Longtime school Trustee Shaughnessy resigning
KINGSTON, N.Y. >> Longtime school district Trustee James Shaughnessy has resigned.
Shaughnessy said his resignation, effective 5 p.m. April
25, is intended to pro- vide voters time to determine who will fill the remaining year of his term.
Shaughnessy, who was elected in 2006 and reelected five times, said during a telephone interview Wednesday that it was important to give the community a say in Board of Education membership.
“The deadline for petitions for being on the ballot is April 26,” he said. “I want my seat to be vacant by the end of the (preceding) day so that they’ll have to put it on the ballot and there’ll be four seats instead of three seats.”
Shaughnessy, a retired computer programmer, declined to discuss the reason for stepping down except to say there are opportunities he is considering that would keep him from fully participating in board business during the coming year.
Shaughnessy served two non-consecutive years as board president, from 2011-13 and 2019-22, and considers efforts to have the social, emotional, and mental health of students become part of the fabric of all district programs. He said it was significant to have that emphasis included with what became the overall district goal of seeking a 100% graduation rate.
“You are never even going to get close to it if you don’t pay attention to mental health and social/emotional well-being of the students,” he said.
“Twenty to 25% percent of adolescents exhibit some mental health concerns by the time they graduate high school,” Shaughnessy said. “We’ve said for years and years that we provide free breakfast and lunch for students who can’t afford it because a kid who is hungry is not going to learn. So, I’ll give credit to (the Rev. James Childs, a former board member) because he said that kids are not going to care unless they know that you care about them, and I say that kids are not going to learn
unless they are happy with themselves.”
Shaughnessy also credited boards over the past 17 years with improving community relations by maintaining an administration that was able to successfully have a $137.5 million high school expansion completed and have it come in about $12 million under budget.
“Everybody does better in a nice building,” he said.
Shaughnessy said one of his first efforts when joining the board in 2006 was to work with other trustees in ending district consideration of buying the former Chambers Farm, an area south of what is now iPark 87 and in the Esopus Creek flood plain. That site had been proposed by Herzog’s owner Brad Jordan, who was paid $150,000 in options while the district considered paying $3.5 million as a purchase price.
A little more than a decade later Shaughnessy was again encouraging the board to reject Jordan’s Kingstonian project, when the developer sought district endorsement for a payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement. The board in December 2020 did vote against support for those tax breaks in a 6-3 vote but Jordan was able to ultimately get the necessary county approvals for the still-unbuilt housing and retail mixed-use project on North Front Street.
“I fought really hard to prevent that PILOT from going through and there wasn’t 100% support on the board and I don’t understand it,” he said.
“So I’m going out having fought Brad Jordan for three years almost,” Shaughnessy said. “It’s full circle almost.”