Dear Editor:
Having attended the BOE budget meeting on Thursday, I couldn’t help but walk home on that cold spring night with fists shaking at my sides. I’d sat through a meeting about a budget in name only to experience one of the most disheartening events in my eleven years in Secaucus. As for the budget, Cynthia Randina deserves credit for crunching numbers like an adept. She’s given taxpayers a reasonable budget. However, that talent comes at a cost, pardon the pun, because she appears to lack interpersonal skills or puts a low priority on people’s feelings, which makes her an enemy of those most emotional of creatures, teachers. I saw Bobby Anderson sauntering to the podium, chastising Mrs. Randina for a lack of communication. He spoke with righteous indignation, leaving with empty answers to satisfactory questions. People talked about an outside contractor that pays for teachers. Mrs. Randina couldn’t find an answer as to the reason that happens. I saw a father seeking an answer to his son’s treatment by staff members at a schools, only to receive Mrs. Randina’s refutation of that treatment. Oh, the father got an apology, but it came dressed in misplaced contrition; she apologized for not making clear how she’d cut a prior meeting with the father short to attend a board meeting. I saw a board completely out of the loop. Imagine, Michael Makarski, who’ll be leaving the board, motion to propose an investigation into the father’s claims, only to be told the Superintendent’s office launched an investigation–all under the nose of the BOE! Talk about egg on the face. Teachers care about feelings. Not a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Speaking of which, that board has grown long in the tooth. Some, I hear, don’t even know how to reboot a computer! The BOE needs a makeover, and I urge older, obdurate members to retire. You’ve got money. Do other things! Why do something so vital to the young for free when you do it badly? Lastly, the absence of people of color at the meeting, save for an Indian family whose son received recognition for third place in a spelling bee and a scattering of Latinos, serves as a telling commentary on our town. As the numbers in our schools indicate, young people of color comprise a significant proportion of the population, yet the absence of their parents and guardians at these meetings blows a hole through the suggestion of a multicultural community. The gathering of residents at the board budget meeting resembled a Wonder bread forum of 1971, not the melting pot of 2011. Why, then, do so many of our immigrant neighbors stay away? Perhaps we who resemble the folks from the archival photos in the town’s nativist calendar this year might do well to consider how the town of Secaucus communicates to its residents. Instead of looking back, asking, “What happened to Secaucus?” we should ask, “What’s happening to Secaucus?”
Mark Anthony Gutmann