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Raucci is denied bail again
Judge: Accused arsonist is danger to community, self
Friday, June 19, 2009
By Steven Cook (Contact)
Gazette Reporter

SCHENECTADY — Accused arsonist and former city schools facilities head Steven Raucci was again denied bail Thursday as a judge accepted witness testimony that Raucci has said he would harm others or himself should he be released while waiting for his trial.
The decision came as school district attorneys endeavored to fend off five attempts to sue the district over Raucci’s alleged conduct, with attorneys arguing the allegations were not related to Raucci’s job with the district.
Acting Schenectady County Court Judge Polly Hoye handed down the bail decision after interviewing five witnesses whose identities prosecutors are attempting to keep anonymous. The decision was filed Thursday.
Hoye interviewed the witnesses in chambers to determine their credibility. She found enough to hold Raucci without bail pending trial.
“The people have demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that if defendant were released to the community he may abscond rather than face incarceration and would present a danger to the community,” Hoye wrote.
Raucci’s attorney, Ronald DeAngelus, Thursday vowed to appeal the decision to a justice from the state Supreme Court in Schenectady County, calling it “arbitrary and capricious.”..............>>>>...............>>>>.............http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2009/jun/19/0619_rauccibail/

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Sch’dy parents: put your kids in private schools

    On Tuesday, people rendered judgment for a second time on Schenectady’s school budget. The first budget (along with two incumbent board members) was rejected.
    I thought this was because of increased taxation, a top supervisor engaging in criminal activity and a regular stream of headline-grabbing brawls. Actually, the rage was inspired by the fact (so we were told) that the budget was not costly enough; librarians had lost their jobs. This could not stand.
    We were informed (i.e. threatened) that if the second, larger budget was rejected, the school would have no choice but to enact a third, even larger, contingency budget.
    The people of Schenectady do have recourse. Every person who is even remotely capable of doing so should place their children in private schools. Our family has always had our six children in private school. We are not rich, it has cost us a small fortune and it has been worth every penny. We cannot afford to have our children “educated” by a system as corrupt as the one we are witnessing.
    The incoming school board members should be informed that their top priority must be a change in leadership. Perhaps if Superintendent [Eric] Ely is out of a job, he can attend some more sessions in the Steven Raucci seminar, “How to coerce friends and intimidate people.”

    DWIGHT MOORE
    Schenectady     

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School district gambit right out of Sopranos

    So Schenectady voters rejected the school budget. I think it’s safe to assume the reason was taxpayers wanted a smaller budget. But the response from the school district was to propose a larger budget.
    To add insult to injury, they promised that if the revised budget was defeated, a much larger contingency budget would be enacted. In other words, we could “voluntarily” give them what they want, or they would take even more. This sounded more like a Mafia extortion racket than a democracy.
Due to financial difficulties, I’ve had to forfeit Netflix, my YMCA membership, and for three months my Time Warner (no cable, Internet or phone). I have to sacrificially reduce my spending so I can afford to give still more money to a government that can’t reduce theirs.
Note to government: We, the taxpayer, contrary to what you seem to believe, are not a bottomless pit of money!

PETER B. FRANK
Schenectady

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SCHENECTADY
School officials: Budget vote stands; no tampering involved
BY MICHAEL GOOT Gazette Reporter

    Schenectady City School District officials say Tuesday’s passage of its $160.6 million budget will stand and there was no tampering involved in the election.
    District spokeswoman Karen Corona said the machine custodian examined all the voting machines with Board of Education Clerk Richard Yager. “They confirmed that the seals on the voting machines are intact and no tampering of the machines occurred. They also confirmed that the sheets signed by the poll workers match the machines,” she said. “Such review of machines is common in many votes in the county that involve use of the machines.”
    Corona said the machines will stay where they are for now and are being kept secure.
    School officials on Tuesday initially thought that the $160.6 million budget, with a 5.8 percent tax levy increase, had been defeated by a vote of 949 yes to 955 no.
    However, during a review of the machines on Wednesday, Yager found that a poll worker at the high school polling place had transposed two digits to record 106 “yes” votes instead of 160. When corrected, the new districtwide total is 1,001 yes to 954 no. ...................>>>>...............>>>>>....................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....amp;EntityId=Ar01402

Quoted from bumblethru

I agree benny! Just when you think you have heard it all in schenectady. It just keeps getting more ridiculous by the minute. Raucci must have been the hub for EVERYTHING! He's gone and the entire empire collapses and they appear to be scrambling to fix it! Raucci must be laughing like hell right now! Guess he was worth WAY more than he was paid...huh?

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District’s Raucci probe not finished
Saturday, June 20, 2009
By Kathleen Moore (Contact)
Gazette Reporter

SCHENECTADY — The city school district’s investigation into Steven Raucci’s alleged misconduct isn’t over yet, according to the school board president.
Although school board members met behind closed doors Thursday with binders labeled, “June 15 2009 Independent Investigation and Recommendations,” board President Jeff Janiszewski said Friday that the contents were nothing of the sort.
“The investigative process is not finished yet,” he said.
The binders contained recommendations regarding a personnel matter, he said.
“The board met in executive session to do personnel evaluations,” he said. “We did get an update germane to our deliberations, as it pertained to evaluations.”
The board spent hours meeting secretly on the matter. As late as 10:30 p.m. Thursday, they were still talking behind closed doors.
The Daily Gazette has requested a copy of the report under the Freedom of Information Act.
The investigation began in April, when the board hired Rachel Rissetto, the human resources director for the Clinton Essex Warren Washington BOCES. She is being paid $100 an hour to investigate allegations that Raucci mistreated district employees.
Workers have said that he sexually harassed them, telling one woman that she must dress to please him or lose her job and playing what he called a “man game” in which he ran his hand up men’s legs to grab at their crotches.........>>>>..............>>>>................http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2009/jun/20/0620_raucci/

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Throw charlatans in schools, and gov’t, out

    After listening to the evening news, I had to walk off the anger and frustration that developed after stories about the blackmail budgets that Schenectady school administrators proposed, and the farce state government has become.
    How could [Superintendent] Eric Ely look directly into the TV camera and say, “I don’t bluff,” when asked if he would have actually imposed a 15.8 percent school budget? He should be removed from office immediately. No questions asked, you’re done!
    Then the legislators, who are certainly not representatives of the people, don’t do their job and still get paid? That’s known as stealing time. Another action that should be followed by termination.
    How lax have we become to allow these actions to go on? Shame on them, and shame on us.

    BOB LULL
    Rotterdam

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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Board mulls Raucci probe in secret
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

    The doings of the Schenectady school board remain as dark and murky as the doings of the old Soviet Politburo, and just as suspicious.
    Here’s the latest:
    This past Thursday night the board held a closed-door meeting on the shortest of notices, using its standard, legally inadequate excuse of discussing “personnel.”
    What they really did is receive some level of report from the investigator they hired to look into the activities of Steve Raucci, their former head of buildings and grounds now under indictment on charges of arson and terrorism.
    A Gazette reporter saw, before the meeting, a binder on their table headed “June 15, 2009 Independent Investigation and Recommendations,” which sounded like it ought to be the final report of the investigation they commissioned and which was due by the end of this month.
    But the next day, the board president, Jeff Janiszewski, told another reporter in a voice mail message: “The board met in executive session yesterday to do personnel evaluations. Part of that was an update from the investigator. The investigative process is not finished yet, but we did get an update germane to our deliberations as it pertained to evaluations.”
    I feel like a CIA analyst hunched over a Teletype in the old days of the Cold War, trying to decipher the latest communique from the Kremlin, and the first thing I fi gure is that the business about “personnel evaluations” is just a cover to satisfy the requirements of the Open Meetings Law.
    The board did not hold a special meeting on short notice and huddle for three hours out of public view to do personnel evaluations such as figuring out who gets tenure and who doesn’t. They got their Raucci report, or a draft of it, or an update on it, and they were tussling with it. That is my reading.
    Now, that would be highly improper simply as far as the Open Meetings Law is concerned, even if the report might have personnel implications, but there is another, graver question, which is: What in the world was an investigator doing giving the school board a confidential update?
    I mean, part of what she is investigating, or ought to be investigating, is the role of board members themselves in Steve Raucci’s alleged reign of terror. Especially the role of Janiszewski, who supervised the janitors that Raucci delivered to him as campaign workers each year at school election time and who reportedly was told of Raucci’s vandalism and did nothing about it.
    But also the role of all those board members who voted to give Raucci the misleading job title of “head utility worker,” allowing him to avoid a Civil Service test while earning tens of thousands of dollars in overtime.
    And those who voted to assign a woman he was allegedly pursuing to be a “messenger” in his office, where she would be at his beck and call, again without the inconvenience of a Civil Service test.
    Why would the investigator give those very board members an update, whether in writing or in person?
    Why wouldn’t she just write her report and drop it on them?
    Now I hasten to explain that the investigator, Rachel Rissetto, is not exactly a seasoned gumshoe or old Cold War sleuth. She is merely the head of human resources at a BOCES up north and a professional colleague of the Schenectady schools’ own lawyer, who recruited her for this assignment.
    It was Bishop Howard Hubbard of the Albany Roman Catholic Diocese who set the standard for self-examinations a few years ago when he commissioned an investigation into allegations of his own possible misconduct and specifi ed that the final report be made pub-........................>>>>..............>>>>.............http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....0&Continuation=1

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Law would ban higher school contingency budgets

By LAUREN STANFORTH, Staff writer
First published in print: Monday, June 22, 2009

SCHENECTADY -- Assembly Republicans James Tedisco and George Amedore want to ban school districts from adopting contingency budgets that are higher than the budgets voters rejected, after the Schenectady City School District threatened to adopt a contingency budget with a 16 percent tax levy increase if its second budget failed last week.
     
Tedisco said this week he'll introduce the School Budget Vote Fairness Act, a law that would forbid districts from taking exemptions that would bump their contingency budgets above the 4 percent spending increase now allowed under state law.

The Schenectady school district told residents its contingency budget would be about $5 million more, and carry a huge tax levy increase, if voters shot down the $160.6 million budget presented to voters Tuesday. The district said it used the state formula to compute the contingency budget, a formula that allows districts to tack on money for expected enrollment increases. Schenectady said it needed $6.3 million more for an expected 471-student surge this fall. Without the enrollment money, the district's contingency budget would have been $159.2 million.

Tedisco and Amedore's bill would stop the practice of adding money based on projected enrollment increases. But it would allow school districts to take other current exemptions, such as for construction and charter school costs, so long as the exemptions fall within the four spending increase allowed.

A news release from Tedisco and Amedore called Schenectady's proposed contingency budget a "questionable school practice." But Tedisco said Sunday he's not specifically criticizing Schenectady by proposing the new law.

"There should be a stipulation, regardless of what happens, that a contingency must be below the last budget voted on by the citizenry of the community," said Tedisco, R,C,I-Glenville. "We're not blaming anybody, but obviously there's a loophole."

Schenectady school officials thought their second budget failed last Tuesday by six votes. But an election worker apparently transposed numbers from a machine at the high school, swaying the vote to "yes" by 47 votes. The 2009-2010 budget now voted in has a tax levy increase of 5.8 percent...............>>>>............>>>>.................http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=812531

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SCHENECTADY -- The school district has chosen its replacement for infamous former facilities supervisor Steven Raucci, the former school boss indicted on terrorism charges for allegedly stalking his enemies.

     
The Board of Education is expected to approve Tuesday the hiring of Nick Insognia to the job. Insognia couldn't immediately be reached for comment, but it appears he is currently the director of facilities maintenance for The Sage Colleges and a resident of Niskayuna.

Despite some rumors that final candidates might be related to a school employee, district spokeswoman Karen Corona said this morning that Insognia has no relation to any school employee.

His salary in the job would be $87,500 and his start date July 27.

Quoted from benny salami

{TU}... "The School Bored will vote Tuesday on extending Superintendent Eric Ely's contract to 6/30/09."

     This cannot wait until July when the new reform Board memebers are seated? Why even consider extending his contract? This School District keeps plummeting with no end in site.