Jay Lee for Putnam Valley School Board

05/29/2026

Nothing will ever feel like enough for this moment, but please consider supporting the Toone family to let them know that their community will always be here for them in the big and small ways.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/supporting-officer-toone-after-tragic-loss

(I did my best to research this link and it does appear that this is the legitimate gofundme for the family. It was shared by the Westchester County Corrections Officers Benevolent Association, a handful of news sources and trusted sources.)

Our hearts are broken as we support Officer Gregory Toone and his family a… Jessica Shannon needs your support for Supporting Officer Toone After Tragic Loss

05/28/2026

We are just so saddened by the tragedy that struck our community today. Our hearts are with the Toone family and all those who have been touched by them. The grief of losing such young lives is overwhelming. It is unthinkable.

There are simply no words for a loss like this.

05/20/2026

I'm just getting home late from the vote counting at PVES this evening. It has been a long (and startlingly hot) day, so I will keep things short.

First, I am happy to report that both the School and Library budgets have passed!

Second, I am humbled to have been elected as a Trustee for the PVCSD school board. I am stunned and touched. Thank you for that trust -- I do not take this responsibility lightly. I'm mindful that this was a close race, and am more than open to hearing from all members of the community in the coming days (and years!) on your priorities and perspectives.

I also want to thank Crystal Hernandez for her service on the board over the last 3 years and during the course of this campaign. I've never had a political "opponent" before, but I am grateful for the respect and graciousness of her campaign. Win or lose, we will always be neighbors and parents in this community that we both love. That is incredibly valuable.

As for the future, there is much to learn, much to navigate and much to do. I hope you will come along on this journey with me. I think it's actually going to be a lot of fun. More soon :)

Send a message to learn more

05/19/2026

Today is school voting day in Putnam Valley. Come out and represent the Public in Public Education. If it feels like it doesn’t matter, I *promise* you — it does.

05/19/2026

Also, for the avoidance of doubt, I’m very much also voting Yes to support the students and the kids 😄.

05/15/2026

These videos started as a campaign tool to reach people like me — busy but interested, voting but not fully engaged. And of course, more passively receiving information than actively pushing to understand the big picture. But they soon also became a way of sharing things I found interesting.

I intend to continue to keep digging and making these videos — it’s up to you whether you’ll be following the journey of a first-time school board member, or of an active parent who is getting more deeply involved. Either way, I hope you find them valuable.

05/14/2026

This is part 1, which is an economic analysis of the tax side of the equation. Part 2 will be about the budget side.

05/13/2026

I posted a lot of really dense serious stuff last night, so I thought I would offer a palate cleanser: the real story of my campaign headshot 🙃

Back soon with more discussion of the budget vote.

05/13/2026

Patty, here's part 4. Thank you for the questions. Quite a diverse set of issues...!

The Enhanced Senior Exemption

Here’s the TL;DR. Yes. I am largely in favor of the Enhanced Senior Exemption, but I do have concerns about the impact on other vulnerable groups. I believe these concerns will be partially addressed by available data from the Town’s tax bills in January 2027. But I don’t like making half promises, so I reserve final judgment until we can see those numbers.

And now the long version.

As a quick primer, in PVCSD there is currently a 50% tax exemption off assessed value if two conditions are met: 1) the homeowner is over 65, AND 2) the household falls below a low-income threshold ($50K). That means if your home is assessed at $500K, qualifying seniors can knock $250K off of their assessed value when taxes are calculated. (And of course, property value is the basis for school taxes – which I don’t love, but that’s another issue altogether.)

In December, Albany passed a law that allows local districts to implement an “Enhanced Exemption” which sets a sliding scale of exemptions ranging from 65% for those making less than $47K all the way down to 5% for people making just under 58K. Putnam County and the Town of Putnam Valley enacted the Enhanced Exemption in February but the school district (which is responsible for a much larger chunk of our local property taxes) did not. That brings us to today, where the question will be re-visited by next year’s school board.

In principle, I am in favor of the Senior Tax Exemption increase. If you had to put a number on it, I’m about 80% of the way there. I believe in protecting the vulnerable and supporting our seniors -- no one should be losing their home over taxes if we can help it. That part is simple.

Here’s the 20% where I’m not fully decided. There are three consequences that flow from the Enhanced Exemption:

- Everyone Else’s Taxes Go Up. Every tax dollar exempted from one taxpayer is redistributed to the rest of the tax base. It does not reduce the overall amount of the tax levy and it does not affect the budget. By the district’s own calculations, the Enhanced Exemption will redistribute an estimated $240K in taxes from low-income seniors to the remaining 4,300 taxpayers in PV – an average of $55 per tax bill. In tax levy terms, that is roughly a .5 percent tax increase in a community that can have very strong opinions about 1.9% tax increases from year to year. Personally, as a taxpayer, I am willing to bear that increase. Your mileage may vary.

- Other Vulnerable Groups Will See a Tax Increase. There are a lot of other people in Putnam Valley who are also on a fixed income or low-income. This includes retirees under 65, people on disability, households with lower income and any other group of homeowners who don’t meet both conditions of age and income. Most importantly, this includes other seniors who are just above the exemption thresholds.

In other words, many low income seniors would be asked to pay higher taxes to cover the exemptions of slightly lower income seniors. Anyone saying that this is a tug of war between “protecting seniors” and “not protecting seniors” is not painting the full picture. This is about trading off some groups with others (including seniors versus seniors) and we need to be careful when we do that.

- Households Who Pay Zero Tax. Tax exemptions stack. That means a household can stack various exemptions (Veterans, Fire Dept, Ambulance, Enhanced STAR) until they have a 100% exemption. As a result, some number of households will pay zero tax under the new exemption. I am not personally stuck on this point, but I can understand the objection that nobody should be paying absolutely zero taxes.

Finally, the data. The district can see tax bills, but it does not have access to W-2s or income information for each household. As a result, it was not possible to see exactly how the Enhanced Exemption would play out without passing it.

But, the good news is that the Town (not the district) has already passed the Enhanced Exemption. That means by next January, the District should be able to see Town's shared data that tells us how many seniors in each income level qualified. That will in turn tell us exactly how much overall tax will be redistributed to other taxpayers, and also leave enough time for some fact-finding -- both on income data for district residents and to hear from the community on their perspective. Better data means better decision-making. My gut says that the impact will be small enough that the exemption can be implemented responsibly. I hope it’s right.

And finally (I’m so sorry, yes there’s more), there have been at least 2 bills introduced in Albany in this session and the last that would reimburse school districts for any tax impacts from Enhanced Exemptions. In other words, the tax burden would not shift – the State would cover the new exemptions. (This is how the STAR exemptions work.) To me, that makes this a no-brainer. I would support those bills and any similar bills. That is tax relief for low-income seniors with no meaningful impact on anyone else.

So, to your last point Patty -- frankly, “Lobbyist” is not one of the many careers I have undertaken to date - but yes, I would certainly be willing to give it a try.

05/13/2026

Questions 2 and 3. Hey Patty! I am going to combine these two questions – as they seem to be circling a larger topic around transgender students. I am also tagging Maranda Zocchi-Gritz who asked me a similar question elsewhere re: "Girls in Sports" and "Protecting Girls."

My first response to these questions: is there a specific instance or incident that is causing you to raise these questions? This is important because even though this has become a divisive issue in the national discourse, I have not seen the sports issue arise in our schools – which matters. Because I expect and hope that in real life(off the internet and outside of the news cycle) any and all of these situations would be handled with grace, compassion and generosity by all of the administrators, teachers and students involved. As with many difficult issues, I believe we can solve them together as a community – and we wouldn’t need to resort to public debates about certain “types of children” or god forbid, a specific one.

I was a bullied kid. My brother and I were mercilessly picked on for something that seems relatively uncontroversial – being slightly chubby Chinese kids. I will never forget the moment my mother told us that a family friend of ours, Steven, had committed su***de at the age of 14 because he couldn’t take being bullied anymore over the same things. It changed me forever. I embraced kindness. It made me a zealot against bullying. I cannot stand it. I won’t stand for it.

When these issues come up, I think…what would life have been like if my school district had an active debate about “how should we treat these Chinese kids in our classrooms?”

Because I do wonder, what must it feel like to be a transgender girl in our schools? Not only might my social life be hard enough (kids can always be cruel), but now there are grownups in the world – in the news, in public office, in my community talking about people “like me.” They aren’t talking to me. And they don’t know the real me. And not only are they talking about my hypothetical interest in sports, but they’ve gone even further to assume that *I* am an inherently dangerous person. That they must protect my classmates from me without any benefit of the doubt about who I am as a human being. I can’t imagine how it feels to be talked like this in the abstract – as a threat.

Me. Someone they’ve never met.

So, if you’re trying to see if I believe we should protect the rights and interests of all of our students, including transgender students. Yes, I do.

Furthermore, in New York state our anti-discrimination laws have strong protections for transgender students, including the right to participate on athletic teams that align with their gender identity. This is state law. This is not a district call. But even if it were, I do not view it as the role of a school board member or the district to place a student under scrutiny on the basis of personal beliefs or theories of biology and gender identity. These are all our kids. They deserve the same love and acceptance as any other child.

I am not blind to the fact that this is a difficult question. People’s feelings of discomfort are valid expressions of their own beliefs. Deep down I believe our current norms on gender will eventually look much like the norms on race 100 years ago. I am aware that there are possible issues around safety and comfort for participation in contact sports and shared facilities – but I absolutely do not think these are issues that require broad, public discourse that can create an unwelcome, hostile environment for any of our kids. I stand for protecting all of our children, and do not accept the premise that some inherently need to be protected from others based on their own sense of self.

If things feel complicated, that’s OK. It’s not supposed to be easy. But I begin with kindness and support.