Report from September 8, 2009 City Council Meeting

The highlight was the Marconi remarks concerning Section 8. When asked why the Section 8 numbers steadily climbed to 1662 vouchers, he thought the previous councils were "asleep at the wheel" and they just kept approving the numbers without really checking out the impact the numbers had on the community.
I'm sorry but I just don’t buy this excuse. Are you telling me that they didn’t understand where all this HUD money was coming from? That Mr. Price didn’t understand or see the declining number of students and needed to show student growth to justify the new schools and more of our tax dollar. That City Council and the School Board didn’t know that these huge numbers of HUD housing would cause a burden on the schools system?

No one would commit to reducing the voucher number saying that it "may happen in their plans" but no promises from any of them. Marconi did say that now that we have the Section 8 program in place, that council was committed to make it the "best it could be" in efficiency, code enforcement and policing of violators.
City Hall can’t reduce Section 8 because it has become our “Economic Development Plan.” It is the cash cow that is now feeding the payrolls of City Hall. As the HUD program has grown more and more jobs that were paid for from the General Fund are being paid for from HUD fund. Are you telling me that over the past 5 years that the council members never questioned where and how all these salaries were being paid?    

The last two topics discussed- Section 8 and City Council's "vision" for the future of Middletown were important topics and not enough time was dedicated to these. It got interesting when the School Board-(Andrew, Fiora and Tyus) told the Council how their Section 8 was affecting the school test/performance results in a negative way. Ms. Scott-Jones spoke on behalf of Council when she mentioned not stereotyping Section 8 parents as lazy and uncaring and Section 8 students as being poor performers as students. Andrew tried to clarify saying she was "generalizing". Fiora asked why 1662 vouchers and council danced around the answer for as long as they could. Interesting confrontation on perspectives from the Section 8 onslaught between the schools and council. Don't think the schools are any more pleased at the Section 8 saturation than some of us are here.
Well I believe that the school board is worried that we will never give them another dime of tax money. However I will agree with Ms Scott-Jones..these terrible test scores are not from just Section 8 students. We simply aren’t doing the job of teaching these students…Shame on us.

Council's "list for the future" mentioned the same things we have been talking about here- streets, infrastructure, jobs, econ. devel., downtown revitalization, tearing more houses down- more greenspace ...... nothing new- nothing doable with this group. Just talk.
Unless we stand up to City Hall millions more will be spent in their downtown area. They have already paved the way for this to happen. Remember the 54% slum rule.

Oh and yeah- be expecting a school operating levy in May 2010 - so says Tyus. The schools also had a presentation on questions asked about building a new high school and rehabbing the old one for a middle school or building both new buildings.
No scores…no money…it’s just that simple for me.

Follow the money in the above posts and you will find the top performing schools.