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REFORMS GET HIGH MARKS

Tom Buxton has seen it all during his 38 years of teaching — how the schools operate now under mayoral control and how they ran in the past under the old Board of Education.

The classroom veteran told The Post that students and educators are clearly better off with the mayor in charge than with a politically divided and unaccountable school board.

“Overall, mayoral control is a plus. All the patronage that was put into the old Board of Education has been eliminated. It used to be a good-old-boys network,” said Buxton, 61, a seventh-grade English teacher at JHS 259 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Buxton said his school has improved and more kids are learning than ever before.

The principal, Janice Geary, is the best he’s had during his four-decade career — and she has more flexibility to run things than under the old system.

“I’m one teacher in one building. But my school is better than it was 15 years ago. The atmosphere is better. It’s a happy place where education takes place on a regular basis,” he said.

Buxton is particularly thrilled about recent efforts to fuse literacy with the arts.

His students painted a 400-foot-wide mural inside the school, adorned with essays and poems initiated by classroom discussions.

The mural is the pride of the school and the students involved have shown vast improvement on their English exams, he said.

And he’s so happy that, despite being eligible to retire with a full pension six years ago, he’s put off retirement indefinitely.

Buxton survived the city’s fiscal crisis, which triggered the layoff of thousands of teachers in the mid-1970s.

“That was absolute chaos. The schools were in turmoil. I distinctly remember teachers checking the time they had punched to see if they have more seniority than someone else to keep their job. Amazing,” Buxton said.