Monday, January 26, 2009

Yes, We Can: Locally as Well as Nationally

Change.

While our country is standing at the threshold of great change this week, those of us born and raised along the New England coast have never been very comfortable with it. We’re stubborn Yankees, descendents, as the journalist Colin Woodward noted in his fine history, The Lobster Coast, of fierce Anglo and French stock. Not only do we not like change: the desire to actively FIGHT it seems embedded deep in our genes.

While fiercely sustaining our unique island culture and traditions is critical, resistance to change can also hurt us and limit our future prospects, most especially when it comes to educating our children.

As world change happens ever more quickly—including in our fishing industries—spurred on by technologies that make once complicated functions possible in mere seconds, the requirements for and demands made on each new generation of students change exponentially. Meeting these needs requires vision and the ability to take risks. Yet instead of leading necessary changes to our schools so our students can compete equally, and succeed, we’re being asked by local school leadership to resist such change.

The biggest change at stake, in a vote on January 27, is school consolidation: whether or not to bring together our small area schools under a larger umbrella, to ensure their survival and ability to provide the resources our students need for a 21st century education.

The benefits of a consolidated rural school district are uncontestable and are currently being realized throughout the small coastal towns in Regional School Unit (RSU) #1 around Bath where, in the first year of consolidation, they have saved over $1.2 million AND added quality to their school program (in the form of additional AP classes at their high school, foreign language at elementary level, etc.—the very things our current structure is lacking). Consolidated rural school districts allow small schools like ours to align schedules; professional development; teaching resources and specialists; curricula; and purchasing and other contract negotiations to keep our small schools alive and thriving. While there are short-term costs to making such changes, the long term savings and benefits are much more important.

Perhaps the most misunderstood component of consolidation is its focus. This is not about closing schools: in fact, the island will be able to strengthen our position by becoming part of the larger district. The focus of consolidation is administration, not buildings. By mandating larger administrative districts, consolidation shifts the focus of control, and costs, away from superintendents and unwieldy numbers of school governing boards, meetings, and disparate contracts, correctly recognizing that true “local control” resides in strong principals in the buildings themselves, as well as active parent-teacher organizations. Consolidation is not about losing our local schools, or control; it is about preserving and improving them.

Students around the country and, increasingly, around Maine, from Bath to Ellsworth and beyond, benefit from consolidated educational structures. Our own students are benefitting immeasurably from the consolidation of the Deer Isle and Stonington elementary schools, another bitterly fought change more than 15 years in the making. Let’s hope it doesn’t take us 15 more years, plus state penalties and further mandates, to take this next necessary step to improve local education.

It’s just plain sad that our local educational leadership has chosen to discuss and plan only for the short term costs of consolidation, rather than the more important educational improvements and long term financial savings. Not surprisingly, those mounting the strongest opposition are those whose roles will be most directly changed in a regional school district: the superintendent and school committee members.

The state law mandating consolidation—similar to the state law mandating the creation of the Stonington Sanitary District in the 1980s, also opposed by local voters—is not perfect. The consolidation plan brought to us by our existing school committees, for an Alternative Organizational Structure (AOS), is so badly put together, taking advantage of few of the benefits offered by RSU’s, it only makes clear they want consolidation to fail.

That leaves making this necessary change up to us, the voters. Even though the current proposals are imperfect, we must vote YES—for the sake of our students and the future of our communities—to keep this critical process moving forward. The existing structure is broken and will not survive the economic and educational demands of the 21st century. We can’t afford to drag our feet on this issue. We owe it to our children.

On January 27, vote for a new and improved future for our students and our communities. Vote YES for school consolidation.

Written from my perspective as an active volunteer, mentor, and teacher in the Deer Isle-Stonington schools, who helped to draft and pass the schools’ Strategic Plan.

Monday, September 29, 2008

Policy and Philosophy Matter to our Pocketbooks

For the second time in the last 25 years, we middle class and poor citizens have felt the pain of failed Republican economic policy and philosophy.

Let's look at the facts. We cannot afford to allow this to happen again.

Wielding the scare tactics of "tax increases" and social issues to assert the philosophy that unregulated markets not only feed individual greed but somehow benefit everyone, the Republican Party has forsaken the economic conservatism that was historically a hallmark of this party and become adept at getting voters to vote against our own pocketbooks.

"Reaganomics"--or "voodoo economics," as they became known when the economy crashed in 1987--convinced the American public that our economy could sustain tax cuts for corporations, Big Oil (Reagan removed Jimmy Carter's solar panels from the White House in 1980) and the wealthy while increasing military spending and not investing in the domestic infrastructure that makes us strong and competitive: education, health care, alternative energy, science and technology research, etc. These policies first failed in 1987, with the largest single-day losses in the history of the U.S. economy and untold job losses.

During the 1990s, Bill Clinton struggled to build bipartisan consensus and was able to restore widening prosperity and innovation to the American economy through the creation of a fair and balanced tax program; cuts in wasteful spending; and investments in domestic infrastructure. Our nation entered the 21st century with a budget surplus and at an innovative peak.

How did we allow the last eight years to happen? September 11 scared us, and we have allowed the Republican Party to leverage this fear for the advancement of a politics and philosophy which benefit the few at the expense of the many. Never has this been more apparent than in today's economic crises. How could anyone, even a registered Republican, vote for the Republican Party this year, in the face of such widespread evidence of the failure of these economic policies and philosophies?

"The economy" and "the market" do not have lives independent from policy--although Republicans attempt to have us believe this is so. It is time to hold those responsible for the current mess accountable for their actions: series of policies and decisions which hurt and damage the American middle class.

This election offers us as middle class and poor voters a clear choice between a candidate who will offer meaningful change and a candidate who will offer more of the same. Barack Obama has clearly proposed the types of economic policies which will rebuild our nation, while John McCain has offered nothing. For the sake of each of us and for us as a nation in a global economy, let's pay attention to the facts and make the right choice this time.

Thursday, July 24, 2008

Coming Soon: Shakespeare Of, By, and For the People--Again!

Second Line Parade: A Culture of Philanthropy

This Sunday, as part of our 8th annual Deer Isle Jazz Festival with its special, expanded focus on New Orleans, we are hosting a traditional "second line" parade through downtown Stonington, along our working waterfront.

New Orleans' "second lines"--the dancers and celebrants who followed the mourners and brass bands in traditional New Orleans' funeral parades--are themselves the creatures of an important and unique part of New Orleans' culture: the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs.

These neighborhood clubs are one of the engines that, pre-Katrina, gave New Orleans a uniquely African and community-based culture. As new development and regulations threaten their second line parades and other traditions, these organizations--and the unique jazz culture they support--are under siege.

The African tribal customs that landed in New Orleans as both a slave port and an important place where slaves could win their freedom (in what is today Congo Square) rested on the belief that a productive tribal member was a valued part of the tribe. In times of need or death, that member's family was taken care of. Because everything that tribal member did was for the care and benefit, not just of an individual family, but of the entire tribe. If a member killed an antelope, he or she would divide up the carcass so each tribal member could share. Members shared in the building of huts, or the digging of shallow rock shelters, rituals, and the defense of the tribe and more.

In New Orleans in the late 18th century, these social customs evolved among freed slaves into the first of the social aid and pleasure clubs, created to provide burial, funeral, and even crafts training services for the African-American community. The clubs are based on the principle originally taught in Africa: of coming together, especially in times of need, for the collective good.

Here in coastal New England, we have churches and secular organizations--the Rebekahs, the Odd Fellows, the Masons, etc.--who take on many of the same functions. When someone is lost in a fishing accident, or injured in a car accident, we host bean suppers and post collection jars at the cash registers of local businesses.

New Orleans' social aid and pleasure clubs, and the musicians of the brass bands at the heart of their second line parades, are now at the forefront of trying to sustain traditional New Orleans' culture post-Katrina. In many ways for coastal Mainers, too, it is time to dig deep into our cultural traditions for the strength needed to collectively sustain communities whose unique legacies are under seige by money and development.

On this Sunday, July 27, at noon we'll have a chance to join forces--the Lobster Crackers' Social Aid & Pleasure Club, lead by New Orleans' Own Hot 8 Brass Band--and parade down Main Street and out onto the commerical fish pier, experiencing the rich tradition, power and celebration of a second line parade.

Art, Entertainment, and Outrage

All during this bright and shiny summer of recession and war, careening toward presidential conventions, I've been wondering: where is the outrage?

Then I saw the new Pixar/Disney, G rated animated film WALL-E.

And there was the outrage, packaged into a little trash compacting robot on a planet ruined by overconsuming humans and displayed for the eyes of the world, and especially children, to see.

Well done, Andrew Stanton (WALL-E's animator)--even if on national radio you did for some reason believe you had to maintain a division between art and politics, and deny any deeper motivations for your story crafting.

It's about time our kids--and us along with them--understand it is perfectly OK, indeed the RIGHT THING, to feel uncomfortable with the world around us: to be disturbed and, yes, outraged. After all, we've got a president and government that have driven our economy into ruin via policies that support and promote overconsumption--whether of oil or of bonus checks. These decisions are so defiant in their blatant self-servingness that I'm still not sure why we aren't all marching on Washington, D.C., and burning something every day.

I guess it is because, well, we are all too comfortable. And our entertainment system is geared, for the most part, to keep us that way. So that when we have a choice, in a community theater company, to choose between producing "Carousel," with its dark story of male-female relations, and something that simply makes us happy--we'll choose the latter. I can't tell you the number of times people have tried to dissaude us from producing a piece of theater or booking a film because, "It just isn't HAPPY." Yep. Right.

But not WALL-E. We had one smart and sensitive seven year old in the audience dissolve into tears and run from the theater the night we opened it. The vision it paints of our future is indeed grim, and that's a picture we don't want to look at. Because to really sit with the discomfort this movie--which, as 20th century Holocaust philosopher Hannah Arendt perceptively wrote mid-century, is more culture than entertainment--creates means we need to get off our theater seats and really make some change.

And real change is possibly even more difficult, more time consuming, to create than, well, real culture.

Leaving us all very uncomfortable indeed.