This is Carl Paladino’s response to Barbara Seals Nevergold and Florence Johnson’s assessment of the new majority on the Buffalo Board of Education:
Carl Paladino
This is my personal response to the attached writing of Board President Barbara Nevergold and Member at Large Florence Johnson.
The letter clearly illustrates that Barbara Nevergold, Florence Johnson and the rest of the present Board of Education majority continue to be pathetically out of touch with 21st Century reality. One can no longer rewrite history or provide lame excuses for his or her incompetency and failures of the past.
Johnson offers no explanation for or even recognition of the failures of the system during her long tenure on the Board.
Nevergold’s nonsensical diatribe clearly illustrates where the cataclysmic dysfunction in the BPS came from. The present Board majority have blamed SED for all of the problems they themselves created.
Discussions at the Board table are comical at best. It’s like talking to uninformed, uneducated, scheming, clueless and contriving pretenders and conspirators with no concept of their responsibilities or competency to solve problems and certainly a major problem with transparency, fairness and truth.
They have expressed their hatred for SED and John King for years. They lie about their inability to meet John King. He in fact invited them to Albany and after a couple of adjournments they aborted the meeting. Only now they plea to engage him. Too late.
The incoming Board majority in fact asked Nevergold if she would consider the position of Executive Vice President for the coming school year over 40 days ago. She was so busy scheming to appoint Mary Guinn as interim Superintendent that she never replied and the offer was withdrawn in favor of Jay McCarthy.
Arguing that 70% of the children are minority, they think that they, and not the citizens of the City of Buffalo, own the BPS and that it’s their little private piggy bank and source of jobs for their friends and family clubs who keep them in power. They have little regard for the plight of the children and families they have destroyed and, certainly, the overall effect of the dysfunction on the decay of the City and flight of the working class from the City over the last 20 years.
Their ignorance is terrifying. They actually advocate that African American children should only be taught in a district led by African Americans no matter what shortcomings those leaders have.
They actually expected to give Pamela Brown on the job training in the most dysfunctional school district in New York State with 46 out of 57 schools failing under State standards, a 46% graduation rate and violence and bullying everywhere.
They haven’t sought the best Superintendents, no matter what the color. They gave us three less than competent Superintendents in Harris, Williams and Brown and in turn our elected and private sector leadership abrogated their responsibility to the community when they allowed the consideration of diversity to take precedence over competency.
They have no interest in ending the cycle of poverty in our urban center where the masses and 34,000 children suffer. The irony is that they talk the talk and say they do what they do for the kids but their actions are directed solely at their own empowerment. They think nothing of displacing 500 kids at MLK in June when there are no slots available in performing schools.
They actually argue that spending $32,000 per year to pay for their attendance periodically at conferences [vacations] all over the nation help them with their responsibilities.
The present Board majority never expected that the people of the City would vote so overwhelmingly to change the status quo and install a new Board majority, none of whom, for the first time in decades, are beholding to the crooked thinking, election rigging, diabolical BTF President Phil Rumore, who only commands respect from the small percentage of teachers who think they are “owed,” and seek to bleed the last drop of blood from the District.
Finally, Barbara Nevergold sees nothing wrong, unethical, immoral or illegal with taking campaign support from NYSUT and the BTF, the chief adversaries of the people of the City, who she is charged to represent.
Becoming irrelevant will be very difficult for the present Board majority.
Another response from James M. Sampson can be read here.