Ossining Bond Issue Debate

The Ossining School District wants voters to approve its $41.5 million borrowing plan. The district's pitch is sparking much debate. Here is some of what Patch readers are saying about the issue:

David Morrison: "I think it is a much needed Bond, But i question why the board see's fit to put in a full renovation of a middle school Locker room, and ditched the plans to renovate the 80+ year old high school auditorium that is actual classroom space, and is literally falling apart."

Robert Little: "There is no time like the present to reduce the effect of the proposed $42,000,000 Bond that taxpayers will be asked to pay until the year 2037....for "soft" cultural fluff, in part, such as the modernization of the OHS Auditorium ($2,554,000), the OHS physical education locker rooms ($1,993,348), the AMD locker room and a new class room ($1,904,000), the new OHS "Main Offices" and Nursing room ($1,9028,959), new AMD Principals' office and Reception area ($1,125,996), Generalized "infrastructure" cost ($9,732,688) and OHS "Basement Staircase to Nowhere" ($1,015,939). We could go on.

Visit: www.FreeOssiningTaxpayers.com for more....

Does anyone honestly believe that Ossining Taxpayers, ~40% (or more) whom are suffering below the poverty level...should be asked to sustain such a tax burden now or ever? And in a crushing Recession?
Superintendant: Tell us how much today's students are suffering this year because of inferior facilities and why, after $42,000,000 of expenditures the same students will be able to be such better graduates for the expenditures? Achieve correspondingly higher SAT scores? How is the ventilation in the auditorium since 1926 suddenly so bad as to cause us to have to modernize the air? Do students pile up at the bottom of the OHS basement staircase now? And if it is such a difficult thing to navigate, how did tens of thousands of students over the decades manage to do it without the proposed "Basement Stairway to Nowhere" expenditure of $1,015,939?"

Brian A: "I support this bond. I made the effort to learn the facts and found the Ossining Taxpayers site to be misleading. They'll suggest equipment shouldn’t have been allowed to deteriorate but fail to acknowledge prior years in which the board or the community voted down spending the money; we're now running out of options. Their campaign suggests things like a "$1 Million principal's office," while purposely neglecting to mention that moving and reducing the principal's office is the smallest piece of a project that creates new classrooms by consolidating administrators' offices. It's like saying that Ford is outrageous for selling a $20,000 set of four tires while omitting the fact that there's a whole car attached to them. The detractors fail to mention the project is being subsidized in part with $22 million in State Aid that may not be around in a year, effectively making this an interest-free $41 million project. None of the people who support this bond are swimming in money and wouldn't prefer to save in taxes if we felt it was a viable option. We have a growing community that needs more space in schools, aging infrastructure that in some cases put our children at risk, like the structurally compromised wall at the middle school, or in cases like window & boiler replacements, send taxpayer money flying out the window every year as a result of inefficiency. This bond is the right way to do what needs to be done in our schools, with the added benefit of not raising taxes."

Brian A: "@David - to answer your questions, it was felt by the board and district that the auditorium project scope needed to be reduced to bare essentials to receive the support of the community at this time, and for the good of the bond overall. There are indeed many taxpayers who were in favor of the previous scope but recognize the need for compromise. Regarding the locker room overhaul, my understanding is that there are two motivations. The first is that the lockers would at minimum need to be moved as part of a plan that created more classroom space by reconfiguring the area in which they're currently located. The second is that they're extremely small (the primary criteria for the size when they were installed in the 60s was that they not be large enough for a student to be stuffed inside one, which is much less a concern today), they're falling apart, and parts are hard if not impossible to find. Students these days carry many more books, and a byproduct of having so many lockers that can't hold much or don't close securely is that we're asking 10 year-old students to troop around the building all day carrying their coats and 25 pounds of books. If we were talking about bigger, older HS students, I could see how some could, not unreasonably say, "Toughen up," but we're talking about young kids here."

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