Tonight, at 7pm in the Middle School/High School auditorium of Onteora School, the Onteora Board of Education will vote on a plan for reconfiguring the school district. Two of the proposed plans call for the closing of the Phoenicia Elementary School, either with clustering of the elementary grades at Bennett and Woodstock, or keeping Bennett and Woodstock as K-6 schools. Under a third plan, dubbed the "bookends" plan, all three schools would remain open, and elementary grades would be clustered, with grades K-3 at Phoenicia and Woodstock, and 4-6 at Bennett. (We've written about this before, here, here and here.)
In this letter to the editor, a Pine Hill parent explains her objections to closing the Phoenicia school. - Julia Reischel
To the Onteora School Board,
I am an Onteora School District taxpayer. My 4 children attended school in the district and currently my 2 grandchildren attend Phoenicia Elementary School. My family moved to the area in 1991 and immediately we were welcomed to the Phoenicia family. It is more than a school, it is a community. I am very much against the proposal to close Phoenicia School. I have just spent the past 3 hours on your district website reviewing the information on “redistricting”. First let me say that this idea, in various forms, has been batted around for 20 years. There has always been overwhelming public support to keep each elementary school open. The district is just too big in area to centralize on one campus. I find your justifications for the proposed redistricting weak and without valid reasoning.
We live up in Pine Hill. It was often hard to make the drive from Pine Hill down to Phoenicia for school activities, but I managed. I could not imagine what it would be like if I had to go to Woodstock! I never could have lived in Pine Hill and been an involved parent and volunteer. On a good day the ride to Phoenicia is 15 minutes, yet my grandchildren and my children before them routinely endure bus rides 35-40 minutes. Last week I timed myself coming home from Woodstock on a clear dry day, with no traffic, 36 minutes. It is a fantasy to state that no child would be on the bus for more than 47 minutes. Busses have to stop to pick kids up, many times.
Expecting the children and parents to travel from the west end of the district all the way to Woodstock will be an undue hardship. They already must travel to the center of the district where Phoenicia is located, now you expect them to go to the other end? Please refer to your own maps, the high-school is actually located more to the east end of the district and Woodstock is the upper east end. Attending school activities, both during and after school would be time-consuming and costly with ever rising gas prices. How are working parents going to manage? Attending anything will add an extra hour travel time, gas and lost wages. Picking a sick child up from school could take 2 hours. I honestly do not see how you can justify this idea, especially given the meager savings the plan shows.
Now as a homeowner and taxpayer I can tell you I am dumbfounded. What will boarding up the Phoenicia school do to property values in the west end of the district? I have neighbors who have been trying to sell their homes in this market for years. Do you think having the local grade school an hour bus ride away will attract young families here? I have also visited the NYS government website and researched the reasons behind the tax cap law. It states in NY while property taxes climbed 5%, home values dropped 20%. Taxpayers need relief! When property values drop in Pine Hill and Highmount who will pick up that tab?
The cost per pupil in the Onteora Schools is well above the state average. Yet, no one wants to address the big giant elephant in the room. The employee salaries. You know it and the taxpayers know it. No one wants to openly discuss it for fear of offending teachers who often are their friends and neighbors. NY State DOT workers recently took a 3% pay cut, no raise for 3 yrs., a week furlough (aka unpaid forced time off) and a raise in the cost of health benefits. These people are professional, hard working all year round and take care of the roads so all of us can get where we are going. They didn’t strike or threaten lawsuits. They compromised. The employee’s at Belleayre have also dealt with cutbacks as the economy recovers. NYS cut the budget there, period, no negotiation. Now the community is worried how the ORDA takeover of the mountain will affect us. Why is it so hard for our school employees to give back? Why are they getting paid $2700 a year to not take health insurance if they do not need it? Why are we paying 95% of their health Insurance cost? What employer pays that nowadays? And what about the starting salaries? They are among the highest in the state, yet the medium wage for are area is half what we pay our teachers. I am sorry if the teachers get insulted but we all remember their “CRISIS CENTER”. Now that was insulting. But they keep telling us if we let them do this or that our kids will get a better education.
I have been hearing that for 20 years and I do not buy it. The cost of transportation and keeping a building open are miniscule compared to the externalities that will affect the community if Phoenicia school is closed. If the school board really wants to be responsible to the taxpayers they would ask the district employees to take a 3% pay cut, no raise for 3 yrs and a raise in the cost of health benefits. Then when the reserves are back up you can talk again. Just like New York State did.
Or perhaps if you are so set on abandoning the needs of the western half of the district we could approach the Margaretville School district and see if they would be open to adjusting the school district lines. Margaretville is 10 minute from Pine Hill. Maybe they would welcome more students and a bigger tax base.
No one wants to change, but if hard choices are to be made let’s not ignore the elephant.
Mary Herrmann
Pine Hill
