Tax Code

The Residency exemption was not passed. This hurts people like me in particular as a prospective homeowner who was looking into a single family. As it turns out though, only 56% of homeowners would really benefit from this ordinance as compared to the rest who would have to pay more.

The thing that really burns me though, is that while it may be a valid concern to more evenly distribute the tax burden, I really wonder why this wasn't brought up BEFORE the vote. It is a major policy change.

Webster School is just Too Inconvenient

After two months of having to stress over pickups and dropoffs at the distant Webster School which for a reason not at all related to Parent convenience was the only place with pre school this year, I finally gave up and had to take my son out. As I was filling out the withdrawl paperwork, I overheard someone say that my son was the 4th the school had lost recently. For me, it cost me $175 a week more to pay someone for before/afterschool care plus transportation to and from school than it does for quality private full day pre-school. If I could have, I would have left my son in the public schools, but since the Webster is 3 miles from my home and more from my older son's kindergarden at a different public school, there is no way a babysitter could be expected to get both to school and THEN pick up the 3 year old a mere 2 hours and 20 minutes later on foot.

You see, the problem is, my wife and I both work days. Our careers are what we had both been working towards by going to college/graduate school for the past 10 years. Even if one of us was willing to give up on the career we had been educated for, our current costs are far beyond what either one of us could support on one income, so one of us staying home is not an option. The thing is, I don't think we are in the minority of parents with this problem. I have no doubt there are far more pre school age children whose parents are paying for private preschool or day care than the Everett Public Schools is enrolling. This is a problem nationwide, but Everett is seemingly making an effort to reach out to working parents with the full day kindergarden program(it just isn't enough).

The full day kindergarden program is the reason all pre school programs had to be relocated to the Webster (classroom space). However, even that program ends at 2:05PM and that is a full 1 hour before I (a schoolteacher)get home from Boston. Again, I have to pay for a private service to watch my 5 year old child after school. I am of the opinion that parents like me are far more likely to continue in private schools once they have lost hope in Public School.

My thinking is, if the Everett Public Schools would like to make a serious effort to improve MCAS scores, they will need to do a better job reaching out and supporting parents like me. In the next 8 years, the magic year 2014 approaches when all kids have to be proficient or the school gets taken over. By that point, more and more children will lack siginificant after school support and more and more active parents who work will be forced to pull their children out of the Everett Public Schools. Meanwhile, our tax dollars are supporting the Everett Public Schools.
(The PTO is killing me with these 2:15PM weekday meetings! they want me to give them money for that!?)

I am left with a decision at this point,:

Leave Everett for superior public education programs in other suburban towns and face a long commute (even Malden has far better after school programs)

or

Pay out the nose for high quality private schools and stay here, (paying taxes also).

The first option is starting to look more and more attractive.

To Audit or not to Audit

With DiMaria's uncertainty, I have to wonder what is going on behind the scenes here. This is the third vote on this issue already, with the first being a reconsideration by Jason Marcus. I didn't know you can go back an approve something that had already been rejected. It makes the whole situation look like is up to the highest bidder to decide whether the audit will go ahead or not. These guys had plenty of time to examine their conscience on this issue already. Lets see if after the election, the whole thing gets called off again. Records, computers and other sensitive data might start to disappear if they don't get audited soon. Could the Aldermen be stalling? There are a lot more questions than answers on this issue.

Michael

Larceny case dismissal probable for the Superintendent

In a surprising turn, a judge today ordered that Mr. Foresterie's larceny trial be continued for a year (Boston Globe). This means of course that he is on probation and as long as he doesn't get indicted again in the next 12 months, charges will be dismissed. He did have to pay $2000 in court costs to the Attorney General. The AG's office was looking for something on the order of restitution for the two stolen air conditioners, but little more. This is a major blow to those who saught Fred's indictment to be followed through with a guilty verdict. This vindicates the school committee for not suspending Fred and reinforces the superintendent's power base.

I will have more on this in the next couple of days...

Swan Street Park needs repair

NOTE: As of Sunday, the 8th, the park was in good repair with the fences intact. I guess Public Works got it right. Good show!

Original post follows:

I have been taking my kids to the Whittier park over by Swan Street and have been disappointed by the state of the equipment there. I am particularly annoyed by the basketball court fences, where the poles are not attached well and kids actually have been dismanteling them, pole by pole. I have called public works twice about this over the past month and have yet to see this resolved. One day kids had laid a 10 foot metal pole across two swings and were using the pole as a sort of bridge between them to stand on. Of course this proved to be a very dangerous situation and I had to intervene when a small girl was nearly bludgeoned by the pole as it was swinging, after she had fallen off. Since my own 5 and 3 year old where also there, I was not pleased.

The other day, I went back with my kids and noticed the fence was in worse condition and about a half dozen kids were standing on the chainlink fence, bouncing up and down on it. It had come loose from the upper supports and was leaning inward towards the basketball court. The kids were about 6 to 7 feet up at one point and the situation looked quite ominous. It had bent over so far that one kid was able to walk, suspended by the thin chain link metal 6 feet above the ground, for almost the width of the basketball court. The kids were ranging in ages from about 6 to 10, which was good in a way. If anyone older had gone up there, I think it wouldn't have been able to handle the weight.

Anyway, I will go back over there tomorrow. If it still isn't fixed, I think I may have to make an appearance at the next council/aldermen meeting. Maybe then someone will do something about it. For some reason, my kids have picked this park as their favorite, so I will surely have to use the park in any case :(

Everett Public's lack of understanding

I am incensed
perplexed
and in a way I have to laugh...

The Webster school is opening up for business with the first day for the 3 and 4 year old preschool being Monday, September 25. I registered my younger son there at the same time as my kindergarten child, back in late May, early June. Since then, I have heard nothing, nada, zero from the school department regarding the 3 yeard old pre school. I had to call to get any info and it was vague at best. The kindergarten also failed to send us any information and we learned nothing about where to go or when to report or who was the teacher until DAY 1. Thank goodness for the local newspapers, that was our lifeline.

As for the 3 year old, we received a letter announcing on Open House on Saturday the 16th from 1 to 3PM. The problem was that the letter was only postmarked the DAY BEFORE and I didn't get it until after the Open house was over. Also noted in the letter was that there would be a ADULTS ONLY orientation on WEDNESDAY the 20th from 12 to 1 PM. This orientation is MANDATORY.

At this point I broke out laughing.
First, you send a letter announcing an Open House late enough that almost NO ONE will receive it on time to make it.
Then, you include a mandatory weekday lunchtime meeting for parents where they can't even bring their child along!?

The Webster obviously doesn't want to see any parents.

Finally, my son was scheduled to be in the afternoon class, even though when we signed him up, he was the 3rd child on the list and we requested morning. We really needed the morning classroom. You see, my older son is dismissed at 2:05PM from another Everett Public School that is a good 10 to 15 minutes away from the Webster, which dismisses at 2PM. Considering the dearth of parking at the Webster, it will be impossible to maneuver through the pick up process and still make it to the other school before 20 minutes has passed by. Since no schedule changes are permitted according to the letter, this is the point where I started to experience a nervous tick....

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I had begun this blog article the day before I received that terrible letter, but what I was writing below fits in with the same theme of a lack of understanding....
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I have about had it up to here with expectations of very specific behaviors that are supposed to come from 4 and 5 year old children. Why is it that people blame the children when they act out when we have over 21 children in a kindergarten/ Pre K classroom? Guidance counselors who do NOT have degrees in psychology should not be making mental health diagnoses on a child who in struggling to perform according to expectations. That is what psychologists are for!!! Teachers should not be sending children home as soon as they feel they have lost control of a 5 year old child. It demonizes the child and undercuts the goal of education, which only happens if the child is in school. If a student must be taken out of class in any grade, that student should receive some form of intervention. There are methods available at all age levels that work if staff members really believe in the children. As a professional educator myself, I am confused as to why they are not utilized in several cases I have already witnessed.

If a child is labelled at 5 years old as a mental case, it is all too easy to write the child off and send him or her away without a glance. What then, of that child's future? It is sad that good parents have to suffer indignities and worry when they learn of the little monster that they have unwittingly sent off from home to terrorize children and teachers in school. It is terrible that public schools (not just Everett) are unable to deal with children of varied abilities and strenghts, instead focusing only on expectations of behavior created for the average "cookie-cutter" child. It is sad that hard working parents have to take time off from work to sit through a littany of complaints from staff members and teachers who are not prepared to allow the parent to respond, assist, or explain reasons for behavior. Why does the opinion of the parent have less merit than that of a school staff member who just met the child that day or the day before?

There is nothing in the real world even remotely similar to the experience children have in public education classrooms and yet we are supposed to beleive that a failure of a child to follow arbitrary instructions without explanation, complaint, or frustration is somehow a defect in that child's intellect or behavior.

In any case, it is a major burden on parents to raise their children in the modern world, filled with so many inappropriate and dangerous influences. We want our children to be smart and ethical. We don't want them to be exposed to violence and social ills. It is so difficult to be a good parent in a world where both parents have to work to make ends meet. It is even harder for single parents. So why is it that schools are so reluctant and unwilling to work with parents? How do they expect test scores to increase when neither the students or parents have faith in the system. By alienating parents, schools are making enemies of very powerful allies in the No Child Left Behind fight.

Immigration revisited

The recent addition of Mr. Almeida's column to a weekly paper in Everett has reignited some immigration verbal warfare that seemed to have died down around here after the protests around the country a few months ago. What is most interesting to me is that on almost every point of contention concerning immigration, there is a philosophical difference between pro-immigrant and anti-immigrant camps that is impossible to reconcile. This is partially because there is actually very little data on the impact of the current immigration because it is impossible to really count those who are invisible to the system. Mostly however, I think the differences are due to prejudice and lack of perspective. Rather than come out and support either camp (since both have members that I don't agree with on a number of points) I would like to take a historical view with some particular populations that I descended from myself. I am a native born American and my families have been here for at least 3 generations. However, 100 years ago, all four branches of my family were unwelcome.

These include the Irish, the Russians, the Dutch, and the American Indians (among others).

As far as immigration goes, the Irish and Russian elements of my family, through no fault of their own, were forced to the United States. My Irish family faced economic ruin and terrible hunger, losing many to starvation. My Russian family faced political exile and many were hunted down and killed following a revolution in their home country. Both of these families were on the run and had to experience death and suffering as a part of life. When they came, they may have been allowed in, but were unable to secure employment or education in anything other than coal mining and steel mills. Even agriculture was completely unavailable to them, almost entirely due to ethnic prejudice.

I don't know much about my Dutch family except to say that Pennsylvania was about the only place to which they could go to find work and the men worked three jobs.

My American Indian family had a far more insidious fate. My ancestors had their communities robbed from them by people who did not respect their right to exist. The only reason that American Indian blood is in my veins is because Indians had their culture and religion torn from them, were punished for speaking anything other then English, and were forced to give up a link to the land they had tended for 1000 years.


The reason I choose to speak about the people of the past is to remind people that now we have the benefit of a historical view and we can clear away some of the biases of the Americans of those times. It is now clear that immigrants who came to this country and American Indians experienced terrible injustice and endured suffering beyond most of our comprehension. It is also clear that prejudice and paranoia of established citizens was a primary reason why suffering was allowed to continue as long as it did.

Therefore, I think it is critical that before we make value judgements on other people, their culture, and their economic status, we must see life from their perspective. When this is not possible, we should educate ourselves until we can empathize. The best way to do this is to not pre-judge. We need to not only drive by these restaurants that we criticize, we should actually eat a meal there. We should talk to people and invite them into our communities as well. Is it any wonder that immigrants don't feel a part of our society when Everett papers don't show up in Brazialian, Mexican, or El Salvadoran restaurants? Every one of these business is owned by legal immigrants who speak English fluently. The waitresses and waiters speak English fluently. The idea that there is a language barrier is a fact only because people aren't opening their mouths.

I think it is great that Mr. Almeida has had the opportunity to publish an article. Whether or not he has the right idea, he is a voice in the wilderness that we must hear, because for most of us, it is the first time we may experience communication from someone with a different perspecitive. With communication, prejudice will eventually give way to more accurate judgements.