As homeowners in Hudson face a possible 5.8 percent increase in school taxes, Hudson Common Sense takes a hard look at the cost to the taxpayer of a related Hudson institution: the Hudson Youth Department. The special report titled "Half the Kids. Twenty Times the Budget" can be read here.
This report is extremely messy and problematic. As a resident (with no kids) it saddens me to see disparate issues being jumbled together into a mis-leading infographic. Not only is the math incorrect, but adding cost based on non-profit orgs is not logical.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, the attack on the Friends of Hudson Youth makes no note of the fact that the City of Hudson does not have a Parks Department leaving the Hudson Youth Center to account for daily management of a 14-acre park with a public swimming beach, trails, and recreational areas.
Thank you for reading, continue reading until you hit the footnotes, Melly
DeleteRight now you have three objections, zero rebuttals. How is the math incorrect? Show us, please.
The math is sourced, rounded down, and a forensic accountant challenge stands open.
The nonprofits are counted because taxpayers fund all of them for the same 720 kids. And "we manage the park because there's no Parks Department" is our argument, not yours: that's mission creep with an MOU and no exit clause.
Besides - running a youth center that quietly became Hudson's parks department (without a democratic vote) is like hiring a babysitter who redecorates your house and then invoices you for interior design.
The job crept. The bill didn't.
This article really does feel like a case study in the dangers of AI-assisted argument making- when you take a bunch of loosely connected information, skew the framing to support your point, package it in a polished “data-driven” format, and hope nobody checks whether the math or comparisons actually make sense. I will say though, Hugo is prolific at producing this stuff! It makes one wonder what one earth he would do with all his time saved, if he had just moved to another town with lower taxes and less community resources. Imagine the possibilities!
ReplyDeleteThere’s honestly too much here to fully unpack, and I don’t have the time or interest to spend any more time inside the deep cynical Hudson Common Sense universe, but a few things jump out immediately:
The proposed HCSD budget is $59,171,704.
District enrollment is 1,474 students.
That comes out to roughly $40,143 per student, not the inflated numbers being tossed around here.
That budget pays for teacher salaries, pensions, transportation, buildings, maintenance, utilities, athletics, arts, special education mandates, food service, and the enormous amount of infrastructure required to run a public school district- this number is not much different from our neighboring districts- and we have a high population of kids with extra needs.
Also, HCSD serves students from Hudson, Greenport, Claverack, Livingston, Stockport, and parts of Ghent.
So I genuinely do not understand the logic of then switching to dividing separate youth organizations by only the 720 children living within Hudson city limits and stacking those numbers onto district spending, as though they are all serving the exact same population in the exact same way- unless your just trying to get as big enough number to enrage people to vote no!
And yes, taxes are frustrating. Everyone feels squeezed right now. But personally, I want to live in a community that invests in kids! I want our children to grow up surrounded by parks, programming, support systems, food access, teachers, mentors, and neighbors who actually care whether they thrive!
I did the math on my own proposed school tax increase: it comes out to about an extra $11 per month.
Thats one less latte, Hugo- we’ll survive!
Just to end VOTING NO ON THIS INCREASED SCHOOL TAX HURTS OUR KIDS!
The real number is closer to $60k, if you include state and federal spending.
DeleteWe rounded down, a lot. And we used HCSD's latest presentation btw;
https://gossipsofrivertown.blogspot.com/2026/02/some-intel-from-school-board-meeting.html
And don't worry... re: "too much here to fully unpack"... we will unpack all the details over the next week in daily drops.
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Your math on HCSD is close to ours (we use actualized spend rather than the proposed budget) which gets you to $41,994, not $40,143. Round either way: it's still Manhattan private school money for bottom-quartile results.
Read Footnote 3, it will explain your denominator error.
Also... we can double the spending per student to $100k if you want, and double HCSD school taxes... it will just come with the trade-off of massive "displacement," of the working middle class.
Pick one.
This comment from Susan Troy was submitted by email:
DeleteOkay, so we're spending $40,143.00 per student. That's a big number. Is it a big enough number, per student, or should we spend more? And if we should spend more, how much more? Specific numbers, please. Enough to entirely wipe out the latte budget for the month or for the year?
I don't spend money on lattes, so no, that's not one less latte for me. It might be two less boxes of coffee on sale at CVS for me, though.
Where are the specific numbers on how many students, by grade, are reading at grade level, today? You know, the return-on-investment numbers.
How exactly would fewer $100K + administrators "hurt our kids"? I graduated from HHS, and never had a single interaction with a principal or an assistant principal. Ever.
And we seemed to have completely glossed over the piece of the $4 million hole the HCSD is in because staff wasn't correctly data entering new hires. Who dropped that ball, and have they been, I don't know, trained, corrected, chastised, fired? You know like, in the real world? In the real world where the hard working, non-unionized taxpayers work?
Lots of adjectives in the pro-tax increase arguments. My father, who was a newspaper editor, always maintained that the more adjectives a reporter had to use to write the story, the less of a story that reporter had.
Hannah - On the AI joke: the report took several months, draws on primary source Common Council minutes from 2005, IRS 990s, Census data, the MOU itself, and actualized budget figures. We consulted attorneys, board members of HCSD and the Boys Club, from the previous millennium. We pre-drafted anti-slapp filings to save time.
DeleteThe footnotes run longer than most local op-eds. We spoke to a dozen contributors across all five wards, gave City Hall and the Youth Center a full week to respond or rebut before publication, and several of our editors and contributors have spent years working inside these very NGOs. We edited out several incredible damning facts and records to keep this narrow and impersonal, and to not saddle the current well meaning administration with their predecessors' mistakes.
We spoke with past mayors and teachers. We spoke with residents' whose families built the physical school.
And we still do not know the inside of this machine and how many people make a living from "serving" the youth.
If that's AI, we'll take it, but the audit offer is very human, very public, and still unanswered. If you know the FOHY leadership, they have gone incommunicado, can you ask them to go 50/50 with us on a financial audit of total spending on Youth in Hudson (private and public, let's get to the truth, together)?
As for our editors moving to a lower-tax towns: we already have a foot on the ground in several, which informs this piece. The staggering contrast in lost potential and unfairness.
The report tries to explain exactly why that keeps happening, and who pays when it does.
Did you figure out your denominator error?
Melly Mimms - exactly. A full summer program that employs counselors, life guards , field trips, buses , the supplies to run the camp. I’m sure I’m leaving something out. These children are our most vulnerable population . As a community, we should all help to insure they have what they need.
ReplyDeleteIf they are the most vulnerable, why are their reading scores in the bottom quartile of New York State after twenty years and a twentyfold budget increase?
DeleteThe moral case for spending more is also the moral case for demanding results.
Chatham gets better outcomes for a fraction the cost. The children (and their parents) deserve both.
And pay for a PORTA JOHN at $250 per month 12 months of the year?
ReplyDeleteBill - is this a Youth Center expense? Or a City of Hudson (DPW) expense? Or a FOHY expense? Where is this porta potty/john?
DeleteThe Youth Department maintains the park? Any park? I believe that's Public Works, not Youth.
ReplyDeleteHannah Black: Excellent points -- but our kids can't read, write, do basic arithmetic or graduate in a timely fashion. Consequently, the HCSD is a failed organization by any measure. Voting "no" on the budget sends the message that the HCSD is already hurting our kids and our families, that it's time to stop pretending it's not, and that more money won't fix this bloated, broken-down and sad excuse for a public school system.
And Nick: It's nice to provide for the Hudson youth, so long as I'm only paying for Hudson youth. But I'm not -- I'm paying for plenty of out-of-town kids.
It’s a death by a thousand cuts; a little bit more every year, with diminished returns and a declining youth population. Many of us are at the breaking point. A major reason for the dwindling youth population is that working families are being priced out. Taxes are a major factor in that. And those high taxes combined with an abysmal ranked school district keeps people with children from wanting to move here. There will be no kids left to serve, and few taxpayers to foot the bill. The numbers aren’t hard to understand and the receipts are in the article. But if that’s too much to read, and it is a lot, just ask yourself which way have things been trending. These issues are worthy of debate, and whenever someone dares to ask questions they get laughed off dismissively by those who are friends of and connected to the few who benefit from the status quo. I’m sure the many high salaried school district administrators and directors of the numerous “nonprofits” are nice people. It takes a lot to change the momentum of an overweight ship that’s off course. I think the taxpayers have a right to ask questions when so much is being asked of them. It must be nice to have the income or an undervalued property assessment to be able to laugh it off. My family’s taxes are more than our mortgage. Hardly a few lattes; but what do I know, I get my coffee at Stewart’s.
ReplyDeleteAs a 24 year resident of Stockport, I would like to clarify, for those that don't seem to understand the HCSD property tax system, we pay (are penalized?) at the same rate as you big city folks. The proposed new budget will add another $500/year to the $8400.00 in school taxes that we already pay for the children we do not have, and the ridiculously low graduation rate of the HCSD.
ReplyDeleteExactly.
DeleteAnd the kids in Stockport do not have the dozen plus nonprofits that the kids have in Hudson.
Please see the Table in Footnote 2.
18 groups and counting...