying out the role of instructional
13 leader.
14 Let's get back to school
15 governance. The following proposal by the
16 Staten Island chapter of our SSA is not
17 elaborate, nor is it costly but it is
18 workable. It is predicated upon the
19 assumptions and knowledge that: One, parents
20 already have ample voice in governance from
21 parent associations, leadership teams on up.
22 Two, community school boards have
23 been ineffective.
24 Three, professionals, especially
25 principals, since they are held accountable,
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2 active and retirement, must be part of every
3 committee on all panels on governance.
4 And, four, continuity of
5 instruction through the grades is vital.
6 As to the structure itself, we
7 recommend that all community school boards be
8 eliminated and replaced by borough educational
9 policy panels. Each such borough panel shall
10 be comprised of one representative each from
11 the borough president, UFT, CSA, RSSA, PC 37
12 and one parent from each school level, that is
13 pre-K to five, six to eight, nine to 12.
14 The selection of these parent
15 representatives shall be made by the council
16 of parent association presidents described
17 below. Each borough educational policy panel
18 shall serve to advise the chancellor or
19 district superintendent, the chancellor on
20 district superintendent and deputy
21 superintendent appointments and to advise the
22 district supervisor on principal
23 appointments.
24 Each district shall include all
25 schools within its geographical boundary,
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2 pre-K through 12, and should be administered
3 by one district superintendent and one deputy
4 superintendent from each school level, that is
5 pre-K to five, seven to eight and nine to 12.
6 The borough council parent
7 association president shall be comprised of
8 one PA president from each school in the
9 borough. This council shall elect three
10 representatives from their number to serve on
11 the borough's educational policy panel, one
12 from each school level previously mentioned.
13 The mayor's educational policy
14 panel does not avail itself of the vast
15 experience of past and present school leaders
16 and should. Thus, we propose that it be
17 expanded to include one representative from
18 the CSA and one from the RSSA.
19 In summary, we have proposed, one,
20 eliminating existing community school boards.
21 Two, establishing borough
22 educational policy panels.
23 Three, establishing borough
24 councils and parent associations.
25 Four, combining all school levels,
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2 pre-K through 12, in all school districts.
3 And, five, expanding the membership
4 of the mayor's educational policy panel to
5 include the CSA and RSSA.
6 We thank you for this opportunity.
7 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Mr. Juliano, we
8 very much appreciate your being with us
9 tonight and representing, I think, so
10 articulately, the retired school supervisors
11 and administrators.
12 Clearly, the body that you
13 represent almost by definition has a wealth, a
14 reservoir of experience and we so much
15 appreciate you sharing your professional
16 experiences and that of your members with us.
17 Before I ask any questions, let me
18 see if you have any.
19 (No response.)
20 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me just
21 ask. One question I have and I just would
22 like you to elaborate on a little bit. We
23 heard some testimony earlier today and on
24 other days that there is a very important
25 virtue in having a continuity of education so
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2 that whatever body is created to help craft
3 education policy in a district, that it not
4 end abruptly at the eighth grade or ninth
5 grade and then have a separate or different
6 body dealing with high school education.
7 One of your recommendations is also
8 to have this sense of continuity, pre-K
9 through 12. Can you just elaborate a little
10 bit for all of us why there is a value to have
11 this kind of overall continuity within the
12 school district?
13 MR. JULIANO: I have joining me
14 here tonight three former principals also here
15 tonight. We have Mr. Pat DeMayo, former
16 principal of Graphic Communications, Mr. Aaron
17 Stern principal of P.S. 52, and Mr. Mike
18 Morata, former principal of Tottenville High
19 School. And just today Mike Morata, the
20 former principal of Tottenville, was talking
21 about that very point. He pointed out that
22 too often it occurs that the high school
23 teacher will receive a student from the next
24 lower level, the intermediate school, and find
25 out that a text book was used on a fourth
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2 grade level in the intermediate school. And
3 certain curriculum sequences have been omitted
4 in the past.
5 Well, this points out the fact that
6 someone must take the responsibility within
7 the district to see that this just doesn't
8 happen. These gaps in student learning are
9 certainly nothing that none of us want but
10 they occur. And these are some of the reasons
11 for it, not entirely all of the reasons, but a
12 significant portion.
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: So clearly,
14 without putting any additional words in your
15 mouth, having a body that is charged with the
16 responsibility of the continuum of education
17 that starts at the earliest grades, we hope as
18 early as pre-K and continues right throughout
19 the high school years right through high
20 school graduation, in your judgment, would
21 represent best practices in terms of
22 organizing the administration of education
23 policy and not have a break and have another
24 entity pick up the rest of the educational
25 career of a student at the ninth and tenth
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2 grade.
3 MR. JULIANO: Yes, it fits into the
4 paradigm of shameless education.
5 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Okay,
6 Ms. Thomson.
7 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you very
8 much for your testimony. In your model how
9 many parents would be on this borough board?
10 MR. JULIANO: On the borough
11 board? There would be three.
12 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Three
13 parents. And how many members total?
14 MR. JULIANO: Let me count them. I
15 have CSA, RSSA, UFT, DC 37. Did I leave out
16 UFT? No, I didn't appear. The borough
17 president, UFT, CSA, RSSA, DC 37 and three
18 parents, that's eight.
19 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Most of the
20 testimony that we've heard across the city
21 from parents obviously is that they would want
22 to see whatever body we come up with have a
23 majority of parents.
24 MR. JULIANO: I'm not surprised and
25 I expect that, but one of our predicates here
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2 was that parents have sufficient voice
3 already. And before we turn over the
4 professional job of running schools completely
5 to the parents, if you want to do that, then
6 turn it over. But at some point if the
7 responsibility is that of the professionals,
8 the professionals need to have the
9 accountability and the responsibility that
10 goes with it.
11 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I guess it's
12 for just my own personal opinion and the
13 comment is that I see education as a shared
14 responsibility.
15 MR. JULIANO: Yes, and that's why
16 there are three parents there and only one
17 from each of the other organizations.
18 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you.
19 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We want to thank
20 you very much, Mr. Juliano, not only for your
21 testimony tonight but a lifetime and a career
22 of involvement in public education.
23 MR. JULIANO: Only for tonight.
24 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: You and Jack
25 Benny are just one and the same. Thank you,
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2 sir.
3 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Eleanor
4 Conforti, chair of Community School Board 31.
5 MS. CONFORTI: Good evening, ladies
6 and gentlemen. Welcome to Staten Island. I'm
7 sure you've heard it already many times today
8 but thank you for the opportunity to address
9 you. Of course, it's always a pleasure to
10 meet with and greet Assemblyman John LaVelle
11 and my board colleague, Bunny Reddington.
12 Your task on the community school
13 district reform is certainly a heavy
14 responsibility and one that I'm certain that
15 you take seriously. There's no point in
16 telling you about the positive effect that
17 the District 31 School Board has had on our
18 community and faces the really big fact that
19 we're gone as of June 30th and we must move in
20 a forward direction.
21 My name is Eleanor Conforti,
22 chairperson of the community school board and
23 my background, I believe, has provided me with
24 the ability to discuss the needs of the
25 community and the schools in order for both to
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2 become well balanced and functioning.
3 I'm a former teacher. I served as
4 president of the Staten Island Federation of
5 Parent Teacher Association, and I'm the
6 longest serving member on the school board,
7 not in age, just in duration. I've
8 represented the teachers, the administrators
9 and the parents, and certainly on a more
10 personal note, I'm a mother and a grandmother
11 and I'm still extremely interested in what
12 takes place within our schools as well as our
13 community. It is important that this is
14 community, including the parents, have the
15 right of input within our local schools. It's
16 absolutely unacceptable to expect Staten
17 Islanders to board a ferry to visit the Tweed
18 Building every single time a problem arises in
19 our schools. We here on Staten Island have
20 enjoyed an open door policy with
21 Superintendent Christy Vigini, our school
22 board, the CSA, the UFT and of course our
23 parents.
24 Our school leadership teams
25 continue to be a viable line of communication
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2 between the schools and the parents but please
3 do not consider them a substitute for school
4 boards. A leadership team is representative
5 of the schools in which it serves. An agency
6 must be in place so that the parents can speak
7 out on any issue. The elimination of school
8 boards, I believe, is partly based upon the
9 belief that they have become too political but
10 then I have to ask you all, are we to believe
11 that the process of appointment versus
12 election will eliminate politics from any
13 procedure?
14 The previous convoluted voting and
15 the proportional representation accounting
16 method for electing school board members was
17 certainly a major difference and a major
18 deterrent to many interested voters. The
19 locally elected school board was never a
20 threat to the mayor's control of the
21 Department of Education and certainly
22 shouldn't be viewed as an enemy.
23 With 1,200 schools and over one
24 million students in five boroughs under Mayor
25 Bloomberg's leadership, we need a system of
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2 checks and balances that insure community
3 input. Without this input at the local
4 district level, parents and community
5 advocates interested in public education will
6 be denied a voice in their children's school.
7 Since 1969 school boards have given
8 everyone the opportunity for local
9 participation and public access. With the
10 elimination of these boards you have denied
11 city residents the right to vote and the right
12 to representation that every other resident of
13 New York City and New York State enjoys.
14 Transportation, support services,
15 staff development, zoning, school maintenance
16 and repairs are just a few of the issues that
17 are decided upon by parents, school
18 superintendent and school board members, and
19 only after local discussion and an open forum
20 on a monthly basis.
21 Will Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor
22 Klein deal with these problems on a daily
23 basis or will they make decisions without the
24 necessary local input?
25 Residents from many other boroughs
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2 aren't familiar with Staten Island issues. In
3 fact, it's about time that Staten Island be
4 treated differently, if only because of the
5 geographic nature of our borough.
6 The chancellor was quoted as saying
7 that it was time to be responsive to the
8 parents and the children. I ask you how
9 responsive is it to parents to take away the
10 opportunity to address educational issues that
11 effect their children? I urge you to devise a
12 plan that provides us with an agency that
13 deals with educational policy, the district
14 budget, superintendent evaluations, the
15 district comprehensive education plan and
16 address the responsibilities that are
17 meaningful. Sometimes when I talk to a board
18 or a body such as yours, I can't help but
19 think of Don Quiote who tilted his windmill,
20 but to no avail. I hope I'm wrong in thinking
21 that the die has already been cast.
22 The bypassing of local input is a
23 mistake. You, this Task Force, and the State
24 Legislature have the power to correct this
25 error and make sure that while the mayor has
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2 control and the chancellor answers only to the
3 mayor, they must both be responsive to the
4 parents and to the school community.
5 We read about the changes in our
6 educational system and then, guess what, we
7 read that the changes are being changed
8 again. The educational system seems to be
9 reaching a new level of chaos and confusion.
10 Please, don't think that I'm
11 against change for the good. Could we at
12 least have something of value in those changes
13 before they are initiated?
14 The promise of successful schools
15 and higher student achievement has little or
16 nothing to do with mayor control. Holding
17 these hearings during the holiday season, the
18 lack of widespread public notification and the
19 limited time constraints certainly only adds
20 to my belief that decisions have already been
21 cast. I hope you help to change my opinion.
22 I read in the Times in December a
23 quote by Deputy Mayor Walcott who said City
24 Hall has refined the mayor's proposal and will
25 present it to the Task Force on January 16th,
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2 so you must agree that I would imagine that
3 things have already been decided upon.
4 I urge you to maintain the existing
5 school district on Staten Island with a
6 superintendent who is familiar with our K to
7 eighth grade curriculum. I respectfully
8 request that you consider forming an advisory
9 panel with seven members who will be
10 responsive to the community. Here on Staten
11 Island our borough was divided into three
12 community boards, each one representing a
13 portion of the island; the north shore,
14 mid-island and south shore. Perhaps each
15 board could select or elect two members with a
16 seventh member being appointed by our borough
17 president. This would insure each section of
18 the borough being well represented. This
19 group could serve as a public forum answerable
20 to the parents and the borough president as
21 well as the mayor.
22 I'm not married to this
23 suggestion. I'm just concerned that we make
24 sure that we do have an agency that will exist
25 and will be answerable to our community. You
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2 and the members of the New York State
3 Legislature are our only hope for an urgent
4 and thoughtful solution to the board being
5 left by the elimination of the school board.
6 Please consider the rights of the voters and
7 the parents when you come to a certainly
8 responsible decision and I thank you for this
9 opportunity.
10 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
11 very much, Ms. Conforti, for being here. We
12 know that you've already had a busy evening.
13 We see you brought some of your closest
14 friends and relatives with you.
15 MS. CONFORTI: You haven't seen
16 anything, if you really wanted an amount of
17 people here.
18 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, we are
19 delighted that you were able to spend some
20 time with us, and I just want to assure you
21 that I can tell you that I speak for the
22 entire 20 member Task Force, that the die has
23 not been cast. Decisions have not been made
24 and we have actually been very careful to say
25 both publicly and privately, we won't even
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2 begin the process of distilling the public
3 testimony and considering the variety of
4 proposals that we have heard and that are
5 being presented to us until the last person
6 has testified at the last hearing. We take
7 this responsibility as seriously as I know you
8 would hope that we take this responsibility.
9 And the final thing that I would
10 just add is that although the State
11 Legislature in the sweeping governance reform
12 changes enacted into law in June abolished
13 local community school boards as of June 30th
14 of this year, it did not abolish community
15 representation. That was the purpose of
16 appointing the Task Force, and it is true that
17 our time frame is very compressed and we
18 regret that maybe even more than you do
19 because it has created a lot to do in a short
20 period of time, but I can tell you before we
21 go to questions that before we make our
22 recommendations to the governor and the State
23 Legislature, which we will on February the
24 15th, we will take into consideration very
25 carefully all of the testimony that we heard
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2 and will here during the course of these
3 hearings.
4 And the final note, I guess, is
5 that because in the area of school boards,
6 community representation, that is an area that
7 does not lend itself towards administrative
8 fiat. That's an area that is iterated in
9 state education law, so while we will be very
10 interested, of course, to hear what Chancellor
11 Klein's views are with respect to the
12 replacement of community school boards, it is
13 this Task Force and ultimately the State
14 Legislature that has to make those decisions
15 and not the mayor and not the chancellor.
16 Although, as I have said, of course, we are
17 interested in their views but we are equally
18 interested in your views and that's why we are
19 so pleased that you were able to make time to
20 be with us tonight.
21 I think we have some questions,
22 starting with Robin Brown.
23 MS. BROWN: I just have one
24 question. Currently in New York City even as
25 we speak over a third of New York City
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2 community school districts, there are 32 of
3 them, are in need of improvement, meaning that
4 the entire district has been in need of
5 improvement so obviously there is a breakdown
6 somewhere, somehow there is a breakdown.
7 Thinking about your role as a
8 member on the school board, how do you think
9 some of that could have been prevented or
10 alleviated? What do you think that the new
11 body or the powers of the new body should have
12 to guarantee that there is continuous and
13 substantial student improvement?
14 MS. CONFORTI: School boards and
15 student improvements. I really couldn't even
16 begin to answer that. That's what we pay a
17 superintendent a very large salary for. My
18 job is to serve as a liaison between the
19 school and the board, but to ask how we would
20 improve, I think you have to look at the
21 entire picture and say, I think we have the
22 finest -- well, I'm very prejudiced. I think
23 we have the finest principals in the entire
24 city but, again, the way mom can't be
25 completely blamed for what her child does, the
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2 superintendent can only work with what he
3 has. People are going to say we need more
4 money. I don't even believe that more money
5 or increased funding makes for a successful
6 student. I just think it has to be
7 environment, the neighborhood, the parents,
8 support and then, of course, within the
9 schools.
10 But as far as us, we serve as a
11 forum. We visit the schools. We meet on a
12 monthly basis. I don't know what other school
13 boards do, and I know that there have been
14 some that have not been -- I understand at
15 some point that some school boards would meet
16 behind a closed television set. When we meet,
17 we meet with our people. We get yelled at,
18 it's okay, for the money that I get and the
19 salary it's perfectly all right, but I love
20 what I'm doing and I think most of our board
21 does.
22 I think we need to look if we were
23 ever going to continue a board we need to look
24 at the crazy way that they vote, the way they
25 count and those things. I think that was
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2 truly a deterrent. I think people were
3 frightened and I resent the fact that you vote
4 with a piece of paper and a pencil. It didn't
5 make it sound as important as anything else.
6 I'm sorry. I can't tell you how to
7 improve the school board. All I know is we
8 were part of the checks and balances. We sat
9 in with the superintendent. We visit the
10 principals when they have a concern. There's
11 never been a principal in this district who
12 has a concern about calling us. We have an
13 open door policy. And, again, I don't know
14 how the others exist. We're lucky because
15 it's one borough here.
16 MS. BROWN: I have just one
17 follow-up. One of the remaining duties of
18 community school boards is to set educational
19 policy for the community school district.
20 MS. CONFORTI: Exactly.
21 MS. BROWN: And, again, in terms of
22 we are trying to get this thing somewhat right
23 with the recommendations that we make, again,
24 I would like to hear your recommendation to
25 make this thing stronger so that we don't have
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2 these types of problems moving into the future
3 or we have less of these types of problems
4 where we don't have districts that are
5 performing or are performing at the capacity
6 that we know that students can perform.
7 MS. CONFORTI: We had brought in
8 these pass two years a whole team of staff
9 development of people, a professional
10 development staff to kind of pinpoint what is
11 needed within the district. And from there it
12 is discussed and we are presented with certain
13 plans and then we will make whatever changes
14 possible or suggestions. And I have to leave
15 it to the professionals as much as I say I was
16 a teacher, I'm not in the classroom now, so I
17 would be versed to say that I can give you
18 just a straight answer on that. If you want
19 to an honest answer I would have to say I'd
20 have to let you know.
21 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Thomson?
22 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: As we grapple
23 with what is the structure that we need to
24 create to improve student achievement and to
25 improve our schools, would it not make sense
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2 that whatever body we come up with, as one of
3 their responsibilities, we talk about checks
4 and balances, shouldn't they be asking the
5 tough question, why are the schools not
6 performing? What are we doing to change it?
7 That's the checks and balances. That's the
8 accountability. Should that be part of the
9 function?
10 MS. CONFORTI: I believe so. I
11 believe that you have no right to serve on a
12 board unless you -- you are not going to be
13 able to ask for accountability.
14 Our system was such that we had
15 much more meaningful responsibility, and since
16 whatever it was 1996 it was drastically
17 removed and then removed and then reduced
18 again, so we were almost a buffer zone where a
19 parent could come and say, because we're the
20 only game in town, we are the only ones they
21 could speak to before they would go to the
22 superintendent. So we were really literally
23 the line between the two, but it wasn't
24 meaningful anymore, even to the idea of doing
25 our superintendent evaluation. That was kind
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2 of -- they took the C30 process where the
3 school boards were sitting in on what we
4 thought was the best for each school and they
5 took us out of the loop and gave it to the
6 parents, which is fine, but I still say we
7 needed part of the school board, maybe even
8 two or three, even if it was in an advisory
9 situation, at least we were there to listen to
10 them. At least we were there to know what the
11 needs of the school were, and each time it was
12 removed.
13 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Advocacy is a
14 very important role and we've heard from
15 parents all over the city, the need for them
16 to have that someone locally to go to to air
17 concerns and grievances. That's a critical
18 function.
19 Prior to the last school governance
20 reform in 1997, would the school board have
21 asked those tough questions?
22 MS. CONFORTI: Absolutely.
23 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: But today you
24 don't feel school boards are encouraged to do
25 that?
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2 MS. CONFORTI: Well, no, there is
3 no need in it. If there is no threat, you
4 know, what's the -- I shouldn't even use that
5 word but there is no power behind it. What's
6 the point?
7 But I still think -- we have a nine
8 member board. Most of us, I think, respond to
9 what is necessary in the school. If we know
10 that there is a problem, we will immediately
11 go to the principal. We will immediately go
12 to the superintendents or to the deputies and
13 I think we are able to solve it. That's why
14 I've stayed on this board so long. If you
15 didn't continue to make a difference, you have
16 no right to be on it.
17 I thank you all for listening.
18 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We're not done
19 yet.
20 MS. CONFORTI: I'm not going to get
21 away with it.
22 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Not that easy.
23 Ms. Reddington?
24 MS. REDDINGTON: Good evening,
25 Eleanor. I thank you very much for your
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2 testimony and I couldn't agree more with most
3 of it.
4 You jumped on one of my questions.
5 You have been doing that all night but I'm
6 glad we are on the same train of thought.
7 Would you say, in your opinion,
8 that if whatever this new body that is
9 constructed, developed or whatever, that the
10 only way it can be successful is to be an
11 empowered board or to be empowered?
12 MS. CONFORTI: Absolutely. It
13 needs to have more meaning to it. It needs to
14 have more teeth in it. It also needs to, if
15 it's going to be an elected process, then it
16 needs to be at the same time as the election.
17 People say take it out of the election day
18 because it's political. What makes you think
19 it isn't political anyway?
20 Even with this whole idea of
21 voting, all you needed was a number of people
22 who liked Bunny Reddington and Bunny
23 Reddington was able to be elected, so there is
24 no real difference.
25 MS. REDDINGTON: One of the
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2 previous testimonies today it was mentioned
3 about election during a non-presidential
4 election so that it wouldn't be as
5 politicized.
6 MS. CONFORTI: Right. Do you
7 realize though that in order to be a school
8 board member, you needed to be a resident of
9 your borough, of voting age and not even a
10 registered voter. You could be a parent
11 voter, no background in any kind of issues
12 that would make you at least fit for the job.
13 So that many times when a board member comes
14 in, he comes in with a learning situation, a
15 learn experience. So normally it's a three
16 year point of view or a three year tenure,
17 well, it takes a year and a half to learn all
18 the things that are going on, so we just
19 finally get into it. This term, of course,
20 they extended us another year so we're pretty
21 good now.
22 MS. REDDINGTON: I just want to
23 follow up. Eleanor, I shared that with my
24 colleagues on the Task Force this afternoon,
25 some of them, about how the first year,
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2 because that was one of the concerns, how long
3 educating a school board member, or whatever
4 it is said this new board would be, to educate
5 or to develop members. And I shared with them
6 how when I first came on the board ten years
7 ago, you were nice enough to take all of the
8 three or four new school board members and
9 oriented us and provided us with a lovely
10 packet that I've used over the years.
11 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Conforti, we
12 very much appreciate your being here tonight
13 and all that you have done for public
14 education on Staten Island. We heard from
15 many people today from diverse backgrounds,
16 parents, educators, principals, school board
17 members, regular concerned ordinary citizens,
18 and every person has spoken with a great deal
19 of pride and I think justifiably so that the
20 job is being done here on Staten Island and
21 has been observed by more than one member of
22 the Task Force. We only wish that that were
23 so in the rest of the city in the other 31
24 community school districts because were that
25 so, perhaps these proceedings, these hearings
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2 could not be needed, but I think that you need
3 to be congratulated and all the people
4 involved in public education on Staten Island
5 need to be congratulated for an excellent job
6 that you have done.
7 MS. CONFORTI: Thank you so much
8 and if you ever need any help, the board is
9 willing to teach the other 31.
10 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you.
11 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Ellen Birch,
12 parent at P.S. 29.
13 MS. BIRCH: Good evening. First of
14 all, I want to apologize for having put a P in
15 your last name.
16 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: That's okay.
17 Everyone does it.
18 MS. BIRCH: Dear Committee Chairs,
19 Honorable Steven Sanders, Attorney Thomson,
20 Distinguished Committee Members, thank you for
21 your presence in Staten Island to take the
22 testimony on community school district
23 governance reform.
24 Staten Island has a personality
25 separate and distinct from the other boroughs
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2 of New York City and our parents' voices are
3 represented in a unique way. We heard
4 testimony from executive board members of the
5 Staten Island Federation of PTAs on how
6 information is effectively being disseminated
7 to parents of public school children on Staten
8 Island.
9 This organization also serves as a
10 forum for our issues and our president and
11 executive board address issues on our behalf
12 to the borough president, our legislators, the
13 chancellor of schools, the superintendent and
14 others with the power to affect positive
15 change.
16 Having had the benefit of an
17 organization like this, which allows for all
18 voices to be heard locally, one that relays
19 information in a timely manner to all parents,
20 one who takes parents and the issues of their
21 children seriously, one who represents all
22 parents due to a direct one person, one vote
23 election process, one that has all officers
24 directly involved with the educational process
25 by virtue of living with the children on a
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2 daily basis. Those who know that a ten-year
3 plan will be a full generation of children, a
4 whole generation of students, I have come to
5 realize that a non-borough Board of Education
6 will just not work for us.
7 It is to this end that I support
8 the PTA Federation's resolution for Staten
9 Island borough Board of Education with better
10 than half of the participants being parents of
11 public school children. I feel that this will
12 continue to allow the different cultures of
13 Staten Island schools should be reflected
14 while effecting positive change. Those who
15 are not part of the solution are part of the
16 problem. Let's enable those who are willing
17 to work for the children, to continue to do
18 so.
19 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We thank you
20 very much for being with us here tonight,
21 Ms. Birch. Let me see if we have a question
22 or two.
23 Ms. Thomson?
24 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: How can you
25 ensure -- you know, we talked a lot this
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2 afternoon. You've been a familiar face all
3 day. You know the challenges for us as we
4 look at Staten Island and then look at the
5 boroughs that are much bigger than Staten
6 Island, the 12 or 14 districts, so it's a
7 different struggle.
8 With this borough board that you
9 are suggesting and the Federation is
10 suggesting, election, how do you ensure that
11 it's a diverse board, that it meets the
12 geographic, the ethnic, the racial demographic
13 diversity of a borough or district? Any ideas
14 about how you can do that?
15 MS. BIRCH: I know you talked about
16 the three community schools, the three boards
17 on Staten Island, community boards one, two
18 and three. I don't necessarily support that
19 platform.
20 I think that division is wrong
21 geographically but part of it would be -- I
22 honestly think if you look at the composition
23 of PTA as it stands now, we do have -- every
24 school has its own culture. Every segment of
25 Staten Island has it's own parenting
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2 population. And if you do represent your
3 schools, if let's say you say a number of
4 people from each school go up for the parent
5 seats, you will have a diversity there between
6 the parent body --
7 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: But that's
8 what I'm saying --
9 MS. BIRCH: -- supporting the
10 parent's half plus one, because I think you
11 will have different cultures, different
12 populations, different ethnic backgrounds. My
13 school alone, we have 11 languages spoken. In
14 one school you can represent a great
15 percentage of different cultural backgrounds.
16 If you allow for a lot of different
17 parents to come to the different schools
18 districts on the island, that will give you --
19 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I think the
20 Federation's proposal was that it be done at
21 the election booth with the names of parents.
22 MS. BIRCH: Part of the reason that
23 I support that, and I support that they do it
24 on election day is not because any other day
25 will be unimportant or politically bias for
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2 some reason. It's purely for voter turnout.
3 I've been involved in PTA, parent schools, at
4 the scary thing is the percentage was
5 pathetic, for lack of a better term. I better
6 take that back. There are non-involved people
7 in every borough. I'm sure you see this. So
8 the reason that we supported an election on
9 election day was for voter turnout.
10 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: We also heard
11 a suggestion somewhere, I think it was today,
12 that we've heard several people suggest that
13 the parent choose the parent members, that it
14 not be the general population, that it should
15 be parents choosing parent members and that
16 the election should take place on open school
17 night when the parents come to look at the
18 children's report card.
19 MS. BIRCH: You're saying a parent
20 at each school choose the parents?
21 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: All the
22 parents at the schools, some variation of
23 that. That's something that someone said
24 today, about parents choosing parents. The
25 general public chooses the non-parent member.
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2 MS. BIRCH: I think if you have a
3 parent line on the election slate, you're
4 having people choose parents anyway and we'll
5 all parents.
6 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me just
7 ask --
8 ASSEMBLYWOMAN PHEFER: Just a
9 clarification, so then the general public
10 would vote for a parent and then others?
11 MS. BIRCH: As a Federation I can
12 speak personally. My perception of that was
13 that there would be a parent slate and then
14 other, because that way everybody pays taxes.
15 You can't say only parents come in and only
16 parents can vote. And also I don't feel that
17 that would be -- I feel that that would also
18 be bias.
19 So if you have a non-parent slate
20 that's for non-parents in the school system,
21 currently in the school system. That would
22 qualify for my definite of parents. It
23 doesn't mean that someone who doesn't have
24 children in the school system, or even a
25 grandparent, who doesn't have perceptions on
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2 being or doesn't feel strongly enough about an
3 issue to vote, they would vote under the first
4 or the other category. And that would be,
5 let's say, if you're talking about -- there
6 was a gentleman who had spoken before about DC
7 37 or some of the other slates, how ever
8 that's been set up.
9 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Ms. Reddington?
10 MS. REDDINGTON: Just to clarify
11 that because we heard it this morning and
12 we've been hearing it. How would you ensure
13 that parents would be elected? Would you
14 only -- the thing is, if you are electing
15 nine members and you have people, as we do
16 now, we have certain people from the community
17 because we've always been, at least on Staten
18 Island, we've always had at least 20 or more
19 people running for the nine seats. Some of
20 them might have been parents.
21 MS. BIRCH: You see, my issue
22 personally, I can only speak as an individual,
23 my issue is that if you are going to represent
24 the position of a parent, you should be a
25 parent of a public school child on Staten
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2 Island, because we live the problems, we live
3 the issues, we live the changes, we live the
4 trials and tribulations, and we do have the
5 input on how --
6 MS. REDDINGTON: I clearly
7 understand that but how can we assure that in
8 a voting booth?
9 MS. BIRCH: Before you go to put
10 your name on a slate, you have to have so many
11 signatures and you also have to have somebody
12 check out your credentials and check out that
13 you have the right number of people signing
14 for you. There would be something, a prospect
15 in that capacity.
16 MS. REDDINGTON: I don't mean that
17 they would qualify. I mean, how can we assure
18 that this person is going to be elected?
19 MS. BIRCH: We would have a parent
20 line and a non-parent line. I don't know the
21 legal ramifications of that, so I can't speak
22 to that.
23 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We got the idea
24 that you want there to be a majority of
25 parents and we should figure out how that
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2 works in an election.
3 Before I ask a question, Robin
4 Brown has a little question.
5 MS. BROWN: After we get folks
6 elected do you think that the power or the
7 duties of this body, what do you think that
8 they would need to be able -- what decisions
9 or what powers and duties do you feel this
10 body should have in order to safeguard student
11 achievement or that students are actually
12 learning within their schools?
13 MS. BIRCH: You've got to remember,
14 part of the reason that I do feel strongly
15 about parent involvement is because a parent
16 does understand from their perspective, that's
17 why they are not solely, they don't have
18 proprietary rights to this board, but a parent
19 does understand positive and negative
20 educational practices.
21 You're asking me what they
22 should --
23 MS. BROWN: What duties or policies
24 do you feel this board should have in order to
25 safeguard that children are learning within
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2 their schools? Do you think they should have
3 some sort of input on budget, some sort of
4 say-so as to who is actually working within a
5 school or a district?
6 MS. BIRCH: Yes. I think when you
7 select a school or you buy a house in an area,
8 you go to the school and you look at their
9 staff, you look at their list of how many
10 teachers have masters degrees and what
11 percentage -- you know, how you selected
12 geographical area that you purchased your
13 house in or you choose to stay in an area
14 based on their report card, if you will.
15 I think that the people on this
16 board should be able to take all of the
17 information that's out there, cull through it
18 and decide if this person is not performing,
19 they should not stay. If this person or if
20 the pools are not meeting -- I don't know. I
21 think they should have a great deal of
22 involvement from budget to who stays and who
23 goes, hiring and firing practices to
24 communication links. I really do.
25 They should be empowered. I think
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2 they should be empowered. I think that we
3 need people -- I know people say I don't get
4 paid, I get paid, I'm a volunteer, I work, or
5 whatever. The bottom line is that we all want
6 what is best for the next generation, that
7 they are the leaders. And we should give them
8 all the benefits and there should be a
9 cross-check, that there should be a way to
10 evaluate on a day-to-day, week-by-week,
11 month-by-month basis. And these people should
12 have a say in educational practice.
13 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me ask you
14 what, I think, will be the final question.
15 You were very clear in your testimony that
16 whatever is created or what's been created or
17 recreated on a borough wide basis, Staten
18 Island is a very large borough in terms of
19 area, the smallest in terms of population but
20 it is far and away the largest in terms of
21 area.
22 Not that I'm advocating the
23 alternative, but why not have a set of school
24 boards that are coterminous with the three
25 community planning board areas? Wouldn't that
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2 bring decision making closer to the parents
3 and closer to the specific local schools?
4 MS. BIRCH: I have to say from what
5 I have observed with Federation and Federation
6 has been a very unifying body for trying to
7 unify BASIS and District 31 and the special
8 education and our legislators and trying to
9 pull all us all as one and I really have a
10 very deeply rooted feeling that to start
11 dividing us is not good. Yes, it would be a
12 very large job. It would be a lot of work for
13 the people on this board. They have a great
14 deal to be -- they have a tremendous
15 opportunity to be responsive to a great number
16 of people, but I would rather see unification
17 rather than dividing them.
18 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: And granting
19 that view and that impulse, I understand it.
20 I understand that it is rooted both in
21 politics and in tradition.
22 The other side of the coin is that
23 you do have local community planning boards
24 and they do represent other services,
25 sanitation, police, fire, land use and I don't
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2 know, you can tell me better, I'm just a kid
3 from Manhattan, what do I know, but as far as
4 I know people on Staten Island have not
5 objected that somehow having three local
6 community planning boards it helps to make
7 decisions about other services as bifurcated
8 Staten Island.
9 MS. BIRCH: I really feel that it
10 depends on who is on each of the boards. Our
11 legislators are able to help try to unify and
12 they represent three different districts. It
13 really depends on -- because I have not --
14 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I was just
15 looking for your gut feeling because I just
16 wanted to better understand from someone who
17 feels strongly that education ought to be
18 borough wide, how that differs from the
19 delivery of other services that have been
20 distributed to local planning boards. There
21 is no right or wrong answer so I don't mean to
22 put you on the spot.
23 MS. BIRCH: In the area that I live
24 in we're trying to down zone our residential
25 area. Some areas are more responsive to
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2 working -- community boards are more
3 responsive to working with their local
4 population than others.
5 I personally feel that you really
6 need to select appropriately if you were to
7 work like that, the people that have the best
8 interest of education as opposed to other
9 services.
10 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: We very much
11 appreciate your time and for being here.
12 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you very
13 much.
14 Next is Alice Braunstein, PTA
15 co-president of P.S. 4.
16 MS. BRAUNSTEIN: Good evening. I
17 would also like the opportunity to answer some
18 of those questions.
19 Good evening to all Task Force
20 members and to all concerned community
21 members. My name is Alice Braunstein. I have
22 two school aged children, a fifth grader in
23 P.S. 4 in Arden Heights and a seventh grader
24 in I.S. 75 in first in Hugenot.
25 I'm currently co-president of the
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2 PTA of P.S. 4, school leadership team chair
3 person at P.S. 4 and treasurer of president's
4 council of District 31. I come here to fully
5 support the reinstatement and continuation of
6 the community school board. I attend the
7 monthly meetings and have also spoken at
8 numerous meetings on topics affecting my
9 children and the entire community.
10 We need to have an arena where the
11 community can come to hear the issues that
12 affect them as well as have an opportunity to
13 express their wants, desires and opinions. I
14 have recently attended a meeting where a nine
15 year old girl spoke about the great loss she
16 had experienced due to the fact that the band
17 program in her school had been cut. She spoke
18 for all children on Staten Island.
19 At another meeting a community
20 meeting spoke about protecting the rights of
21 the special needs children in District 31 and
22 District 75. She spoke for all parents with
23 children who have special needs.
24 When community school boards are
25 dissolved, there will be no other outlet for
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2 us to go. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor
3 Klein are both business men. They know the
4 importance of market research and a formalized
5 ongoing consumer feedback program. Community
6 school boards accomplish both of these tasks.
7 While I understand the mayor's desire to
8 eliminate redundancy in the system, none
9 exists here. There is no other opportunity
10 for any and all community members to attend a
11 meeting that directly affects their children's
12 education. To that end and in fact the
13 community school board should have its former
14 powers restored so that it can be more
15 efficient and more effective.
16 In closing, let me state that I
17 fully support the Staten Island Federation of
18 PTAs resolution for school governance where a
19 parent component is a vital part of the
20 organization. The parent component is crucial
21 in achieving balanced governance for the
22 Department of Education and it's ultimate
23 consumer, the students of Staten Island and
24 New York City. Thank you.
25 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: And we thank
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2 you.
3 Ms. Brown?
4 MS. BROWN: I just have a quick
5 question. Just thinking about this for a
6 minute can you give more power or more say-so
7 to parents thus basically taking away the
8 middle person. What additional powers do you
9 think that parents should have in terms of
10 whatever this new entity may be?
11 MS. BRAUNSTEIN: I don't think that
12 parents should necessarily have more power but
13 they should have more of a voice, be part of
14 the solutions that come into play. They need
15 to have an arena, just like -- which leads me
16 back to the question previous to my getting up
17 to the table. I am a full supporter of school
18 leadership teams. I have been on school
19 leadership teams since it was school district
20 management, and I wrote bylaws for school
21 leadership teams.
22 And the parent component, whereas
23 in many cases we are not trained and have the
24 background that speaks to many of the issues,
25 we have an emotional component and a grass
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2 roots based information that is helpful in
3 pulling the educational system to a whole and
4 to make everything work better.
5 And when you talked about the
6 election process, that's what was going
7 through my mind. School leadership teams have
8 designated seats. If you want to guarantee
9 that a parent is voted in, then you have a
10 designated seat. It's a south shore seat, a
11 north shore seat and an east shore, west shore
12 seat and then you run for that particular
13 seat, and the same would be true with the
14 other nine positions.
15 MS. BROWN: I guess what I'm asking
16 is that once you get parents to this position
17 and they fill the designated seats, what
18 should be their role on this new entity once
19 they get there?
20 MS. BRAUNSTEIN: An equal role. It
21 should be whatever you expect of the
22 non-parent, it should be the same.
23 MS. BROWN: So then you are saying
24 they should be involved in the resolution of
25 possible conflicts and also part of the
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2 decision-making process, be it budget, be it
3 around curriculum.
4 MS. BRAUNSTEIN: Absolutely. In so
5 doing, because it is a parent, we have to take
6 that into consideration and there should be
7 some type of professional, quote-unquote,
8 development for the parents that do get
9 elected to that position but it's absolutely
10 an equal role, just like on a school
11 leadership, everybody leaves their hat at the
12 door.
13 MS. REDDINGTON: Good evening.
14 Thank you for your testimony.
15 I was wondering if you wanted to
16 chime in on the fact of the three council
17 districts that we have and if we were to go
18 in -- well, not council districts, community
19 board districts, our three community boards.
20 Did you want to give us your
21 opinion on them?
22 MS. BRAUNSTEIN: I think education
23 is an entity unto itself. If you mix it in
24 with people that have to make decisions about
25 the sanitation and the parking line and the
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2 crosswalks, you have a very messy situation.
3 That would make it become more of a political
4 arena than not if you mix up all those
5 things. Those people will have an agenda and
6 the education will be put on the back burner.
7 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Just to follow
8 up on the questions so I think you have a full
9 picture, the proposals that we have heard,
10 some of the recommendations that we have heard
11 is not necessarily to fold education into the
12 existing planning boards but to have the same
13 jurisdictional lines. So theoretically you
14 could have the planning boards, planning board
15 one, two and three dealing with the issues
16 that they deal with now, sanitation, police,
17 land use, et cetera, and have a separate board
18 but with the same jurisdictional lines that
19 was dealing with the educational needs in that
20 area.
21 Under those circumstances would you
22 be as skeptical --
23 MS. BRAUNSTEIN: Yes. Should I
24 elaborate?
25 One of the things that just comes
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2 into mind is that we have one board that is
3 extremely successful and why change that? And
4 we have a mayor and a chancellor that's
5 looking to eliminate redundancy and, to me,
6 that would be more redundancy in Staten
7 Island. I don't know how it works in the
8 other boroughs. I know there are a lot more
9 school districts. I don't see the benefit in
10 splitting Staten Island because we work well
11 as a whole and we learn a lot. You would be
12 eliminating diversity in many cases if you do
13 that.
14 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: We've heard a
15 lot from parents across the city about the
16 flaws in their school leadership team. You
17 seem to have had a really positive experience
18 in your school. The role of the school
19 leadership team is the creation of the
20 comprehension education plan and the budget.
21 Could you talk to us about the role
22 of the parents in being part of the team that
23 creates the CSCEP and what kind of training
24 you receive as a group so that you feel
25 equipped to deal with the budget.
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2 MS. BRAUNSTEIN: Let me state in
3 public that P.S. 4 has one of the best working
4 school leadership teams and has had for many,
5 many years, and I take great pride in that.
6 The training that we've received is
7 the same training that everyone in the
8 district has received. We've been invited to
9 consensus workshops and how to write a CEP and
10 when we had our own budget, do you remember
11 that, in the stone age, we had our own budget,
12 we would spend our own money and a staff
13 development for our own school leadership team
14 and we brought in people who would teach us
15 how to do grant writing and things like that.
16 I just think we've been lucky that we all, and
17 we are a large team, we have 18 people and
18 we've never had a problem getting people to
19 run. Whenever someone stepped off, we've
20 always had enough people to run.
21 So I think it really does comes
22 down to luck in terms of our personalities in
23 our school. We are willing to work. We have
24 a principal that allows us to function as an
25 equal partnership. Of course there have been
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2 times when things get heated but that's just
3 people. We strive for consensus.
4 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Well, we thank
5 you very, very much, Ms. Braunstein, for being
6 with us and sharing your views and your
7 experiences. Thank you.
8 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: The next
9 speaker is C.F. Blewer, representing CPAC,
10 Cecilia Blewer, B-L-E-W-E-R.
11 MS. BLEWER: Good evening. My name
12 is Cecilia Blewer, a parent of two public
13 school children on the upper west side,
14 District 3, which I represent as CPAC. I am
15 also past president of the President's
16 Council, current treasurer of it, also
17 president of the P.S. 163 PTA.
18 My testimony will focus on two
19 issues relating to parent involvement and
20 school governance, transparency and district
21 wide parent organizing and then I will end
22 with a perspective on what mayoral control as
23 currently practiced now means for public
24 school families and their communities.
25 To begin with, I would like to tell
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2 you a true story. On December 19th I went to
3 the panel on educational policy, its meeting,
4 an entity created along with the extreme form
5 of mayoral control under which our system now
6 operates. I gave a plea for me transparency
7 on the part of the chancellor and the
8 Department of Education. I began my remarks
9 by stating what I considered a common
10 understanding in American civics, that
11 transparency and accountability go hand in
12 hand.
13 To my amazement the chancellor
14 refuted the need for transparency. He said
15 that accountability comes every four years at
16 the voting booth.
17 Later, when I was approached by
18 members of the press, the chancellor said that
19 transparency can bog the system down. He said
20 that Donald Rumsfeld does not perform his role
21 with transparency and that he should not have
22 to either. This response does not bode well
23 for students, parents or the public.
24 On the other hand, this indicates
25 what our current form of extreme mayoral
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2 control has given rise to.
3 On that same evening the panel on
4 educational policy voted in favor of a drastic
5 reduction in capital spending with only one
6 member abstaining because there was no impact
7 analysis of the reduction on the children's
8 education. Even as a mere advisory body, the
9 PEP has greatly restricted powers to organize
10 among themselves or to speak publicly. They
11 are impotent.
12 The reason I went to the meeting in
13 the first place was that I was concerned about
14 the changes in the principal hiring practices,
15 particularly since at a CPAC meeting we had
16 been told that new policy, which
17 disenfranchises parents, had been the result
18 of a pole a school leadership team chairs.
19 When I inquired of PTA presidents in my
20 district, I found no recollection of ever
21 having been contacted on this issue. In fact,
22 when that issue had been raised by the
23 previous chancellor, the SLTs of my district
24 said that they did not want the
25 responsibility.
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2 What I needed to know from the
3 chancellor is why PTA presidents who sit on
4 SLTs and often serve as their co-chairs, do
5 not know anything about this poll and
6 certainly would have opposed it, if asked. I
7 needed to know if there was a problem at my
8 district level or if the chancellor surveyed
9 principals and superintendents only instead of
10 SLT chairs or if there was no survey at all.
11 This is the kind of information
12 transparency provides. We all need to know
13 whom to hold accountable and in what way. The
14 moral of this story is this. We need to have
15 an entity which can force transparency out of
16 the mayoral control of the Department of
17 Education. If everyone is working for the
18 mayor, who's working for us? How can we get
19 conflicts with the Department of Education
20 adjudicated?
21 Let me now turn to parent
22 organizing at the district level. This is
23 very important. It is important because
24 decisions get made at the district level, some
25 broad based and some concerning individual
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2 schools or children. District president's
3 councils are the means by which parent leaders
4 organize the changes in the school districts.
5 The president's councils are important because
6 they are tied to neighborhood and the
7 community. They are often the means by which
8 information and experience circulate within
9 the district. We parents help each other
10 address mutual problems, like recess and
11 getting our spring fairs off the ground.
12 Parents are so organized through
13 our president's council at city and state
14 levels over funding and policy issues.
15 President's councils can address the kind of
16 entrenched problem that bureaucrats never seem
17 to have time for. In my district, president's
18 council is working with teachers, college and
19 the studies circle resource center on a
20 district wide study circle to address racism
21 and the educational inequity in the district
22 schools. This was an initiative of the
23 president's council. This promises to be an
24 enormously fruitful community dialogue which,
25 unlike "Children First," operates
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2 transparently.
3 Let me give you an insight into
4 effective strategies for parent involvement
5 for my own advocacy and involvement at the
6 district level. Parents have limited
7 mobility. Why? And this is late breaking
8 news. Parents have children. Parents do not
9 like to drag their children to meetings far
10 from home. When president's council meets in
11 the Harlem Valley, we see the parents from the
12 Harlem Valley. When president's council meets
13 on the southern end of the districts, say 71st
14 Street, we generally do not see the uptown
15 families present.
16 The idea of mega districts is
17 absurd in its own right as a supervisory
18 entity, and for parents it is also another
19 form of disenfranchisement. Districts need to
20 be -- now I realize I'm now saying something
21 that goes against what you have just heard so
22 I will rephrase this. Districts in my neck of
23 the woods need to be small, accessible and
24 tied to the community. Their administrators
25 need to have decision making powers and
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2 monthly public meetings. We cannot be stuck
3 with ombudsman. Thank you very much.
4 In concluding my remarks, I would
5 like to give you operational information about
6 how extreme mayoral control is working now.
7 As you will recall, it was parents who opposed
8 the extreme mayoral control in Allan Place and
9 the issues raised but not heard at the time
10 have turned out to have merit. The system for
11 transparency, accountability and redress is
12 still not in place. We are out of balance.
13 Parents in my district are increasingly
14 disgusted as the teach to the test mentality
15 of principals and teachers who feel they have
16 no other options with a mayor obsessed with
17 standardized tests.
18 Some of our children have not had
19 science instruction for years, because of the
20 tests, never mind foreign language, art
21 education or history. Under the test regime
22 of creative writing, even for elementary
23 children, is no longer taught to any degree.
24 Instead, English language arts is an endless
25 round of reading responses and factual
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2 writing, which is what the test is. Homework
3 has reached epidemic proportions in this
4 climate of fear.
5 My president's council is
6 organizing around this educational Enron, but
7 right now it seems hopeless. What is the
8 entity which can put a break to this vicious
9 cycle, not the superintendents surely. They
10 are working for the mayor and are frightened,
11 too, not the parent liaisons. They work for
12 the same frightened superintendents and are
13 more reluctant than ever to help a parent deal
14 with conflict with the system.
15 The rumor we hear that parent
16 liaisons will be put in every corrective
17 action school does nothing to address the
18 fundamental conflict of interest. It
19 certainly does not diminish the need for
20 monthly public meetings with direct decision
21 makers.
22 I will not belabor this point.
23 There is currently no way we, as parents or
24 community members, can force answers from the
25 current system. Parent involvement is not
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2 nearly a civility within school governance.
3 Parent involvement is predicated on the
4 proposition that parents are those who speak
5 best on the well being of the children for
6 whom they, as parents, are ultimately
7 responsible.
8 I will not burden you with my
9 thoughts at this moment on what I think about
10 how this Task Force has conducted the
11 notification and outreach process of this
12 voting rights issue, although I think it's
13 extremely important.
14 I will simply end by saying that
15 now is the time to balance this system. Think
16 about the way by which families and
17 communities can hold the mayor accountable,
18 not just every four years, if they are even
19 eligible to vote, but within a 30 day limit.
20 Think about ways parents of schools and
21 districts, people within communities organized
22 to bring about change with a press for
23 resources for the system.
24 The mayor and his chancellor may
25 identify with Donald Rumsfeld of the defense
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2 department, which is now on the eve of war
3 with Iraq. I know that exercising the raw
4 power of war is different from running a
5 peaceable institution involving children,
6 families, communities and their civil rights
7 to an education and to vote. And it's up to
8 you to show that you know that difference,
9 too.
10 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Thank you very
11 much for that very eloquent, very passionate
12 presentation. Let me see whether we have any
13 questions.
14 Ms. Thomson?
15 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: Thank you for
16 your testimony and for coming to Staten Island
17 to give your testimony.
18 What would you envision that we put
19 in place? What are your ideas about a
20 structure that would address the issues you're
21 talking about? And what role should parents
22 play in that structure?
23 MS. BLEWER: I don't really have
24 a -- I mean, I'm not, for example, wedded to
25 the idea of district or mega district, which
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2 is what I'm hearing really, leadership teams.
3 I think it's generally a step in the right
4 direction.
5 What I'm much more interested in is
6 how can parents work with some power in this
7 system, and not just the few who have the
8 resources to be on school leadership teams,
9 which is already a very skewed number of
10 parents. Most parents really just can't leave
11 their children to go to these meetings. They
12 don't believe in baby-sitters, can't afford
13 baby-sitters, children won't do their
14 homework. It's a handful of people.
15 What I'm much more interested in is
16 how your average parent can get some real
17 accountability, right now accountability out
18 of this system. And I think that what we have
19 to look for is some kind of parent advocate
20 role, something that is independent from this
21 system. This mayor has enormous control and
22 it is sending a chilling effect up and down
23 this system. We need parents to have
24 something that is all theirs. They, as the
25 truth tellers, which I think parents are, we
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2 are the truth tellers of the system. We need
3 to be empowered to tell the truth and get
4 results.
5 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Let me, on
6 behalf of the members of the Task Force, thank
7 you very much for your testimony. I assure
8 you we are listening very carefully and we are
9 certainly taking to heart your strong views
10 and your recommendations. We thank you very
11 much.
12 I would just like to ask --
13 ASSEMBLYMAN LAVELLE: I just would
14 like to acknowledge the presence of our
15 superintendent, Christy Vigini, who has joined
16 us this evening in the audience.
17 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I would add to
18 that introduction, sir, that we've heard
19 repeatedly the success stories of your
20 district, and while leaders are always blamed
21 for the failures, they have be acknowledged
22 for the successes, and I have to assume that
23 you had a lot to do with the successes and the
24 environment for success that has been created
25 here on Staten Island. I join my colleague,
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2 Assemblyman LaVelle, in welcoming you here and
3 expressing our appreciation for all that you
4 have done.
5 There are three persons who signed
6 up for tonight's session. Let me just see if
7 any of them are here before we conclude.
8 Mary Lou Aranjos from New Horizon
9 School?
10 Beverly Wall, president of one of
11 the parent teacher associations, I'm not sure
12 which. Beverly Wall?
13 Yolanda Gonzalez, a student
14 advocate?
15 (No response.)
16 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: Then let me
17 conclude by -- Audrey Phefer was concerned
18 that everyone here was going to speak. Half
19 of you have become residents of Staten
20 Island.
21 I want to, on behalf of all of the
22 members of the Task Force, first of all, thank
23 the residents of Staten Island for your
24 hospitality. We have enjoyed our stay here
25 today. We will be back. Borough President
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2 Molinaro, who was our first witness, set a
3 very good tone for the proceedings that we
4 engaged in during the course of the day
5 today.
6 I just want to reiterate for those
7 who may not have been here earlier in the day
8 or earlier in the evening that this Task Force
9 has a legal mandate under the legislation that
10 was enacted into law to promulgate a report
11 with recommendations about how to replace
12 local community school boards. We have to
13 make that report to the State Legislature and
14 to the governor by February the 15th. We will
15 be concluding the public hearing phase of our
16 activities on Thursday, January 16th, with our
17 fifth hearing in Brooklyn. And at that point
18 we will try very hard to distill all of the
19 testimony that we have heard from residents of
20 Staten Island and all of the five boroughs and
21 try to formulate a report and a set of
22 recommendations which is consistent with what
23 we have heard and hopefully provide a
24 framework and a road map for community
25 representation and parental input, which will
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2 meet with the satisfaction of people here on
3 Staten Island and, indeed, around the City of
4 New York.
5 Terri, do you have anything that
6 you would like to add?
7 CHAIRWOMAN THOMSON: I just want to
8 say that we've had some really terrific,
9 thoughtful testimony all day today and we
10 certainly appreciate the input we've received
11 on Staten Island. Thank you.
12 CHAIRMAN SANDERS: I have also been
13 asked to please advise you to departure by the
14 side door is how we would like you to exit.
15 That's what we have been told by security here
16 at Petrides.
17 And, again, we will resume our
18 public hearings in Brooklyn a week from
19 Thursday. Thank you, Staten Island.
20 (TIME NOTED: 8:25 P.M.)
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4 CERTIFICATION
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10 I, Francis X. Gray, a Notary
11 Public in and for the State of New
12 York, do hereby certify:
13 THAT the foregoing is a true and
14 accurate transcript of my stenographic
15 notes.
16 IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have
17 hereunto set my hand this 14th day of
18 January 2003.
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25 FRANCIS X. GRAY
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