Duty is when something needs to be done and you can do it.
Duty is when God has given you talents which can be used for the benefit of others.
Duty is what motivates honorable people.
Duty is what Terry Dade wouldn’t recognize if it walked up and slapped him across the face.
Rochester got conned, and Terry Dade got the gold, and that’s all she wrote.
And now the people of Cornwall-On-Hudson can say they have a black friend.
And the children of Rochester can say they have a black-hearted betrayer.
Because at the bottom of all this is the fact that a man who had the ability and political support to truly better the lives of the children of Rochester chose to turn his back on them. He had the ability to help, he had the opportunity to help, he had the duty to help, and he chose the thirty-three pieces of silver.
The city of Rochester has one of the highest concentrations of black poverty in the nation, and one of the least successful school districts in the nation, and a yearning need to give its children the baseline opportunity that a basic education can provide. Terry Dade was the answer. Terry Dade was the chosen one.
Terry Dade was believed in. By principals who gathered to his side. By teachers who supported him, even when their jobs fell to his budget cuts. By parents who believed in him. By a mayor and an assemblyman and a former lieutenant governor who hurried to his defense. By all four unions that work in the district.
By a battered but proud and noble city that worried and prayed for the future of its children.
Terry Dade was believed in.
But he was only running a con.
“The decision is not final,” he told principals, days after it was final, “I still have some prayer and reflecting to do.”
I wonder to what god.
At the end of 36 hours in which he had ginned up community support for himself, Cornwall Central School in Orange County announced that he was their new superintendent. While the people of Rochester fought to protect him from a school board he said was victimizing him, he had already signed and sealed a deal that benefits no one but him.
Cornwall-On-Hudson is 89.2 percent white. And 7.29 percent Latino. And 1.5 percent Asian.
That doesn’t leave any percents for black.
Or for non-English speakers.
And just seven-tenths of one percent for non-citizens.
The median income is $103,000 a year, and the average house goes for $300,000. Its high school scores among the top 15 percent in the nation.
Rochester, on the other hand, is 38.5 percent black, 36.8 percent white and 17.8 percent Latino. The median income is about $32,000 and the average house goes for less than $80,000. It’s district can literally be in the bottom two or three percent of schools in the nation.
Rochester has need and Cornwall-On-Hudson has privilege, and Terry Dade chose the deeper trough.
More to the point, in a position where he could make a vast difference for good, he chose to be a highly paid figurehead at a lily-white boutique district.
The children of Rochester need him, the children of Cornwall don’t. And instead of serving where he was needed, he served where he could coast. Three elementary schools and a high school, all currently expertly run and well funded. All currently some of the best schools in the nation. And you wonder if he was brought in to improve the school or to improve the look of the school.
Not that it didn’t have diversity already. One of the children depicted on its website does have dark hair.
Complicit in the betrayal seems to be the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester. Pulled in a few years ago to help run Rochester’s East High, it was the Warner School that reportedly put Dade and Cornwall-On-Hudson in contact.
That was so nice of them.
Of course, Dade was a threat to the funding of their pet project, and a rival to their preferred superintendent.
And it is what it is.
It’s like we were all in “The Music Man” but it ended after the first act and the itinerant conman never had the change of heart and became good. And we got screwed, right here in River City.
Terry Dade said he was different. He said he was here for the long run. He said he was focused on the children. He said the school board was the problem.
And he lied.
All day, every day.
And for all the betrayal we feel, no one was more wronged than the sons and daughters of Rochester who are still denied the opportunity that gave so many of the rest of us our shot in life – a good, basic education.
Terry Dade had a duty, and he didn’t do it.
And one day he’s going to have to stand before God and explain why.