According to the TU disgraced School Board President Jeff J is now claimed this horrible budget PASSES by the same 955 to 949! You can't make this stuff up. Who's observing the observers?
We need to call in President Carter to supervise yet another vote. Maybe John Sweeney is available? The fix has been in for years-to separate every dollar from the oppressed taxpayers wallet.
I'm waiting for Sal to weigh in on this fiasco. These idiots in the Schenectady Schools can't even steal an election right. Throw in the vote election night not the next day. Less obvious.
Sheesh is right. We need Iranians mullahs to instruct these morons on now to steal an election. You can't make this stuff up-all this Raucci and Keffy too! Only in Schenectady.
first they need to get the taxes up to where they should be to keep out the riffraf and hire back all the poor teachers the repubs made the cut out when they showed up to wreck the voting and wreck the board. then straighten out the trouble cuase by duci and jursynsk immediatly.
And as we all pick our chins up off the floor!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Is someone keeping notes cause this will make for a GREAT novel someday!!!
When the INSANE are running the ASYLUM In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
“How fortunate for those in power that people never think.” Adolph Hitler
Editorial: Cloud over Sch'dy school budget vote Thursday, June 18, 2009
It sure would be easier to believe Schenectady school officials who now say the revised budget passed by a whisker Tuesday night if they hadn’t been so brazenly misleading in their effort to get voters’ approval. Regular readers are by now familiar with how the school board refused to cut the original budget — calling for a 4.8 percent tax hike — after voters rejected it on May 19. Instead, board members restored some library positions that had been cut and warned voters that if they didn’t approve the revised budget (raising taxes by another 1 percent), they’d be stuck with a contingency budget. That one, according to Superintendent Eric Ely, would raise taxes 15.8 percent. Ely’s assertion — made repeatedly, as a threat, in the weeks before the second vote — was that a contingency budget would have to provide $5 million more (mostly for projected enrollment increases) than either the initial or slightly higher revised budgets provided. Never mind that the superintendent himself said he doubted such an enrollment increase (4.8 percent) would occur. Never mind that neither the original nor revised budgets provided any significant amount of money for such an increase. Never mind, too, that a state Education Department advisory has told school districts to calculate expenses for enrollment growth in contingency budgets on anticipated costs, not formulas. In other words, if the district wasn’t planning to hire additional teachers or build new classrooms to handle an influx of students — and it clearly wasn’t — it needn’t budget for them. Ely knew this, and believed there would be nothing like a 4.8 percent enrollment increase; and proved it by not budgeting for it. But he and the district insisted on using the 15.8 percent figure as a scare tactic..........>>>>.............>>>>........http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2009/jun/18/0618_edit1/
Sch’dy school budget now said to pass Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.
First the Schenectady school budget was defeated, and then it passed. In less than 24 hours. On Tuesday night, only an hour after the polls closed, the school district posted on its Web site that the budget had lost by a vote of 955 to 949, meaning a margin of a mere six votes, which would have triggered a highly controversial “contingency” budget raising taxes almost 16 percent. A stunning development. But by yesterday afternoon school officials were saying, whoops, we just found another 54 “yes” votes, so the budget passes after all. They say it was simple human error. An inspector writing down the number of votes from the back of a machine wrote 106 where he, or she, should have written 160. Very convenient for the school district, which was facing the major embarrassment of raising taxes 15.8 percent to support a contingency budget based on inflated enrollment numbers. This lets them off the hook, if the new number stands. And there is no reason why it shouldn’t, since schools do not come under the purview of the state or county Board of Elections but run their own elections as they see fit, just as fire districts do. It’s not an adversarial undertaking, with Democratic and Republican poll-watchers looking over each other’s shoulders like you get in a general election. It’s just the school officials themselves and their own inspectors, with no one to challenge them. If they say the machines were sealed at the proper time, when the polls closed, and the 54 additional votes were discovered the next day during a routine recanvassing, without opportunity for monkey business, there is no one to gainsay them. The machines will be returned to the county Board of Elections next Tuesday, with the votes still recorded on them and with seals in place, county election commissioners tell me, but by then it’s too late to do anything but read the numbers again. So we are in the position of having to trust people who in the past have proved themselves not exactly trustworthy — people who nurtured and protected a supervisor now under indictment for alleged acts of terrorism, people who created jobs for relatives while skirting Civil Service requirements, people who concocted a phony-baloney contingency budget with a scary tax increase as a cudgel to force approval of the budget they really wanted. ...............>>>>...............>>>>>...............http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar01300
I was recently considering, as a cost-cutting measure, cancelling my subscription to The Daily Gazette. Carl Strock is the reason this subscriber is going to continue it. Mr. Strock is a 21st-century muckracker who has exposed the corruption of the Schenectady Police Department and, most recently, Schenectady school Superintendent Eric Ely and the school board, led by [school board President Jeff] Janiszewski. I am amazed at the brazen attitude of these people toward the very people they are supposed to be working for, the taxpayer. I am watching from the outside to see how the Schenectady people will react to Ely’s and Janiszewski’s pompous attitude. I certainly believe, in the light of events exposed by Mr. Strock’s heroic efforts, that taxpayers of the Schenectady school district should call for their resignations.
I went out and got my mail today [Monday], and I had a blackmail letter. It was from the Schenectady City School District. It said that if I didn't vote to approve the budget proposed ($160,624,500) on June 16 and [if] it didn't pass, they would be forced to go to their contingency budget ($165,525,451), which is more than the first budget. I thought that blackmail was illegal in New York state, but it seems that it only applies to the layperson, not the government. Pretty soon they will have to come up with another budget because everyone will be moving out, and then where will they get the money? This is unbelievable.
Just when you thought it couldn't possibly get any worse. Everybody resign before the FBI arrives. Only at your "award winning" Schenectady School District. What award from hell did these idiots win?
This is obvious fraud. How can the totals on the back of the voting machines be 50 votes less than the front counter?
Did they think 50 people went to vote, closed the curtains and could not decide on a YES or NO? This is hilarious. These machines must be impounded by the DA until and honest recount can be done.