Dear Editor:
I’m running for the School Board and here’s why. Irvington is a beautiful village and a great place to live, and we all have to work to keep it that way.
I’m not one to sit on the sidelines; I want to do what I can to make our school district as good as it can be.
People in the District know we have issues with our schools. First, property taxes are too high.
Second, costs have gotten out of control. We have nineteen administrators (that is, nineteen non-teaching professionals, not counting the clerks and secretaries who support them) for a district of under nineteen hundred students. Finally, many people feel the quality of education needs to be raised. Lots of families have had good experience with the schools, but many are tired of the constant experimentation with new programs that are expensive and often don’t seem to work. Parents worry that we’ve moved too far from the solid methods that served us well when we were in school. I’m told kids spend too much time on group projects and not enough on the basic building blocks of knowledge.
People have asked me why I am running since I don’t have children in the schools. I have no children of my own, but I’ve always been interested in kids. After all, kids are the future of our country! So I’ve put my beliefs to work. After graduating from law school, I did educational advocacy for abused and neglected children who were handicapped. Next I did appeals on termination of parental rights cases so that kids who had been abused and neglected could be adopted by their foster parents. My husband and I had my niece move in with us for her junior and senior years of high school. She was an at-risk kid doing poorly in school; she ended up in the top 10 percent of her class and went on to graduate from Mt. Holyoke. I’m serious about kids.
Before I went to law school, I worked in banking and insurance where I did lots of financial analysis. That sort of background seems necessary to wade through the all the data provided by the school district and to figure out what really matters.
Robyne Camp, Irvington
