The Onteora School Board has adopted a policy against reading or acknowledging anonymous communications. The move came after board members received a letter from “Concerned Citizen” at their home addresses.
“As tempting as it is to discuss the actual Neanderthal hate mail that came to our houses,” said board member Kevin Salem at the board’s October 8 meeting via teleconferencing, “I don’t think we should because I think if we’re not going to acknowledge anonymous email, I don’t think we should acknowledge it at all. This is a board of education. This isn’t a YouTube comment thread. People … they’re allowed to come and say anything they want. They can be angry, they can be spiteful, they can be cooperative.” Salem said.
The next time, “If it doesn’t have a name on the outside, it should just go in the bin.”
The return address on the letter was what board president Laurie Osmond called “obviously fraudulent” because the West Hurley post-office box number was higher than the number of boxes at that post office.
Board vice-president Rob Kurnit said he remembers numerous conversations about the matter/ The decision had always been against considering anonymous mail. “I thought we already had a very clear message about that,” he said.
Member Valerie Storey asked superintendent Victoria McLaren to ask the district’s legal counsel whether trustees were legally obligated to acknowledge such communication addressed to the board. “We’re elected officials. We’re not going to like what people say about us or talk about us or any of that stuff,” Storey said. “People are going to hate you just because you’re a person. We get hate mail a lot. But I think it’s responsible to read it, and if you don’t agree with it, fine.”
Storey argued that some people might want to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the district.
Osmond said letters and packages addressed to the district office can be troublesome. “Let’s say [district clerk] Fern [Amster] gets a package addressed to the board of education. Is she required to open that package?” she asked. “What does it look like? Is it weird? Is there white powder leaking out of it?”
Trustee Bennet Ratcliff said threatening communication should be dealt with swiftly. “If they contain some sort of threat or hateful, bigoted or misogynistic threat of action, these things need to be referred to law enforcement,” he said. “People are writing anonymous things because they’re saying hateful, bigoted things, and we need to turn that over to the district attorney and we need that to be part of an ongoing file if there’s harassment of board of education members.”
The contact information on the board of education section of the Onteora School District website, www.onteora.k12.ny.us/board-of-education, now states “The Board of Education will not read or respond to anonymous mail.”
Too much homework?
Some Onteora High School students are complaining about what they think is a burdensome amount of homework on Wednesdays. School board student representative Leon Savage said the assignments take anywhere from four to ten hours to complete.
“Students were under the impression Wednesdays were an off day,” Savage said. “They’re spending most of their Wednesdays into the evening if not later doing assignments. For the AP students, that’s understandable, but a lot of [other] students have complained they’re getting what seems to be an unreasonable amount of homework.”
Middle- and high-school students enrolled in the hybrid learning plan are split into four cohorts. Each cohort is in school one day a week and participates in remote learning for three days. Wednesday is supposed to be a common self-study day, but high-school students were under the impression it could be treated as a day off.
“The plan was not that Wednesday would be an off day. The plan was that it would be an asynchronous day,” superintendent Victoria McLaren said. “It’s unfortunate students had it in their heads that Wednesday would be like a weekend.”
Laurie Osmond said Savage should find out whether the amount of cumulative workload over the span of a week has increased.
Trustee Valerie Storey asked Savage to have the students compare the amount of homework to two years ago. Would there be a difference? Last year shouldn’t be compared because of the pivot to remote learning during the pandemic.
Savage said he was working with principal Lance Edelman and the teachers to make sure an appropriate amount of homework is assigned. He understood that a lot of what would normally be done as classwork was now being assigned as homework.
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