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An Open Letter to Donn Esmonde

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Dear Mr. Esmonde,

With today’s anti-school piece about Clarence’s difficulties with its school taxes, you’ve hit a new low. Frankly, given that you’re usually a reasonably progressive thinker who may have more than a passing interest in education, it’s appalling.

Did you speak with your anti-tax friends how the school tax rate – even with the 9.8% hike would have been significantly less than it was in 2003? 2005? The rate would have risen to $15.52/$1000.  In 2007 it was $15.86.  In 2003 it was $16.85. Did you know that in the last 4 years, Clarence has lost $13 million in state and federal funding?  No, you didn’t. If you did, you ignored it.  

Did you happen to mention to them that the tax rates in other highly-ranked districts like East Aurora, Williamsville, and Orchard Park are in some cases 2x the ~$15/$1000 it is in Clarence?

Did you mention to them that Clarence has the 2nd best district and is ranked 6th most cost-effective in the region by Business First?  Did you know it’s 93rd out of 98 districts in WNY in per-pupil spending?

Did you mention to your tea party friends or your readers how the district cut 60 full-time staffers since 2011? That the proposed budget that failed would have cut another 24? 

Ever heard of the Triborough Amendment or the Taylor Law? Did you know that the union agreed to a lower salary increase in its most recent contract than they would have received under Taylor? Did you mention to anyone that, even if the teachers and administration contributed 25% or 50% towards their health care, it wouldn’t close this year’s budget hole? 

Did you happen to question whether they knew that state pension costs are completely outside of the control of the local district and the teachers (and their union)?  Did the issue of the pension and the recent recession’s affect on it come up at all? Did you know that pension costs take into account the past five years’ worth of investment income, which includes the crash of 2008-2009? Did you happen to mention that the district had basically played Giambra-type games with the budget in past years, leaving us with a green/red budget type situation now?

Did you happen upon the fact that the so-called “Citizens for Sustainable Schools” is a local front group for Americans for Prosperity?

Why are we comparing what an educator makes to what someone at DuPont makes? In what way are they similar, except for the fact that they are “jobs”?

Did you happen to ask your friends what they think an appropriate salary for a tenured teacher with 20 years’ seniority should be?

Did you happen to speak with anyone who supported the tax hike and could have explained why it was deemed necessary? If so, why wasn’t that included in your piece? Why did you simply digest as fact what you were told by opponents?

Welcome to the tea party.

Alan Bedenko

Esmonde’s Paladino Arc

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Donn Esmonde is a hypocrite and an inveterate asshole who has no business ever using his fingers to type about school matters again. After being caught pimping charter schools operated by his close friends, or caught vilifying teachers’ unions, despite his wife being a former Buffalo schoolteacher and himself a former union member, his opinion is as worthless as a farthing. 

He now calls on Carl Paladino to resign from the Buffalo School Board. It would be a fitting, Palinistic resignation, but as one Twitter commenter opined, 

Indeed. Who would have thought. 

Donn Esmonde. Donn Esmonde thought and knew. 

He knew in 2013. 

Paladino’s blowtorch style and email history make this board a potential tinderbox. But I think he’s there for the right reasons. Expending his time and energy in the name of helping school kids – nearly 80 percent of whom are minority – doesn’t strike me as racist. But I think it would go a long way if he dropped the “sisterhood” condemnations.

He knew when he pimped James Sampson in 2013, 

Sampson was swept onto the board with Carl Paladino on a reformist tide. Paladino gets the press, Sampson – who co-founded West Buffalo Charter School – co-sets the reform agenda. He is as radical as the board’s resident rattlesnake, minus the fangs and venom. I am not a big fan of Paladino’s personal-attack style. But he, Sampson and a potential reform-majority board will force-feed change to a calcified district – and may doom its oddly detached superintendent, Pamela Brown.

He knew when he tried to make light of matters involving the poorest and most disenfranchised citizens of Buffalo, 

Despite the absence of a Kardashian, this was another episode of “As the Board Turns.” African-American board members referenced “Selma.” Minority-bloc member Theresa Harris-Tigg claimed the majority is “treating children and parents as property, and we know from history where that went.” About a dozen spectators rose at one point and turned their backs to protest board majority’s tactics. A chant of “Shame” broke out after words were exchanged between majority board member Carl Paladino and School Board attorney Rashondra Martin, a black woman. The exchange prompted one black male in the audience to walk toward the board table, saying to Paladino, “You can’t talk to her like that,” and sparked the removal of several spectators by Buffalo cops.

A late-comer asked me if anyone had been led away in handcuffs. No. For better or worse, that’s a different movie – not “Selma,” but “50 Shades of Grey.” Although sitting through nearly four hours of boardroom theater felt at times like an exercise in masochism.

He knew in May 2015, when his vaunted “reform” majority acted like dictators. 

A my-way-or-the-highway creed may work at a private company, though I have my doubts. But it’s undeniably a bad fit for a public school board. It makes me wonder whether some of the board majority, particularly Paladino, are temperamentally unsuited for the job. I don’t doubt the developer’s passion or intentions. But Paladino’s bully tactics of demonizing anyone who disagrees with him, personalizing disputes and launching frequent email rants against an ever-shifting cast of targets is no way to win friends and influence people.

“They’re acting like bullies, the five of them,” said Jim Anderson of Citizen Action, the good-government group. “They need to learn how to play with others.”

I agree with much of what the board majority wants to do. But they can’t make decisions from on high – without consensus or collaboration – and expect parents, clergy and community groups to nod their heads and march in lockstep.

He knew when the board hired Kriner Cash as the new Superintendent. 

Ignore Carl Paladino – Like a tantrum-prone child, Buffalo’s mini-Trump isn’t easily tuned out. Let the board majority’s lightning rod kick, scream and rant. In Paladino’s bully-world, there are angels and devils, no in-between. As everyone from departed Superintendent Don Ogilvie to board President Jim Sampson discovered, you are the second coming until the first time you stray from Paladino’s extreme-reform party line. At which point the nitro-tempered developer launches an email assault and tries to get you voted off the island. Roll with it.

He knew. Donn Esmonde knew, but he promoted the simplistic privatization agenda of the “reform” bloc, which has now found itself transformed into a 3-person minority. Not necessarily because of the meritoriousness of its ideas, but also because of the dictatorial obnoxiousness of its most outspoken member; a vulgar, petty, man who casually utters racist and sexist nonsense in the name of not being “P.C.”, a man who deserves no elected office, no public trust, and no respect from the western New York community.

Donn Esmonde, who clearly doesn’t believe in public education, should never write about schools again. 

Carl the RINO and Donny’s Shovel

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1. Tea Party Champion Carl Paladino: 

Who better to lead a protest than a perpetually incensed, elderly millionaire? What better thing to protest than “socializing” America? Who better to “send a message that RINO’s [sic] who support an elected Democrat…have no place in the…Republican Party”? How about the developer millionaire who was a registered Democrat for 31 years, until 2005, and who donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to convenient Democrats who were positioned to help his business goals? He attended a Democrat’s fundraiser just this year. Oh, and this from the Buffalo News: 

Speaking of Paladino, several of the 2010 Republican candidate for governor’s companies recently dropped $9,000 on Erie County Democratic Chairman Jeremy Zellner’s housekeeping account, according to campaign finance records. This occurs even after Zellner moved Democratic Headquarters out of Paladino’s Ellicott Square.

“I’m supportive of Jeremy’s efforts,” Paladino said last week. “When it comes to good government, it’s what we do. We support both parties’ central operations to do the right thing.”

Who better to lecture Patrick Lee and Anthony Gioia on who is and isn’t a “RINO” than a self-anointed tea party hero who has given thousands of dollars to Democrats in just the past year? 

2. Buffalo News Columnist Donn Esmonde: 

It’s called “objectophilia“. 

As I grasped your handle and cupped your lean, strong shaft of a body in my left hand, I silently celebrated all of the times, over all of the years, we had done this together.

Donn Esmonde, to his snow shovel. I think the shovel swore out an order of protection. 

3. Bonus thing to Read

From the Harvard Business Review, “It’s Not OK That Your Employees Can’t Afford to Eat“. 

It wasn’t that long ago that in most companies, especially large ones, a fair amount of time was spent worrying about whether the company’s practices towards employees were fair. One of the functions of human resource departments was to advocate for the interests of employees.

The motivation wasn’t entirely altruistic. Since WWI, employers figured they could keep unions out by giving employees virtually all of the wage and benefits they would have gotten from joining unions. Even without that concern, though, the leadership of the company considered it part of their job to strike a balance between the other demands on the business and the needs of employees.  They were one of the important stakeholders in the business, along with customers, shareholders, and the community around them…

…A family of four with one breadwinner is eligible for food stamps if they earn less than $2500 per month. That is the equivalent of a $15 per hour job and a 40 hour work week.  The government has determined that full-time workers earning less than that do not have enough money to feed their families on their own. If that breadwinner earns less than $16 per hour, they are also eligible for Medicaid assistance to provide healthcare. Depending on where they live, that breadwinner is also eligible for subsidies to help pay for housing.

Pre-haunting Scrooge is no way to go through life, and no way to run a country. 

Esmonde Goes For Disclosure

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In response to this article I wrote about a week ago, Donn Esmonde adds this to a column about killing skunks: 

Mea culpa: I wrote three columns in the last two years concerning or mentioning the efforts of charter school advocate Steven Polowitz. In them, I failed to note that Polowitz – whom I have known for more than 20 years – and I became partners in 2010 in a Florida investment property. The business relationship did not influence my stance on charter schools, which I have supported for more than a decade, nor did it affect my view of Polowitz’s charter school activism, which I had previously written about. Nonetheless, I should have disclosed the association.

To anyone wondering why I keep writing horrible and mean things about Donn Esmonde, consider this piece he wrote in late May about the Clarence school budget fight, and this quote in particular:

“Make no mistake: Come budget-approval time, officials in every school district are masters at pushing parents’ emotional buttons and propping up false choices. It goes like this: Vote for the budget, or you will force us to cut (choose your poison) sports/music/field trips/foreign language.”

Guess what? Turns out, it wasn’t false. They got cut. 33 clubs, 13 teams, and these courses: 

So Donn Esmonde can take his self-righteous bucket of hypocritical geographic animus and shove it up his ass. He hates Clarence because it’s just like his neighborhood, only not in his neighborhood. He hates kids in Clarence because they’re just like his kids, only not in Buffalo. 

Now? A shitload of parents are working their asses off to try and raise money to fix what Donn Esmonde knowingly helped to break.

When an influential columnist comes by your house and intentionally propagandizes to do palpable, real harm to your kid’s education, you get back to me on that.

Do you have information about Donn Esmonde that you think I should know about? I figure non-disclosure of a business relationship with a longtime source is just the tip of the iceberg – smoke from a larger fire. Let me know what you know. buffalopundit[at]gmail.com. 

Esmonde’s Exceptional Ethics

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Let’s get something clear, here. Donn Esmonde is a hypocrite. He is a semi-retired former-and-current City/Region columnist for the Buffalo News. Donn Esmonde thinks your kid deserves a quality education, including (but not limited to) charter schools; however, that right to a quality education miraculously ceases to exist, in his mind, at precisely the borders of the city of Buffalo. To Donn Esmonde, there is no greater sin in the world than the sin of “choosing to live outside Buffalo city limits.” The evidence for this was most starkly measured when he devoted two or three columns specifically to convince Clarence taxpayers to do genuine harm to the quality of that town’s school district. He succeeded in this mission. 

Make no mistake – the “Donn Esmonde is an ass” series stems directly from that, and if I wasn’t writing for Artvoice it would be named something profoundly more profane. Esmonde went on and on about the evil, greedy teacher’s union while failing to disclose that his wife belongs to one. He went on and on about how unconscionable it is for union workers to enjoy good wages and benefits, given that he and his wife have enjoyed union benefits for most – if not all – of their work-lives. He went on and on about these things without disclosing his own conflicts and biases. 

I don’t write about stuff in which I have a personal financial interest without disclosing it. 

Part of Esmonde’s shtick has been to promote the advent and growth of charter schools within city limits. In some instances, charters help kids in underperforming traditional schools to get a good education. In some instances, charters help the wealthy and well-connected families living within the city to provide their kids with a suburban school experience without packing up boxes and renting a U-Haul. In some instances, charters simply fail. 

Whatever. You do what’s right for your kids and their education if you care enough and have the means to do it. There’s no second chances, and you don’t have the luxury of waiting around for stuff to get better. You move to where schools are good, you apply for a charter school, you get your kids to take entrance exams for schools that need it, you go parochial or private, or you just stay put and try hard to make sure that your kid’s education – and every kid’s education – is as good as it can possibly be.  These are not just personal choices, but societal ones – as a general rule, we want well-educated kids because the alternative is horrible. For everyone. 

I don’t begrudge any parent’s choice regarding what he thinks is best for his kid. So, what does undisclosed bias have to do with anything? 

In 2000, Esmonde wrote a column about the Buffalo Niagara Partnership’s effort to help charter schools in Buffalo start up.  

The Tapestry Charter School was one of Buffalo’s three finalists, but didn’t make last month’s final cut. Tapestry’s Steven Polowitz said their grass-roots effort could have used a Partnership loan fund.

“I can’t say for sure it would have made the difference (in getting a charter),” said Polowitz. “But it would have eliminated a significant question.”

In 2007, he wrote a column blasting a tax incentive given to big-money waterfront condo owners. 

“This is not a marginal neighborhood where you’re trying to induce people to buy [with tax breaks],” said community development attorney Steven Polowitz. “How do you reconcile giving away the store for high-end condos in a coveted area?”

In 2011, Esmonde again pimped the charters as a way to bypass failing Buffalo schools. 

“Charters are the only option that lets you make the fundamental structural changes that give these schools the best chance for success,” Steven Polowitz said.

Polowitz is a longtime charter advocate who 10 years ago co-founded the successful Tapestry charter. He is now with Chameleon Community Schools Project, a nonprofit that develops charter schools. Polowitz laid out a charter turnaround plan for James Williams just before he left as superintendent. Interim successor Amber Dixon said she is open to the charter option. I think she — and the School Board — ought to be.

These seven schools need more than cosmetic surgery. That translates into — among other things — a longer school day; smaller class sizes; an expanded school year; more classroom aides; social workers and counselors on staff; and keeping the building open for everything from after-school tutoring to child care. It will not happen in a district where contract rules stifle options and slow-track change. It only comes with restriction-lite charters.

“You can interchange parts,” Polowitz said, “but if the fundamental structure remains, it won’t make much difference.”

In fairness to Buffalo teachers, counteracting the baggage of broken homes and battered neighborhoods these kids carry into the classroom is a near-impossible job. Schools, to some degree, don’t “fail”; they simply get overstuffed with desperately needy kids. Which is why it makes sense for hurting schools to be taken over by the academic version of a SWAT team: flexible, fast on its feet and able to use every educational weapon, from alternative curriculums to business partnerships.

If schools are reinvented as charters, kids stay in the same building. Teachers either move to another school or reapply for their jobs, likely with similar pay and benefits — but without seniority and job protection. Granted, charters are only as good as the people running them. But if you need change — and these seven schools are at cliff’s edge — charters are the Extreme Makeover.

In 2012, Esmonde effectively dedicated an entire column to Steven Polowitz hagiography. 

“We are concerned about education in the city,” said Steve Polowitz, “and have been for years.”

Polowitz is part of the pack of reformers who are trying – against all odds – to transform two of Buffalo’s 28 failing schools into public charter schools. The folks behind the nonprofit push are taking fire from a Board of Ed that has yet to grasp the enormity of its failing-schools crisis. On the other parapet is a teachers union determined to protect its ever-shrinking turf.

If every verbal blow the reformers have taken were a punch, Polowitz would be a walking bruise.

He is 61, a rail-thin attorney with silvery hair and impeccable school-reform credentials. Eleven years ago, he and four others founded Tapestry Charter School. It is arguably the most successful charter in Buffalo. The public charter school, which since expanded through high school, last year got 1,200 applications for 200 spots.

Here’s a dissenting voice: 

After all Polowitz and Co. are all ready running Tapestry Charter School, you know the one with the fewest students receiving reduced price lunches of any school in the city limits, the school whose students must have private transportation, wink nudge, and we know who that’s going to keep out of the lottery don’t we ? Essentially this guy and his crew are running a private school full of middle to upper middle class kids with the ever present charter spectre of “counseling out” a.k.a. “expelling” any kid who shows a learning, emotional or behavioral issue. If you can shoot fish in a barrel your aim doesn’t have to be all that good.

Who is Steven Polowitz? Damned if I know, except from these Esmonde columns, a guy who helped start Tapestry Charter School, and someone who is a “community development attorney.” Just, y’know, random school advocate guy. 

Random guy? 

Donn Esmonde and Steven Polowitz (and their wives) are co-owners of a property in Spring Hill, Florida, just north of Tampa. 

While Esmonde touts his city-resident cred, he co-owns a very suburban, very sprawltastic single-family home in a subdivision outside of Tampa, Florida. It’s unit 12 in that particular subdivision, and has a market value of around $86,000, but possibly as low as $75,000 – it’s okay, though – the mortgage is for $66,000. With an area of just over 2,000 square feet, the house was placemade in 2004 and began to matter for Esmonde and Polowitz in 2010.  The annual property taxes are a low $1,400, and the home has 3 bedrooms. Here it is: 

Could use some better landscaping. Maybe some flowers or something. 

Sadly, the previous owners bought the place for $210,000 – Esmonde and Polowitz got it for a steal, and the prior owner took a hit of $130,000 at the time – in fact, Deutsche Bank moved to foreclose on the property in 2009.  The previous owners were a husband and wife from Buffalo who owned a paving company here, and their 2005 mortgage was for $168,000 – twice what the property is now worth. 

I don’t care about Donn Esmonde’s sprawly vacation home, or that his kids went to an exam school (away from the riff-raff), or that he is a massive hypocrite who harbors a geographical animus towards children. But one would suppose that, if I was to write a glowing blog post about someone with whom I co-owned a vacation home, I’d let you guys know about it one way or another.

Donn Esmonde hates the suburbs, except when he lives in them.  

Shorter Esmonde

8 comments

1. Sergio Rodriguez is a swell guy, but he has no hope – a “sand castle has a better chance in a tsunami”. So, I will label his run for Mayor “quixotic” and otherwise dismiss him altogether, while doling out some faint praise. 

2. James Sampson is a wealthy and important person, and if there’s one thing I like, it’s wealthy and important people. He “aches” for the schools, and wants to change them. Don’t forget that my wife works for the school district, I sure didn’t bother to disclose it this week. Also remember that only the city schools matter, and suburban schools – and everyone in them – can go rot in hell. 

As always, Donn Esmonde is an Ass. 

Shorter Esmonde

5 comments

Part of the running “Donn Esmonde is an Ass” series, “shorter” takes a typical 500-word Esmonde column and reduces it to a couple of sentences. I try to preserve the general tone and theme of the original column while boiling it down to its essential point. Think of it as a public service: I read it so you don’t have to. 

Friday

Regarding the awful, horrible, soul-sucking pits of racism we call “suburbs”, at least one has thankfully come around to my way of thinking and decided to make their streets less treacherous. 

Sunday

If I were Bernie Tolbert’s campaign manager, he’d be losing in a different way. His refusal to read my mind and follow my phantom campaign strategy means he is “woefully unprepared” – not to be mayor, but to run for mayor.1

1As an aside, I will note that I receive all of Tolbert’s campaign releases and his problem isn’t not issuing press releases or holding news conferences quickly enough after news comes out – his problem is the town’s reductive media either ignoring him completely or preempting the mayoral race for Extra and Jeopardy. If Esmonde thinks that something’s wrong with the mayoral race, a lot of the blame sits firmly with the way it’s being covered. 

Meanwhile, Tolbert is the first mayoral candidate to secure statements – on tape – from two police officers (who are anonymized to prevent retaliation) who explain how the Brown Administration plays games with crime statistics in Buffalo. It’s shocking. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42IveBLAw0w&w=640&h=480]

Shorter Esmonde

26 comments

I join in the local media outrage over animal cruelty that, while horrible, doesn’t come close to the cruelty that man does to fellow man on a seemingly daily basis throughout WNY.

While animal cruelty gets loads of column space and talk-radio time, human-on-human violence generally registers a shrug and a segue into which teenager the local sports franchise is going to shower with millions of dollars for throwing a ball or smacking a disc with a stick.

Last year, 50 people were homicide victis in Buffalo. Hoskins was convicted of 52 counts of animal cruelty. Those animals lived. 

 

Like Esmonde’s other love, preservation (and, now, tea party politics), the local fascination with animal cruelty cases is built upon a mountain of white privilege. Esmonde is its weakest cheerleader – a pathetic, aging parrot of lazy WBEN topics. 

That’s today’s edition of Donn Esmonde is an Ass™.

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