School board should find a solution closer to home

By KATRINA FOSTER

Over the course of the last few years, the Tri-State Chamber of Commerce, the Port Jervis Community Development Agency and a handful of other organizations have worked hard to support the business community, aiding the success of local businesses, the life-blood of the city. But efforts such as this cannot succeed on the basis of just a few organizations. The involvement of the entire community is required. Unfortunately, a recent program approved by the Port Jervis Board of Education suggests that the school district may be actually undermining this effort.

The basic idea of the program is good: a business is selected to partner with the district to give students an opportunity to apply what they learn in classrooms to real-world work situations. The Career Achievement Program (CAP) gives students the opportunity to run all aspects of the business from marketing, handling customer orders, collecting money and managing the books to developing an operation budget. It is a great program for the students, especially since this is just phase one of the school’s expansion of the business program. But the company selected, Gillman’s Cleaners (a dry cleaning business), is a regional, not a local business.

The businesses in Port Jervis and its immediate surrounding areas pay quite a bit of school taxes that help support school programs like CAP. Local businesses are the top 10 percentile of the 100 highest school-tax payers, which makes sense given that the school tax is based on the assessment of property value multiplied by a rate per thousand. The latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau states that the median real estate tax paid in Port Jervis is $2,210, and at any given time there are approximately 620 businesses in the community. That’s a little more than $1.3 million dollars.

The problem is that Gillman’s is a regional business that does not pay school taxes to the district. The district says it plans to expand the business program, and kudos to them. But they plan to diversify it by including internships and work-study opportunities that would be provided by regional business owners and corporations like Gillman’s.

Why is the district going outside its own community, which heavily supports them, to regional businesses that do not? Seemingly, the district is taking money right out of the pockets of the community and not acknowledging its financial support. Why didn’t the school district offer this opportunity to the local businesses before jumping the gun and signing up a regional business? How do regional businesses support the local business community? The whole concept of the district bringing a regional business into the school that will compete with the local businesses is a bit mind-boggling. Small businesses in the city struggle as it is.

The school’s main goal is to “prepare our students to be responsible and knowledgeable individuals in this constantly changing world,” and they look forward to “helping the students maximize their potential… academically, socially, and emotionally.” This is a little harder when the district is not being socially responsible itself. Although school officials realize that the school “has such rich tradition, a faculty that is committed to excellence and a community that is very supportive,” they have yet to show their appreciation and reciprocity for the community. As Lincoln has said, “A house divided cannot prosper.”

(Katrina Foster is the proprietor of Kconceptual Kreations, a public relations firm in Milford, PA.)