I grew up in a lighting family, my dad was a lighting sales rep, and I studied industrial Design. I hate recessed lighting. It's an awful, no brain, cookie cutter approach to lighting. I do like having a central room light, often a ceiling fan fixture, and then you can accessorize with lamps. What you might like best is a "torchiere", a bright light on a stand that points to the ceiling so that all the light in the room is reflected down. Very soft and comfortable, some even have a reading lamp secondary light on the side of the pole.

https://www.amazon.com/Torchiere-Standing-Adjustable-Stepless-Dimmable/dp/B08YRC5FXH

>Learn from successful schools such as McNair

There's nothing to learn when a school's success is based on skimming the best students from the rest of the district. Your premise would hold a lot more water naming a very successful lottery entry Charter like LCCS as a model. It produces superior results on a fraction the budget of a district school, and yes, it still has to pay for special ed students.

You missed the point of trying to give away junk, it's supposed to be less work not more! Having you take one or two and leave him with the pile of crap is not the goal!

This is simply not true. My son is a professional 'mountain man' who spends his time all over the Rockies, Cascades, Alaska and Vermont. He has service from an ATT MVNO that has not been a problem at all.

Sounds good as long as it's cheaper. I've always had cell service from MVNOs, and think anyone who pays top dollar for direct service with the carriers is a fool.

Horseshit. I grew up in Nassau County with the Republican machine that produced Al D'Amato, the Republican doppelganger of Bob Menendez. It was every bit as corrupt. Machines are machines are machines.

She's apparently counting on HCDO corruption and voter apathy to not only to keep her office, but probably to see her through to the mayors office. Not bad plan given our history. Princesses will princess, you can all fucking eat cake!

Those filters do not apparently function in spreadsheets other than actual Excel, which is often not owned by people like me who have no reason to invest in the MS pro suite. In LibreOffice (open source) I get this error "Ranges containing merged cells can only be sorted without formats." I managed to get them to sort in Google Sheets, but not by those filters. So I need to download the files, then upload them to google!

Government agencies should not publish data in proprietary formats. Jersey City distributed a sheet about boiler inspections in a Word doc instead of a PDF! Yes, I know PDF is originally Adobe, but at this point there's many readers/writers and I've never had a problem with it. Word often has problems with interoperability, as apparently does Excel.

But, to get back to your inquiry as to why focus on teachers rather than bloated admin staff and salaries: teacher are 56% of the overall budget while admin is 8%. I shouldn't need to tell a CPA to follow the money!

Have you ever taken a look at the JCPS "user friendly budget"? I did. I found line item terms that Google couldn't define!

I'm trying to see how we spend more than anyone else in the nation on our school system. Sorting helps understand the context. Say we are near the top of our group in teacher salaries, but what if the group only varies by a few percent, then that's not conclusive of much, right? But without sorting by spending, that's hard to see.

I downloaded the files since they no longer allow you to view the data online as in the past.

Just pointing out the lowest hanging fruit, even with bloated admin staff there's still a lot more teachers, that's where most of the money goes.

I have a mea culpa, I already admitted I'm not an Excel wiz, I was misreading the spreadsheet about which was the most recent data and quoted from 2019-20. But it raises more questions.

From file CSG3.xlsx at https://www.nj.gov/education/guide/2022/ind.shtml, The teachers salaries went from 85/92 in 2019-20, to 55/92 in 2021-22! That's quite a shift in a scenario with 92 datapoints. It says the actual cost per student dropped from $10,807 to $10,120. Seems way more likely to me they're cooking the books not cutting payroll. Are you actually a CPA? Do you know how to fix these files so they can be re-sorted?

>The very over-simplified version is that the schools are kinda meh fucking awful but also super expensive to run (as a result of the state cutting back it’s funding decades of generous contracts because we weren't the ones paying). “Education Matters” candidates are backed by the teachers union and would attempt to prioritize quality of education staff pay and benefits. They are also the current group with control over the board.

Fixed this for you. As I posted elsewhere today, the fact that maintenance staff make more than 98% of their NJ peers, teacher 92%, and the district ranks 11th percentile (bottom) in extracurricular spending tells you all you need to know about Education Matters priorities.

The fact that Change For Children is backed by developers doesn't mean that no one should stand up to the idea that unions should control our schools.Someone has to! One could even argue they're literally more invested in JC's future than school staff who live in the suburbs.

Data source: https://www.nj.gov/education/guide/2022/ind.shtml

Very true. I will point out that both JC and Hoboken have done a crappy job of maintaining both the stripes and the plastic poles. One spot in particular, Harrison between Observer and NY Ave, the stripe is gone and it creates a hazard for drivers who know the bike lane is there! Several times when I've kept left out of the bike lane I've had asshole drivers pull up to the right of me in the bike lane even though the block ends in a single lane right turn only.

Also the daylighting combined with the bike lanes creates an untenable situation for delivery drivers. Some blocks there's now simply no place to pull over except double parking in the bike lane, and they have to get their job done. This is where engineering rather than enforcement has created a shitshow.

Don't be a total dick. The OP hasn't lived in JC even if they've lived in NYC. If you live Downtown you may not need a car but if you live in Society Hill you sure as shit do.

No one is forcing you onto the sidewalk. If you can't stay in the street you shouldn't be riding.

The spending data the state makes available is deliberately impenetrable. They used to provide a spreadsheet per district with all the categories of spending statistics, but I guess that was too useful, now each category is a spreadsheet for every district statewide.https://www.nj.gov/education/guide/2022/ind.shtml

They provide defective spreadsheets where the sort functions don't work! I'm not an excel wizard, but with patience you can mine out tidbits. How about these comparisons of cost to other large districts in NJ.

Salaries and Benefits for Operations and Maintenance of Plant: 90|92. That is, we pay more per student than 89 out of 91 other NJ districts.

Teachers: 85|92 They're among the best paid in NJ, which means the best paid in the nation.

Extracurriculars: 10|92. We spend less than 81 out of 91 peer districts. No wonder our kids hate school! We're taking their school enrichment experience and giving it to overpaid teachers and maintenance workers.

Of course, but if they're rent-controlled then they might be well protected since the city uses CPI and don't take taxes into account as far as I know for allowable rent increases.

But by how much? Lets say there's a 3 family worth $1m and taxes go up 0.3%. That's an extra $3k, or $83 per month per unit. More, but not devastating by itself to most renters.

But I buy it by the pint or less, not by the gallon or whatever they sell!

I'm not any happier about the taxes than anyone else, but I just want to inject some reality in to the "taxed out of our home!" hyperbole. If you owned for the last 5 years you saw a 30-50% increase in your value, you're sitting on a pile of equity, you're not poor. Lets say the rate goes up to 2%, do you really think that over the next 10 years your appreciate will average less than 2% annually?

So many people want the financial benefits of owning property but aren't willing to pay the overhead. If you are cash poor, there's a number of ways the banks can help you pay your taxes.

As I said during the reval, the city would be smart to set up a "tax deferral lien" bond system in lieu of the much maligned reverse mortgage. The way it would work is if you can't pay your taxes, the city puts a lien on your property to be resolved upon eventually transfer (similar to reverse mortgage), and sells the bundled liens as bonds. You essentially get a loan at interest, the city gets it's money, the bondholders make profit. Everybody wins, including the property owner who still gets their appreciation while not paying taxes.

OMG, there is a dumpster fire over on Nextdoor that reminds me of the heyday of JCList. People who have no idea what the reval was all about and have no idea what's going on with the schools.

There are downtowners who made a million dollars in the last 10 years on their row house complaining they can't pay a 2% property tax! The disinterest in what goes on in this city until it reaches into their purse is just fucking amazing.

Mmmm, bulgogi. Last time I had it was in the food court of a bigass mall in Seattle when went to the mall for a well rated Chinese restaurant that told us a 2 hr wait. We were just looking for food before crashing in a motel for super early flight!

There used to be a big steam table type deli at 14th & 6th that had Bulgogi platters to go in a hot case for cheap. Coming back from a seeing a client in Queens I'd get off the F, get my Bulgogi fix, then hop on the PATH.

Turns out I was wrong, I checked the stuff from Asian Market, it listed the usual suspects including fish sauce. Interestingly, it had both onion and scallion.

That does sound like a hoot! TIL there's such a thing as a kimchi fridge.

Damn, same answer as to u/Iluvsnowbunnies, I don't think I can make the commitment to all kimchi, all the time! I've never even cooked with it yet, I just throw it on a snack platter with a bunch of Eastern Euro stuff like herring, cheese and salami with some good bread.

Wow, don't know if I'm quite up for that! Maybe the farmers market thing would work for you?