Column by Ken Hamilton —
There is example after example of otherwise qualified Niagara Falls’ board of education members and staffers lending their time and efforts to organizations outside of the school district’s core business. Meanwhile, the district continues to fail our children, the children’s parents, the taxpayers, and even themselves in their stated mission of “Learning for All … Whatever it Takes.”
Is there a relationship between the performance of staffers and board members, and their performance on the other boards upon which they sit?
It seems that there just might be.
Judging by the wipeout rate of our students, it is obvious that It doesn’t take being on every board in and around the city to educate kids. In fact, the opposite is more likely true. Seemingly, the boarders and staffers who surf these other boards don’t seem to have learned a whole lot in doing so themselves.
The Niagara County SPCA, and the apparent failure of that organization, may be the latest example of this inability for school board members to focus on the business of any board. That organization shares two members with our school district; and one has to wonder if the oversight that they gave to the SPCA is just a sample of what they provide to the organization that is supposed to be educating our kids.
But, near-incestual boards likely didn’t start with the SPCA; and they likely won’t end there, either. At least two more school higher-ups also sit on Niagara Falls’ housing authority and have a degree of oversight of the new multi-million dollar housing project in the north end of the city.
That project was supposed to supply a safe and well-lighted community for the people who would live there. However, despite planning to the contrary, there are no streetlights within the HOPE-VI project; and children who have to walk to the nearby Kalfas School risk crossing streets that are in need of four-way stop signs and designated crosswalks for their safety. Well, so much for oversight.
To further make my point, need I mention the board of education members and staffers that also sat on the Niagara Falls Memorial Medical Center’s board of trustees while it was immersed deep in a pool of ink that was redder than a surgeon’s sponge?
With records like that, regardless of how good the project may be, can voters trust our board of education with their soon to be proposed $53-million Phase IV Capital Improvement bond?
I don’t know; but what I do know is what I have said before, and I will say it again — with the performance of our Niagara Falls Board of Education being the worst in Niagara County, and near the bottom of the 97 school districts in Western New York, it is long past time for both board members and staffers to drop all of their extra-curricular board situations until the schools’ performance is satisfactory, and to do that which they claim they encourage their own failing students to do — FOCUS.
If the school board members don’t solely focus on their core business — education — then the students, the school and the city will continue to hopelessly go, well, to the dogs.
Contact Ken Hamilton at kenhamilton930@aol.com.
Ken Hamilton
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Ken Hamilton
HAMILTON: BOE and kids, or the SPCA dogs?
- Ken Hamilton
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HAMILTON: Dandelions, parades, broken poles and people
There are still those remnants of the fading bouquets of floral tributes that still hang at that base of a tree on city hall’s lawn. It is near where, last year, from his shiny silvery cart, Melvin Johnson sold hot dogs and sausages to both city employees and passerbys while his tiny white dog excitingly yelped at anyone that came near.
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HAMILTON: Civic ‘ParticipAction’ can work too
Back in the 1970s, our Neighbors to the North ran a national campaign called ParticipAction to encourage Canadians to get off their butts and do things for the sakes of their bodies.
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HAMILTON: Monuments, baths and depots are related
After five-years of hard work, the Niagara Falls Veterans Memorial Monument is finally rising from the both the ground at Hyde Park and the controversy from which it was born; and that controversy was in whether or not should the limited number of streets that a city has be renamed for the proud and brave men and women who gave their lives for the freedoms that we thusly have to do such; or should they be honored together with those whom they served.
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HAMILTON: How about just standing against bigotry?
The best time and place to stand with anyone against any kind of bigotry is in the morning and in the mirror.
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HAMILTON: O.J., Zimmerman and the imminent civil trial
What is to become of the unregistered Florida security guard George Zimmerman, now up on charges of second- degree murder for the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin?
That is up to the courts to decide. -
HAMILTON: Trayvon, Zimmerman, you and I: All Americans
Though it is subsiding, and its once roaring flames have all but died down, racism will always be with us — it is inherent in our human nature. But its glowing embers of hatred burn us the most when we pick them up with our hands and blow upon them with the chilling breath of notoriety.
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HAMILTON: Our past, not Niagara's, leads us to love city
Not everyone in Niagara Falls remembers its past, and not everyone who remembers its past shares either the same set of memories or remembers them in the same way that others do.
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HAMILTON: Black-on-black crime, crabs and melted butter
On the subject of black-on-black crime, an Army veteran from Washington D.C. said to me that we, as black people, have to work on this black-on-black crime issue. There is this “crab in the barrel mentality” that a lot of us have, especially the youngsters, and their attitudes toward life are a work in progress, he said.
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HAMILTON: Holy Moses, council, where're we going?
The leadership compass of our local elected bodies are spinning like the pinwheel of that little piggy in that GEICO commercial; and watching it with my one good eye is making me dizzy.
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HAMILTON: It ain't about fracking, it's about process
What people say is one thing, but the basis of their arguments is what is likely to concern me the most.
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