Letter to the Community Announcing My Candidacy

Post date: Mar 31, 2013 11:50:15 PM

Dear Friends in the Croton-Harmon School District:

My name is Joshua Diamond. With great pleasure I announce my candidacy to become a trustee on the Croton-Harmon Schools' Board of Education.

We all have great hopes for our children, for our community, and for our society as a whole. I am convinced that we have the greatest opportunity to affect our future for the positive by providing all of the children of our community with an excellent education. We must support each and every one of them with an education appropriate to their talents, needs, desires and aspirations; one that provides a strong foundation for their lives — inculcating in them a love of learning and a desire to better themselves through continued education. Beyond providing basic knowledge, we must teach them to be creative problem solvers, effective team members, compassionate friends, and critical thinkers - building in them a foundation for strong careers that will allow them to affect their families, community, nation, and the world for good.

By most measures, including state assessments, we already have great schools here in the Croton-Harmon district; schools which strive diligently to achieve the aforementioned goals. My sons, N'yoma (6th grade) and Max (11th grade) have done well here. Our students are upstanding members of our community — doing good works locally and globally. They win awards ranging from the academic, to the scientific, to the athletic, to the creative. The success of our graduates is significant; they move on to great colleges, and profitable careers.

The high quality of education provided by our schools is a fundamental foundation of Croton's social fabric. It keeps our property values up — as homebuyers are looking for districts with strong schools. It makes us a better village, imbued with strong community bonds and caring neighbors.

But there are storm clouds on the horizon. Increasingly, external forces drive local educational content — often negatively. Mandates such as excessive amounts of standardized testing, mostly tailored to troubled schools elsewhere, could derail our success. Some mandates seem to serve solely to enrich testing companies, extracting private profit from public schools, while providing little real benefit. Others seem driven by political agendas unrelated to education. Limited budgets driven by recent economic realities and the property tax cap could restrict our ability to provide our children with the education they deserve, by driving the district to reduce offerings, rather than expand them.

As a trustee I will commit to making our great schools even better, despite the difficult crosswinds affecting us. I will focus on the actual education of our youth rather than on the mere satisfaction of external mandates, and explore how we can meet our requirements without sacrificing quality of education. I will strive to strike a balance between the need to properly fund education, and the understanding that high property tax rates can be devastating to retirees and to families of limited means. I will guide our district in supporting a corps of administrators and faculty that implement creative, effective, and forward-thinking solutions to the educational challenges of the 21st century. And I will always speak out for doing what is right for the children.

I hope that you will vote to elect me to the Board of Education in the upcoming schools election, on May 21st, 2013.

For the kids,

Joshua Moses Diamond