Information
Discussions with other members of the community—including some during the January 30 Community Workshop hosted by the district—lead us to believe that there’s a lack of information readily available to members of the general public. That makes it difficult for voters in the North Colonie School district to make an informed decision when deciding whether to back initiatives proposed by the administrators.
Purpose
It’s our intent to collect and compile the information needed by North Colonie voters. The district employs hundreds of teachers and administrators to teach the approximately five thousand students who live here. Education and pedagogy are profound branches of knowledge, worthy of a lifetime of study. The issues we will discuss here are necessarily complex, but they are important, and we will strive to give them the attention they deserve.
Future Content
If you have a topic you think we should address, please reach out to us and let us know.
Posts
May 15, 2018 Election
Annual school elections this year are on May 15. Polls will be open from 6:00am until 9:00pm, and voting will take place at the Goodrich School (91 Fiddlers Ln). We’ve put together a summary of what’s on the ballot.
May 16, 2017 Election
Our summary of the May 16, 2017 election, published prior to the election.
Background
In December of 2016, the North Colonie School District held a referendum on a proposed $197 million bond that would be used to pay for multiple infrastructure improvements throughout the school district. This bond proposal was the result of numerous community meetings over the course of the preceding 18 months and was necessary both to bring the schools of the district into the twenty-first century and to create the additional classroom space needed to handle the projected arrival of an additional nine hundred students over the next decade (a roughly twenty percent increase in enrollment).
The proposal was to be paid for in large part by state funds promised the district for consolidating with the Maplewood School District in 2008. However, utilization of the additional state aid required that contracts for the project be signed by June of 2018, a process that includes six to nine months of state review, in addition to the usual architectural and engineering time required to prepare contracts for a project of such scope.
Because state law does not allow school districts to hold elections where voters can cast their ballots in any one of multiple polling locations (as has been practiced by North Colonie for years), the district made the decision to hold the vote at the Goodrich School (a former elementary school, which now houses the District offices) on December 15th 2016. Holding the vote during the Presidential election was discouraged by the Albany County Board of Elections.
Opponents of the bond vote seized on the single polling location and December date as justification for a “no” vote. A well-orchestrated, anonymous “Vote No” campaign sent postcards to thousands of residents and distributed thousands of anti-bond act fliers throughout town.
This campaign, coupled with negative news accounts in the Times Union, helped convince more people to vote no and the bond proposal was defeated. However, it’s unclear if the “No” vote actually indicated opposition to the bond issue itself, or if town residents used the bond vote as a referendum on other issues, such as the use of a single polling location or the recent, unfettered growth allowed by the Town. The district plans on releasing data from its exit polling in the near future; we’ll post links to that information as it becomes available.