Without Apology Continued

October 28th, 2003

The Morning Call reporter who covers the board, Kevin Penton, has consistently misreported events at the board. In his latest outrage, his story on last Monday’s board session relating to the Tarola, Grove and Fellin reported a number of the questions asked the board without mentioning the board responses, nor the fact that the Tarola buy out had saved the district well over $100,000. In addition, he misquoted both John Freund and me when he referred to what he claimed was the fact that the district “sweetened” Tarola’s contract to speed his departure. We said nothing of the kind. I will demand a retraction.

In my previous column, I said that the present Saucon Valley School Board is among the best in the state and went on to damn the candidates opposed to the present incumbents as incompetent, unconnected to the community, inexperience and spreaders of outrageous lies.

I also promised that I would detail the accomplishments of the present board to lend credence to my claim. Here goes:
To assess the progress this board has made it is necessary to remember where the district stood when Susan Baxter was president up to December of 1995. The school buildings were in terrible shape. Saucon Valley Elementary School was practically uninhabitable by any reasonable standards. The HVAC was a mess. Water was so impure that the district had to import bottled water. Asbestos problems abounded. The sewage system leaked. At the Reinhard Elementary School, the 1910 building was still in use and the roof literally fell in one winter. The entire Reinhard school, including the “new” 1950s wing required modernization and needed to be put in compliance with the Americans With Disability Act.

The same was true of the Middle School on Main Street. And, finally, at the high school the roof leaked, there was no air conditioning, the pool was closed, and repairs were needed in several other areas. The high school stadium was very dangerous and not handicapped accessible.

Several studies during the Baxter reign had indicated that the schools had to either be repaired or replaced and each of those studies maintained that it would be cheaper to replace them than repair them with the exception of the high school.

In addition, the district’s curriculum was in very bad shape. It had not been reviewed in many years, there was no coordination between the various school buildings so that students entering the next highest school were often unprepared for what was taught there, and text books had not been replaced in many years. History, for example, ended with the Eisenhower administration and science textbooks did not mention the space age.

Administration was in a sorry state. Mrs. Baxter and company had fired Superintendent Jane Coover after a trial by a kangaroo court on trumped up charges represented by a lawyer who subsequently went to jail and was disbarred. (Coover subsequently brought suit, to which there was no defense, and was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars.) The high school principal was a poor choice and the Reinhard principal was actually working at another job while serving as principal. While many dedicated teachers worked hard despite increasing board and administrative non support, there were a number of incompetent or lazy teachers who were simply allowed to vegetate in their jobs. Moreover, many good teachers were leaving the district because Saucon paid much less than competing districts.

Since the end beginning of December 1995, these are some of the accomplishments of the present board:
1. Under the brilliant leadership of board member David DeRemer, it built a modern safe campus where all children in the district were accommodated. Although some critics have complained that the schools were not built large enough to accommodate the expected student population growth, the district was limited to building the capacity mandated by the state. Accordingly, the campus was so designed that when school population grew, as the board anticipated it would, the buildings could be added on to as necessary without requiring new and separate buildings at some other site. Moreover, the construction of the new campus did not require disruption of the education offered in the individual schools as would have been the case had the individual elementary schools been repaired. Today, despite initial concerns by some parents, the campus is very safe, efficient and promotes the idea of one educational system rather than different fiefdoms in individual buildings.

2. In view of the new campus, with one exception, the board sold off unused property and buildings for a total sales price of $1,800,000 or about $30,000 more than their then assessed valuation. In addition, the tax revenue from these sold properties now exceeds $246,045 per year. The one exception was the Reinhard School that was given to the Borough of Hellertown for community use. This property had an assessed valuation of $230,000, but if it had been sold to a developer approximately 40 families would have moved onto the property, The taxes paid on this property, therefor, would have been considerably less than the cost of educating the children who would live there. Morever, the gift saved taxpayers in Hellertown a considerable amount and assists the Hellertown Community Center in meeting the needs of the community.

3. The board hired Robert Nagel on a temporary basis while it looked for a superintendent. Nagel jumped started the whole process of improving the curriculum by hiring Dr. Richard Grove as Assistant Superintendent. Grove, with the board’s blessing, inaugurated a continuing review of the entire curriculum so that each part of the curriculum is reexamined at least once every five years. Dr. Ralph Tarola was hired by the board as Superintendent and began a period of dynamic leadership which managed to get rid of poor administrators and teachers, no easy task in view of the legal protections that some of these people have and the fact that even poor teachers and administrators have a few friends in the community. New modern textbooks were purchased. Tarola, with the board’s help, inaugurated a technological revolution in the district making computers easily accessible to all teachers and students.

As a result, today our district ranks second in academics in the Lehigh Valley (athletically it ranks first), our SAT scores rose 36 points higher than last year and our PSSA scores were 200 points above the state average in the High School. We were the only district in our area not to suffer any negative results under the No Child Left Behind assessments.

4. The board has appointed Dr. Richard Grove to replace Dr. Tarola, and engaged Dr. Sandra Fellin as Assistant Superintendent. Dr. Grove’s record in this district is outstanding and he has proved, in only three months to be an excellent superintendent. Dr. Fellin’s resume is sparkling and she too has proved to be a great success in only a few months. We are extremely lucky to have her. Under the leadership of these administrators, the disarray and down right disgrace that troubled our district as late as 1995 is a thing of the past.

Some have complained about the terms of Dr. Fellin’s and Dr. Grove’s contract as they relate to sick leave. The simple answer is that the district had to provide these administrators with the same kind of benefits offered by competing school districts. If we are to get the best administrators, and we have, we need to offer them the same benefits as are readily available elsewhere.

5. For five years after the new board took over at the end of 1995, our underpaid teachers postponed negotiating for a raise in order to allow the district to concentrate its resources on the other projects already mentioned. But finally they negotiated a contract that contained substantial increases and required a considerable increase in the tax rate. The raises that the board agreed to merely make our teachers’ salaries competitive to surrounding districts so that we could stop the loss of good teachers and attract new ones. This has worked out very well indeed. In my view, good teachers are a bargain at any price as they have the ability to make huge changes for the better in the lives of our children.

6. I make no apology for the increase in taxes over the last several years. Increasing enrollment resulted in increasing need for teachers, services and classroom space. State and Federal unfunded mandates have increased. The state has paid less and less of its share of the educational burden. Plans for property tax relief, which all members of the present board support, have not passed the state legislature. It is easy for state legislators to claim that they have not raised taxes. What they have done is to duck their responsibility and force the school districts throughout the state, ours included, to do their dirty work. The problem is state wide, not limited to our area.

I would add that for many years previous boards have held school taxes to be the lowest or among the lowest in the Lehigh Valley by increasingly under funding the educational institution to the damage of the students. This board refused to play that game. It devoted itself to the best education possible for students given the limited resources of the community. For a while we jumped in taxes from the near bottom to the near top in the Lehigh Valley, but other districts beset by the same problems soon exceeded us.

7. Aside from taxes, some critics have carped at the financial management of the district. The present board inherited a system of accounting based on state mandated budget categories. We struggled with it, but were somehow able to come up with reasonable and understandable budgets. We also decided to spend the money on a new financial management program but have delayed purchasing it pending the receipt of recommendations from the Pennsylvania School Board Association following a review of our business office we invited the Association to do.

The records of the business office have always been open to public inspection. That office has a very small staff and is sometimes overwhelmed with requests for information, but no reasonable inquiry ever goes unanswered.

Starting with board finance chairman Larry Angelilli and continuing through his replacement, Bob Kreps and later me, the board has been able to negotiate extremely low interest well-structured loans to aid in school construction and has been alert to refinance possibilities, resulting in savings of millions of dollars to the district.
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I started by saying that these columns were written “without apology.” I end by saying that this board has an enviable record by almost any standard.

What is at stake in the forth coming election is the future of our children and the value of our properties. It is mandatory that the community vote wisely and not be misled by the constant distortion of this board’s record.