Rite of passage

Graduation is one of our culture’s few remaining rites of passage. It is both a leaving behind and a going forward; a loss of safety and a gaining of responsibility and independence. And behind the theme of change there is a sense of continuity: students move on, but the school itself abides.

This year in the Upper Delaware Valley this rite of passage has a special poignancy and import. Students will be moving on, to be sure, but in two towns they will be leaving nothing behind: after 53 and 76 years respectively at the heart of their communities, Delaware Valley School in Callicoon and Narrowsburg School will be closing their doors for good.

While the graduation of students can be seen as an end that is also a beginning, it is hard to view the passing of these two community schools in the same hopeful light. But must we leave it at that? Is this really and finally a death, or is there any way to turn it into a transformation, to forge a beginning out of what looks like an end?

There is no way to change the fact that the schools will be closed next year. But the evidence suggests that the public’s opposition to this closure may be equally intractable. The fact that the original budget was rejected could, to be sure, be interpreted either as a rebellion against even an 18 percent budget increase, or as a rejection of a budget that required two schools to be closed. But the results of the school board election suggest that the latter interpretation is more likely. Both Catherine Novak and Jennifer Mann, who campaigned on a platform of keeping the schools open, were voted in, moving the balance of power on the school board to that side of the debate.

In other evidence that the public is not willing to settle for the current outcome, Shannon Bailey and Nikki Maxwell have served papers on the Sullivan West School District alleging that they neglected to post adequate notice of the school closing hearing and of the school closing itself. The petition also notes that, though the statutes do not require an advisory committee to be formed, if it is formed it must consider a certain minimum list of questions. A Community Budget Committee (CBC) was in fact established, but according to the petition did not give consideration to this full list of questions.

We received notice of this petition just before our press time. The school district has 20 days to respond, and it is too soon to say whether the type and timing of the notices given were legally adequate, whether the CBC can be considered an advisory committee on school closings and if so, whether the inquiries undertaken by the CBC satisfy the statute. What we do know, from letters this newspaper received and published, is that members of the CBC itself felt that Superintendent Alan Derry and the board largely ignored their recommendations, which did not lean in the direction of closing the schools.

What this means is that regardless of legality, the decision to close the schools appears to have taken place without sufficient grounding in fact or exercise of due diligence—an especially grievous omission given the trouble in which we find ourselves after the similarly ill-prepared decision we made to merge the school districts in the first place.

Some of the questions that ought to have been taken into account have been stated in public meetings, some have appeared in letters to the editor we have received, some you can no doubt think of for yourselves. Here are a few:

What are the ramifications of the closings for the communities? Was the possibility of BOCES renting space ever fully explored? Are there small luxuries like the practice of sending out full-color newsletters that we could eliminate on a line-item basis that could cumulatively make a big difference? What are the social and psychological costs of lengthy bus rides? And given the combined costs of mothballing the buildings and paying for busing as gas prices soar, will closing the schools really achieve the savings desired?

We can take the closing of the schools as a death or as a challenge to rebirth; a dead end or a rite of passage. Some determined citizens are still fighting, and at a bare minimum we should use the next year to dig for answers to the hard questions regarding the costs and benefits of keeping the schools closed or opening them again. We should not let the schools remained closed just because in the face of a difficult dilemma a simple solution was embraced and not explored.

Dr. Punnybone

Half and Half