I consider myself very lucky to have been Dad to two wonderful children. My son, Chris Lynch, runs a $400 million-a-year company called Hydrologic here in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area of Florida. My daughter, Liz Lynch Colosimo, manages the social media marketing for Delaware North, which operates the concessions at all of our national parks. Liz lives in Grand Island, New York — an island in the Niagara River just before the Falls (firmly anchored, of course).

Grand Island is a wonderful town to raise children, with two state parks, many playgrounds, soccer fields, a community library, and a fabulous school system. Liz and her brother Chris are testaments to the town’s foresight in providing for its residents.

Apparently, President Trump’s campaign of hate and disdain for education has turned the leadership and voters of my former hometown against the very principles that made the community so successful. Liz, infuriated by these developments, wrote this essay on Facebook today (5/20/2026). I’ll reprint her essay here.

Rant ahead.

Sorry not sorry. I am so overwhelmingly disappointed in the Grand Island community today.

Our schools are the center of our community. The heart. And ours is one of the best.

Incredible music, arts, technology and sports programs. Talented teachers who truly care. Specialized services for our most vulnerable. And a student body filled with our literal future. Your future doctors, teacher, carpenters, engineers, musicians, firemen (and women), all converge daily in our schools. And this community voted down their budget not once, but twice.

I saw complaints like “I went there in the 70’s without AC, kids these days should do the same”, like it’s some kind of badge of honor to force our youngest to suffer like we did “back in the day”.

Isn’t our job as a society to leave things better than we found it? To want more for our children than we had for ourselves?

I saw complaints from so many “I don’t have a child in school anymore, I shouldn’t have to pay into the schools. Money is so tight, we are being taxed to death.” And those people completely ignore the fact that their anger actually lies in the town board’s reassessment of their home value.

I spent 7 years in an underfunded school district. Thank god we had amazing teachers, but they were overworked and underpaid, and my oldest spent an entire year in a shipping container classroom. Special services were non existent. Extracurriculars were few and far between.

Want to know who suffered the most? Our children.

I was so grateful to move home to a town that cared about their children. A town that prioritized our kids and the people tasked with turning them into their best selves.

Now we are one of two districts in WNY who failed to pass a budget. And we voted in a man who correlated electric cars setting fire from ocean water in Florida after a hurricane to the possibility that an electric bus would “fry the kids” because we use salt on our roads. A man who also suggested that our schools are only in use 180 days a year from 9am to 3pm, a claim that is completely untrue. Someone clearly out of touch with reality and uniformed. Someone who would rather “audit” every bit of spending to identify waste, than work to keep our schools highly ranked by spending on our children and the people who have dedicated their lives to educating them.

This is such a disappointment.

I really thought we were better than this.

I really believed we were a community who cared about its children.

I promise as my kids grow up and move out, not to become the person who no longer cares.

I hope all of you will do the same.

We have got to do better. If we can’t pull it together for our kids, there is literally nothing that will bring this community together.