Dear Editor:
I sincerely thank the JCEA for endorsing Lorenzo Richardson (1H), Joel Torres (3H) and Gerald Lyons (7H). As a regular attendee of the school board meetings, a parent and a taxpayer, I am requesting you to support these individuals for the following reasons:
• We need to balance the board in order to bring back the best democratic practices and save it from “rubber-stampers” as well as special interest groups.
• I have seen these three individuals in the board meetings regularly. They read the agenda books thoroughly, unlike the few board members who never look over the agenda and simply “rubber stamp” it, and they ask important questions even though we usually never get the answers.
• The current board under the leadership of Board President Ranade reduced the timing of the public comments by combining agenda items and general public speaking, therefore reducing the overall time limit from 10 minutes to 5 minutes. This reduction of time took away our ability to discuss agenda items in detail.
• In a caucus reorganization meeting, Board President Ranade presented and adopted a resolution to stop broadcasting public comments without giving the resolution to the Policy Committee to review beforehand. Furthermore, she did not give the public the opportunity to the public to comment at the regular board meeting. This move was condemned by Mayor Fulop as well as the good governance group, CivicJC.
• The current board increased our taxes by around 1.5 percent and most of it went to charter schools, while the rest of it went to the schools where some of the board members’ children attend. They cut the funding for most of the classrooms in public schools and poured it into the aforementioned schools.
• The real leaders are the teachers and they are working without a contract while the central office has money to outsource substitute teachers’ contract for $4 million, spend thousands of dollars in employing consultants, hire highly-paid directors at central office, keep renewing obsolete technology hardware and software licenses, open elite schools while the failing schools continue to fail with a classroom size of 25+ children, allow the superintendent to work without benchmarks, try to give a salary increase to the Business Administrator who did not show up for teachers’ contract negotiations meeting, and suspiciously shared the public school students’ data with a charter school, etc., etc.,
Richardson (1H), Torres (3H) and Lyons (7H) understand the issues and will be productive from day one. On Nov. 4th, please vote to support these candidates and let us bring back the best practices of democracy to the Board Of Education, including inclusiveness, accountability, openness and transparency.
May God bless our school children, teachers, tax-payers, and America!
Riaz Wahid