Village Green/Town²

  Some come from houses, some from apartments, some are homeless. Their caregivers may be parents or step-parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, or foster parents. English may be their first language, but, it may not be. They may walk to school, ride a bus, or be driven by a family member. They may be typically developing or have any number or disabilities. Today they are getting ready for the first day of school. They all live in Howard County. It’s really quite amazing that we expect the public school system to accommodate every child, from every background, with every assortment of gifts and challenges. Howard County has seventy eight schools that serve students from preschool age through young adulthood. According to Superintendent Michael Martirano, there are 56,500 of them this year. I’m trying to imagine what 56,500 students looks like. Most of us went to school, and it’s likely that the majority of us went to public school. Our memories are personal and specific to the ti...

  Meanwhile, over in the real estate section… I spied the following houses on Twitter this week.* They all happen to be in Ellicott City. What follows is not a scholarly treatise on the state of real estate nor suburban architecture. It’s…well…commentary. House number one: House number one made the list because it is on Broken Lute Way, which is one of the notable Columbia Street names that people love to laugh about. (I have known actual lutenists who didn’t think it was so funny.) However, this home is said to be in Ellicott City.  Not with that street name, it ain’t. Of course what that means is that it’s in Dorsey which manages somehow to be in both Columbia and Ellicott City at the same time. This continues to bug me for no good reason, in addition to the fact that it’s  really none of my business. Still, if I broke down and bought a house on Broken Lute Way I would want everyone to know it was in Columbia.  Your mileage may vary, as they say. House Number Two l...

A Monday morning shout out to Jeremy Dommu (The Merriweather Post Blog) for his comprehensive look at Columbia’s Village Centers.  The Village Center Edition- - June 2024 News Roundup He describes it as “a comprehensive rating and review of every Columbia Village Center.” This is the kind of work that Dommu does extremely well. He has taken a large amount of information, organized it, and presented it in a way that is easy to comprehend for the average reader.  It’s a lot to process but it’s easy enough to read in chunks if you want to. He also includes a visual layout of each center which I found extremely helpful. What I have particularly enjoyed is how open Dommu is to receiving feedback and incorporating new information as readers respond. So, if you have thoughts after reading the piece, you should feel comfortable adding your two cents.  How? You can respond to the post on the blog  itself, on Facebook , and on Reddit . I found the conversation on Reddit t...

  May 5, 2011 (Columbia Patch) It's May! Time for all the good folks to gather at the Village Green--if only we knew where that was... Welcome to The Village Green. According to Wikipedia, a village green “… is traditionally at a central location and provides an open-air meeting place for the people of a village, for example at times of celebration, or for public ceremonies.”   I am envisioning this space, where I will be sharing my ideas, as a village green of sorts—a place where we have the “customary right to indulge in lawful sports and pastimes.” Almost daily I read news of Columbia’s villages: calling for participation, creating new visions, or struggling to reach consensus amidst polarizing differences. Just as often I cannot make up my mind whether to be encouraged or frustrated by it all.  So, this will be a place to sort it out with input from you, my fellow villagers.   In a related entry, town squares are described: “Most town squares are hardscapes suita...

Have you seen this? It has recently resurfaced on social media after being released originally in October of 2020. I think you would call it a digital zine, (webzine?) completely student-written and produced. Its title: Hush: Quiet Racism at Glenelg High School. https://issuu.com/glenelghush/docs/hush?fbclid=IwAR3849W7Lc9ju3meUyxc9gVCqQCiuS_TGGcZYbXHx_BGC8AFse0lW-mJWAE Lately there’s been a good deal of talk centered on Glenelg High School and some examples of blatantly racist behavior, and with good reason. But I’m beginning to be concerned that it’s too easy to point the finger at just one school and ignore what is happening everywhere else. How neat and tidy to suggest that we have this one school where racism is a problem but we’re just fine other than that. It is easier to say but it isn’t true. We have 77 public schools in Howard County and, every day, in more than one of them, something racist is said or done. Every single day. Not because our young people are innately “bad” or ...

  I’ve been telling people for years that I live in a neighborhood of quadroplexes. It turns out I may have made that word up. The correct term is more likely quadplex or fourplex but I like mine better. At any rate, it means that our house is a part of a larger structure made up of four independent houses. We are surrounded by grass and trees; each house may not have a very large yard but each has a fenced patio. And there is plenty of shared open space for running, playing, sledding, and so on. It doesn’t look like the suburbia of the neighborhoods I grew up in but it is clearly suburban. When I first moved here I still had a picture of my childhood homes in Cleveland Heights, Ohio in my head and to me my little “quadroplex” was not it.  Things change. Time and life experiences change you. Living through a recession when you realize you are living in a house you can afford while many around you are struggling or losing their homes is truly transformative. Home becomes what ...

  It’s the first day of school in the Howard County School system. Though I haven’t been in school for a long time, and my own kids have graduated, there are still some traditions that feel familiar: picking out a first day of school outfit, perhaps, packing a lunch, riding a school bus, gathering on a playground.  You hope you will have friends. You hope your teacher will like you. You hope that what you will be doing for the next school year is interesting or at least not so hard that you will be miserable. You may be looking forward to gym class more than math class. You may come to school drawn to music and the arts. You may be looking forward to the sweet relief of knowing you will have breakfast and lunch every day. Some things are very different. The current presidential administration is dismantling the Department of Education. Funding for schools is being withheld, and vital resources being used to manipulate how states  educate their children. Our students are g...

Local liquor stores are pushing out delivery after delivery each day. Restaurants are now permitted to sell you drinks with your dinner. Jokes appear online about the perfect quarantine cocktail, or at what time each day it is appropriate for Mom to switch from coffee to wine. How about you? Are you quarantining with or without? For me, it’s without. I don’t drink at home. It’s a “going out”, special occasion thing. I don’t judge anyone else, and some of those creative libations look mighty good, really. But it’s just not my thing. The sale of liquor generates tax money for the state, which must be helpful in a time like this. And, for restaurants, the ability to sell alcohol for pickup/delivery is a lifeline, because that is where most of the money is made. On the drinks. It almost feels as though one is supporting the community by drinking. And yet. Drinking alcohol isn’t for everyone. And the prettiness of fancy drinks and artfully designed bottles by local distillers ...

  It’s the last day of school and I forgot to turn the sound on for my alarm. My husband pointed out, wryly, that tomorrow is the day to turn off all the alarms. One thing that’s on my mind this morning is the size of the Howard County School System. It’s pretty darn big, you know. I looked at the size of the two public school systems I came from (Cleveland Heights-University Heights in Ohio, and Stamford, Connecticut) and they are tiny by comparison. HCPSS is made up of 78 schools, spread out over an entire county. Many school districts are based around towns, with multiple systems within a county. This is why we sometimes have those conversations about how winter weather events affect some parts of the county more than others, necessitating closure throughout the entire system. We’re not all the same, and yet our school system must make decisions for everyone. There’s a lot of ground to cover. Why is this on my mind today? Well, I’m thinking about parents. I do write a lot about...

  Image from Poorly Drawn Lines, Reza Farazmand* Today’s post comes to you from the adhd files. Life post-diagnosis hasn’t been quite the steady march of progress that I had envisioned. Medication makes a huge difference but it’s not a magic wand. It opens doors but only if I am willing to do the work to walk through them. I get into the zone and things go extremely well, and then gradually the focus and forward motion slips away and I feel like I’m stuck. Hence, today’s comic from Poorly Drawn Lines. I’ve come to realize that the way I’m learning to cope with my adhd brain is cyclical. I can either accept that and be kind to myself about it, or I can beat myself up for not simply getting better and better in a linear fashion. Honestly? I’ve done some of each. A  helpful technique I’ve learned about in the past year is called Body Doubling. No, not that . The simplest explanation might be that Body Doubling is having someone “keep you company” while you complete a task that is...

Yesterday I shared a wish for Columbia from a local friend. That got me thinking about a wish list I made, long ago, back when  Columbia Patch  was still a happening thing and Marge Neal was the editor. From December 20, 2011: A Letter to Santa — Of Sorts — On Behalf of Columbia To me, Christmas in Columbia means going to the Symphony of Lights with my whole family. That's when the holiday season officially begins. So, this year, like Barbara Kellner of the Columbia Archives, I started thinking about my HocoLocal wish list. 5. For me: I would like a tour of Elkridge from someone who loves it and knows it well. (I'll pay for gas and snacks.) This is definitely an area where I need to learn more and think more. Any takers? 4. For my village, Oakland Mills: a very special Bridge to connect us to downtown, and span the separation between east and west over Route 29. 3. For the Howard County Public Schools: a variety of truly viable school board candidates...

"Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday…” Remember this? On a totally different note, I’ve been pondering turning Fridays blog into a free-for-all of things I want to write about that fall outside of the HoCo local territory of the blog. It’s long been known that people tend to read blogs less on Fridays. I wonder what would happen if I had “off-topic Fridays”? (In my head the working title has been, “The hell with it; it’s Friday.”)  Perhaps it’s the temptation to write about the things I would write about if no one were watching.  One reader referred to this possibility as Free Expression Fridays, which has morphed into Free Form Fridays because that gives me the opportunity to use that nifty superscript. Mathematicians are asked to withhold judgement. At any rate, it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Bones You may be awake of the relatively recent phenomenon of the dog who will assist you in deciding what kind of a day it is.  “ Bones o...

  March is Music in Our Schools Month. And just last week the Board of Education voted against maintaining the third grade strings program in the school budget.* Oof. Why is it that, when budgets get tight, arts education is invariably the place where the axe is poised to make the cuts? It is a wrong-headed assumption that things like music are “nice to haves” or extras. It may be ‘penny wise’ but it is most definitely ‘pound foolish.’ The arts are not separate from . They are inextricably linked with our other learning experiences. Arts Education is the oxygen which allows the strictly cognitive paper and pencil work to "breathe" into the student and be meaningfully retained, the leavening which allows the learning process to rise, the glue that makes the learning stick. It is the experience of all the different educational domains in combination that produces an end result which is greater than the sum of its parts. We don’t say that yeast should be able to stand alone, a...

Apologies to my readers. I’m still working on Part Two of “It’s Broke”. Look for that tomorrow, Something to think about today: this response from writer Melinda D. Anderson: This data refutes a widespread (and ignorant) belief in schooling that Black families “don’t value education.” Instead, what most educators value (signing forms, checking homework, room parents, etc.) is not a valid measure of importance of education for Black parents & families. Black parents are out here taking their children to plays, visiting museums, going to the zoo, and engaged in all kinds of education-related activities. Yet y’all will still say “They don’t care about education” because a Black parent missed teacher conf. held during the workday. Here’s the data, a report released by the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Educational Statistics. Here’s more about Ms. Anderson: Why am I sharing this? As we head into back to school mode, I think it’s impo...

  Today’s post feels like two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, The Loft: Wine, Liquor and Beer has finally opened in a second-floor location above Wegman’s. Image credit: The Loft On the other, tonight Sobar is hosting an alcohol-free Happy Hour at the newly reopened Georgia Grace on Main Street in Old Ellicott City. Thursday, December 8th 6 pm - 8 pm Georgia Grace Cafe on Main Street in Ellicott City Free samples, zero alcohol holiday gifts, fabulous beverages, fun food and Hot Shots - peanut butter hot chocolate served with a mini peanut butter brownie! Featuring Dan Cronin performing acoustic blues and ragtime. Image credit: Sobar Image credit: Georgia Grace Café I haven’t been over to The Loft yet but I mean to soon.I had a chance to see the space when it was but a twinkling in its proprietor’s eye.  That was back in 2018. I’ve written quite a few posts since then about the legal hurdles placed in front of The Loft’s Tom Quick from area businesses who did not want ...