East Fishkill Not as Thieving as I Thought

I should apologize to East Fishkill. It turns out that the lion’s share of my real estate taxes goes to the school district and to Dutchess County with East Fishkill’s cut being less than a $1,000. That makes more sense in view of the services I get from the town. I don’t know why Dutchess County gets more than the town or what Dutchess County even does. Every square inch of Dutchess is in some town or hamlet or municipality, isn’t it? What is left for the county to concern itself with? Courts or some such thing no doubt. There may be a sheriff and a jail.

Out of the nine grand extorted from us, over seven gets shoveled into the maw of the insatiable Carmel Central School District. The CCSD is proud of its high per pupil spending, as if gross inefficiency in delivering schooling were something to crow about. It seems to me that decreasing per pupil spending would be the goal if the CCSD were really responsive to the unfortunates subject to its power to tax. The CCSD must be responsive more to its employees than to its constituents since its goal is to spend as much money as it can get.

The thing that really disturbs me is that the population of the CCSD is relatively affluent and intelligent such that schooling their children ought to be much less challenging and concomitantly less expensive than schooling in a district with lots of poor and/or stupid children. Yet, the opposite is the case. The CCSD pays more per pupil than its counterparts with needier pupils! How can we suffer this to continue? Incredibly, school board members run on and get elected based on a platform of increased per pupil spending. The delivery of schooling, it seems, is subject to some other kind of economic logic than any other service.

Of course, I am being intentionally obtuse. Per pupil spending is not really related to the quality or efficiency of schooling. It’s about erecting barriers to entry into the district. If taxes and per pupil spending are high enough, property values will rise, and poor people won’t be able to afford to live in the district. The poor folks you already have might even have to sell out and move for want of the means to pay their increased taxes. Everybody wins! It’s discrimination and it’s perfectly legal. Nudge nudge, wink wink. It’s costly, though, and I don’t mind having working class neighbors. It's not worth $7,000 a year to me to make sure that I live among yuppies exclusively. I also hate being robbed. And one of these days, I could get taxed out of my home.

Yonkers in Westchester County had its school system under federal supervision because of racial discrimination. Meanwhile, the neighboring town that included Bronxville was able to discriminate freely because its schools were in separate villages, and each village could manipulate its taxes such that poor folks, many of whom would be black, would not be able to afford to live in the village and have children in the village schools. If Yonkers could have divided itself into separate villages instead of being a single municipality, it would have been able to effect segregation of its schools just like Bronxville and Scarsdale.