FW: letter to the editor

[Tanya Marquette]

 

To: newpaltztimes

Sent: 1/15/2010 11:40:29 AM

Subject: letter to the editor

The elephant in the room

 

When I heard that a piece of the Middle School ceiling fell down, my first thought was for the safety of the children. Then I got really ticked off. This did not happen suddenly. The leak was there for quite a long time before the ceiling became so heavy with water saturation and deterioration so that it lost its integrity. This problem could have been cheaply and easily avoided by annual gutter cleaning and visual inspection of the roof, including evaluation of the ice dam guards. It seems that they bent and thus, stopped functioning.

This is a nickel and dime repair.  This school board let this happen. It was blatent neglect. My question is was this just plain poor maintenance that wouldn't make safety a top priorty? Or perhaps it was intentional benign neglect trying to prove a point to the community about the poor building structure requiring an almost $80 million dollar major remodeling in order to fix a roof leak. Sort of like an argument looking for an excuse to happen.

My unhappy supposition is that this is an unacceptable protocol designed to manipulate the community by fear. Hmm, Hitler used fear and lies to control the public. Bush & Co used fear and lies to get us into an illegal war in Iraq which never attacked us, and to force the Patriot Act on us to destroy our civil liberties. Lies and fearmongering:  very old tactics for mass social manipulation. And now do we have the New Paltz Central School District using fear and lies to force an unaffordable, unnecessary, poorly designed and bloated renovation on us? I cannot support this school board's choices: the elephant is in the room and its droppings stink.

It is Okay to Vote No on February 9th.

Tanya Marquette

tama...@earthlink.net

Gardiner, NY