Terence Ward's Letter to the Editor 12/30/09: Biting the Bullet for the Sake of Our Kids

Richard Cohen believes that the Planning Board, and not the School Board, should be deciding what's best for the New Paltz Middle School property. He seems to suffer from a common, and understandable, misconception: that Planning Boards actually have anything to do with planning.

I've served on both the town and village Planning Boards and I can say with confidence that nothing could be further from the truth. What a Planning Board does is decide if the developer's project will go through or not. They don't decide on the zoning, they don't get to choose among several alternatives and they don't tell developers, "What the community wants is..." The very name "Planning Board" is a misnomer; laws governing Planning Boards make them reactive bodies, not at all involved in any real planning.

Mr. Cohen is also under the impression that the Board of Education made the decision to keep the middle school at its present location in a vacuum, completely understandable for anyone just waking up to an issue that has been actively discussed for years, not the few months some naysayers seem to believe. I was at the meetings and debates about whether it was better to keep it where it is or move it, and it was the community that gave the Board of Education its marching orders. Or, I should say, it was those of us who decided to show up. I imagine that the debate would be differently framed if those in opposition had helped the board make its initial decision, rather than pitching a fit now, after they did a tremendous amount of work to figure out what's best for the students and taxpayers.

For the record, as a taxpayer I'm not looking forward to what this project has in store for me. We can probably find ways to make it less expensive, but two things are clear: we have dragged our feet on this issue for too long and cannot delay, and it will cost us much less money to renovate it on the same site. That's what came out of the forums over two years ago, along with a desire to see our kids educated in a school they can walk to, and a desire to avoid the problems of what to do with the athletic field if the school isn't there anymore. (For those just joining the debate now, the New Paltz Lumber Company deeded the athletic field to the district under the condition that it be used for that purpose only, and the land will return to whoever its successors in interest are should that change. This means additional busing to cart kids into town to use the field.)

The real problem here is that property taxes are regressive and medieval. Once we stop trying to tie wealth to land and tax people intelligently, maybe we can have a rational debate about how to educate our children without having to punish those on fixed incomes for the sin of being successful at some point in their lives. I'm not holding my breath about that happening in my lifetime, but I am getting ready to bite the bullet for the sake of our kids -- even though I don't have any in school right now.

Terence Ward
New Paltz