Village Green/Town²

Remember this? Question, "What do you think the job of a Board of Education member is?" Please address the following: 1. What power does the position convey? 2. What is the best use of that power? 3. To whom is the Board of Education member responsible? No matter what particular issues interest you the most in this race, these questions must come first. If an elected Board Member does not understand the responsibility, power and limitations s/he has, then none of the other things stand a chance of being addressed. Good intentions are not enough. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Our Board members must know how to do the job, and why they do it. It is with this in mind that this blog endorses the following candidates for the Board of Education: Bess Altwerger Zaneb Beams Dan Furman Cindy Vaillancourt Ms. Altwerger has an excellent understanding of the needs and rights of all of the constituent groups that make up the system as a whole. This is impo...

June 3rd is your last day to register to vote before the June primary election. It is pretty easy to do. Just go here . There are some important choices to be made and you ought to be one of the people making them. I think of this blog as a Community blog. Certainly a strong thread within our community to me is Education. That is why I focus on issues such as usefulness of high stakes testing, fair treatment of teachers, adequate recess, stakeholder engagement, music/arts education, and special needs students and programs. Right now we have a Board of Education which appears to have lost its way. While they are elected to represent the voices of constituents, many act as though they are answerable to no one but the Superintendent. No matter how good the intentions of the Superintendent or the Central Office staff, it is extremely unhealthy to turn the process on its head. Decisions made without stakeholders, or one might even say, shareholders , are necessarily flawed. It does a t...

This ad yesterday made my skin crawl. It is creepy. Watching this confirmed every reason I have ever had for refusing to buy a Nintendo 2DS for my child. They have depicted children in all the iconic locations of summer, but the kids aren't really "present." They're disconnected from the natural environment. It's manipulative, and sad. So, with a nod to this loathesome little piece which subverts the real joys of summer, here is my commercial. You'll have to use your imagination. ***** A sunny day. A happy child is biking along, tossing newspapers to front porches along a paper route. Narrator: Have you heard the news? Summer's coming. Will you be ready? Camera pulls back to show second child on bike, happily reaching into a pouch and tossing Nintendo 2DS devices in to trash cans along the route. Narrator: What's on your summer fun list? Keeping cool? Parent is throwing diving targets into the pool for kids to bring up. They are revealed to be 2DS dev...

Last night I was startled to read the following in the Sun article about Thursday's joint meeting of the CA Board and the Inner Arbor Trust: "Many of the residents who testified at the meeting did so in favor of the plan, although there were some who criticized it." My first thought was, it's too bad there wasn't someone from the press there to take an accurate count. Oh. Yeah. For the first time in recent memory, the vast majority of those who turned out to speak at a CA Board meeting did so in favor of moving Columbia forward. If you weren't there, the press account gives you absolutely no idea this occurred. The numbers really matter. It made me wonder what other newspaper stories would be like without the numbers: Many cast their votes for Smith, although some voted for Jones. The Orioles scored many runs, but some were scored by the Red Sox. The school budget allocates many dollars for testing, with some for teachers salaries. Many of ...

In one of my favorite movies, "A Thousand Clowns", Jason Robard's character Murray likes to go down to the docks to see off cruise ships. He explains, "It’s a great thing to do when you are about to start something new; it gives you the genuine feeling of the beginning of things." That's the feeling I got when I volunteered at the Inner Arbor Trust booth at Wine in the Woods. People stopped to look at pictures of the plan, ask questions, share their own opinions. The response was overhwhelmingly favorable. The most asked question-- "How soon is this going to happen?" There was a time when the concept of Columbia was New Daring Cutting-edge Ground-breaking Creative Breaking the Mold Columbia was meant to bring the force of change to community-building: to transform old patterns with new ideas and transform our way of living for the better. The Inner Arbor plan brings exactly that spirit to Symphony Woods. I continue to be as...

Anyone who has parents has lived through the stage where they go on and on about how "they don't make things like they used to." With my mother, it was shirt boxes. Every Christmas she bemoaned the fact that the making of shirt boxes had degraded to this: "And they don't even give them to you--they make you ask!" she would exclaim indignantly. Mother, who grew up during the Great Depression, knew how to outsmart those retailers and their substandard boxes. She had saved nearly every really good shirt box from years gone by. You know, the ones that looked more like this: She kept her collection in an upstairs closet. Once a year, she'd get them down to use for gift-giving. They really were the best boxes for shirts, sweaters, scarves, and many other things. But they always produced gales of laughter once the wrapping came off, because each one was labeled on the end: "1971 Income Tax" or "Connecticut State Tax Records." Before you cou...

How do you write about something and not make it about yourself? How do I blog about Memorial Day and not make it about me? Because it isn't. It really, really isn't about me, my feelings or my views. I could tell you about how I was raised as a Unitarian during the '60s and how my sisters' friends were conscientious objectors. I could tell you that my Grandfather fought in Italy in WW1 and my father served in Japan in the Army of the Occupation in WW2. Oh, and have I ever told you that my family fought on both sides of the American Revolution and the Civil War? I was raised to believe that war was wrong, killing was wrong, but that sometimes you still had to do it, and you had to choose very wisely, because life is precious. But Memorial Day isn't about me. It is about choice, risk and commitment, fear, pain, work, dedication, and grief that I will never know. If I hang out a flag does that even begin to touch it? If I stop to say a prayer will it mean something? W...