Party Apartment of the Weekend

 Crestview Apartments, North Amherst

Amherst Police were called to #35 Crestview Apartments very early Saturday morning (2:10 AM) for "loud music and voices coming from listed location."

According to APD narrative: "Upon knocking on the door observed a bong in plain view. There was also a marijuana grinder and marijuana joint in plain view on the table. Perp slammed the door and ran inside to hide the contraband. Door was finally answered. Items listed were seized and perp was issued citation for noise and marijuana less than an ounce."

Given citations for noise ($300) and marijuana ($100) violations: Jared Johnson, age 21

Auf Wiedersehen and Do svidaniya

 Superintendent Maria Geryk

In order to trim their budget and stay within Finance Committee guide lines of no more than a 2.8% budget increase, the Regional Schools will nix Russian this coming year and German the following year.

According to Superintendent Maria Geryk:  "The decision to cut German and Russian at the Region was made about 3 years ago. Since that time, no new students have been added to the classes. We maintained enough FTE to support the students who were already taking classes in these languages. This year is the last group currently in Russian, and we have one more group left in German. For FY13, there will be a .4 reduction in these areas. Therefore, Russian is cut in FY13 totally and German will be cut in FY14."

At least they're still offering Chinese.

Party Concert

UMPD evidence confiscated early in the evening from one vehicle

UPDATE 6:20 PM:  Saturday night is not starting out so hot.  Another dumpster fire at Hobart Lane.  And the fireworks at North Amherst Winterfest stimulates a bevy of calls to 911

#####

Like the melody of a song that gets stuck in your head, "200 Commonwealth Ave", the Mullins Center address, will stay with me for a while as that became a loop run for Amherst Fire Department ambulances starting even before the Rusko concert (drunken young woman fell and broke her arm).

UMass Police did their best to be proactive: patrolling expansive parking lots with an armored car and unmarked patrol cars--swooping in when alcohol was visibly in possession by minors--but on nights like this, you may as well bail out the ocean with a plastic red cup.

Riot buster on patrol outside Mullins Center

The concert started at 7:30 PM, but over an hour later coatless young men in short sleeve shirts and young women dressed in even shorter black skirts with midriffs exposed, streamed down Commonwealth Avenue from the Southwest area heading toward the Mullins Center, while many of the vehicles converging on the scene had out-of-state license plates.

The good thing of course is the concert kept thousands of students on campus, the bad thing, however, is our Fire Department became like a Domino's Pizza delivery service--carrying cargo from the Mullins Center to the Cooley Dickinson Hospital.

And the saddest thing? It's become routine.

AFD ambulance at the Mullins Center. Load 'em up

Loaded For Bear

Backpack Journo tools

Since a high ranking Amherst public official--obviously not a sports fan--once tried to have me arrested for using the expression "locked and loaded", I thought it safer to explain my use of the term "loaded for bear" on Facebook regarding tonight's ride along with UMass Police Department.

My weapons--I mean tools--include a Kodak z981 with 26x wide angle optical zoom and high ISO for low light conditions, flip camera for simply to use video (but better quality than a cell phone), portable tripod so the flip can become an instant dash cam, portable scanner with Amherst and Hadley first responder frequencies, digital audio recorder, and of course when all else fails, small notebook and pencil.

And no, I'm not hoping for a riot--or what photo journalists refer to as "bang bang". Any Friday night with APD or UMPD is a newsworthy evening. Although... it is unseasonably warm and there is a big concert at the Mullins Center tonight.

Amherst Fire Department will have extra staff with nine on duty professionals (7 is normal) split between Central and North Station as well as another special detail of two stationed at the Mullins Center covering the concert.

Counterattack!

Cutting Bully Columns

UPDATE 5:05 PM Friday:
See Comment at 5:02 PM today from Bart Hollander, Catherine Sanderson's husband.

#####

Catherine Sanderson, as usual, hit a nerve with last week's column in the venerable Amherst Bulletin questioning the glowing evaluation the Regional School Committee bestowed upon Amherst School Superintendent Maria Geryk by highlighting those inconvenient truths about the high cost of education in Amherst with mediocre MCAS results, currently the most failing in over a half-dozen years.

This week's Amherst Bulletin has not one but two columns ganging up on Dr. Sanderson, written by three-out-of-four remaining Amherst School Committee members. Interestingly not a peep from any of the four hilltown committee members who presumably were as offended as the Amherst members. Or maybe Amherst has thin skinned public officials--especially now that Catherine Sanderson and Steve Rivkin are gone.

How dare she point out the rosy report was penned by a Pelham School Committee member with a spouse working under the Superintendent!

Massachusetts public officials--both paid and volunteer--are held to a higher standard. It's not called "conflict of interest", it is called the "appearance of a conflict of interest". Kind of like in criminal cases the evidence must prove "guilt beyond a reasonable doubt" vs. civil cases were it is a "preponderance of the evidence."

And having your volunteer spouse critique your highly paid boss clearly has the appearance of a conflict. The state, however, offers a simple solution: disclosure. You know, that thing called transparency--which we see very little of in Amherst.

Some might even argue appointing a high school student to the school committee smacks of an appearance of a conflict. Although we're told by reporter Nick Grabbe that the teacher was joking, newly appointed school committee member Solomon Goldstein-Rose was greeted with "I'm teaching my boss now" by a teacher at the High School on Tuesday.

Yeah, and you damn well better not give him too much homework!

Both columns use the same lame excuse town officials have relied on for 25 years protecting the Cherry Hill Golf Course: Wait until next year. Katherine Appy even manages to throw in liberals favorite boogeyman to blame, President Bush.

Yes, it takes time to turn around a big ship in a sea of molasses. But other nearby towns navigate in the same sea and seem to do as good a job in a far more cost efficient manner. As President Kennedy once said, "A rising tide lifts all boats." And Amherst has a rising tide of red ink.

Neither counter column answers that nagging question of why our cost per student is by far the highest in the area at $16,413 per student while state average is $13,055. Is it too much to ask why we don't get average adequate yearly progress when we pay 20% above average for our system?

Indeed, nobody likes a critic--especially when they're right!

President Biddy Martin Presents

Amherst College President Biddy Martin (speaking extemporaneously)

Perhaps it was the home field advantage, speaking from the comfort of a newly refurbished historic inn, or the friendly audience of local business and civic leaders--the "usual suspects" at an Amherst Chamber of Commerce event--or maybe her lifelong background in higher education...but more likely all of the above, as this morning Amherst College President, going on seven months now, Carolyn "Biddy" Martin gave an engaging fireside chat to a receptive audience of 86 smartly dressed men and women at the Amherst College owned Lord Jeffery Inn.

First and foremost, President Martin wanted to dispel the outdated notion (from back in the day when Emily Dickinson was putting quill pen to paper) that Amherst College is an elitist, blue blood private school for the privileged. She cited the telling statistics that over half the current enrollment are a combination of international students and students of color and almost one-quarter are eligible for a PELL Grant .

She highlighted her background at Cornell and the University of Wisconsin-Madison which are both "land grant" institutions expected by charter to serve the local community. And so it will be with Amherst College, where the fortunes of the town and the college named after the town are so deeply intertwined.

Ms. Martin's short list of top priorities include hiring new faculty in the current competitive market. The education boom of the 1960s swelled the ranks of professors, who are now retiring in droves. While competition from demanding Asian colleges and universities for liberal arts professors only adds to supply problems.

She proudly pointed out the new $200 million life sciences building, which will require the next four or five years to complete and will be second to none on a national scale. One unusual component (at least for a liberal arts college) will be an "incubator" for the study of entrepreneurship. Not a space for business start ups, like at UMass or Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, but a center for students to learn about the social value of starting a business.

Coincidentally enough fellow Amherst resident Donna Kelley, associate professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College, made national news last week for a major study she co-authored on women's entrepreneurship encompassing 59 economies, that found American women have greater fear of failure than American men when contemplating business creation.

Precisely the problem education can rectify--the earlier the better. Kelley also recently co-taught a Junior Achievement course at Amherst's Crocker Farm Elementary School, where her daughter is a student.

When the new Amherst College science center opens sometime in 2017, the four-story, 220,000-square-foot building will be the largest structure on campus, and an impressive trophy to attract new faculty and students.

But expensive new bricks and mortar buildings are not the only means for dispensing higher education--at least not in this digital age. Ms. Martin pointed out the importance of distance learning online as a cost effective adjunct for face-to-face communication, where maintaining an 8-1 student teacher ratio is costly. A lesson the Amherst public schools could stand learning.

If anyone in the audience harbored any uncertainty about the first female president in the 190 year history of the college, they left the Dickinson Room with those doubts dispelled.

Amherst College is in confident, able hands.

Occupy the Trolley stop

Trolley Station on North Pleasant Street, built 1911

Those who fail to appreciate history are doomed to retweet it.

Last week I asked UMass director of campus planning Dennis Swinford about the current status of the quaint brick trolley waiting station (now recycled as a bus stop shelter) and received this ominous reply: "The Massachusetts Historical Commission issued a ruling that the structure can be demolished after photo documentation and measured drawings are prepared and submitted to the Mass Archive."

In other words, the bulldozers are already warming up.

Retired Professor Joseph Larson, a historical preservationist on a mission, recently pegged the cost to save the station at $75,000...down considerably from the original lone quote UMass received at $200,000.

Considering the Amherst flagship campus has witnessed an unprecedented construction boom over the past ten years, averaging over $100 million annually, that new quote to save a healthy piece of history comes to less than one-tenth of one percent--an even more startling statistic than the Occupy mantra centered on the 1%.

Original Trolley Barn Cowles Road North Amherst, built 1897. One year demolition delay expires 7/28/12

Second Trolley Barn, now Amherst DPW, built 1917

A brief history of the local Trolley by Jonathan Tucker