On Wednesday evening, June 23, in the packed auditorium of the high school, it was announced that another long-term member of the Board of Education, Ellen Seigel, had resigned. This was welcome news to most of the several hundred Roslyn school district taxpayers in attendance.

But not too many minutes later, it quickly became clear that two other long-term and, therefore, tainted members of the Roslyn Board of Education, William Costigan and Pat Schissel, were not about to salvage some of their dignity and do the same. Not now, not at any time before their terms expire in May of 2005, Mr. Costigan said.

Since, in the face of the strongest of arguments for their leaving uttered repeatedly in a wide range of voices---from angry, belligerent denunciations to the very measured tones of a statement read by three distinguished former board members---since in the face of all this neither was able to offer a coherent, rational response (Mrs. Schissel, by way of Mr. Costigan, refused even to speak when asked why she didn't resign), their refusals can fairly be described as pig-headed.

There is no point in repeating those arguments. However, it is clear that the essential point of all of them is undisputed, even by Mr. Costigan himself: as long as any of the members of the old board continues to sit, the community cannot place its trust in the board as a whole. And if we in the community cannot place our trust in the board, we cannot move forward to repair the damage everyone agrees has been done to us while this board sat. Therefore, they all must leave.

So apparently what we have is a classic, seemingly intractable conflict: an immovable object meeting an irresistible force. Or at least the force we exert might be irresistible, but if and only if we can find an avenue to make our political will effective.

And what might that avenue be? Unfortunately, at this point, the only one seems to be to connect their resignations to the upcoming vote on the revised budget. If Mr. Costigan and Mrs. Schissel believe that remaining adamant and staying on the board will result in the defeat of the revised budget, sufficient pressure will be exerted on them to step aside. If, as they claim, they have the best interests of the Roslyn school district and its students and taxpayers at heart, they will not be able to also claim that a defeated budget and the consequent move to a contingency budget with all the attendant consequences of such a move will serve those interests, and so they will finally see the wisdom of resigning, lest they be exposed as being truly self-serving and arrogant. In short, we have to be willing to play hardball.

Stewart Ronk