Heidcamp creates cooperation
I support the re-election of George Heidcamp to the Saugerties Board of Education. When I joined the Board in 2008 the relationship between the administration of Superintendant Rich Rhau and the School Board was very strained to say the least. Over the next two years Mr. Rhau, Assistant Superintendant Ms. Nuciforo, High School Principal Tim Price and Business Manager Joe Dziadik all left the district. Due to an error by the business official related to the construction project, the District experienced a shortfall of approximately $1.6 million creating a serious problem of a zero fund balance.
The Board eventually installed a new administrative team that has worked with the Board under Mr. Heidcamp’s leadership to successfully recreate a positive fund balance through precise budgeting and financial belt tightening. When I joined the Board, Mr. Heidcamp held the vice-president position and was voted in as president shortly thereafter. He has been crucial to establishing an environment of cooperation between the Board and the Administration that did not previously exist. Reelecting George Heidcamp to the Saugerties School Board will help the district to continue to move in a positive direction, both financially and educationally.
Charles Schirmer
Saugerties
The kingdom and the power
The kingdom needed money, so Governor Andrew pushed to change the wise old state constitution so as to make it legal to have up to seven casinos – knowing full well the insidious nature of gambling and all its negative ramifications.
As expected by the wise old cynics of the kingdom, even though the legalities have not yet happened, money has poured into, but not to, the kingdom. Unfortunately, that money leaves no trail but all the kingdom’s denizens know that the politician’s deep campaign pockets are being filled by those hoping to eventually profit from casinos.
The publicity creates the “buzz” (money for starving Albany and jobs for the masses) and the “funnel” for payola.
Oh, but that couldn’t happen here, it must be a fairy tale.
Susan Puretz
Executive Board, No Saugerties Casino
Highway superintendent’s results
It was interesting to read the recent account of expenditures and savings of the town of Saugerties Highway Department in last week’s local paper. The restoration work needed after Hurricane Sandy was significant. This is a credit to the management capabilities of first-term Highway Superintendent Doug Myer. It is not an easy job to take over a department or to make changes and decisions that are not always popular and don’t always appear, on the surface anyway, to make sense. But the taxpayer is the shareholder and in these times the shareholder wants to see change, service and measured results. I believe the highway superintendent is doing this to the best of his ability.
Paul Andreassen
Malden-on-Hudson
Post Office food drive
The Saugerties Area Council of Churches would like to thank everyone involved in the Post Office food drive. This year was the best by far in the total of donations, around 10,000 pounds!
Marilyn Richardson
Saugerties
Standardized tests are garbage in and garbage out
When European settlers wanted to justify killing Native Americans in order to steal their lands, they chose the excuse that the native people were dumb and inferior and therefore fair game. To prove this detestable justification, they measured skulls to see how big a brain could fit inside. The settlers chose the biggest European skulls they could find and the littlest Native-American skulls and filled them with buckshot to see how much each skull could hold.
In addition to cheating on the skull sizes, they packed the European skulls really tight and the Native-American skulls very loosely. Hey, why take a chance with research when you can fix the “results” beforehand?
Later, slavers would try similar methods to prove African Americans were inferior and therefore fair game also.
So in case you think we shouldn’t get worked up about these attempts to create hierarchical levels among our children using “scientific” (yeah, right!) standardized testing, consider our history (and read the Mismeasure of Man).
Fast forward to today’s IQ and “high-risk” standardized tests, which are the heirs to the buckshot method of deciding who’s smart and who isn’t; who’s “gifted” and who — presumably — has no “gifts”; who should be elevated above the “herd” and who’s expendable.
Please don’t give me a whole lot of crap about “assessing progress” and testing “improvement.” That’s a whole lot of…buckshot.
Unless you’re a high-priced administrator who hopes for an even more lucrative job with a testing corporation or you’re simply an idiot, you know standardized tests are garbage in and garbage out.
By the way: Here is a surefire “test” which confers “idiot” designation on a person without any shadow of a doubt.
An “idiot” is one who:
A) Believes flooding schools with standardized tests helps children learn.
B) Thinks high-risk tests are worth the property taxes wasted on them.
C) Thinks administrators who allow the tests are well-intentioned.
D) Believes that state politicos ( the ones the FBI hasn’t rounded up yet) know what’s best for our children and have the purest of motives in insisting on a mess of junk test mandates.
On the other hand, because the readers of this paper are “gifted and talented” by definition, I know you realize every one of those beliefs is false.
Even if the Pearson TestCorp hadn’t made a total fiasco out of the New York City attempt to separate mythical standardized testable “giftedness” from the untestable potential of our precious children, we can say with absolute authority that the five-and-a-half million New York City spent on this rubbish should result in indictments for cruelty to children and misappropriation of funds.
In case you haven’t gotten my drift, let me repeat that there is not one iota of value in the tests so compelling as the damage they do; no validity to — or use for — the results; no such thing as a standardized child; no such thing as an unbiased, culture-neutral standardized test; no such thing as a standardized test that isn’t tainted — in some measure — by economic status. And there sure isn’t any reason to take scarce education money and my property taxes (damned right it’s personal!) and hand them over to the snake oil edu-corporations. Got it?
Gioia Shebar
Gardiner
Benghazi cover-up
The controversy over the Benghazi tragedy has managed to muddle the issues. All the political figures, talking heads and writing heads, have failed to clearly articulate the issues involved. The threshold issue deals with the facts of what happened in the attack and what was done or not done preceding it. The second issue deals with the attempted cover-up.
When we elect public officials, we in effect buy their judgment. That they will make mistakes is a given. Those mistakes are a legitimate subject of inquiry and oversight to identify what happened so as to take steps to avoid its repetition. That justifies a congressional inquiry into what really happened in Benghazi that resulted in the death of an American ambassador and three associates is justified.
What is not justified and is inexcusable is the attempt to sweep the inquiry under the rug with Hillary Clinton’s dramatically presented glib retort— “What difference does it make?” It was crass and insensitive to the four people who died and the suffering of their families. One would consider it beneath a former United States senator and secretary of state to make such a statement.
The attempted cover-up of what really happened and what led up to the Benghazi tragedy is legitimately subject to criticism. Any explanation that requires a dozen revisions of conflicting statements is naturally suspect. The attempt to attribute it to a spontaneous reaction to a video critical of Islam, rather than the planned terrorist attack that it was, constitutes a cover-up.
Any cover-up, whether it be of a low-level burglary (Watergate) or governmental mistakes (Benghazi) should carry a high political price that deters future cover-up attempts. The price in Watergate was the resignation of a sitting president. The participants in the Benghazi cover-up have lost credibility and should never again hold high office, whether elected or appointed. Cover-ups destroy governmental transparency and undermine public confidence in elected and appointed officials.
The disclosure of the Watergate cover-up was the news media’s finest hour. Any lack of media interest in reporting on the Benghazi cover-up should not be excused on the basis that the incident has been politicized. What could have been more politicized that the Watergate fiasco? The Benghazi incident deserves no less than a similar in-depth media investigative effort.
This recent political imbroglio brings to mind the often quoted 1905 admonition of George Santayana that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” A high political price for cover-up attempts would deter future cover-up attempts.
Michael E. Catalinotto esq.
Saugerties
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