Alan Ng, We Have Your Kids, 8/10 (same 8/10 he gave Dune).

Coe’s crime noir begins as a murder mystery, who’s killing the National School of Character? Undeniably brave parent-gumshoes, Coe & Gilger, investigate when a corrupt consolidation endangers their kids. They dodge administrative lies, harassment, a growing gauntlet of board prohibitions & restrictions, Union lobbying, coercive voting blocks and (caught on camera) ballot stuffing. The corruption at the top infects schools across America. The schools owners are a tax cartel of banks, insurance & wallstreet who consume one third of school taxes. They’re the ‘education industry” giant who close 1600 American schools a year, bagging two billion in fraudulent costs for schools no longer schooling and employees no longer employed. These gangster financiers find child-killing cluster munitions, genocidal fighter jets, & elective perpetual piratical war. As the duo’s talks & newspaper articles name the corporations endangering education and their kids the admin. grows hostile installing sinister million-dollar facial recognition cameras and hiring, over the cries of "appalled" parents, armed police intimidation. To no avail. Truth prevails. In a small New York Village parent-heroes, Coe & Gilger, become the first in the nation to stop a school closing.

Mr. Smith goes to the school board, Emmy-winning artist, Wayne Coe, in a Michael Moore-style performative exposé, an investigation of the billion-dollar education industry ransoming kids for cash.

Have American schools gone the way of Congress, the Executive branch, and courts, where money runs all, and representatives can’t even pretend to represent the public?

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

We Have Your Kids as a true crime, social drama, a social justice documentary about school political & financial corruption. 

Like a detective movie we parents became  flatfoots. Our Film Noir was a traditionally low-budget affair, a no-budget film. Yet, it’s 8/10 review was equal Alan Ng’s 8/10 Dune review for a $150,000,000 film. As an indie filmmaker I had to be endlessly resourceful creating animations, two system sound, the music score, & gain guerrilla access to meetings & school records. 

Chatham’s school board recorded nothing & kept no public records when we arrived. Over three years I assembled the largest archive of public school records & meetings in private hands.This first time access created a cinema opportunity for an exposé on state school corruption. The oft heralded "public school crisis" is entirely caused by the deliberately under discussed education industry/admin/Unions who fatten the 1% who own school. Fatten the elite off NY students half of whom are on assisted lunches.

After finishing the film the first thing I noticed was typical ed. docs are industry puff pieces with starry eyed kids, passionate teachers & education overachievement. We Have Your Kids followed the community/consolidation conflict, closing schools for corporatized profit endanger education & kids profit. Parents & taxpayers give great reviews but as a festival programmer told me, “your film doesn’t give those stabs of pleasure that the festival funders expect.”

To save our school the community opposed the Teacher’s Union, corporate elites, & their state school administrators and managers who’d kill it. Why teachers? In NY teachers are tenured in five years, making an average salary & benefits of $105,000 a year in 13 yrs. In Chatham a stable $50,000 a year in private industry is a solid salary. Teacher privilege is enforced by the Teacher’s Union voting bloc which institutionally captured board. The employees manage budgets, bonds & school closing - which they vote for. Not one teacher or admin. would speak to us on camera. Fear dominates. Four Mothers independently said, “I won’t go on camera, they’ll retaliate against my kids.” 

My financial noir covers subgenres of true crime & espionage & political corruption. We were not just investigating we infiltrate secret meetings. I used animated infographics to define invisible systems the public suffers under. My art mission has always been to make the invisible visible. Since the most visible antagonists were the administration, by using FOIL, behind closed door meeting video & board meetings audio, I used their own words and actions to indict them. We didn’t fight to win. We fought because quality education and safety is right, we had to fight radical evil even in public school, they endanger not only my kids but all children worldwide. Our school taxes finance mass child slaughter and starvation; accepting pedocidal investments in the “Teachers Retirement System” is insane. School financed pedocide is a powerful reason to resist school taxes, and “take our kids off their buses. Take our kids out of their schools”, (James Baldwin).

The explosive train motif reflects the realities of the fearful setting, two schools surrounded by explosive trains with one escape route. The motif for me creates that body shaking anxiety from the inexorable corporate gravy train grinding our life’s money away as it rolls over the disempowered community.

I didn't used the word “corruption” in the film. Reviewer, Alan Ng, used “corruption” six times. He compared We Have Your Kids to Scorsese’s Pension/Gangster film, The Insider, twice. This small battle to protect my kids from a dangerous consolidation became a struggle to understand the interconnected systems of cruelty and coercion we students, parents and taxpayers experience from what amounts to a colonial tax extraction system. Matt Taibi’s book, Griftocracy, called it, “a highly complicated merger of crime & policy, of stealing and government at the nexus of politics and economics”. Naming grift, filming grift, teaching the grift systems is critical.

Chatham’s students published a fantastic student poll, their own institutional critique of the administration and this destructive consolidation. The administration hated it & never spoke of it. Their strategy was to place the young writer on the board in a powerless position. This accolade of deception silenced his reporting. Another corrupting trick the board played on children. The article “What About the Kids” should be bronzed and hung in the foyer. It could only have been printed in a vanity paper, a noncommercial paper. Newspapers & radio supported us only until we had any success, then they too deplatformed us.

For our physical safety we learned to arrive on state grounds with cameras or audio running. You never knew what they’d say or do. It was crazy and dangerous. Cinematic counter-surveillance created years of meetings and wild votes and yelling matches that would have vanished just like National School of Character, and the public’s glorious fight, we gave voice for the voiceless.

“All crime films are about capitalism, because all capitalism - is about crime.

filmmaker, Abraham Polonski