Didi Barrett announced it yesterday on Facebook:
The proposal divides the entire area into four parts: a covered space with a chalkboard, tables and chairs that will serve as an outdoor classroom; a garden area; an amphitheater-type presentation space for science and agricultural classes; and a storage area that will also serve as an additional workspace for students. . . . The area will be surrounded by plants native to the area.
The outdoor classroom will be situated along Paddock Place, on the lawn beside the historic 1937 school building.
The purpose of the project is to give students more time outside, connecting with nature and learning how to grow food. Hannah Black, who with Christy Asbee spearheaded the project, cited a possible additional benefit. The following is quoted from the article:
Creating a classroom in full view of whoever might be driving by could also serve as an advertisement for wealthier newcomers to the area to consider sending their children to Hudson public schools, Black said.
Black is also quoted in the article as saying:
"I think that's, optically, why we want it outside, because there's people with money that are moving here buying expensive homes, and for whatever reason, through the rumor mill, they feel like the school isn't right for their kids without even trying it. I feel like we've been working really hard to kind of combat that rumor and that feeling, because once you're in here, the kids are amazing."
Incredible win for the community 🔥
ReplyDeleteBlack is right that an outside classroom advertises the school. The catch is what it advertises. And why it is so expensive to sit under a tree.
ReplyDeleteHudson spends $42,000 a pupil and ranks near the bottom of New York on literacy and numeracy to grade level.
Now we mount that on a $1m + chalkboard by the road for the newcomers to admire, checks notes, when for 50-75% of the school term it is too cold to sit outside.
And isn't "time outside" and "grow food" the pitch for the Youth Department's Oakdale grab, and for Kite's Nest's $7 million in public money toward a $14 million riverfront "regenaritive" campus?
More duplication, via coercive taxes, for a dwindling youth population...
Imagine what HFD could have done with that money? Or they could have helped 10 local families whose kids attend HCSD with a downpayment or low interest loan for a house.
A broken record needs to be repaired, not listened to.
DeleteAgreed MS. Time to spend less, get school results up, or consolidate the school with other districts.
DeleteThis year over year record of underperformance needs to be repaired.
Dear MS, sorry but it's only a "broken record" for folks who believe, as Hannah Black indicates above, education is a matter of "optics." Optics? This is what Didi Barrett and Carl Heastie want to spend scarce State dollars on? Optics? No wonder New York State students have slid from among the best educated in the country to barely average.
DeleteGreat news for the school and community! Thank you Amb Barrett and Speaker Heastie.
ReplyDeleteRe: other, “better” uses for this money - that’s not how grants work. The CREST program, like just about every pot of public funds, isn’t a big pile of non-discretionary money; it is earmarked for certain uses.
If anyone wants to know what those uses are and the guidelines that govern them, that’s freely available and easily located information.
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=Community+Resiliency%2C+Economic+Sustainability+and+Technology+Program
Look at the photo, MB.
DeleteStudents: zero.
Politicians on this year's or next year's ballot: several.
HCSD just cut jobs and raised the taxes 5.8%.
This week: $1.6m for a lawn.
CREST is money legislators steer wherever they pick, so this was a choice, not a rule. And they chose a $42k per pupil school near the bottom of the state.
That isn't how grants work. It's how Municipal Capture works.
It sort of sounds like you would prefer if Hudson (whatever you want to consider ‘Hudson’) never received any grant funds of any kind from any source for any program. Or that you would prefer that grant programs didn’t exist at all.
DeleteWhy route it through Albany at all, Michael C?
DeleteThere are four ways to spend money.
1. Your own money on yourself: you mind the price and the quality.
2. Your money on others: you mind the price, less the quality.
3.Others' money on yourself: you mind the quality, less the price.
4. Others' money on others: you mind neither.
A state grant for a roadside chalkboard is that fourth kind.
Which is why your own bathroom beats the coffee shop's, and the coffee shop's beats the one by the waterfront: the closer the spender stands to the bill, the cleaner the tile or more premium the paper.
Tax locally, spend locally, and the people footing the bill actually care what it buys. America used to run this way, and the best states still do.
See Figure 1 of the Friedman Spending Typology: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecaf.12700
Well HCN, there isn’t a single state in the union that doesn’t bundle taxes collected from its residents into grant programs; they just fund them differently (usually consumption taxes rather than income taxes). There’s no state in America that doesn’t redistribute taxpayer money from its Capitol.
DeleteI understand that some folks have a strong preference for what they think America was before the New Deal. Like it or not, we aren’t going back.
Your criticism of the entire system is noted; good luck in your struggle. But local orgs that refuse to compete for state grants are doing their constituents a grave disservice.
Hell, there are *private businesses* in Hudson that have received state and federal grants; I’m very sure that many of our most anti-tax and spend residents patronize some, most or all of them.
If a place is run well, people move toward it.
DeleteIf it is run badly, they leave. That is the whole test.
New York taxes its people harder than any other state. The Tax Foundation, using U.S. Census data, puts our combined state and local burden at ~15+ % of income, first in the nation.
So we pay the most.
And what do we get?
The Census Bureau's 2025 estimates show NY lost about 201,000 residents since 2020, the worst rate of people leaving in the country.
Columbia County keeps shrinking too.
So if people leave, and taxes go up to cover the gap, what do you think happens next?
Many public workers now take their NY pensions and go spend it in retirement in Florida, Texas, Carolinas etc.
People are already voting, just with a moving truck instead of a ballot.
The anger in this thread, and the division in the state and County, is what you get when those paying the bills stop trusting those spending the money.
So we ask again, plainly.
What is your idea to make Hudson better, and attract families living here year-round?
Who in this thread is angry?
DeleteI have already said—many times—that I have no interest in suggesting policy ideas in the comments of a blog. I suggest policy ideas to the people who can make them happen.
Maybe some of my ideas overlap with HCS’s “15 Suggestions to Improve City Hall” that were abandoned six months ago after Idea #6, but it seems like we may never know.
Re: taxes and out-migration - I’m sure these orgs and their research won’t rise to HCS’s standards, but here are a couple of links anyway. tl;dr - correlation is not causation, and high taxes aren’t necessarily the reason people move from state to state.
https://www.ctbaonline.org/reports/debunking-myth-tax-policy-causes-out-migration
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/states-should-forge-ahead-with-new-revenues-in-face-of-misleading-tax-migration-claims
You have now spent more words declining to share an idea than an idea would have cost you.
DeleteOn migration, no think tank study required:
U-Haul tracks where its one-way trucks end up. New York ranks 47th of 50; Texas and Florida rank first and second.
The fleet has reached a verdict. In defending Hudson and NY's broken social contract and tax/migration imbalance, you are like that CNN reporter from Kenosha;
“FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING” while a fire raged in the background."
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/513902-cnn-ridiculed-for-fiery-but-mostly-peaceful-caption-with-video-of-burning/
And we are well past 15 ideas. But we admire the bookkeeping; you are not alone in reading us so closely.
Now write the Guest Op-Ed and stand up for big government and 5 overlapping after school programs in Hudson, it is what Bernie and AOC would do!
Reference for the U-Haul numbers:
DeleteOperational data. Trucks. Feet. Families. Not paid advocacy.
U-Haul Growth Index 2025: where 2.5 million one-way trucks, trailers, and containers were picked up vs. dropped off.
Net gain means people arriving; net loss means people leaving.
(2024 rank in parentheses.)
>> Top 5 (gaining):
Texas (2)
Florida (4)
North Carolina (3)
Tennessee (5)
South Carolina (1)
>> Bottom 5 (losing):
46. Massachusetts (49)
47. New York (47)
48. New Jersey (48)
49. Illinois (45)
50. California (50), last for the 6th straight year.
Same top five as 2023 and 2024, shuffled. New York: 47th three years running.
Turns out very few people rents a one-way truck toward a 15% tax burden and a $42,000-per-pupil school district.
And note what the index cannot see: the wealthy leave via Teterboro and ship the furniture white-glove.
The one-way trucks are the Working Middle Class, moving themselves.
uhaul.com/about/migration
Cool data, I guess?
DeleteWhen people who have migrated out of “high cost” states are surveyed, they mostly cite the same three reasons: housing costs, employment and family. It takes a real set of blinders to look at that and think, “hmm…it’s taxes”.
Here in the Hudson Valley, we have a good amount of transplants from LA County. Folks assumed this was for film and TV tax credits. But when surveyed, those folks said they were motivated by climate issues (droughts, wildfires).
When your only solution is “less government”, every “problem” looks like high taxes.
Happy Flag Day, HCN. Let me know if you ever need help voting with your feet (if Teterboro is too busy) 😉
You clearly have not read our manifesto.
DeleteWe do say New York's gov is too big and over-regulated. That is not a fringe view, and it is not the radical part.
The radical part, the half you keep skipping, is that we believe in growing businesses and creating jobs.
The private kind, not the grant-funded sinecure kind.
Less government is the means. Hudson Growth is the end.
What you keep skipping is that Hudson and the County are shrinking.
Fewer (and more retired) people means fewer jobs, fewer reasons for a family to stay, a thinner tax base to pay for your public spending pipe dreams.
The county empties, consolidation follows, and a smaller working population carries a larger share of net tax takers.
Naming that is not nostalgia. It is math.
And look who arrives to replace them.
The people moving to Hudson Valley, more often than not, already own a home elsewhere. This is the second, or the third.
Soho House is building a members' retreat in Rhinebeck to serve exactly that crowd, and the weekenders from the city.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZdKVBBNNWB/
A weekend campus fills no classroom and holds few year-round local jobs.
A city runs on the families who are here Monday - Thursday.
Thanks for the unnecessary moving offer. Are you already lining up the work, for when lost tax revenue forces the government cuts? ;-)
Add some new idea or write a Guest Op-Ed. Gossips shuts down threads if it does not advance the conversation. As she should.
p.s. If your counterpoint is "people move here from one of the few cities in the country (and states) with equally or slightly higher taxes, that recently burned down because of gov mismanagement... maybe you should get a subscription to The Economist to broaden your perspective.
The point, HCN, is that people move for all sorts of reasons and when asked, will tell you what they are. And it very often isn’t “high taxes”. I know Sowell teaches that correlation isn’t causation; hell, every economics professor does. Do we need to revisit the lesson about hospitals being dangerous because people tend to die in them?
DeleteYou are wasting your time asking me to generate content for a platform that I find ridiculous. It’s very strange that you keep asking me.
I understand that it’s impossible to exit a “conversation” with you without you getting the last word. But I’m done here. It’s worthwhile just to shine an occasional light on exactly what the HCS brand is about. Far more people read Gossips than are familiar with your “manifesto” (which I assume is why you’ve co-opted the comments section; can’t read this blog these days without paying the HCS Tax). Thank you for clearly articulating your beliefs here.
Thanks for the space, Carole.
Why not add a table for School Life News so the kids can be writing what they are learning and producing a newspaper while they're at it.
ReplyDeleteIs this supposed to exciting news ... given the abject failure of the HCSD to educate???
ReplyDeleteIndoors or out, uneducated is still uneducated. Birdsong will not make an illiterate student suddenly grasp critical reading or thinking. And clearly math skills are locally weak — $1.6m for a classroom without walls, electricity, hvac?
ReplyDelete