Lincoln's Log

Less than a week ago, the Greenwich Republican executive committee earned the bragging rights to claim a higher road when it agreed to give voters a choice by recommending four candidates- instead of two – for the school board this fall.

At the time Edward Dadakis, the GOP bigwig, told the Greenwich Time:
“What is significant about the vote by the Executive Committee is, during these tumultuous times for our education system in Greenwich, we are presenting to the citizens of Greenwich a real choice in who will lead the school system for the next two years …This stands in stark contrast to the Democrats’ stated position that they will throw off their incumbent Board of Ed members, replacing them with others and refusing any input from the voters of Greenwich.”

Never mind that Dadakis didn’t seem to know that the BOE term is four years, he made headlines with his provocative quote.

Now, with only two days to go before the full RTC meeting Wednesday, a movement appears to be afoot to nominate only two again. The move is clearly intended to knock off Marianna Ponns Cohen from any chance of retaining her school board seat.

Leading this effort is Peter Tesei, who has taken an unusually active interest in the school board even though the first selectman has no oversight of the schools and no direct connection to the school board. Insiders say Tesei is promoting Lisa Harkness and will put her name into nomination from the floor Wednesday and attempt to override one of the four candidates recommended by the RTC executive committee. That one would be Ponns Cohen.

There is also talk to retaining four candidates as long as they are not Ponns Cohen.

This is high stakes for the RTC. Even as the ruling party, if they reneg, it’s going to make them appear as small-minded as the Democrats. And Dadakis is going to have to eat his words. Such is the intensity of the animosity toward Ponns Cohen among some RTC leaders.

It will be quite a show Wednesday. Stay tuned …

Local Democrats publicly lament the century-old Republican dominance of Greenwich politics, but year after year they put up candidates who are more conservative, more establishment oriented, more likely to blend into the town hall wallpaper and more willing to buy into the status quo than their Republican counterparts whom taxpayers have counted on to deliver real leadership. It’s as if the Dems are so thrilled just to be at the table that they will do almost anything not to get voted off the island.

It’s not an accident that when the town needed BOE members to shake up the somnolent school board, two Republicans took on that charge. The Democrats either sat on the sidelines (Natalie Queen, Jonathan Cohen) or worse, they made the Kool Aid, stirred it and served it to the taxpayers in meeting after meeting (Leslie Moriarty, Nancy Kail).

Repeat after me:

“Our schools are fine ..”
“Our schools are fine …”
“Test scores are not important …”
“Test scores are not important …”

Now we are presented with the most important school board election in a decade. And the Republicans have an exciting slate of proposed candidates. The Democrats, instead of seizing on this massive opportunity, have served up the same predictable hash that comes with every one of their meals – one from Column A, Jennifer Dayton, and one from Column B, Adriana Ospina.

OMG, why didn’t they just leave Natalie Queen and Jonathan Cohen in place?

To me, Jennifer Dayton is poised to be the biggest disappointment since Nancy Kail, who reeks of pungent, personal ambition. Her blind loyalty to Moriarty is striking. She is the Clarence Thomas to the Antonin Scalia (Moriarty) of the school board. I had high hopes for Dayton two years ago before she withdrew her candidacy. But now I fear she will also drink the Kool Aid.

That gives the status quo the bloc of Steve Anderson, Moriarty, Kail, Dayton, and Ospina – one Republican and four Democrats.

Any challenge to this bloc will have to come from the Republicans. Incumbent Peter Scherr is steadfastly independent with a true north moral compass. He is committed to education for our children and will not be easily moved by local politics and back room loyalties.

But the biggest surprise to this party are the RTC Executive committee-endorsed candidates – four of them – for a slate exciting for its diversity, experience and good sense. To be sure, this was not any grand commitment to give Greenwich a people’s choice, even though the Republicans positioned it as a high-minded strategy to do just that. It was the Republican leadership’s best effort to torpedo the candidacy of Marianna Ponns Cohen pure and simple. The ayatollahs Tesei and Campbell knew they did not have the votes to derail her re-nomination, so they chose the next best option: Flood the zone and hope the two surviving winners will not be Ponns Cohen.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum: The Republicans actually came up with some interesting candidates:

Barbara O’Neill ran the Advanced Learning Program for years and will be supported by the ALP parents who have watched Sid Freund attempt to dismantle ALC the last two years. Some worry her loyalties to former colleagues will test her resolve to take on teachers and the teachers union, but we’ll see. Her academic cred is superb.

The big surprise is Anna Povinelli. I heard nothing but praise for her knowledge, poise and deep understanding of what we need to do to turn around the Greenwich schools. She is said to be second only to Ponns Cohen on the issues.

And then there is Ponns Cohen. Greenwich schools were on a serious down slope since the middle of the last decade. The only person who sounded the alarm on the BOE was Ponns Cohen, who joined in 2008. The town should be indebted to her and not demonize her. Come November, she will either be the lowest vote getter or the highest. I do not believe there is a middle ground with her, and believe that’s the way she chooses to go out or remain.

The Republican endorsements were notable for whom was not supported: Rosa Fini, a purported Tea Party wag who was totally incoherent at the candidates forum, and Lisa Harkness, another obsequious PTA veteran which is not what Greenwich needs at this moment. I don’t know that much about Peter von Braun.

After the DTC executive committee endorsed Sean Goldrick and Jennifer Dayton, Moriarty and Kail went to work to convince the DTC to change the Goldrick recommendation to the more politically palatable Ospina. So several dozen DTC members voted in her favor.

That is something for all of us to think about – that several dozen people in a town of 65,000 can determine who runs the school board.

The Republicans have given us the only choice. Please vote wisely.

This is one of those cases where the photos speak for themselves. Binney Park is one of the most picturesque and treasured places in Greenwich, but its pond is filling in with silt. It’s so bad that a new island in the middle of the pond has emerged. In addition to losing the aesthetic value of the park, the silt exacerbates the draining problems in the area. With the pond filling in with silt, the water has to find somewhere else to go, including nearby basements.

I know of no plans to dredge the pond by the town.

A reader pointed me to this story yesterday about a retiring superintendent in New Jersey with remarkable relevance for Greenwich. Click here for the article

The parallels are uncanny.

It’s also depressing in a way, because the likelihood of Greenwich hiring someone with the capabilities of the Cherry Hill superintendent is remote. The last thing the BOE chair would want is an open dialog with the community. The BOE chair has obsessed over his control of the board for years, the current effort at a gag order, AKA “Code of Conduct,” being the latest in a pattern that goes back to 2008. That was when the Greenwich school board voted to remove an illegal section of its own governance policy requiring all BOE members to publicly support all votes of the board even if the minority disagreed with it. Imagine members of Congress being required to publicly support all majority votes of the body.

The BOE vote to remove that section – clearly a violation of the First Amendment – was 6 in favor and one “abstention.” Guess who that was? The current BOE chair, of course.

The cankered alchemy of the current BOE is a direct result of that command-and-control sensibility. In Professor Harold Hill, the BOE chair had a perfect enabler.

But now that Sid the Lid is soon gone, the BOE chair is grasping and gasping. Who will be his next co-dependent?

Stay tuned …

Jack Moffly, founder of Greenwich Magazine, is not the sort given to hysteria and overreaction. That is why his column in the July issue which just hit the newsstand is a must read if you are a Greenwich resident concerned about the state of our schools.

It demonstrates that core Greenwich insiders are not about to keel over and be manipulated by the Nixonian PR express of the current BOE chairman and his PTA sycophants.

I am generally not in the business of promoting competitors. Since Hearst Newspapers does compete with Greenwich Magazine for advertising dollars, I suppose you could consider us competitors. Nonetheless, I urge you to go to your local newsstand, pay the five bucks, buy the latest Greenwich Magazine and turn to Page 25. I would have linked to the article, but Greenwich Magazine doesn’t post their articles online.

The column demonstrates what is happening in Greenwich given the test of time and sober analysis by intelligent people since the sudden resignation by Sid Freund and the campaign by BOE chairman Steve Anderson to deflect the embarrassment of his guy quitting halfway through his contract and to turn the event into an opportunity to attack his detractors.

Lots of prescient local politicians, Jim Himes, Peter Tesei, Jim Campbell, misread this initial orchestrated sympathy vote for Freund and they might regret it. At the core, more and more people are discovering that Freund was an inflexible, control freak who manipulated the PTA and plowed through the Greenwich hierarchy – with Anderson in tow – without any regard to due process, community input or sound fiscal hygiene.

I am hearing and seeing more people coming to this opinion. They are outraged by the overt campaign by Anderson to impose a “gag order” on his critics – AKA “code of conduct” – and are appalled that he is not spending more energy focusing on the future – such as an interim superintendent and a search for a permanent superintendent.

Someone needs to take Anderson by the arm and say, “Hey pal, let’s have a talk … enough with the code of conduct stuff … let’s move ahead and not settle scores…”

Consider this paragraph from Jack Moffly about Freund:

“He (Freund) appeared unaccustomed to having his judgment challenged or to accepting the need to to be accountable to the public and all members of the board. The duty and responsibility of the Board members is to set educational needs of the districts, and in doing, all opinions, facts and factors need to be aired and evaluated …”

Anderson’s campaign for a “code of conduct” is a travesty and in direct conflict with a growing public awareness that Havemeyer is out of sync with the public’s will. Greenwich elected officials, Ignore it at your peril!

Greenwich residents are accustomed to the collateral publicity associated with its notoriety. It’s a trade-off we make for the privilege of living in the Connecticut waterfront town closest to New York City, and yet pay an inordinately low property tax.

But it’s one thing to see an occasional headline about a celebrity divorce or a hedge fund felon or the sale of a Back Country mansion. It’s quite another to see our town’s declining schools laid out in the Wall Street Journal.

But there it was Saturday – a WSJ article calling out how we are failing our children. It brings great shame to a town that has allowed a systematic dismantling of what was one of the great public school systems in the nation – right up there with New Trier in North Chicago and Montgomery County in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.

Two days before the WSJ article, the town’s top “educator” was telling GHS grads not to pay attention to test scores, saying that only the media obsessed over statistics and test scores. He said the responsibility of educators was more than just training future workers. He then sent the class off with some bloated Ayn Rand rhetoric.

Bloated rhetoric seems to be the hallmark of Sid Freund: never implement anything measurable, always woo the BOE power center with amorphous mission statements such as “The Vision of the Graduate,” full of subjective and high-minded adjectives and no substance, no specifics.

The Class of 2011 faces a world where measurability and accountability in the workplace are at a fevered pitch. The warm bath of the Freund rhetoric successfully cast a spell over the BOE chair and co-chair and the PTA leadership, but make no mistake my fellow Greenwich residents, there is no free pass no matter what Professor Harold Hill says. Life is not going to hand your kids a break just because the faux educator we hired as a superintendent tries to justify why he couldn’t deliver on his promise.

He came here talking about great expectations – such as plans for data driven accountability – but it soon degraded into a mirage. A veil of secrecy completed the cycle. It was a triple threat – superintendent, the BOE chair and co-chair and the PTA – all in cahoots to manage down expectations to a feel-good sensibiity.

Want an example?

In March the PTA endorsed and sponsored the showing of a controversial documentary film in all Greenwich schools supporting the notion that test scores and statistics were pushing the American student into a permanent disability. “The Race to Nowhere” instantly became a hit with teachers and principals and superintendents because it let them off the hook. After 50 years of pushing test scores and statistics, America suddenly took a turn toward the soft underbelly of the beast.

Never mind that some of the country’s education experts and writers challenged the basic precepts of the film such as Jay Matthews of the Washington Post in this article, “Why the Race to Nowhere” documentary is wrong,” Professor Hill was off and running. So we had the spector of all our schools showing the film in March and having our teachers and principals engaged in a PTA-sponsored discussion of why test scores are bad. In case you missed it, here is the flyer.

This culture of secrecy has implications beyond the schools. It is not an accident that Freund and BOE chair Anderson were caught violating the town charter and state laws for illegally funding a capital overrun at the North Mianus School, in which PTA chairperson Sue Rogers characterized as a “tempest in the teapot” in the WSJ article. Their imperious view of the world failed to take into account the potential damage to the credit standing of the Town of Greenwich for questionable financial activity. The vote by the BET last week to fund this overrun was a step to clear the slate, but it remains to be seen whether a forensic audit of this mess will ultimately clear the town and retain its high credit rating.

So statistics aren’t important? Okay. I’d like Professor Hill to tell our recent GHS grads what to do when they fill out a job application, especially the part that asks for grades, class standing, college and any data that would enhance their chances of getting a job.

One hundred years ago, the United States embarked on a policy to require all its citizens to attain a high school diploma. The Old World European nations scoffed at the idea. For the next century, America dominated the world’s economy and unleashed a knowledge-centric industrial explosion.

Now we are the Old World enablers. I have been watching this train wreck of a school administration for more than five years when the Nancy Weissler board hired Betty Sternberg who had never been a superintendent and who had some minimal teaching experience. She also had no idea what to do with a budget.

Who was the only surviving member of that search? No other than the current BOE chair, Steve Anderson, who also had the biggest hand in the selection of Sid Freund.

It is time for our “town fathers” – Peter Tesei, Jim Campbell, Frank Farricker, Mike Mason and others – to come to grips with the town’s biggest problem and to agree that beyond local politics, we have a problem much bigger than Anderson and Leslie Moriarty are capable of handling.

In the midst of last week’s articles was this intelligent piece by Erica Purnell in the Greenwich Time. She is an RTM member from the 10th district. it demonstrates that there are many, many Greenwich residents and elected officials who are extremely knowledgeable and eager to help. For the sake of Greenwich and its children, it’s time to remove the grip held by the BOE chair Anderson and his co-chair Moriarty. It is time for a change.

Sometimes it take a good neighbor to hold up a mirror to show us the folly of our ways.

Such is the case of the Lewisboro Ledger and its recent editorial on Greenwich’s promotion of the retired superintendent of Katonah-Lewisboro, NY, school district:

“The hubbub around the latest superintendent hiring at Katonah-Lewisboro may not be the envy of school districts elsewhere, but at least residents here can be thankful they’re not in Greenwich. That’s because that Connecticut town has just promoted former Katonah-Lewisboro Superintendent of Schools Dr. Robert Lichtenfeld as its new human resources director. Apparently, they either did not talk to anyone here while researching his qualifications or decided his poor record of personnel decisions somehow was not relevant. So now New York taxpayers are footing the bill to pay yet another “retired” superintendent a hefty pension while he is employed in a well-paying major school district position elsewhere. And his promotion is just another example of how school boards throughout the area make questionable hiring decisions often by stressing the quantity instead of the quality of the candidate’s previous employment.”

You can read the entire editorial by clicking here

Lewisboro is a village just north of Stamford. The paper is owned by the same company which publishes the Greenwich Post.

In announcing his hiring in Greenwich in March 2010, Kim Eaves, Greenwich’s director communications, said Lichtenfeld came to Greenwich after an “extensive search.”

Perhaps so, but doesn’t it strike you just as a little too facile that these valued jobs in Greenwich keep going to retired guys around the corner in New York? (How do you spell CRONYISM?)

Besides his promotion, Lechtenfeld’s name surfaced recently when the Greenwich Time attempted to ask him about his role in the North Mianus School scandal in which school administrators violated both the town charter and state law by illegally paying a school construction overrun without approval from the RTM. He declined to answer the paper’s queries.

I wonder how much of his background members of the BOE were privvy to when Sid Freund hired him? I wonder if Freund even bothered to seek board approval? I wonder how much board members knew about his background when they promoted him? I wonder if these are the type of questions considered impolite among the tight knit group of BOE members? I wonder if asking these type of question constitute a violation of the “code of conduct” being drafted by the BOE chair?

The RTC held its candidates forum last week and recommended six persons to be considered for nomination at its July meeting, including Marianna Ponns Cohen. The others are: Rosa Fini, Lisa Harkness, Anna Povinelli, Nancy Smith and Peter von Braun.

Moreover, the RTC appears to be leaning toward a slate of four candidates. This has less to do with giving Greenwich voters a choice – although the RTC is likely to spin it that way – than because the pro-Peter Tesei crowd could not talk Ponns Cohen out of withdrawing her candidacy. The thinking is that by putting up four candidates, they stand a good chance of knocking out Ponns Cohen at the polls.

But there is a risk to this strategy. By putting up four candidates, the RTC unwittingly would be encouraging a public debate about the schools. Certainly Ponns Cohen will campaign hard and will be loud. That will force the others and the two Democrats – Jennifer Dayton and Adriana Ospina – to have to discuss issues as well.

Personally, I think that would be wonderful. It’s exactly what Greenwich needs. And it is what a democracy is all about. But then Greenwich is not a democracy. The local ayatollahs are fearful that a big public debate about the schools would bring out the parents who normally do not vote in municipal elections.

But I think their fear is unfounded. The reason is John Blankley, the most uninformed and clueless Democratic candidate for first selectman to come along in a decade. Blankley doesn’t seem to have a grasp of the simplest issues and certainly has no idea how local governments work. He is on his way to the slaughterhouse otherwise known as the biennial Greenwich elections.

On thing is clear: Ponns Cohen has significant support among RTC members for reasons that I don’t necessarily agree with – many of them think she is the only fiscally responsible member of the BOE, for instance.

No matter what happens, the school board in Greenwich will never be the same, even if Ponns Cohen is not re-elected. The decline of the schools is well documented even though BOE members are in denial. Every action of the BOE is now watched by a lot more people than before. The unholy alliance with the PTA has been exposed. And I doubt Ponns Cohen will remain silent – even if she is on the sidelines.

The six RTC nominations include one who is completely unqualified to serve on the BOE and another who is a puppet of the BOE/PTA establishment.

I will write about them in future posts. Stay tuned.