Do as I say! (Not as I do)

UPDATE: Thursday, 9:20 AM

So the Crusty Gazette did not cover /expose the health hazard going on since September at Wildwood Elementary School in this morning’s edition. Now you know why I call them Crusty.

But they did cover the “restructuring “ of our elementary schools proposal that somebody posted as a Comment yesterday (so I’m not sure if that qualifies as scooping them or not).

The article by Mary Carey is of course a lot more thorough than what you might find in the blogesphere but then that’s why she makes the big bucks. There was a, perhaps inadvertent, odd juxtaposition of paragraphs that I found illuminating:

Just keeping the schools running at the current level would require an increase of 7 to 8 percent in the $20.6 million budget. The schools will instead be aiming to increase the budget by only 2 percent over last year.

"I've never dealt with decreases of this size," the co-superintendent said.

Only in Amherst is a 2% budget increase considered a “decrease”
###################################################################################
ORIGINAL POST: Wednesday afternoon
So if you can believe those damn anonymous “spurious” and “ugly” comments posted on local online forums; well actually there’s only one, Masslive (Amherst) Forum, as the Crusty Daily Hampshire Gazette spiked their lively one seven years ago: Wildwood Elementary School (built in 1970), entrusted with over 400 Amherst children, has no hot water.

And furthermore, if you can believe another anonymous commenter who provided (in a journalistic sense—if you acknowledge anonymous sources) corroboration, they have been running on cold water since September!

I decided to be that investigative journalist I always wanted to be and took a trip up to Wildwood this afternoon, figuring a formal Freedom of Information request could take weeks.

Sure enough, no freaken hot water! And then I went back to recheck over an hour later (figuring maybe multitudeness kids used that bathroom and temporarily overwhelmed the hot water heater). The video is from the second visit.

Now if Puffton Village or Southpoint Apartments lost running hot water in the wintertime, the People’s Republic of Amherst Building Inspector would instantly shut them down. And since private management knows that, the problem would be corrected overnight.

Last month the US economy shed over 500,000 jobs--mostly from manufacturing, construction and retail. But, education and government actually experienced job growth. Ahhh…the dramatic difference between 'I'm-here-to-help-you' Government and the 'source-of-their-funding' Private Sector.

God help us!

Hear no evil

This from Mary Carey's article in Saturday's Crusty Gazette about the School Committee voting down an online suggestion box: " We don't see a need for a blind suggestion box, a blog site for people to complain," said Alton Sprague, interim co-superintendent, summing up the view expressed by a majority of School Committee members.

In his 40 years working in public schools, "nothing good has come from a suggestion box," Sprague said. Comments about school employees on local online forums have been "spurious," he said. And the tenor of some of the email officials have received in response to a fatality involving a school bus earlier this year and the coming closing of the middle school pool has been "ugly."

So you gotta wonder how the Facilitation of the Community Choices Committee, feels about that Old-School statement denigrating anonymous surveys—after all, the FCCC relied almost exclusively on the 497 responses from Amherst taxpayers to formulate their budget recommendations to the Select Board and Finance Committee.

Perhaps Mr. Sprague was a tad unhappy with the Masslive Amherst Forum “discussion” of the tragic bus accident that took the life of a toddler. Somebody questioned why the Sprague’s were on vacation at the Cape at the beginning of the school year; kind of like a Health Club owner taking off the first two weeks in January--the best month of the year for the industry (New Year’s resolutions.)

And somebody offered up as a defense their (slightly) advanced ages. Yikes!

The recent anonymous survey of town employees turned up problems with the Town Manager’s style of leadership and resulted in the Select Board at the very least suggesting he work on it.

Many industries specifically solicit employee feedback for cost containment and often will reward good ideas with a chunk of the money saved. That way everybody wins. If you don’t like what somebody writes then don’t act on it (other than to delete).

But how are you going to know what you don’t know if you refuse to even listen?

Sunday, December the 7'th

Another one of those dates we should never, never, never forget.

Even if your knowledge of the awful event only comes from Hollywood movies, the sights and sounds reinforce the Hell that was “A date which will live in infamy”.

Had their never been a Second Wave of fighters and bombers swarming like angry bees—but way less effective because all the smoke from dying battlewagons now obscured the fleet--and even if the First Wave broke off the attack ten minutes into it, about half the personnel damage had been done.

The Arizona had already become a tomb for 1,177 of her crew.

UPDATE: 7:30 PM
So amazingly the People’s Republic of Amherst, unlike last year (or the previous twenty or so) actually remembered to bring the town flag to half-staff. Not so for the blue blood private colleges like Smith, or Amherst College and even our public flagship Umass (although they remembered last year but maybe those budget cuts axed the flag protocol person).






Or even the town of Hadley.

Yes, Virginia, even in Amherst.

UPDATE: Monday, 12/8 9:30 AM As Mary Carey pointed out the great thing about a blog is that you have expert readers who can set the record strait. So I just received an email from an overly reliable member of Amherst PD who wanted to correct one of Ed's comments about traffic control:

The Univ. Police Dept. is ENTIRELY in Charge of the Traffic Detail for Commencement. It is THEIR plan and they hire us. (APD). They tell us where they would like officers to be and which direction they want traffic routed. I believe they use a plan that was designed by the students themselves.

ORIGINAL Post 12/5 8:00 PM Okay so this year the Merry Maple (not to be confused with a Christmas Tree)is a tiny bit more merry than last year when it looked like the poster tree for a North Korean anti air raid illustration. The Umass band under the amiable direction of George Parks was outstanding as always.

The politics of a terrible tragedy

Pelham (population 1,440) Police Chief Ed Fleury

UPDATE: Saturday 2:45 PM
So my forever buddy Izzy just jokingly emailed that she was gonna suit for my use of Chief Fleury’s photo (above). I had done a Google Image search and found it (so I assume it’s free game but now that somebody has used a bunch of images from my blog in his youtube trailer for a Hollywood screenplay I’m actually going to research the legality of using Google images without permission of the original owner)

I just now redid the search and realize the Google credit was to ‘MassNews’ and not ‘Masslive’. I had wondered why the Springfield Republican (the owner of Masslive) used the Gazette mug shot of Fleury and had to credit the competition on the Front Page of yesterday's paper.

So the photo credit goes to: Isabel Lyman former (and probably only conservative columnist) for the venerable Daily Hampshire Gazette, a tireless champion of home schooling and former co-owner of a private, Christian Middle/High School in the overly education-oriented People’s Republic of Amherst.

And yes, I’m certain her article from over five years ago will not go a long way toward engendering sympathy for Chief Fleury. But again--it points out that he never tried to hide anything when it came to machine guns (note photo of Mount Holyoke co-ed using one, which I’m now sure was illegal.)
Fleury Gun profile from 2003


ORIGINAL POST THURSDAY 12/4/08
Tomorrow the hard-copy news will be front-page banner headlines all the way. Gazette, Springfield Republican, probably the Boston Globe and Herald as well: “Crusading DA indicts small-town Police Chief for involuntary manslaughter in child’s machine gun death”, or something like that (you can tell I don’t normally do headlines)

Of course the DA is quoted saying that Machine Gun Shoots are "clearly a violation of the law.” Well gee Mr. DA, where the Hell were you over the past few years when these things having been routinely promoted—and I mean PROMOTED—in this state?

It’s not like they were secretly holding cock fighting in a basement somewhere. If you did your job and shut these events down a year ago that child would be alive today.

If you are going to indict somebody then how about the father who picked out the gun? Or your office for dereliction of duty.

The jury will never convict. But another life has been destroyed.

How quickly they forget.

So I was about to post a comment/response over on Ms. O’Keeffe’s blog—or whatever she calls it—but then thought if she is no longer going to post, why bother?

As most “inside baseball” aficionados know, Ms. O’Keeffe first came to public notice via her blog ‘Stephanie’s Town Meeting Experience’ started in the Spring of 2006 when she won a seat in Amherst Town Meeting back when nobody really paid attention to the antiquated 240 member body, most of whom are AARP members in good--if not longtime--standing.

Then after the public limelight started to shine Ms. O'Keeffe added “InAmherst” where she tried to be “another source for local news and information,” and oftentimes succeeded.

Within a month of winning her Select Board seat she stopped posting at both sites. Of course a month or two before the election she started ‘Stephanieokeefe.com’ which was even more instrumental in winning her Select Board seat.

It’s what I jokingly refer to with fellow bloggers as “behold the power”.

But now that she’s become the Star Trek equivalent of “Captain Dunsel”, the Select Board recaps and summaries may go the way of her previous two websites. Hmmm...

Hey Stephanie (sorry, I mean “Madam Chair.”) Remember where you came from, remember what made you: communication is key!

Rearranging deck chairs

Okay so our illustrious Select Board is under new management…but will it make a difference? Well of course it will--a houseplant could replace His Lordship to make things better. But will Ms. Okeeffe’s meteoric rise to Chairwomen of the most important elected position in town make a significant improvement in this time of fiscal crisis?

Hell no! Because at this point, she’s taken command of the Titanic ten minutes after scraping an iceberg.

Only in Amherst would someone snatch the premier position of political power based on having “the time.” If Amherst moved to a professional Mayor/Council then perhaps others would decide to make “the time”

One of the hidden gems peppered throughout the survey responses from Facilitation of the Community Choices Committee's outreach to Amherst citizens is the underlying belief that we need a lot more from our local government: More professionalism, more accountability and more creativity.

And that simply can’t happen with our fragmented current form of government populated by part-time, volunteers (no matter how many hours they are willing to donate) where ultimately the buck stops nowhere.

The Springfield Republican reports