Tom Mountain for School Committee

Friends,

Well, we certainly tried. But it was like David and Goliath, and the Newton political machine prevailed once again. I had no illusions when I got into this race last August. I knew it would be a tough fight, no matter who my opponent would be, because I knew that the powers-that-be would be out gunning for me all the way though. We caught them by surprise in the September primary when, after only jumping into the race six weeks before, I beat two reputable opponents, and made it to the final two in November. I sense that they saw this as a shot across the bow, and redoubled their efforts to make sure that I would not win in the end. So they called in every vote they could muster. And in a mayor’s race where two avowed liberals faced off, it meant that every liberal voter from every nook and cranny in the city would come out to vote for one of them, and inevitably, as they went down the ballot, against me.

Yesterday I made sure to take an hour to meet with the new Superintendent, Jim Marini. I hadn’t seen him since he exited the stage a decade ago. But when I walked into the Education Center, and into the Superintendent’s office where I was (literally) greeted with open arms by my old friend Jim, I experienced not only a sense of relief that he’s superintendent and not you-know-who, but it was the first time in a decade that I could honestly say that I felt good about being in that building. I had a long talk with him, and I can safely confrim to you that… he gets it. We’re on the same wavelength. He knows that the pendulmn has swung too far to the left, and he wants to bring our schools back to the center, back to the mainstream, where they were in the decades before the Cohen-Young era.

So yesterday I lost a battle. Nevertheless, I’ve never felt so positive about the direction of the Newton Public Schools as I do now. The whole culture of the school department is changing. The era of political correctness is coming to a close. The days of agenda-driven nonsense are winding down. Common sense is returning.

The future looks good. Have faith.

Thank you very much for your support.

And God bless All of You,

Tom

We made it to the finals in November!  In the September 15 primary the voters of Newton gave Tom Mountain enough votes to make the final two out of the four candidates running!  You can see all the vote tallies by ward and precinct HERE. On to the Nov. 3 general election!

You won’t want to miss this one!! Tom had both barrels blasting as he appeared on Jackie Morrissey’s “Newton Talk” on NewTV local cable television, live this past Wednesday evening, Sept. 9.   The show is repeated at various times this week — so catch it if you can! To find out which cable channel it’s on go, and when, to www.newtv.org/blue.htm.  NOTE: We will also be posting the show soon.

Given Tom Mountain’s long association (7 years as a weekly columnist) with the Newton Tab and his personal friendships with the editors there, the question of the Tab’s endorsement in this race seemed a bit sticky. It would likely be considered by many to be a conflict of interest.

If the Tab did endorse him, would it be because of his close relationship with them?  If the Tab didn’t endorse him,would it be because they didn’t want to be seen as showing favoritism?

Tom decided it was best if he made it clear beforehand that he would not seek or accept an endoresement from the Tab.

Back in early August Tom Mountain sent the following press release to the Newton Tab, Boston Globe, NewTV News, and other interested parties across town:

PRESS RELEASE           AUGUST 12, 2009

FROM TOM MOUNTAIN, FORMER NEWTON TAB COLUMNIST

CANDIDATE FOR NEWTON WARD 8 SCHOOL COMMITTEE

“GIVEN MY LONG TENURE AS A STAFF COLUMNIST FOR THE NEWTON TAB/GATEHOUSE MEDIA, AS WELL AS MY PERSONAL FRIENDSHIP WITH THE CURRENT NEWTON TAB EDITORS WHO SERVED IN THAT CAPACITY DURING ALL OR MOST OF MY CAREER AT THE TAB, I HAVE CONCLUDED THAT IT WOULD BE A CONFLICT OF INTEREST FOR THE NEWTON TAB TO ENDORSE MY CANDIDACY FOR ANY NEWTON POLITICAL OFFICE AT THIS TIME.”

“THEREFORE, I CAN NOT, IN GOOD CONSCIENCE SOLICIT, NOR WILL I ACCEPT, ANY ENDORSEMENT BY THE NEWTON TAB FOR MY CANDIDACY FOR WARD 8 SCHOOL COMMITTEE THIS YEAR.”

Tom had expected the Tab to mention this in a news story. But instead the editors briefly referred to it in one of their Tab blogs. The Tab editors had some disagreement about it, but Tom felt it was the most honest course of action to take.

Therefore, Tom also did not take part in the Tab’s editorial meeting with all the candidates. The other three candidates did attend. Tom explained to the Tab editors the reason he did not attend.

Today the Tab announced its endorsement. It endorsed one of the other three candidates.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s certainly an interesting turn of events that I find myself writing to you not as a columnist for the Newton TAB, but as a candidate for School Committee. In my long tenure at the TAB I served as the opposing voice to the entrenched Newton political establishment, in particular the Cohen-Young stranglehold over our city and school system for the past decade. I called it as I saw it. I went after the politicians and bureaucrats head on. I have no regrets.

My 225 columns, including about 100 devoted to the Newton Public Schools, are my resume, my legacy. My very reason for running.

Much of my criticism over the years has been directed towards the School Committee, with good reason. I have analyzed, critiqued, investigated, and dissected every aspect of the School Committee and I can tell you with certainty that I have never witnessed such a dysfunctional lot in any municipal entity. The School Committee long ago abdicated its role as the overseers of our school system to its primary employee, the school superintendent. The Committee let the superintendent do what ever he wanted with our schools and tax dollars, with Mayor Cohen always endorsing the checks.

If anyone has the slightest doubt of the consequences of this pathetic arrangement, I need only point to the new Newton North High School. All $200 million of it. From the beginning, through over two dozen columns, I warned repeatedly that this project was mishandled and mismanaged. And I was right. We now have the most expensive high school on the east coast. It has drained us. And we’ll be paying for it for decades, thanks in large part to the inept School Committee.

In 1999 there was one administrator in the school department who made over $100,000 annually -the superintendent, of course. Today there are 65 administrators who have crossed the $100,000 threshold. There are dozens more who rake in over $80,000 or $90,000 yearly. Countless others who are hired at $70,000 plus. Many of them have summers off, and they’re not even teachers. I want most of these Cohen-Young cronies out of our school system. Gone. We don’t need them or their blotted salaries. In this economy there are plenty of white collar professionals who would eagerly take a $100,000 administrative job for $75,000. Let’s try it.

The Office of Curriculum and Instruction is the most useless department in our schools. Try as I may I still can’t figure out what these expensive curriculum coordinators do all day. I want to shut them down, and use the savings to eliminate the costly bus and athletic fees that parents are forced to pay.

Special Education in Newton is an example of a bureaucracy that’s out of control. Too many children who for generations would be characterized as lazy or misbehaving in class are being diagnosed with learning disabilities by SPED staff. We now have about one fifth of the students in the Newton schools under SPED supervision. This has to stop. The current SPED administrators should be fired and the SPED budget cut by at least a third. Handicapped children, for whom SPED was originally intended, would still receive all the help we can give them.

For the past decade the School Committee has experimented with the weird educational fad called anti-racist multicultural education. The experiment has failed. It needs to end. The Social Studies curriculum in particular must be completely revamped to align with the normal mainstream state standards. I volunteer to undertake this task.

METCO should be phased out. We can no longer afford to educate so many non-Newton residents at a steep discount. The City of Boston pays nothing to Newton to educate and transport 423 of their students, and the state pays barely half what it really costs Newton to educate them. A four year notice should be given to all METCO participants, thus giving their families enough time to prepare to move to Newton if they so choose.

Friends, I’ve merely presented a brief sampling of my ideas for improving our schools, and getting our finances in order. The Cohen-Young era is coming to a close. But it’s not over yet. We need to clean house. We need to bring our schools back to the level of Weston and Wellesley. But we could easily slide back to business as usual. I’m running to make sure we don’t.

The Newton political establishment is petrified of Tom Mountain on the School Committee. They should be.

YOUR SCHOOL COMMITTEE AT WORK

Maybe it’s because the School Committee’s (mostly the same people) of the past decade have gotten too used to being a rubber stamp board, taking their cues from their superintendent. Or maybe their senses have just been dulled into behaving like passive sheep. Or maybe they just can’t get along in a post-Jeff Young world (their de-facto boss) and have a hard time making a firm decision.

Whatever the reason, the School Committee has once again passed the buck on a very matter important matter- the selection of a new school superintendent. Selecting a superintendent is one of the few specific duties of the School Committee that’s actually in writing, but even here they can’t function. As with just about any major decision that’s come before them, the Committee has passed it on to a task force, this time , a superintendent search committee, comprised of prominent citizens, etc, etc. They even want to hire a consulting firm to find a new superintendent.

What, pray tell, is so difficult about finding and hiring a highly qualified superintendent for the Newton schools? It’s complicated, they say. On really? What’s so complicated about finding a superintendent whom they want to pay over $200,000? Friends, give me a month, and I’ll find the best superintendent imaginable. And, I promise, he won’t resemble the prior superintendent in the least.

CLASSROOM TECHNOLOGY OVERRATED

One of the latest mantras in the Newton schools is the need for more technology in the classroom. By technology they mean computers. Why they just don’t say that is anyone’s guess. This was a part of former (oh how I love to say “former”) Superintendent Young’s dopey Vision 2020, before he bailed out and headed for the Woodstock Nation of Cambridge. His techie followers want the classrooms to be saturated with computers so that the kids learning process will revolve around computers until their heads spin.

There should be at most one computer in the classroom- for the teacher to use sparingly, and preferably, not during class time. Overall, I want to minimize or even eliminate the use of computers in the classroom. Here’s why:

Too many kids spend too much time on computers in their daily lives, to the point where many of them are practically addicted to these machines. Their lives are far too often tied to too many electronic gadgets ranging from cell phones to I-pods to laptops to blackberrys – to who-knows-what’s- next.  The last place I want to see any of these gadgets is in the classroom.

The teacher should stand in the front of the class and teach; the children should listen- and take notes -that means actually putting pen to paper and writing. When they’re not writing or the teacher is not speaking, they should be reading … a book, with pages to turn. This is how children have been taught for generations, this is how they learn.

Then as soon as they’re out of school for the day, they can turn on their little electronic gadgets, until that hoped-for day when mom and dad finally pull the plug, and buy them books instead.

DRESS CODE…EVEN FOR TEACHERS

I touched on this subject some years ago in a column, and actually got a lot of positive feedback.

We’ve all waited to pick up our kids from school, and glanced at their classmates leaving for the day. On a warm day what ventures past us can be startling indeed- how many times have we seen girls dressed like little Brittany Spears-tarts, looking like they’re off to audition for the local strip club? Or the boy whose pants are falling down, underwear sticking out, and shirt ripped to shreds? Or the teacher in gym clothes even though she’s not a gym teacher, dressed like she’s about to do yard work?

Inappropriate doesn’t begin to describe how some of these students and teachers dress when they’re in school.

A few years ago the Prozdor Hebrew School in Newton Center sent a directive to parents and students specifically outlining what the girls could not wear- tank tops, belly shirts, etc,. They didn’t have to tell the teachers how to dress. Catholic schools don’t either.

Why can’t we do the same?

Venture into Johnny’s Deli in Newton Centre sometime and gaze at the dozens of photos on the walls of Newton students from years gone by. They never dressed like slobs or tarts. You didn’t either. And neither should this generation.

We need a dress code in the Newton Schools. Now.

ANTI-RACIST HIRING

It’s annoying enough that School Committee members have for years dodged my questions on anti-racism. Usually I’d simply ask them to define anti-racism, active-anti-racism, the difference between the two, and how one gets to be an active-anti-racist. Naturally, they never responded, probably because they haven’t got a clue what any of this PC nonsense really means. But I never let the issue drop because ant-racism was (and still is) so integral to the Newton schools.

In order to teach anti-racist education, the school department needs to hire personnel who understand what anti-racism is. This must certainly be a limited pool of prospective employees, since so few school systems stress anti-racism like Newton. In fact, I have yet to find any other municipality in the state that is so fixated with anti-racism.

Nevertheless, in nearly every advertisement that the school department has placed in the general media (i.e., Boston Globe) seeking potential employees, the add has specifically requested “candidates with a proven commitment to active-anti-racism.” This requirement is there, for all to see, on the department’s Human Resources website. Take a look. Then realize that no other school department in the state has such a strange prerequisite for hiring. But there are enough loony educators who will jump at this, and apply for the job, which is why we have so many of them educating our kids.

This pathetic PC hiring practice has got to go. And it will, if I’m elected. Because if all else fails, I’ll embarrass the department into getting rid of it.

BUS FEES AND ATHLETIC FEES

I wrote a lot about these obnoxious fees, especially the bus fees, when the school department first imposed them on parents a few years ago. The bus fees started because a school district on Cape Cod sued for the right to shift the cost of bussing students onto parents, and won. As soon as Jeff Young and his well paid lieutenant, Assistant Superintendent for Business and Finance Sandra Guryan, found out about this, they quickly pushed them in Newton. They did this because they could, just like they would charge tuition if they could. The question of whether they should never seemed to don on them. It was just another way to pick the wallets of the public.

At the same time, of course, the superintendent went on a hiring spree, and rewarded many of his cronies with hefty raises, to the point where we now have 65 administrators who make over $100,000 annually, and climbing.

The athletic fees started to rise also. I said at the time that the School Committee will never revoke the bus fees, no matter how flushed with money the school department became. But here’s the catch-22: the department will say that they can’t eliminate or even scale down the fees because their costs keep rising. And why do costs keeps keep rising- salary pay raises (see above). The way to dispense with the department’s excuse for having such fees is to eliminate some of the expensive administrators from the pay roll. For this specific purpose we actually won’t need to can that many- the curriculum coordinators should do- but this will be enough to get rid of the fees.

The School Committee and its superintendent, or rather, the superintendent and his School Committee, never did understand the concept of free public education, which is why they imposed these fees in the first place.

But these fees are obnoxious, unfair, and unethical, and they’ve got to go.

HIRING AND FIRING PRINCIPLES

This School Committee and its prior superintendent have treated principles like judges. Except in rare circumstances, once hired, they’re virtually guaranteed a job for life. And many of them, it seems, have been there for what seems like an eternity.

In the private sector a percentage of managers are turned over every few years, since it’s a given that not all managers are equal and not all perform at the same level. School principles are no different, except that our School Committee treats them all the same. Some of these principles have been very good at their jobs, some have been average, and some have been very bad at their jobs. This is normal, to be expected. But the School Committee is reluctant to fire any of them. Why? Because they’re either too timid or too chummy with these principles (their employees).

Over the years I have heard multiple complaints from parents about the same principles who are still on the job. Many of you know who these principles are. I’ve profiled a few in my columns. But they’re still on the job, still running their schools into the ground, alienating parents, annoying students, and pushing their agendas. Some of these people have even been kicked upstairs to central administration.

Friends, I want to get rid of these few incompetent agenda-driven buffoons masquerading as principals. And I have two elementary school principles in mind right now.

On a very peculiar and somewhat isolated matter, consider that Newton South is now on its fourth principal in five years. What’s going on? Why did the previous principal really leave and why did the School Committee quickly find a replacement when the search process usually seems to take forever? I’m not a Newton TAB columnist anymore, otherwise I would have probed into this matter. But I can assure you, as a School Committee Member, I will.