One leak can open the flood gates
The community should know by now that the Tuxedo Union Free School District desperately needs work on infrastructure. This does not just apply to the inner workings of staff, administration, or board of education, but, also applies to the buildings that are to safely house its students.
Today all students from George F Baker are schooling remotely. A pipe feeding one of the boy’s bathrooms burst and flooded the first and ground floors. It has been reported by Mr. White, the Superintendent of Schools, that the building is solidly constructed; however, the plumbing is showing its age with much of the piping encased in cement. A notice was sent to all families yesterday, 02/09/2022. This is now an emergency situation and must be addressed. Monies were allocated for capital repairs last spring, what has been done in regards to this? The question is, how many more band-aids can we keep applying to decay? Why does it seem as if no work has been done? Or, if it has, the public is left unaware and the student suffers the most.
In February 2020, a Capital Bond failed with the vote count of 318/187. Repair items began to get identified in 2015. In 2018, the State of NY performed an inspection on all school buildings with the Tuxedo UFSD and supplied a list to the district of MUST FIX items that needed to be addressed. The District retained CPL, an architecture, engineering, planning firm that specializes in K-12 design. The identified areas of repair were in the realm of 8 million dollars. The Board worked for over 1.5 years conducting walk-throughs of the buildings and evaluating each repair priority. During this time, the district was fortunate to have a board member who was, and still is, the Maintenance Supervisor at New York Power Authority, Michael Arone. I can not tell you enough the great work he did during this time. The Board focused on the most jeopardized items and brought the cost down to a little over 4 million.
One would think that knowing there is great need of repair within these buildings, the current Board would have prioritized its energy in keeping snakes at bay, ceilings in place, roofs intact, and pipes tended to. It seems the priority for the sitting Board was to oust one of it’s members which ate many, many hours and drained much needed money from our District that should have been used towards the facilities and students.
It is time for this Board to focus on academics and building safety. At $60,000 per student, this is unacceptable.