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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31116
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, December 05, 2012 - 10:11 pm: | 
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Paulin's bills support mandatory kindergarten in N.Y.
Kindergarten would no longer be optional class
Written by Randi Weiner / White Plains (NY) Journal News
Dec 3, 2012
NEW ROCHELLE — Kindergarten may drop off the endangered programs list next year under legislation to be introduced in January.
Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, D-Scarsdale, vowed today to introduce two bills that would change current law that considers kindergarten an optional program. The bills, for which Paulin is seeking partners, would require either that public schools provide classroom space for any 5-year-old whose parent wants it, or require full-day kindergarten for all. Paulin said she plans to introduce both with hopes the stronger bill will prevail.
“Attendance in kindergarten should not be optional,” Paulin told about 40 members of the grassroots Westchester United organization, who hosted her announcement. “We cannot play games any longer.”
 Guess who would support this new mandate. Why, it would be superintendents, school boards and their associations and teachers -- the same people who lobby for all kinds of mandates and then complain that the state keeps passing them.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 31081
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - 7:42 pm: |
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Don't pile on mandates
By JAMES D. HOFFMAN, Albany (NY) Times Union Commentary
November 27, 2012
When is the other shoe going to drop? When will New York understand that merely cutting funding, without reducing mandated costs, means that schools will eventually crash?
It only means that IF school districts continue to pay excessive labor costs. It's that simple. Cut your salaries. They are doing it in other states. They are demonstrably and irrefutably excessive in NY. You care about students? Bring your labor costs down to market rates. But, no. Educators would rather blame the state for their excessive costs. It just isn't true.
In 2010, the property tax cap was passed with great fanfare. Gov. Andrew Cuomo hailed it as a victory for taxpayers. For those of us who were tired of continual increases in property taxes, it came as a huge relief.
With the passage of the tax cap, Cuomo also stated that the other piece to the puzzle was mandate relief, and again, with great fanfare, created groups that would gather information across the state to provide him with the information he needed to alleviate the burden of unfunded mandates that had fueled the dramatic rise in property taxes over the past 10 years.
So, what happened? In a word, nothing. No mandate relief, no reduction in costs, other than items whose impact will not be felt for many years. A new pension tier is welcome, but it only became necessary because politicians sold out the system in 1999 by reducing what employees paid into the system. Medicare costs will be picked up for towns and cities, but not immediately.
What about schools? Not only has there been no mandate relief, but mandated costs are rising faster than the much-touted property tax cap itself. The new teacher evaluation system has added millions in additional costs to school districts for training, labor and other expenses, and there is no aid to reduce those costs. In my school district, a conservative estimate is $200,000 of expenses in the first year of implementation for teacher evaluations. If you cannot reduce mandates, at least do not add to them.
If school districts had REAL teacher evaluations, they wouldn't be facing this "mandate." It's only a mandate because every teacher is exceptional. Why? Since you can't fire them, you might as well try to entice them to do better by giving them stellar evaluations, which is exactly what school districts have been doing for decades. It's a mess. So, the state has said, "You can't do that, anymore." Why should you have to tell "professionals" to do what they know is right? This is a mandate to stop misbehaving, and it's about time. The cost belongs to the school districts because they are the ones who created the problem, and they are the ones who should do proper evaluations, even without the state telling them.
What about the "money pits" in budgets — pension, the Triborough Amendment to the Taylor Law, and health care costs? Cuomo himself has stated the "political will" is not there to address these issues. Of course not — they are what led to increases in costs in schools.
The political will isn't there because administrators and teachers would riot if the state changed these. You can't be an educator and complain about politicians not changing mandates that you like and then claim they cost too much. You can't have it both ways. Either educators sign letters demanding these changes or they stop complaining about politicians lacking willpower.
Addressing anything else is merely nibbling around the edges of mandate reform. Those three issues have made expenses rise, removed contract negotiation bargaining power, and made cost containment all but impossible.
That's what educators want. That's why the law is the way it is. But school districts aren't helpless. They can use other leverage to reduce salaries. They simply refuse to do it because staff would have bad attitudes and take it out on the children (being the professionals they are), and nothing could be done about it because you can't fire a teacher just for having a bad attitude.
Here's the way this works. Just to get rid of one teacher with a bad attitude could reasonably cost $300,000. But giving teachers $200,000 in raises could solve the problem and make them happy. That's why it's cost-effective to wildly overpay teachers, which is what NY is doing. It's a short-run expediency headed for a long-run disaster, and the educated elite ought to know enough to stop it.
As an example, if our pension costs were at the same rate as they were in 2000, we would save $2.25 million this year alone. Also, since we are required by Triborough to pay salary "step" increases with or without a contract, districts' bargaining power is weakened. And all of us are experiencing the rise in health care costs — even after moving to consortium purchases, self-insured plans and reducing the overall benefits.
Does Cuomo want to drive districts into mergers to end the problems of funding? When will the governor realize that starving schools into mergers will merely be a short detour on that road. Until true mandate relief in New York becomes a reality, the question will remain: When is the other shoe going to drop?
Hoffman is superintendent of the Averill Park Central School District.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 30255
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 07, 2012 - 7:52 pm: |
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Schools should get some relief
An Albany (NY) Times Union Letter to the Editor
June 6, 2012
Where do people get the idea that the state isn't already paying school districts for their mandates? Almost every school district gets more state aid than they claim to pay in state mandates. To make it explicitly clear to everyone, all the state has to do to fix the mandate problem is change then name of foundation aid to mandate aid. Viola! Problem solved. The mandate issue is simply another way for people to say the state isn't giving school districts enough aid. By claiming the problem is mandates, people can blame the state and avoid sounding like the greedy money grabbers they really are. You can graduate from high school but you can never leave. All this silliness is high school redux.
Fred LeBrun in his column "Throw grenade, walk away," May 20, makes several good points.
I don't agree with his tactic of stripping the New York City schools out of the calculation of graduation rates. These schools are funded by all state taxpayers and should be included when making state-to-state comparisons; other states don't get to indulge in this "cherry-picking."
I do agree the state's 700 school districts have more than done their part in dealing with the financial crisis the state continues to face. They have made significant teaching and staffing cuts, eliminated programs and drawn down reserves. I expect Mr. LeBrun is correct in stating that one-third of the school districts in the state will be insolvent within three years, given the two percent tax cap.
I agree with the tax cap. It was necessary to finally control the practice of passing along ever-increasing expenses to local property taxpayers. But the other half of the tax-cap deal was relief from state mandates, which school districts have no control over but must fund.
It's clear Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature have no interest in addressing mandate relief in any meaningful way. Accordingly, when crafting next year's budgets, each school board should deal with funding shortfalls by making value judgments on which unfunded mandates they can no longer afford. If the state objects to the school boards doing their work, then the state needs to come up with the money to pay for its mandates.
JOHN VAVASOUR
Albany
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 30056
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 03, 2012 - 8:03 pm: |
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Bargaining gives workers a voice
An Albany (NY) Times Union
Letter to the Editor
May 2, 2012
The New York Times article on the Triborough Amendment ("Public workers get raises as talks stall," April 11) furthers the implication that this decades-old law gives unfair advantage to public employee unions or guarantees raises after a contract has expired. Neither is true.
After a contract expires, Triborough makes sure an employer cannot unilaterally cut wages or diminish other contract benefits, so long as the union does not strike.
Triborough does not guarantee post-contract salary increases because the law, as it has been interpreted by the Public Employment Relations Board, has always allowed the contracting parties to agree that such benefits will end, or "sunset," after a contract expires. If raises such as salary steps are paid post-contract, it is because the parties so agreed.
Triborough has been successful in deterring strikes. And, during this recession, Triborough has not stopped hundreds of public-sector unions from agreeing to new contracts that make difficult compromises to avoid painful job cuts. These agreements are the result of fair give-and-take between parties with some semblance of equal bargaining power.
Without Triborough, at the end of a contract, the public employer could simply change the terms of employment while the union would remain powerless to strike. Collective bargaining would become collective begging. Of course, that is exactly what many employers and right-wing think tanks want: The incremental or outright elimination of collective bargaining.
Collective bargaining and unions have been under relentless attack for 30 years, particularly acute in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio. Wages have stagnated. Income inequality now threatens the American dream.
New York has long been at the forefront in protecting workers' rights. Collective bargaining is a right guaranteed by our state's constitution. It is the fundamental right that gives ordinary people a voice in their working lives and a chance to earn fair wages, decent working conditions and a dignified retirement.
Eliminating or altering Triborough would be an assault on collective bargaining and contrary to the best progressive traditions of our state.
RICHARD E. CASAGRANDE
Latham
So, there you go. All those school boards demanding an end to Triborough are worst than misguided, they're deceiving us. Right.
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Jerry Moore (Admin)
Board Administrator
Username: Admin
Post Number: 29961
Registered: 01-2000
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, April 23, 2012 - 10:25 pm: |
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Less talk, more walk for man protesting against unfunded mandates
MAURY THOMPSON / Glens Falls (NY) Post-Star with around 20 comments
April 20, 2012 10:55 pm | (20) Comments
Tom Cavanagh has a long walk to get to his 60th birthday party.
Cavanagh began walking at the Canadian border Sunday, and will walk 459 miles along Route 9 over 18 days to call attention to unfunded mandates, with the walk ending in Long Island on his birthday.
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Local government and school district officials have long complained that unfunded mandates are the biggest contributor to high property taxes.
That would be a lie. No law tells localities how much to pay employees, how many steps to give them, and how large the steps should be. These are all local decisions and employee costs are the biggest contributors to high property taxes.
Moreover, there are NO unfunded mandates in almost all NY public schools. State aid more than covers the cost of the mandates educators complain about.
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