Yonkers, NY, is the 4th largest municipality (by population) in New York state. It's nickname is The City of Vision. Believe it or not, Yonkers was once the birthplace of the elevator, synthetic plastic, and the first golf course in these United States.
Recently, that vision has dimmed, and Yonkers is at risk of being the birthplace of something far less uplifting than the elevator.
A few weeks ago, our mayor presented a city budget that cuts $42million from Yonkers public schools, while every other municipal division (police, fire, sanitation, mayor/council offices) remained intact. One consequence has been the decision of the superintendent to pinkslip more than 700 teachers and support staff (school psychologists, teachers' aides, bus monitors) due to the elimination of prekindergarten and reduction of kindergarten to half-day status. The Yonkers Public Schools (YPS) are also cutting high school sports and extracurricular programs, and would cut art and music, but those were already eliminated in the last few years, and there's nothing there left to cut.
I, along with a growing group of parents in Yonkers, have been active in speaking at rallies, city council open hearings, calling state representatives and city council members, and writing letters to local newspapers. It seems the more information we gain, the more convoluted and confused the situation appears to be...
One option we are considering is to create a political action committee for Yonkers parents. (Not that the NYS Board of Elections website is especially helpful. Full of dead-links to necessary forms and more information on how to disband a PAC than how to create one! Ergh.) One thing we have discovered is that Yonkers appears to be a collection of factions, rather than a community of neighbors. In an environment where every stakeholding group blames some other group rather than coming together to create workable solutions, we've discovered that as individuals we may not be as effective as an organized group. But, we don't want to be just another faction, either.
The mayor in Yonkers has been here for nearly 8 years, and has always privileged construction projects to development of human capital (schools). New spiffy construction projects (movie theaters, luxury condos, and a shiny new REI!) are not hurting for many-millions in tax incentives to build here, while kindergarten classrooms are being reduced from full-day to half-day status and valuable prekindergarten is eliminated outright. Along with the hundreds of jobs that staff those programs.
The movie theater at that construction project hired 10 full time workers, and about 100 part-timers. Our eliminated school programs kept 7x that many fully employed. Not to mention that I've never met anyone who moved to a community because they had a new movie theater, but I've met hundreds who moved to a community because their schools offered something of promise for their children.
Now, I've been a union-guy my entire life. The politics of this get very messy very quickly. If you're the president of the Yonkers Federation of Teachers, do you lead your group to take yet another paycut to save the jobs of your fellow union members, or do you stay quiet and effectively protect 5% of your remaining union's base wages? If I wasn't a parent, or if I was a high school teacher with no skin in prekindergarten, I might need some time to think about that. (Except, I know the value of pre-k, so even as a high school teacher, its obvious which side I'd fall on there.)
But, I'm also now a father and I don't want to see my 4-year-old daughter's pre-k and kindergarten disappear because the police, fire, sanitation, and other unions were unwilling to voluntarily contribute to those program's continuation. We moved to Yonkers less than one year ago for the explicit reason that it was the only community in NY metro that had a public pre-k and fully funded kindergarten program. So, while my political sympathies lie with several actors in this story, my activism will be loyal to my daughter and her needs and interests.
Ironically, these are the same needs and interests of the community. It turns out, children in pre-k are much less likely to act out in class later, to skip school, to dropout of high school, to get arrested, to serve jail time, to become pregnant in the teen years, to use drugs, to become addicted to drugs, and are more likely to go to college, earn more money, and contribute more tax revenues than are children who do not attend prekindergarten. Several studies have found a 10 to 1 savings per dollar spent on pre-k for the communities that have them, and some go as far as $17 to $1 when accounting for inflation and increased costs of social programs over time, because cities with prekindergartens spend less on special education, police costs, incarceration, public health, and welfare programs.
I'm not willing to accept this, though, as a "public union workers have to give up cost of living increases and step increases in order to save school programs" fight in the long term. While this is the frame given us by current elected leadership, and leaders at the state level, there is a new mayoral election in Yonkers coming later this year. The same people in these photographs are looking beyond this immediate crisis to how we can best continue to be involved and work toward cleaning up our city, and create long-term solutions to develop the human capital of our children as well as the physical capital of our construction sites. There should be a group that exists to pull the other groups together, or at least communicate with them from a point-of-view that represents parents and other considered citizens. Right now, there is not.
So, we're considering building one. And I wanted to come here and ask those of you with greater experience with this sort of thing than I have, for advice. To activate the wisdom of the DKos community in helping us in Yonkers who are desperate for a better way to strategize and act towards creating it. There is real urgency and momentum here, and we're looking for the best ways to harness that and turn it into real results that benefit our children and our entire community.
So, what do you think?
Thanks for any ideas or experience you're willing to share. I've said above how there are many different ways to view this conflict/problem, and while I welcome a discussion of the merit of what is happening here in Yonkers, I'm also far more interested in learning what others have done, or attempted to do and learned from, to address such problems in their localities. I'd rather not rebuild any more wheels than we have to here in Yonkers, and learning from your experience and wisdom may help us make a positive difference here for our children and Yonkers at large. So, thanks in advance.