IF SCHOOL BOARDS GOT GRADES on their performance like their students do, the Taconic Hills Central School District Board of Education might have earned a D-. And just like concerned parents, school district voters have to figure out what remedial steps are needed to improve the school board’s grade in a course called the Tools of Democracy.

Last June a majority of the school board voted to change the way the school district determines who is eligible to vote in school district elections. It no longer matters whether you have registered with the county Board of Elections or the school district and have voted within the last four years. Now you have to bring some sort of acceptable identification with you each time you vote, according to an attorney for the school district.

It doesn’t sound like such a big deal until you try to remember what kind of tax form or special driver’s license or, of all things, a “voter registration card,” which you’ll need in order to vote each year instead of just showing up at the school on Election Day. Instead of a one-time hurdle when you first register to vote, this one is recurring. It’s bound to increase the time it takes to clear the voter ID checkpoint (will Taconic Hills voters have to remove their shoes and empty their pockets before proceeding to the voting booth?). This will increase voter frustration and make voter turnout even smaller than it already is. Read more…

NOTE TO TOURISTS: Skip this page. Nothing here you’d want to know. You’ll find good stuff to read on the next page or two. This is just, you know, local news.

Are they gone? If so, can anybody explain the tidal surge here of what you might call cultural activities, which must be part of the reason tourists come here, right? Maybe a longtime favorite like Olana is an exception because it’s about history, too. And leave room on that list for Lindenwald, Clermont, the Firefighting Museum and the county Historical Society. Then count on your fingers and toes a few times over all the galleries and stages and performance spaces from Hudson to Ancram, Ghent, Chatham and New Lebanon, plus the Art School, Omi, TSL and PS21 too. Even CSX delivers moving exhibitions of boxcar graffiti.

And now the Shaker Museum and Library plans to remake the three-story brick shell in uptown Chatham village that was at various times a cancer sanatorium, hotel, car dealership and gas station into what promises to be the museum’s new home. Read more…

DEAR LANDLORD: This newspaper has been a tenant of yours for over eight years. You have been a friend for a decade longer than that and yet I still have a few things I don’t recall ever mentioning to you. Now, with your death, I’ll settle for sharing them with our readers, many of whom knew you well.

You talked a lot. The remarkable thing is that when you talked it was about real projects and real problems and real political or social or economic needs. What you said mattered and people wanted to know what you thought.

How is it that a human being could be in as many places doing as many things as you did? But there you were at the Blue Plate and Rewraps, and Chatham Area Business and Arts (CABA) and the Columbia Land Conservancy and WAMC boards and co-founding the Real Food co-op and helping save the Crandell Theatre and, in past years, not only sitting on the Columbia Memorial Hospital board, but funding the hospital’s Hospice Unit, to name just a few items on your schedule. You were the evidence that proved something in the planning stage was likely to become a reality, as in: Oh, Judy’s involved. That’s news. Read more…