Jeff Blatt Completes Term on the Scarsdale School Board

Jeff Blatt, just completed six years of service on the Scarsdale School Board, giving innumerable hours to the district while also working at a very demanding job at Time Incorporated. Here are the remarks he made at his last Board of Education meeting on Monday night June 21. Read his thoughts on the non-partisan system and the recent election below:

It has been a great honor to serve on the Scarsdale Board of Education for the last six years. I will always look back on this time in my life as one where I gave my time and effort simply because it was good and important work worth doing and doing well. This is the purity of volunteerism that so many in Scarsdale know so well but that honestly, I had not previously experienced in any meaningful way. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to undertake such work, so intensively, ever again, but I am very pleased that I will be able to look back on this period of my life and know that I did my best for as many of my fellow citizens and our children as I possibly could.

I’m keenly aware that anything I accomplished was part of a team effort. Over many years, I have served with fabulous trustees, people like Emily Sherwood, Jeff Samuelson, Bob Steves, Terri Simon, and Florie Wachtenheim. I won’t name each trustee on our current board, but I do want to cite Linda Chayes, who served as Vice President of the Board during the year in which I was President. Linda’s skills were the perfect compliment to my own, and together, I feel that our dialog, our back and forth, our listening to each other and our give and take, got us to the right outcome in almost every case.

This district is run by amazing professionals in every discipline. Mike McGill, Joan Webber, Linda Purvis, Mike Mendelson, Lynn Shain, Jerry Crisci and Jeff Martin are a dream team of School District Administrators. Someday, they’ll be gone, and if you don’t know what we have in these people today, you’ll surely know when they depart. And of course, ditto for our District Clerk, Lois Rehm. People say that Lois runs the district, and of course, they’re right. But let’s not let this inside joke trivialize what Lois really means to all of us. Lois makes us all better and in so doing is one of the many roots of a system that makes the educational experience what it is for all of our students.

In my time on the Board, we’ve done some truly wonderful things. We’ve ended the practice of occasionally starting special education students in one building and moving them to a different elementary school in a later grade based on space considerations. We’ve built a proper new wing at Quaker Ridge. We’ve modernized our PTA gift giving policies. We’ve introduced an AT curriculum that has reminded our nation’s colleges and universities of Scarsdale’s commitment to lead and innovate. We’ve introduce elementary foreign language and expanded and deepened our offerings in the arts. We’ve wisely resisted calls at elementary schools for additional construction. We’ve put through remarkably low tax increases in difficult times. We’ve collaborated with our teachers union on a ground breaking reopening of a contract. I could go on and on. It’s been a privilege to be a small part, for a small period of time, of such wonderful and important endeavors.

We all know that what matters most happens in the classroom. We have spectacular teachers in Scarsdale. I’ve had teachers call me at home at 9pm, and at 7:30am to discuss my children. I know about lesson planning and grading papers and staying after school to meet with students. I know that the job is not 8am – 3pm. And I believe most others in town know it too. To Trudy Moses and the STA, thank you for your great work and ongoing partnership.

To get the best teachers, we’ve paid the best wage, a choice taxpayers often make in their own lives in other areas, be it an architect, plumber, or painter, and certainly a choice that we always made with full disclosure and citizen support. No trustee should apologize for so doing. I urge my colleagues who remain on the board, and those who will serve in the future, to focus on the Budget vote results and what they mean. They are the ultimate arbiter of what the electorate wants, and clearly, consistently, and loudly the vote has overwhelmingly said one thing – we endorse the work of the board and the school district and we support that work. Never forget this. Without superior schools, we have no identity as a town. And given cost realities that are beyond local control, schools will not stay superior on annual tax increases that rise less than 3 percent per year for any sustained period of time. As I have said, there comes a time when less is indeed less. And we are about there.

I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the SBNC for selecting me for Board service. I cannot emphasize enough the difference the SBNC makes in Scarsdale. Our non-partisan system is at the very heart of why we have such great schools in this town, and therefore, by extension, why we have enjoyed great prosperity as a community for decades. In the most recent election to take my seat, some talked about this being the town’s first contested election in decades.

This is simply not true. Every year the school board nominating committee – YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES – pick from among a slate of candidates for school board. Anyone can run. Multiple people run. People go before the committee and vie to be chosen. There are people chosen and people not chosen. THAT IS, by any definition, A CONTESTED ELECTION. I can tell you that I would never have run had I had to do what Suzanne Seiden just did – stand at a train station and hand out material and campaign. What would my campaign have been “vote for me I’m smart and fair?” Or perhaps “vote for me, I have no experience in these matters and you’ve never heard of me, but I know in my heart I will do a good job?”

I can tell you that almost all of the great trustees I have worked with would never have sought election if traditional campaigning were involved. Why anyone would want to encourage a process where people stake out entrenched positions before they have any idea of what they are talking about, when they can otherwise rely on their elected representatives to choose from among the best and the brightest, as they have done for decades, is beyond my comprehension. The sanity of the SBNC process is the reason that so many great people have been willing to serve our community as school board trustees. And thus it is this system that is an important root of our community’s prosperity. What we had this year was pedestrian, a regression to the mean, and a path to the mediocrity that exists in public education throughout our nation. I hope to never see it again in my lifetime.

In closing, I want to thank my family. My wife Erin Foster is a saint. As a general matter, she puts up with me and constant diatribes like the one you just heard. As it relates to this evening, Erin was the one who first brought the idea of board service to my attention. A very substantial contributing school volunteer in her own right, at one point Erin dealt with my being on the school board, my holding down a demanding job, and my attending night school all at the same time. To my three children Josie, Louisa, and Charlie, I’m very proud of you. Keep trying your best in school, as I have tried my best on the school board! I’ll be home more often now, and when I haven’t been there the past six years, I’ve missed you. Thank you all very much. It’s been an honor to serve.