What’s the message Buffalo Students First is sending to voters this weekend promoting the incumbent candidates, three days before the school board election? That depends on where you live in the city of Buffalo.

First, here’s a mailer sent by Buffalo Students First to voters in the 144th Assembly District, represented by Sam Hoyt. The message on the back begins: “The politicians and special interest groups want to take over control of our schools. We can’t allow that to happen…”

If that’s the case, what does one make of  this mailer sent by Buffalo Students First to city voters in the 141st Assembly District, represented by Crystal Peoples? Voters there, primarily African-American, received an open letter from Mayor Byron Brown, Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples, and State Senator Antoine Thompson, endorsing the incumbent slate of Florence Johnson, Catherine Collins, and Chris Jacobs.

Are Brown, Peoples, and Thompson not politicians? And is Buffalo Students First and/or the Buffalo Niagara Partnership  not a special interest group? News Flash: THE POLITICIANS AND SPECIAL INTERESTS CURRENTLY HAVE CONTROL OF OUR SCHOOLS. And it’s clear they will spend a great deal of money in the hope of keeping it that way.

The blatant hypocrisy displayed by Buffalo Students First in sponsoring these two divergent messages should be offensive to every voter in the city. But there’s plenty of shame to go around here. Why would Brown, Peoples, and Thompson lend their support to a slate of candidates in an election that is held in May for the express reason that it should not  be political?

And why would the Buffalo Niagara Partnership hide behind a phony name like Buffalo Students First, when it is clear that they are directly involved in the funding of this campaign that preaches two different messages to urban voters based largely on the color of their skin? The evidence of their involvement is here in this one-page financial disclosure form, signed by Glenn Aronow, Director of Government Relations for the Buffalo Niagara Partnership.

Then there’s Saturday’s Buffalo News, which contains this editorial endorsing the incumbents.

(While writing this blog, I have received a report from a resident of University Heights that all the cars in the neighborhood had anonymous flyers on the windshield this morning, referencing this Buffalo News endorsement of the status quo.)

“Ideally, a School Board member encompasses a strong work ethic, willingness to do the necessary homework and the ability to ask the right questions and to come to a fair decision without undue political influence. Florence Johnson, Christopher Jacobs and Catherine Collins have done so, and deserve to continue in their current roles,” the News editorial staff opines, apparently with a straight face.

Is it not interesting that their very own columnists have offered contrary opinions? Consider Rod Watson’s May 29, 2008 article that begins, “Despite the many things the Buffalo Board of Education is probing in the McKinley High School fiasco, one critical issue has yet to surface: What to do about board members who appear to lie to the public?”

Or Donn Esmonde, who wrote on April 16, 2008: “Put the pieces together, and you get a picture of what happens when a school system is run by the integrity-lite and the ethically challenged. They all will tell you that nothing matters more than the kids. Amazingly, their noses do not grow an inch when they say it.”

Watson summed it up also on July 3, 2008 in an article entitled: School Board lacks guts to do right thing. He begins: “Of all the reforms possible in the wake of the McKinley High School fiasco, the most obvious has yet to be mentioned: Students need a union. And lobbyists. And bigger allowances, so they can make campaign contributions to buy off legislators who write the laws that Buffalo school officials are hiding behind to avoid holding anyone accountable.”

“You can thank the unions and their grip on Albany’s legislative machine, as well as their intimidating ability to affect a School Board candidacy in elections with miniscule turnouts,” he continues.

Shall we also thank the editorial staff of his paper for their ability to try to do the very same thing?

Tuesday’s school board election will be decided by city voters. It should be decided by the parents of children who attend classes every day in the city of Buffalo, and by every city resident who recognizes the critical importance of improving the quality of education for the children of our impoverished city—where only 46% of students graduate from high school in four years—a number that has worsened over the past five years under the the questionable guidance of the incumbent at-large school board members, who now seek an additional five years to finish the job.

Their biggest success, they claim, is a $1 billion “state of the art” school renovation project that is so hopelessly out of touch with progressive green-building standards that the electrical bills to run the buildings will be an albatross around taxpayers’ necks long into the future.

The title of the Buffalo News editorial nails it on the head: Tuesday’s Buffalo school board vote will determine future of district.

Wouldn’t it be a surprising miracle if, when voters step into the booth this Tuesday, May 5, they remember the little voices of the children who deserve so much better, and forget the propaganda dumped upon them by business people from Niagara Falls and the suburbs, who would have us believe that things are just fine in the Buffalo Schools?

Vote!

Lately Buffalo News columnist Rod Watson has been nailing his columns. Take today’s piece about the quandary presented to Buffalo Police Commissioner H. McCarthy Gipson by the Dennis Delano case (which AV’s Buck Quigley also wrote about today):

Delano sits at home— just like that former cop whose fate also was resolved in Police Headquarters: Cariol Horne.

Horne was the officer fired last year after stepping in when she felt that other cops were choking a man being arrested in a domestic dispute over mail.

The comparisons are intriguing.

Many consider Delano a hero for helping free Lynn DeJac from prison after she was wrongfully convicted of killing her daughter, Crystallynn Girard. Yet department brass consider him an outlaw for giving TV newscasts footage of the murder scene and results of a polygraph test of a suspect who had been granted immunity.

Similarly, many call Horne a heroine for putting her police career on the line in a scuffle with officers she felt were choking a man taken from his home on flimsy charges that a judge threw out. She was fired for acting, despite flashing back to a decade earlier when a Buffalo man died from pressure exerted to his neck during an arrest.

Delano acted to get justice for a girl whose life was prematurely ended; Horne acted to save a life she felt was under threat.

Delano’s alleged insubordination was premeditated, with time to ponder the consequences; Horne’s was a spur-of-the- moment decision in the heat of battle, the kind cops usually say shouldn’t be second-guessed.

But the biggest difference is the elephant in the community, the one we’ll pretend doesn’t exist: Delano is white; Horne is black. More to the point: Delano helped white victims of injustice, while Horne went to bat for a black man.

Now look at his last column, about a meeting of big names in the local development community to discuss Governor David Paterson’s proposed changes to the Empire Zone program (I can’t find a link, so I’m pasting in the whole thing):

They gathered to talk about one problem; the composition of the group illustrated another.

When our big developers met privately last week to save the Empire Zone tax-break program, there was not a minority or female entrepreneur in the room.

What a surprise.

And it raises a question: How much support should they expect for a program that has worked best for downtown interests while ignoring Buffalo’s most distressed communities?

In fact, instead of meeting privately, they should stage a rally in Niagara Square. No, make it Martin Luther King Jr. Park; they can always MapQuest it.

Once they find the East Side, they can have previously unemployed workers take turns at the mike describing how they’ve escaped poverty, while minority companies show how they’ve expanded, thanks to Empire Zones targeted at stretches such as Genesee Street.

State leaders would then race to expand the $1.2 billion program, not cut it in half and boost job-creation requirements, as Gov. David Paterson proposes.

On the other hand, if the only people at the rally are the ones getting out of limos and stepping gingerly through the park in Johnston & Murphy loafers, maybe that would say it all.

Buffalo News analyses over the years have documented that the zones work best for banks, law firms and downtown interests while doing relatively little for the most depressed parts of the city or for job growth.

Not that the zones haven’t done some good. Developer Rocco Termini, who convened last week’s confab, says his Ellicott Lofts wouldn’t have been successful without the zone. He said tax breaks early on helped make rents affordable when there was not much else to attract tenants to a downtown he calls “distressed.”

Termini and others point to Tops markets on Jefferson Avenue and Niagara Street as examples of how the program has helped minority neighborhoods.

“If we don’t take advantage of the benefits, then we have no one to blame but ourselves,” Termini says of other blighted areas. He adds that Paterson’s proposal would kill upstate and that applying new job standards retroactively is “unconscionable” and would undermine trust in future programs.

On that last point, he’s right; even program critics call that unfair.

But what’s the greater unfairness, changing the rules in the middle of the game or having a program designed to bolster blighted neighborhoods whose benefits instead flow primarily downtown and to the largest corporations and most wired developers?

Assessing Empire Zones, Henry L. Taylor Jr., director of the University at Buffalo’s Center for Urban Studies, said that there has been no effort “to use development of business to drive community development.”

Rebuilding communities — not just helping businesses — is what Taylor has been preaching for years, and something the zones were supposed to do.

Termini agrees that more is needed in some neighborhoods but says the solution would be enhancing help for the poorest census tracts, “not taking Empire Zones away.”

But that’s exactly what the zones were supposed to do. And if the program’s most ardent backers had been pushing that broader perspective all along, they might have more allies now as they try to save their own financial skins.

As it is, one good will come from the controversy: We’ll never again have to hear downtown developers complain about high taxes. After all, taxes wouldn’t be as high if the rest of us didn’t have to make up for the breaks they’re getting in the Empire Zones.

He’s my new favorite columnist.