Granto prepares to bid farewell the Falls schools
Falls school chief held line on taxes, leaves in the wake of critical audit
NIAGARA FALLS — When Carmen A. Granto started his first job in the school district in 1966, there were 100,000 people in his native city and 19,000 students in more than 30 buildings. The Vietnam War and civil rights movement were in full swing.
“We were just starting to integrate the schools . . .,” Granto recalled. “There was a lot of trouble. Kids were fighting. It was a mess.”
Granto often found himself on the front lines helping make the schools and integration work. While an assistant principal at Gaskill Junior High School in 1974, he got slashed with a box cutter while stepping in between a clash between a black pupil and a white pupil.
“I had 110 stitches to my hand breaking up that fight,” he said. “The kid who did it was back to school before I was.”
More pain would follow in a career that comes to a close this week, but so would plenty of fulfillment.
Granto has been through a lot in his four decades — the last 16 years as superintendent — in a district that has shrunk considerably as economic decline and poverty took over the city.
Come Wednesday, he will leave the district smaller, and better, than he found it, say those most familiar with his work.
He has chosen to step down earlier than the end of the school year, his original plan, in the wake of a blistering audit of district finances — and with a golden parachute that would be the envy of almost every worker in the Falls.
“So does the audit look bad?
Yeah,” he told The Buffalo News Niagara Bureau. “Does it make some people think I was underhanded? Sure. People who don’t like me do. People who do don’t.
“All I know is I’m glad when kids tell me I do a good job. I like that. My proudest accomplishment is that no kid has ever told me I was unfair to them.”
Granto leaves a district much different than he found it.
Racial tension has been replaced with poverty and a decline in student support systems that include traditional families and the influence of religion.
There are 7,366 students in the district today, roughly a third of the enrollment when Granto began teaching in the Falls, and 11 school buildings, seven fewer than when Granto became superintendent in 1992.
At the start of Granto’s teaching career, the city had three high schools and four junior high schools. Today, there is one high school, and Gaskill and LaSalle — former junior high schools — are preparatory schools for seventh-and eighth-graders.
The falling numbers have allowed Granto and the School Board to keep the amount in the school budget paid by local property taxpayers steady at $25 million the entire time he has been at the helm.
“I’m not bragging that I haven’t raised taxes,” the superintendent said. “I just can’t.”
The majority of city residents are poor — more than half are on some sort of public assistance — “[so] if you raised taxes, we’d just end up with a lot of vacant homes, and what good would that be? So we had to increase revenue from the state,” Granto said.
“That meant the superintendent’s job had to change to being a fundraiser. That meant going to Albany to lobby for more money by telling the school district’s story, going after special aid funds and aggressively going after grants.”
He said he often went to Albany over the years, and with the help of elected representatives who included Assemblywoman Francine DelMonte, D-Lewiston, and State Sen. George D. Maziarz, R-Newfane, succeeded in raising the percent of state aid to the district to about 80 percent from about 60 percent.
“We went down and explained the plight of Niagara Falls,” he said. “It’s no secret we have economic hardships, so it was a fairly easy sell if you can get people to listen.”
Varied funding
Granto said he hired grant writers to help, which has resulted in the district receiving “an average of about $22 million in grant money” to help fund programs annually during his tenure. The district also tapped into revenue streams that include about $750,000 a year in slots revenue from the Seneca Niagara Casino and $2 million annually in cash and low-cost electricity from the New York Power Authority as part of the Niagara Power Project relicensing agreement.
Granto also cut administrative jobs and about 70 teaching jobs.
“You want to spend money on programs or kids, not bricks and mortar . . .,” he said. “We changed the way the services were delivered. We needed fewer people, and it was more cost-efficient.”
The district also decided to attack head-on the issues of school safety and underperforming students during Granto’s tenure.
Technology programs and intensive teacher training have been among the tools used — along with the belief that any student, regardless of color, creed or economic standing, can succeed in school through hard work and with help from a compassionate staff.
Granto credited his staff for the many individual student successes in the district; 99 percent of seniors graduated last year, many of them with college credits from Advanced Placement courses or other programs through Niagara University or Niagara County Community College.
“Everyone is dedicated to making sure our kids get what they need to excel,” Granto said. “We have our share of knuckleheads, but most of the kids try to do their best. And we spend a lot of time teaching them that they are somebody and can be somebody better and that they have a future. A lot of our kids come to school and think they are stuck and can’t ever get ahead. But we go out of our way to encourage them and show them they they are just as good as anyone else. . . . The sad thing is the local economy is so bad they have to leave the area to get work when they’re done with college.”
Nicholas E. Marchelos, the district’s former support services director who retired last year, said Granto provided the district “with very progressive leadership.”
“We have continually improved in the most important area — student scores — in what clearly is one of the most economically distressed school districts in Western New York,” Marchelos said, “while maintaining our facilities in a way that is second to none.”
3 new schools built
Granto also was able to build Niagara Middle School — now Cataract Elementary School on Girard Avenue — Niagara Falls High School and Niagara Street Elementary School at no cost to local taxpayers.
He said Niagara Falls High School was built in the late 1990s because the city only needed one high school, and staying with the old Niagara Falls High School or LaSalle Senior High School would not have worked because of the rivalry between the two student bodies. He said the district was able to sell the community and the students on the new school and “made it special for them” in many ways, such as providing a laptop computer for each student to use.
“We made a bargain with the kids. We said we’d give them the best high school we can possibly afford, but then said you’ve got to do the best job you can in school by working up to your abilities. For the most part, it’s paid off,” Granto said.
Granto said the district has been thinking long-range since he took over. For example, Niagara Falls High School was intentionally built too large so that the preparatory schools could be closed down some day and the high school could become a seventh-through-12th-grade operation if student population continues to fall.
Also, in those plans, he said, “One of our first rules is you have to have a safe, orderly environment. So we spent a lot of money on security and have police resource officers working in the high school, along with a security staff, to make sure the streets don’t enter the school.”
The district also adopted a “no tolerance policy” to curtail violence and other problems in the schools.
“We told them if you put your hands on somebody, you don’t stay in regular school,” Granto said. “You’re not going to ruin things for kids who are trying to learn. So we kick them out and send them to an alternative school or to be taught at home so the only people they can annoy are themselves.”
Angelo Massaro, the district’s lawyer, said a major reason Granto stayed in the top job so long was that he was “motivated first and foremost by what’s best for students.”
“I’ve always truly admired him,” Massaro said, “for wanting to give our students — through technology, through great facilities, through teacher training, through intervention programs — the best opportunity to succeed, even though they come from a poor city and many of them from families that are really struggling. I don’t think he has ever lost sight of that during his superintendency.”
Spending concerns
The success in the district has at times been colored by concerns about spending and criticism that Granto and the School Board have orchestrated win-win situations for both the district and themselves.
At least a half-dozen of Granto’s relatives work in the district, including his sister, Deputy Superintendent Cynthia
A. Bianco, who will become interim superintendent while the School Board launches a search for Granto’s replacement.
Some School Board members also have family members working in the district.
School leaders are known to do quite a bit of traveling, and dining, on the district’s dime, which is among the practices that led to a scathing audit of district finances released in October.
The state comptroller’s office also found the district overpaid 272 employees more than $500,000 over the reviewed time period, July 2005 to December 2007 — most of which has since been paid back — and the district regularly circumvented the purchase order process, placing it at risk for making unauthorized purchases.
A review by The News of receipts for Granto’s district credit card also showed other expenses, including:
• Two golf outings in 2005 that each cost about $1,200.
• An $806.74 dinner July 21, 2006, in La Jolla, Calif., and $77.02 for drinks the same day, including $30 for Corona beers and a $9 Grey Goose vodka.
Granto said the audit found a couple of items, one where he was paid more than $10,000 for unused vacation time he was not entitled to and for a personal charge made to a district credit card for about $2,000 for a flight on a personal business trip. He said he returned the money to the district when auditors and district staff discovered it. He said he was unaware that his travel agent accidentally made the one charge to the district credit card instead of his personal card and that he was paid the unused vacation time when his staff told him he had it coming. “I didn’t know. I have staff to keep track of that,” he said.
Granto said the audit was the low point of his superintendency.
Granto also padded his retirement nest in the waning years of his job.
With his pension based on the last five years of service to the district, he started cashing in unused sick and vacation days, as allowed by his contract.
At one point, Granto had accrued 747 sick days and 45 vacation days. When cashed in, those days are worth a total of about $220,000. By cashing in the unused days, Granto has notched his take-home pay up to as much as $200,000, including his annual salary of $131,000.
As opposed to taking a lump sum payment, Granto has been cashing in the days over three years, a move that will add about $33,000 to his pension, according to News calculations.
Board Vice President Don J. King, a member for more than 30 years, said Granto was a great superintendent.
“His major contribution was he brought stability and credibility to the district,” King said. “He could talk to anybody — including the [unions] — and get them to buy into the system. He was very convincing. He was effective. He got things done.”
Aaron Besecker of the News Niagara Bureau contributed to this report. pwestmoore@buffnews.com
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