Readers Write: Criticism of Port schools not accepted

The Island Now

I find that disgustingly dismal is about the best way that I can describe the results of our school district voting that were announced this past Tuesday night.

The proposed budget was approved by a vote of 4,756 to 1,901 if you can believe the voting results that were reported, and we have no choice but to believe them. That means that the budget was approved by 71 percent of those residents who voted.

That’s not a surprising result since every HSA/PTA parent must have been contacted a number of times to make sure that they had mailed in their ballot, marked yes, or else.  I’m sure that Nora Johnson, the president of our school board, will call that result an “overwhelming vote of approval” and it appears to be, but is it really?

If you measure the yes vote against the number of registered voters, 22,000, all of whom were mailed absentee ballots, then the approval percentage shrinks to 21 percent of all possible voters. But, who cares about looking at the results that way? Nobody, I suppose, except you and me.

 Together, the yes and the no votes totaled 6,657 votes. That’s a voter turnout of just 30 percent, which I consider to be disgustingly dismal, at best, when you consider that 22,000 ballots were mailed out to registered Port school district voters.

Why disgustingly dismal? Because with mail-in balloting being used for the very first time this year, voting could not have been made easier for the registered voters of our community.

Why 70 percent of registered voters, such a very high proportion of them, chose not to vote, is something of a mystery to me. Stupidity/laziness has to be one reason and another has to be that thousands of those voters had to believe that the voting was not going to be by secret ballot.

After all, a stamped, self-addressed envelope addressed to Mary Callahan, to return the ballot in, would make many people think that how they voted, would be no secret.

In addition to that, I know of a bunch of moronic, but qualified voters, who tore up and threw away their mail-in ballot and envelopes when they received them because they thought that they had just received another piece of junk mail, in their mail.

My prediction that 16,000 votes would be cast, was way off of the mark. Your prediction that 8,000 votes would be cast was much closer to actuality.

I think that with such dismal voting results in hand, that serious thought should be given to ending voting for local school district budgets and for candidates to serve on local school boards.

Of course, if local school districts were abolished, which they should be, matters like filling local school board seats and voting on local school district proposed budgets would disappear.

Those voting matters would be sent back to the 18th century, where they belong. There are third and fourth world countries in our world today, that achieve much higher voter turnouts than 30 percent.

 I think that the proposition, “one man, one vote,” is fallacious and that the very poor results of our school district voting show that, since so many of today’s qualified voters in Port chose to ignore the privilege of being able to cast a vote.

The founding fathers of our great country never spoke about “one man, one vote”. When they discussed who should have the right to vote for the newly established government, they defined the qualified voter to be an educated, property-owning male, of probably Western European heritage.

They didn’t envisage that Eastern Europeans, Africans, Asians and females, no matter what their social standing, would be qualified to vote and certainly not anyone else, who didn’t have a vested interest in the success of the new country.

 I don’t think that you have to look any further, for proof that the outcomes of our school district voting is both rigged (legally) and is absurd, than looking at what the results were of the voting for Port school board members.

Four candidates just ran to fill two Port school board seats. The candidate who was, by far, the least known by the vast majority of Port residents, and who was by far and away, the least qualified to win a seat, Mrs. Julie Epstein, received more votes than any of the other three candidates.

Mrs. Epstein received 4,068 votes. I read Mrs. Epstein’s resume and watched her answer questions at the two recent “Meet the Candidates” forums that were live-streamed to our community.

If I recall correctly, Mrs. Epstein has no specialized education, training or life experience that would uniquely qualify her to be serving on our school board. However, she did state that she diligently attends all school board meetings and meetings of the board’s subcommittees, and as she also stated, she listens intently to all that is said at those meetings and can be persuasive in carrying messages forward.

However, she is currently a co-president of the PWSD Parents Council and that is more than enough reason for her to win 4,068 votes, happily cast by captive HSA/PTA parents. Dr. Adam Block, who was by far and away the most qualified of the four candidates running to fill a seat on our school board, was only able to win 2,921 votes for a board seat, which left him about 800 votes short of winning a seat.

Although Dr. Block is overly qualified to be serving on our school board, he made a terrible tactical error, when he first entered the race to win a seat. He announced that he was motivated to run for a board seat because he had found out that with our schools closed, that one of his children was only receiving 40 minutes of remote learning a week at home. He thought that was a terrible deficiency, that he could help to correct.

When he announced that he thought that our school district was doing something that was not wonderful, that was tantamount to shooting himself in his foot.

In order to win a seat on our school board, a candidate must let it be known that he or she believes that every Port teacher, every Port school administrator, every class given and that every program, policy and practice in the Port Washington school district is wonderful, and that the only reason the candidate wants to serve on our school board, is to help make everything more wonderful than it already is.

 God bless America.

 

Joel Katz

Port Washington

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