Rondout Taxpayers Demand a Consolidation Audit of the District Administration

It is the responsibility of the Rondout Central School’s District Office to balance educational soundness with fiscal responsibility. See Together We Can.

We feel that this balance is not being achieved by the Administration and Board of Education’s approach of forcing principals from every school to make drastic cuts to next year’s budget resulting in reduced teaching and reduced programming while other budget reductions are not being explored. This approach that considers firing teachers, including special education and closing a school, opens our district to significant and costly problems in the future due to failures in delivery of services, lowered test scores, and new construction demands to name just a few.

However, in the past five years we have gone from supporting five administrative positions to ten whose average income is $120,000 while the median income for this community is only $31,664. The administration has refused to consider consolidation and has refused to provide detailed documentation to support why every administrator’s job must be saved while teachers, teaching assistants and programs are cut. We are told that the funded mandates are to blame but our review (Mandates & Administrators) argues otherwise. The BOE has remained silent to our request supporting a Superintendent who has been in our district for just two years over tax payers, many of whom have lived here a lifetime.

As the above tag line states, “Together we can, Together we will”. Its time for the district administration to realize that “together” means each and every one of us, even the ones at the top. Let’s rebuild the trust in our community with transparency, honesty and equity.