PTA crossed line, backed village candidates

The Island Now

Dear Great Neck North High School parents at gnnhsptsa@gmail.com (who sent an e-mail from the PTA lobbying residents to vote for the incumbents in a Great Neck Village election on June 18):

A while ago, I was a parent of a student or two, and I certainly had my differences with various teachers and administrators, but this did not translate into an opposition to the one institutional board on the Great Neck peninsula, in my view, that always reached for the ideal, the school board.

As time passed and I became known for my advocacy in local civic affairs, I pledged to myself that any civic activism I might engage in would never compromise the schools.

After the recent library referendum, a school board member asked me to give assurance that the “no” at the library I had had a hand in making come to pass would not “roll over onto the schools.” I assured this trustee it would not, for my part.

In light of the write-in campaign last week in the village election, a different school trustee asked, though with more jocularity, that my role in this election not prefigure trouble for the schools. Again I answered it would not.

Meanwhile, that very evening, while the election was in progress and hundreds of residents were at the poll writing in the names of opposition candidates as a protest, some stupid, irresponsible parents at [Great Neck] North High School with access to an e-mail list of parents they were pledged to use only for school business sent a mass of e-mails urging parents to hurry out and vote for “village officials.” 

The PTA thus opposed the write-in candidates without having a glimmer what was transpiring, without knowing the names of the write-in candidates, without knowing that one of the write-in candidates was a parent and one a teacher at North High. 

You dragged the school district into a political environment in which it did not belong and by this action removed the school district from its time-honored neutrality 

You may say you were pawns, but you nonetheless aided officials who have been enacting and enforcing draconian laws that harass and punish residents. 

You aided village officials who are pretending, in the aftermath of an eye-opening election, to have been uninformed of the disaffection among residents. You aided officials whose only reaction to an outpouring of opposition votes was to label that vote “disappointing,” as though some small children had had a bad day and embarrassed their parents.

You availed yourselves of privileged access to an e-mail list to lobby on behalf of the incumbents, whose names you apparently also do not know. Your behavior, if not actually illegal, was unethical and mindless, and you were indifferent to the repercussions your actions would have for the schools.

Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar 

Village of Great Neck

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