BY PLANET VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY, FEB. 8, 2016) — Kathy Yon must go.

Let THE PLANET keep this simple. Pittsfield finds itself in a financial pinch one or two missteps from a full-blown crisis. It resulted from a generation of administrations, city councils, and school committees taking care of The Suits and, as the city’s population declined from almost 60,000 to near 40,000, enriching the Pittsfield School Department. As the population dropped and the middle class disappeared, the pols kept adding positions to the schools to create the largest single political voting block in the city.

Do the math. To run all city departments, services, and operations, the city side employs 489 workers. Meanwhile, the PSD grew to its present unsustainable size of more than 1,200 employees. To each of these 1,200 you must add their family, friends, and loved ones of voting age. What’s the multiplier — 2.5? 3? 4? Let’s play if safe and say three. That gives you a PSB bloc of 3,600 people who have a vested interest in seeing the schools get more, much more, and ton$ more. Combine that with the apathy that has gripped the general public after having been shut out of the political process for those 30 years, and you have the formula for disaster.

While everyone has some blame for this situation — mayor, councilors, department heads, citizens — no one shares more culpability that the Pittsfield School Committee (PSC). They directly interface with the school administration come budget time. When they rubber stamp extravagant requests, they stand guilty of dereliction of duty.

Lady, Your Hoo Hahs Are Sagging

Unfortunately, Mary Jane and Joe Kapanski have as their “representative” the worst chair in PSC history: Kathy Yon. She has made an art form of unaccountability, deception, and SIG-sagging. When the principals of the Pittsfield schools came before her with their requests for more, much more, and ton$ more, Lady Boots ignored the failure in the schools and wet herself thanking all of them for … for what, exactly, we don’t know.

To be sure, there are many teachers in the PSD doing their best, working wonders, in those mean corridors and classrooms. They have a thankless job trying to instill some learning in a majority of kids who have been brought up wild, neglected, spoiled, and abandoned by too many single moms and missing dads. The schools aren’t equipped for such social triage.

Let’s do more math.

Since 2006, Pittsfield has lost nearly $50 million from school choice — parents opting to remove their children from the PSD and into other country public schools, including the uber-performing BART in Adams. Here are the numbers indicating what percentage of Pittsfield school kids left the system for other county schools:

2006, 2.88%

2007, 3.11%

2008, 3.08%

2009, 3.39%

2010, 4.38%

2011, 4.76%

2012, 5.05%

2013, 5.60%

2014, 5.93

2015, 7.07%

Fraud: School Choice Loss Gets Billed to the General Fund

Does anyone detect a pattern? The kicker to all this lost money is that it’s billed to the city side of the budget. That’s right. The PSD’s incompetence loses $5 million, but the money comes out of the general fund, not the school department budget.

Congratulations, Lady Boots, Grandpa Munster Jr., Venus Hum, and the rest of the blundering PSC. You just presided over the greatest academic failure in city history.

For that, you rewarded not just full-time teachers and part-time teachers but also guidance counselors, department heads, team leaders, unit leaders, head teachers, supervisors of attendance, coaches, librarians, media specialists, teachers of students with special needs, speech therapists, caseworkers, clinical social workers, in-hour suspension teachers, peer mediation counselors, certified ESL teachers, supervisors of vocational education, instructional technology specialists, evening school teachers, ABE teachers, TPP instructors, mentor teachers, school nurses, school nurse leader, occupational therapists, physical therapists, academic coaches, and extra-curricular personnel with a new, three-year contract that provides pay raises of 16.2% to 18%.

We have challenged the PSC or administration to refute these figures after they did a lot of whining publicly about that Mean Mr. PLANET and his “detrimental” coverage ofthe PSD in the “blogosphere.” Not one of the runts accepted the challenge.

Pittsfield has a spending problem. If it wishes to solve it, it has two choices:

1. Raise more money.

2. Cut costs.

Option 1. has been the default action in the form of raising taxes, resulting in Pittsfield having the state’s most punishing tax situation when factoring in ability to pay. That will no longer suffice. That leaves option 2.

If the city cuts costs, it has no other choice but to his the PSD budget, hard. There are many ways to do this while at the same time driving up quality. Tomorrow we’ll present just how to do this. We hope Mayor Tyer will be taking notes.

Meanwhile, be thinking about Campaign ’17 and the ousting of Kathy Yon and her goons. The city can’t afford them.

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“When I was young, I thought the most important thing in life was money. Now that I’m old, I know that it is.” — Oscar Wilde

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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