Bombast

"A life without bombast is not a life."

Steven Halkiotis, Orange County Commissioner, in response to chair Barry Jacobs' recognition of Halkiotis' 20 years of service. "We thank you for your compassion, your integrity, dedication, creativity and for your passion and even for your bombast on occasion." Halkiotis announced yesterday that he will not seek re-election.

I attended my first county commissioners meeting last week when OWASA was asked to explain to the commissioners how they handle assessments (adding service to existing neighborhoods with septic systems). The atmosphere was casual and collegial between the commissioners themselves and the presenters. I don't recall ever laughing out of amusement at a Carrboro or a Chapel Hill town meeting, but Commissioners Halkiotis' bombastic speech gave me a couple of good belly laughs that night.

I regret now that I haven't paid more attention to the county commissioners. We could certainly use more interesting characters in local politics. Sorry I missed the opportunity of getting to know Commissioner Halkiotis as a legislator and a bombast.

More on Net Neutrality

"Nothing less than the future of the internet is at stake in these discussions. We must preserve neutrality in the system in order to allow the new Googles of the world, the new Yahoo!s, the new Amazons to form. We risk losing the internet as catalyst for consumer choice, for economic growth, for technological innovation, and for global competitiveness." Vint Cerf , speaking to Congress on 2/7/06

GGC all -the-way

In my younger days, I ended many nights of partying on Franklin Street at Hectors. Not the best of places for vegetarians, but the GGC (Greek grilled cheese) all-the-way will go down in memory as one of my favorite foods.

Raspberries to the property owner that is forcing Hector's out of their space on the corner of Henderson and Franklin Street. I'm glad they'll be re-opening elsewhere but it won't be the same. Pretty soon all the remnants of old Chapel Hill will be gone. Thank goodness for the Shrunken Head!

First School

FPG Institute is proposing a new model of early childhood education. "This model offers a new way to think of children starting school that moves away from simply thinking of preschool, Head Start or More at Four as being an “add on” to the existing system, that is not fully integrated into how we think about educating children in our community." (Dick Clifford memo excerpted by Neil Pederson in his memo to the Sewell School Governance Committee)

The idea is to build the school at the back end of the Horace Williams Tract, close to Seawell School to create a natural transition from the preK-2nd students at First School into grades 3-5 at Seawell. On the surface, this is a great idea, like everything else that comes out of FPG Institute. Children from low-income homes are exposed to more non-educational television and less written and numerical materials than children in middle-to upper class homes. When they come to school, the disparity in readiness creates one of the most significant social problems of our era (IMHO).
I was happy to see the following also from the Dick Clifford memo (see above for reference):

"The model has as a major goal of reducing the achievement gap between children with great economic advantage and those with less advantages. About half the achievement gap exists prior to kindergarten entry according to recent studies. By reaching children earlier we have a chance to substantially reduce the gap at this point in their lives. We know that both your More at Four and Head Start programs have this same goal and we see a joint effort in First School as the next logical step in working toward school success for all. A clearly articulated model that cuts across the current age and grade configuration should be a major help in dealing with the achievement gap. We know that the school system has been committed to addressing this issue and believe First School will offer a new set of strategies to accomplish this common goal.

I understand the concerns expressed elsewhere about institutionalizing children at such a young age. But this proposal is an attempt to provide exposure to words and numbers and other intellectual activities that low SES children do not always receive at home. Children in lower-income homes don’t have as many books, newspaper, or magazines available to them in the home; their parents are less likely to be seen reading or calculating; their neighborhoods have less signage; they don’t travel as much so their neighborhoods and homes are the environments that establish their frames of reference. In essence, their environment does not convey the message that literacy (words and numbers) is a vital aspect of everyday life. Schools are built upon the basic assumption that words and numbers are the basic operational tools of life. If children come to schools without already having embraced that assumption, they are at significant disadvantage. As are the schools that have to balance their services between those who already ‘fit the mold’ and those that don’t.

The school district needs all the help it can get in resolving the minority achievement gap, and I've long wanted to see more interaction between the university and the school district. But I am concerned that Seawell isn't the best choice for students to populate this program. For one thing, Sewell Elementary is doing a better job of bridging the gap than 4 other district elementary schools.

Excerpted from the Chapel Hill Carrboro School ReportCard for 2004-2005

Elementary School	Black	Hispanic	Economically Disadvantaged	Limited English Proficiency	Disabilities
Seawell	74.2	87.5	80	78.9	81.5
FP Graham	66.1	76.7	65.9	74.1	65.6
Glenwood	78.1	89.5	78.0	76.2	72
McDougle	71.1	66.7	69.2	50	68.1
Carrboro	63.3	67.5	60	51.3	51.9
Ephesus	57.1	85.7	68.1	78.6	51.4
Estes Hills	60.8	71.4	61	64.7	57.9
Scroggs	88.2	73.3	73.3	80	80.6
Rashkis	74.4	57.1	65.7	83.3	63.6

I hope the school board will consider an assignment plan that pulls students from Frank Porter Graham, Carrboro, Ephesus, and McDougle as well as Seawell if they go forward with this project. The goal should be identifying strategies for reducing inequities, but I'm afraid the money savings may get in the way of their focus.

Questions for now:

1. Who will be attending this new school? Will this new school taking students exclusively from the (middle class) northern neighborhoods currently served by Seawell or will it also pull from FPG elementary and Carrboro where there is a more diverse student population (racially and SES)?

2. The minority achievement gap is the most significant performance problem in our school district. According to the literature, children who come to school ready to learn lose the benefits of early age programming by late elementary/middle school. Where do the students of CHCCS most benefit--an additional readiness program or late elementary/middle grades programs that help prevent the erosion of benefits from current readiness programs? Does the financial situation dictate making a choice between the two?

3. What criteria will the school board use for making this decision? Can we take the financial aspects of it off the table for the first round of discussions? How will the school board and district administrators communicate with the public? Will public review come early enough to actually have an impact on decision making?

I'm much less skeptical of the programming part of this project than I was when I first heard about it. Hopefully, the implementation plan will focus on serving the most underserved children and not get too tangled up with finances.

Changing Paradigms

This week we saw the 'messiness' of appointing someone to a position that should have been filled through election. The public debate of the Carrboro Alderman was painful, circular, and at times appeared to be downright, heavy-handed bullying. For a while there was two groups on the board, publicly defined by the individual that group was supporting for the open seat.

The ideological differences between those two groups is of critical importance for members of the community to understand. Too bad those different positions were so singularly attributed to representation for the annexation area, to be referred to as northeast Carrboro from here on out (thanks for the suggestion Mark!). Certainly that was a consideration, but I think it was masking the deeper divide on issues of growth.

On one hand, there is the 'go slow, minimize change' group. Those individuals are working to maintain the status quo of Carrboro as a small, funky bedroom community of Chapel Hill. In many ways, this is the group I most closely identify with. At least, it is the group that has my emotional support. The other group is working from the assumption that future growth within the urban services boundary will take place in Carrboro and that we need to acknowledge the inevitability of change and to plan for it. While I don't like the way change is destroying the small-town, close knit community feeling of Carrboro, I also intellectually understand that denying this position will force development outside the urban services boundary and result in sprawl/environmental degradation.

Donella Meadows says that 'If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules, and to who has power over them.' (Rule 4 of Leverage Points) What do we know now that the 'no/limited growth' group has control of the rules?

• Environmental regulations within Carrboro zoning control will become stricter. On the surface this is hardly objectionable. And yet, we don't live in a bubble. What happens to growth that is kept out of Carrboro? We certainly won't stop it from occurring, so we should assume it will go where there are fewer restrictions, such as Chatham County. They may be downstream from our waterways, but their traffic certainly flows northward.

• The stock of affordable housing will increase. Again, hardly objectionable. And yet, focusing on supply through zoning ordinances/policy is tied so closely to development of luxury housing that we should be prepared for the current trend of decreasing proportions of low-to-moderate income residents to high-income residents to continue, creating a more economically bifurcated population.

• Taxes will most likely continue to increase. I'm not a no-government supporter. I don't object to paying for taxes that provide valuable human services and environmental protection. I do mind wasting my hard earned money on unsustainable infrastructure and administrative services. I definitely object to the impact annual tax increases is having on the composition of the community. Gentrification and out-migration of Carrboro's African-American population will leave this community looking more like Cary than Carrboro.

• The cultural divide between old and new Carrboro will turn local government into a war zone. The repercussions of the appointment process will have a significant and detrimental long-term impact on old Carrboro. There's no way to predict whether appointing someone from the newly annexed northeast Carrboro area would have smoother over the transition, but there is no doubt in my mind that the failure to appoint someone with a legitimate claim to representing those who were not able to vote will have a major impact on the 2007 election. Fortunately the residents of northeast Carrboro do have a strong environmental and social justice ethic, but they will change us in other ways.

Up until now, local growth has been caught up in a series of postive feedback loops ("any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more"). The more growth we see, the more pressure is placed on local government and human service agencies, the higher the taxes go, the more we need development to support the burden of growth. The reputation of our school system contributes to those growth pressures. The better our kids do on national tests, the more development occurs to support wealthy families who want their kids to go to school here.

What steps/policies will the new majority on the BOA undertake to break the growth cycle? Will they be successful or will they create more turmoil? Will they acknowledge the complexities or fall back on positions they've shared in previous contexts? And how much pressure will they feel to act quickly before the 2007 election? Will they dance with the system or try to control it?

The question that can never be answered but which we should never forget, is how the use of appointment rather than election impacts everything that happens over the next couple of years. Yes, I know there was no way around appointment. But the appointment could have been made on the basis of the last election by appointing the 4th runner up. That one little decision may be the one flap of a seagull's wings for Carrboro.

And where does Dan Coleman fit in all this? Without his participation in the electoral process and having been subjected to the intense questioning of groups like the Sierra Club, we really don't know but we might have a clue. In one of his pre-campaign season editorials, he speculated about a candidate of the future: "In the future, Carrboro may find itself on the horns of a dilemma: On the one hand, a marvelous case study that small really can be beautiful; on the other, a small town facing the challenge of trying to affordably meet the expectations of an increasingly affluent population....Some future candidate might posit a merger with Chapel Hill as a way to resolve this tension."

Where's my crystal ball? Certainly sounds like a campaign issue that would get him traction with Carrboro's newest neighborhoods in 2007.