Just a few generations removed from the era of the one-room schoolhouse, public primary and secondary education in New York State is touted to have become more sophisticated, more diversified, more technologically adept, and better suited to meet the varied needs of a diversified student population. Though it is delivering more, public education has become increasingly more expensive. No surprise there. And in certain ways the system has become more tightly constricted by bureaucratic edicts than ever before.
For more decades than I want to remember, I have every September or, alas, October paid annual taxes to Onteora, a geographically sprawling school district that includes Olive, Shandaken, most of Woodstock, West Hurley and a tiny part of Marbletown. When the enrollment numbers for school districts become available in October, Onteora’s total pupil count will this year total about 1300 — just about half of what it was two decades ago.
Onteora’s adopted school budget for 2018-19 calls for expenditures of $55.578 million. On August 14, the school board formally approved a property-tax warrant for $42.622 million. (As a homeowner, I’ll pay $50 a week in property taxes to my school district.) Most of the rest of Onteora’s revenues will come from state aid. The cost of educating a single Onteora student, derived by dividing the number of students into the total amount to be expended, will be $42,752 per student for the district’s 2018-19 budget.
Educational services provided by Boces have been an increasingly significant part of Ulster County public education. “As schools continue to face economic challenges, the need for our services and the efficiency that they provide is more evident than ever,” explained a recent cover letter for the 2018-19 Boces listing of services, written by Ulster superintendent Dr. Charles Khoury. “With an emphasis on effectiveness and efficiency, our services provide quality programs that aid component districts with the challenges of implementing federal, state and local initiatives while meeting the more demanding graduation and school accountability requirements.”
Ulster Boces, comprised of nine member school districts, created the six-year Pathways Academy as an innovative way to expand high-school educational options to include two years of community college. New within the Boces constellation is now the Phoenix Academy, an evolving alternative-school institution that bears some resemblance to Onteora’s discontinued Indie program of about a decade ago. A single local school district alone couldn’t efficiently support such a program.
Customized education does not come cheap. The Ulster Boces budget for 2018-2019 is now only $113,000 less than the entire Onteora budget for the upcoming school year.
Some 128 Onteora district residents of k-12 age received non-public education in 2017-18. These included students in religious schools like Kingston Catholic and The Mount, special-education institutions like Brookside, UCP and the Center for Spectrum Services, and so-called alternative schools such as Woodstock Day, Hudson Hills Academy and the Sudbury School. In 2012-13, a year in which the data was readily available, an additional 63 students in the Onteora district were being homeschooled (out of 408 homeschooled countywide).
At the most recent meeting of the school board on August 14, trustee Laurie Osmond noted leaflets in a supermarket parking lot advertising a new private elementary school, the Middle Way School, in West Saugerties. The Buddhist-oriented school-in-formation is hoping to have 28 students enrolled when its first cohort gathers on September 6. As of August 17, 20 or 21 four-to-eight-year-olds were enrolled, according to Noa Jones of Middle Way, the first graduate of the now-defunct School of the New Moon in Wittenberg.
Other kinds of specialized education take place within the public schools. English as a Second Language (ESL) attracts a significant student population in many districts. Universal pre-kindergarten education is now taken for granted. Students at the high-school level take advanced-placement pre-college courses, and some students attend community college before they graduate from high school. In addition, the number and variety of special-ed options keep increasing, as the impressive 2018-2019 joint SUNY Ulster and Ulster Boces catalog illustrates.
By most accounts, including its own, Onteora has an active and conscientious seven-person school board (president Kevin Salem, vice-president Laurie Osmond, and members Rob Kurnit, Bennet Ratcliff, Lindsay Shands, Valerie Storey and Robert Burke Warren) and a competent schools superintendent (Victoria McLaren).
I was told by Dr. Michael Rosenberg, dean of the school of education at SUNY New Paltz, that New York doesn’t pay as careful attention as some states do to data about teacher skills and needs. States need to train not only the right overall number of teachers but also enough teachers in the subjects where teachers are needed. A March 2018 Rockefeller Institute study at the state level concluded that an adequate supply of teachers were being trained in New York colleges. There were subject areas and grade levels, however, where teacher supply was greater or less than student demand. A 2016 federal survey had reported New York claimed particular teacher shortages in special education, bilingual education and career and technical training.
There are geographic imbalances and mismatches, too. The number of students declined most in New York State’s rural and town districts, and changes in teacher supply lagged behind pupil enrollment trends in the largest cities.
Training teachers in more than one specialization would be useful, the Rockefeller Institute recommended. Making greater use of transitional or alternative teacher certificates, loosening the rules for certification, and providing greater flexibility for teachers from other states would also help.
Following up on a regional level, the Mid-Hudson School Study Council (MHSSC), based at the Mount Saint Mary’s campus in Newburgh, sent out a survey in 2016 to the school districts. The goal was to develop three-year and five-year regional perspectives on teacher supply and demand, according to MHSSC executive director Roberta Greene. The 14 colleges and universities in the region with teacher training programs participated. The views of school districts, administrations and guidance counselors were solicited.
One of the outcomes was a regional training pipeline to qualify teachers for administrative licenses. The MHSSC membership has also discussed ways to improve educational services to challenged populations.
Is this progress? Or is it just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic?
“We need to focus on more profound questions about the purpose of education and make sure that what we are measuring will allow us to learn the lessons required to improve our schools,” wrote Washington Post reporter Valerie Strauss this March about the continuing debate about public versus private schools. “Formulating these questions depends on understanding a complex reality.”
I am not personally convinced that the many earnest efforts to improve New York State public education go to the heart of what is needed significantly to transform the schools. Though I applaud every advance that public education can accomplish, I regret to say I remain deeply suspicious of the politically corrupt, impossibly bureaucratic and painfully clumsy institution of New York State public education.
What is being done is in my opinion nowhere near what is needed. The local public schools are not using to the full extent the skills and the knowledge and the resources of the amazing communities they serve. Busing more kids around may help, but it’s not going to the heart of the problem.
It appears I am not alone in my pessimistic views. Google “public education sucks” and you will get about 18,300,000 results in 32-hundredths of a second.
Join the family! 
