Alas. One of the reasons I retired from teaching at age 60. Not Croton schools but another Westchester district where no regular classrooms had AC. We recorded classroom temps and humidity for the state as proof of almost unbearable conditions, but the 89 degrees with 87% humidity in the classroom, sometimes for several days, wasn’t quite awful enough. September and late spring. It did make me feel a lot of empathy for my teachers from the 1970s when I was a child.
There was at least one other classroom with broken AC (not for the first time) and there was no communication to parents about the plan for students in rooms without AC. Fortunately, parents are saddled with half-days the rest of the week at the end of this insanely late ending to the school year.
The HVAC system seems outdated and perhaps needs an overhaul if it’s not functioning properly - will any rooms outside of the few mentioned also be eligible for new systems?
The school this year also had rampant issues with respiratory and highly communicable diseases, including your run of the mill coughs and colds to flu, Covid, norovirus and stomach bugs, plus lice all year. A whole building air filtration system, which is much less costly than some of the projects in the budget, was not part of that. Why not?
Additionally, actually enforcing health policies would help in preventing highly contagious diseases from spreading all over school. Lice checks and having children stay home until at least one treatment would also help prevent the spread of the highly contagious bugs, which are difficult and very expensive for families to eradicate. So much for equity.
Why are Walker, the BOE, and Bianchi okay with these major issues? Why is there again no communication?
Kerri Bianchi did not send a note out to parents. She put a post on Parent Square, which is a private website inaccessible unless you agree to the one-sided, onerous, and unfair Terms and Conditions. If you don't agree to the T's & C's you don't get communication from the schools.
I didn't agree to this contract, and so I don't receive any information as a parent. The School District's legal obligations to notify parents remain unfulfilled, as some parents do not have access to Parent Square.
The situation where the School District provides ridiculous T's & C's to see a website with public information is barmy.
In 2017, my wife agreed to the T's & C's in the predecessor system, named K-12 Alerts, which we were promised for emergency alerts only. Even though I agreed to nothing, 9 years later I am still receiving Sales calls and irrelevant messages for other parents on those emergency contact details.
The spam and privacy situation was so bad with the K-12 Emergency Alerts the School District replaced it with Parent Square a couple of years ago. However a new system fixes nothing as it is the same people making the same mistakes in the District Office.
I have had all three of my children rushed to Urgent Care or ER after being over-heated or sunburnt at Croton-Harmon schools. A bad case of heat stress took my son over a week to recover from.
Part of the reason for getting the kids outside in the heat (even without shade), and onto buses, is if they collapse on the bus and need hospitalizing, they don't need to record it as an injury at school. I enquired into the record keeping of the injuries to my own children, and found there were no records kept.
I have spoken to about a dozen other parents whose children have been injured at school by heat or sun.
The baking, roasting, and frying of school children is entirely the fault of the Board of Education. The Board of Education Members decided to leave Air Conditioning out of the official Facilities Goals in Policy 7000. https://boardpolicyonline.com/?b=croton_harmon&s=27023.
Forget what the District Superintendents and Board of Education say, look at what they do. They excluded Air Conditioning from the Facilities Goals. What they say about budgets and funding is a distraction for the public. What they actually did, was exclude Air Conditioning from the goals and policies. The funding is a big smoke-screen when the Facilities Staff are formally directed elsewhere by the actual policies.
Thank you for the update on the buses. That sounds like an unsafe situation for everyone involved - students, drivers, and others on the road. Can anyone get a photo of what the temperature/humidity is on one of these buses?
Actually, the Superintendent will get paid $282,000 (just in salary alone). His total compensation package doesn't include benefits, sick days, paid vacation days, etc. I would also like to point out that we are a small school district with only 1 elementary school, 1 middle school and 1 high school compared to other school districts who pay higher compensation packages to their superintendents. Many of these school districts have 4-5 elementary schools, 1-2 middle schools and high schools that are 2-3x larger than our little Croton Harmon High School.
So the Superintendent will get well over $ 300,000 in total compensation from the taxpayers and his management skills can be rated "poor to fair". Yet the voting taxpayers continue to pass school budgets that are way out of touch with reality. You generally get what you deserve, in this case a very expensive, mismanaged and underperforming school district!
I believe voters approved to renew a $6 million bond that was due to expire. Does anyone know where that source of funding was put towards? I spoke with a CET teacher yesterday and she mentioned teachers barely got raises. I just cannot figure out where the money $$ is going in our school district. If anyone can break it down for me and explain where our money is going, it would be much appreciated (ex. % of budget spent on consultants; % of budget spent on upgrading school buses; % of budget spent on capital projects (air conditioning at CET, new roof, etc.); % of budget spent on sports facilities (ex. turning sports fields into year round turf fields); Thanks!!
I’d love to know this also. I hope Mr. Balter can dig into the numbers to see where all the money is going. Shouldn’t the top priority be investing in teachers, staff, curriculum, and facilities for students?
The biggest expenditure increase is the battery school buses, that are often broken down and don't work in the cold. For every broken battery bus, you need an additional regular diesel to actually transport the kids. And even for the battery buses not broken, you need an additional regular diesel to transport the kids in cold weather. We bought electric school buses before the technology matured.
So many parents have pulled their children out of the School District for September, that the School District is projecting enrollment shrink by 4%. We have more children than ever in the School District, but the School enrollment is shrinking as parents choose to register at other addresses or go private. There is suddenly a lot fewer children to educate than in the Demographic Study, and the budget now has slack.
If you think that the upper level (big bucks) management of the district cares about the discomfort of a bus driver, think again. They proved their distain for low level employees recently during the teacher's aids negotiations. You are nothing but a neccessary annoyance. Someone considered a member of the "deplorable" class cited by a famous politician.
Alas. One of the reasons I retired from teaching at age 60. Not Croton schools but another Westchester district where no regular classrooms had AC. We recorded classroom temps and humidity for the state as proof of almost unbearable conditions, but the 89 degrees with 87% humidity in the classroom, sometimes for several days, wasn’t quite awful enough. September and late spring. It did make me feel a lot of empathy for my teachers from the 1970s when I was a child.
There was at least one other classroom with broken AC (not for the first time) and there was no communication to parents about the plan for students in rooms without AC. Fortunately, parents are saddled with half-days the rest of the week at the end of this insanely late ending to the school year.
The HVAC system seems outdated and perhaps needs an overhaul if it’s not functioning properly - will any rooms outside of the few mentioned also be eligible for new systems?
The school this year also had rampant issues with respiratory and highly communicable diseases, including your run of the mill coughs and colds to flu, Covid, norovirus and stomach bugs, plus lice all year. A whole building air filtration system, which is much less costly than some of the projects in the budget, was not part of that. Why not?
Additionally, actually enforcing health policies would help in preventing highly contagious diseases from spreading all over school. Lice checks and having children stay home until at least one treatment would also help prevent the spread of the highly contagious bugs, which are difficult and very expensive for families to eradicate. So much for equity.
Why are Walker, the BOE, and Bianchi okay with these major issues? Why is there again no communication?
Kerri Bianchi did not send a note out to parents. She put a post on Parent Square, which is a private website inaccessible unless you agree to the one-sided, onerous, and unfair Terms and Conditions. If you don't agree to the T's & C's you don't get communication from the schools.
I didn't agree to this contract, and so I don't receive any information as a parent. The School District's legal obligations to notify parents remain unfulfilled, as some parents do not have access to Parent Square.
The situation where the School District provides ridiculous T's & C's to see a website with public information is barmy.
In 2017, my wife agreed to the T's & C's in the predecessor system, named K-12 Alerts, which we were promised for emergency alerts only. Even though I agreed to nothing, 9 years later I am still receiving Sales calls and irrelevant messages for other parents on those emergency contact details.
The spam and privacy situation was so bad with the K-12 Emergency Alerts the School District replaced it with Parent Square a couple of years ago. However a new system fixes nothing as it is the same people making the same mistakes in the District Office.
The NYS Education Department Chief Privacy Officer in its official Determinations directed the School District to fix its policy: https://www.nysed.gov/sites/default/files/programs/data-privacy-security/croton-harmon-determination-9.12.24.pdf. The School District stated it was preparing a policy, but refused to follow the Chief Privacy Officer's direction to consult with parents.
I have had all three of my children rushed to Urgent Care or ER after being over-heated or sunburnt at Croton-Harmon schools. A bad case of heat stress took my son over a week to recover from.
Part of the reason for getting the kids outside in the heat (even without shade), and onto buses, is if they collapse on the bus and need hospitalizing, they don't need to record it as an injury at school. I enquired into the record keeping of the injuries to my own children, and found there were no records kept.
I have spoken to about a dozen other parents whose children have been injured at school by heat or sun.
The baking, roasting, and frying of school children is entirely the fault of the Board of Education. The Board of Education Members decided to leave Air Conditioning out of the official Facilities Goals in Policy 7000. https://boardpolicyonline.com/?b=croton_harmon&s=27023.
Forget what the District Superintendents and Board of Education say, look at what they do. They excluded Air Conditioning from the Facilities Goals. What they say about budgets and funding is a distraction for the public. What they actually did, was exclude Air Conditioning from the goals and policies. The funding is a big smoke-screen when the Facilities Staff are formally directed elsewhere by the actual policies.
Thank you for the update on the buses. That sounds like an unsafe situation for everyone involved - students, drivers, and others on the road. Can anyone get a photo of what the temperature/humidity is on one of these buses?
Yes, quite a " shit show" even though the Superintendent will get $ 275,000.
Actually, the Superintendent will get paid $282,000 (just in salary alone). His total compensation package doesn't include benefits, sick days, paid vacation days, etc. I would also like to point out that we are a small school district with only 1 elementary school, 1 middle school and 1 high school compared to other school districts who pay higher compensation packages to their superintendents. Many of these school districts have 4-5 elementary schools, 1-2 middle schools and high schools that are 2-3x larger than our little Croton Harmon High School.
So the Superintendent will get well over $ 300,000 in total compensation from the taxpayers and his management skills can be rated "poor to fair". Yet the voting taxpayers continue to pass school budgets that are way out of touch with reality. You generally get what you deserve, in this case a very expensive, mismanaged and underperforming school district!
I believe voters approved to renew a $6 million bond that was due to expire. Does anyone know where that source of funding was put towards? I spoke with a CET teacher yesterday and she mentioned teachers barely got raises. I just cannot figure out where the money $$ is going in our school district. If anyone can break it down for me and explain where our money is going, it would be much appreciated (ex. % of budget spent on consultants; % of budget spent on upgrading school buses; % of budget spent on capital projects (air conditioning at CET, new roof, etc.); % of budget spent on sports facilities (ex. turning sports fields into year round turf fields); Thanks!!
I’d love to know this also. I hope Mr. Balter can dig into the numbers to see where all the money is going. Shouldn’t the top priority be investing in teachers, staff, curriculum, and facilities for students?
This does sound like a good fall project for the Chronicle. Anyone with thoughts and suggestions can contact us at TheCrotonChronicle@gmail.com
The biggest expenditure increase is the battery school buses, that are often broken down and don't work in the cold. For every broken battery bus, you need an additional regular diesel to actually transport the kids. And even for the battery buses not broken, you need an additional regular diesel to transport the kids in cold weather. We bought electric school buses before the technology matured.
So many parents have pulled their children out of the School District for September, that the School District is projecting enrollment shrink by 4%. We have more children than ever in the School District, but the School enrollment is shrinking as parents choose to register at other addresses or go private. There is suddenly a lot fewer children to educate than in the Demographic Study, and the budget now has slack.
If you think that the upper level (big bucks) management of the district cares about the discomfort of a bus driver, think again. They proved their distain for low level employees recently during the teacher's aids negotiations. You are nothing but a neccessary annoyance. Someone considered a member of the "deplorable" class cited by a famous politician.