The children of the Kingston City School District, their summer vacation come to an end, went back to school on Tuesday. Elementary-level students returned to schools which were dramatically less, shall we say, tuneful.

Two weeks ago, KCSD Superintendent Paul Padalino broke the news to the Board of Education and the community that due to elementary students’ low standardized test scores, music education would be cut back from twice a six-day cycle to once, reducing it by 50 percent. “We know that the people in our music program are fantastic, but our main priority is 65 percent of our students who are reading below grade level,” Padalino said, noting that the move brings music to the same once-every-six-days status of art and library classes.

The news was not greeted warmly by school board trustees. “I can't imagine it could ever be proven that adding in the time that would be taken to do those musical instruction times would help improve those numbers,” Trustee Stephanie Kearns said, referring to math and reading scores. “I worry that that messaging can get lost and it can villainize any sort of enrichment opportunity that students may have, which to me is essential to a student's well-being.”

“The research says that music students do better in subject areas,” Trustee Herb Lamb said. “I was two years ahead in math and science, and I thanked my music teachers for that.”

The nosedive of test scores in the pandemic’s wake is certainly not confined to Kingston. Your Editorial Team spent some time over the holiday weekend using the State Education Department’s online school report cards site to make some comparisons between the KCSD and surrounding city school districts. There’s a humongous amount of data available on the SED site; if you’re wonkish in that way, go take a look.

In 2025, 37 percent of Kingston students grades three through eight were deemed “proficient” in English Language Arts. The statewide number is 53 percent. Poughkeepsie came in at 28 percent. Hudson’s figure was 31 percent. (We went with Hudson instead of Newburgh for this editorial as we think it’s a more apples-to-apples comparison with Kingston than Newburgh.)

Math is a little tricker, as the site inexplicably didn’t provide overall grades three through eight numbers for Kingston math tests (ironic). Last year, KCSD third-graders led the pack with 48 percent proficiency (60 percent statewide). Bringing up the rear was the eighth grade with 15 percent proficiency (47 percent statewide). Second lowest were fifth-graders at 19 percent (54 percent statewide). The rest of the grades hovered around 35 percent proficiency. Counting backward in school years, 2025’s eighth graders (assuming that when the SED says “2025” it means the 2024-25 school year) were in third grade when the pandemic hit – disrupting their education at a critical time for developing skills. The good news is that Kingston’s 2025 third-graders had not only the highest proficiency rate of all those grades, they had the smallest gap between their proficiency and the statewide number. Does this mean the school system is healing? Poughkeepsie’s combined grades three through eight number was 23 percent proficiency (57 percent statewide); Hudson’s was 25 percent proficiency.

Now on to science, tested at the fifth and eighth grade levels. Kingston’s fifth grade came in at 26 percent proficiency (45 percent statewide), compared to a disconcerting 18 percent for Poughkeepsie and 29 percent for Hudson. Eighth grade breaks it down into regents and non-regents categories, with the latter coming in substantially poorer than the former, but combined, Kingston was at 48 percent proficiency (57 percent statewide). Poughkeepsie’s was a disconcerting 23 percent; Hudson took the silver with 30 percent.

All of this is to say that as bad as its numbers are, Kingston’s substantially better off than Poughkeepsie or Hudson when it comes to test scores. Better off enough to justify cutting music by half? Hard to say.

According to existentialist thought, we as individuals decide, whether we realize it or not, what to assign value to and what to not – no object or idea is anything in and of itself and may be thought of in whatever way an individual cares to. Take standardized test scores, for instance. Many KCSD parents, especially the ones who chose to send their kids to the Montessori-model George Washington Elementary School, think tests are overblown at best and an assassin of true education at worst. But the school system, starting with the State Education Department in Albany and tricking down to every public school district in our state, assign a very high value to standardized test scores and use them to make all sorts of decisions about what happens and what doesn’t at their schools. In other words, this is a case of math trumping the humanities - another part of the tragic and overwhelming trend toward reducing every aspect of our behavior to an algorithm.

We do think students need to be better educated, and we can’t argue with an emphasis on language, math and science. But it’s going to come at the expense of those relatively few students whose best pathway to improving those subjects goes through the music room. It might even thwart the potential future musical careers of some who will be victims to institutional goals being placed above individual goals. Kids only go through the school system once – whatever the schools are like when they’re of school age is what they get. Those who were in earlier grades when the pandemic struck may well lag their peers for the rest of their lives, but time will tell with that.

We wonder, though, why it’s music getting cut, with a potential loss of music teacher jobs down the road, when it looks like it’s reading, math and science teachers who are failing? Maybe they’re the ones who need replacing? The district’s core programs are clearly not doing the job, so Paladino's solution is just to do more of what’s already not working. No one could be condemned for calling that total bureaucratic incompetence.

We also wonder why if there was so much pushback from school board members, the board didn’t just tell Padalino to scrap the plan and figure something else out. But our years of experience tells us in both school districts large and small, the superintendent runs the show, not the school board. It’s designed, actually, to be the other way around.

It’s unlikely to happen, but we’d like the district to reconsider this move and take a stand for the arts in the face of the 21st century’s rapidly increasing dehumanization.

We’re a community that treasures music, and we think the schools should reflect that. Resistance to the twin behemoths of algorithms and the state education system may be futile – they both have ways of getting what they want, and some of them are not pretty – but we shouldn’t give up something so essential to the human spirit without a fight.