Drinking Drugs Weapons Harassment- "A Healthy Cross Section” of Valhalla Students

We are shocked to read the latest letter home to the Middle School High School parents telling of student fights, excessive drinking and drug use, unsupervised weekend events, weapons, and harassment among a “healthy cross section” of Valhalla students.

These incidents are somehow impacting on “our ability to remain focused on the business of educating our students”.

Focused? This is a district where unethical behavior and skirting the law are commonplace. A district where budgets are padded, where the superintendent and business manager negotiate $1 a year leases without board of education direction. Where buildings are leased to Park Avenue corporation at $1 a year in violation of the New York State Education Law. Where “off the books” deals are made to dump contaminated fill on school property with no records kept. Where an unneeded $300,000 artificial turf field is purchased through an equipment lease agreement to evade the legal requirement of a taxpayer referendum. This is a district that no longer has a track because we are waiting for a million dollars in foreign money from a pyramid scheme involving the cousin of the dirt broker who brought thousands of tons of untested landfill onto school property. No this can’t be happening in ethical Valhalla, where board members are so keenly focused on their, excuse me, “the” children.

Wake up parents, there are no grown ups home. Through a series of very bad decisions, the High School gym is at the 3rd graders school, the High School track is missing, the new baseball and softball fields are locked, contaminated and the state has come in and taken over the site. In the past two years the district has built and rebuilt and elaborate 500 foot decorative wall at the high school that is so unsafe it requires signs posted through out the grounds warning that anyone sitting on the wall will be removed by directive of the board of education. Meanwhile people attending games sit back into the woods on bleachers borrowed from the local little league. There is now an elaborate, unnecessary and dangerous playplaground at the high school involving rock climbing and high wire acts. Teacher training on the equipment is taking weeks, while uncertified substitutes fill-in in the classrooms. Did you know the pressure treated wood is contaminated with arsinec?

Whatever these student issues are they should be the focus of the administration and staff, not the dirt brokering, property management and circus ring leading that have taken so much time and money away from the children.