Orange County Elementary Schools

Orange County School District has been put into Title I Improvement due to lack of progress in reading scores over the past three years. Using NC Report Card I pulled out the Snapshot data statistics on race and economic status for each of the elementary schools in the district. The racial and economic status columns in this table represent the percentage of students passing both reading and math tests. 46% of economically deprived students passed both compared to 70% of not economically deprived students. Clearly economic status is a factor in student performance in Orange County.

School	White	Black	Hispanic	Econ Deprived	Not Econ Deprived
Cameron Park	88	49.1	63.6	58.7	85.1
Central	57.7	32.1	60	47.4	46.5
Cheeks	58.4	26.6	33.3	36	53.3
Grady Brown	76.4	41.9	37.5	41.8	74.6
Hillsborough	91.8	52	0	60	88.2
New Hope	69.7	20	36.7	33.9	70
Pathways	74.4	34.2	57.1	44.3	74.9
OVERALL AVERAGE	73.8	36.6	41.2	46.0	70.4

Maintaining an energy efficient refrigerator

Appliances account for about 20 percent of a household’s annual electricity use. (Union of Concerned Scientists Green Tips, February 2007)

Refrigerator/Freezer

• Keep your refrigerator away from heat sources (including dishwashers, ovens, heating vents, and direct sunlight), which cause it to work harder to keep its contents cold.
  
  
• Leave a few inches of space behind the refrigerator to ensure proper air circulation around the condenser coils, and vacuum the coils at least once a year.
  
  
• Open the door as little as possible to minimize the amount of cold air that escapes.
  
  
• Don’t keep your refrigerator or freezer too cold, which can waste energy. Recommended temperatures are between 37 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit (ºF) for refrigerators and 5 ºF for freezers.
  
  
• Keep the refrigerator and freezer full to better retain the cold. If your refrigerator is fairly empty, store water-filled containers inside.

Limits on Growth?

Earlier this week, the Chapel Hill Town Council authorized the town manager to finalize the contract with Ram Development for the Lot 5 development. While the Council did instruct the manager to assure that the contract included a stipulation of 20% energy reduction in accordance with ASHRAE 90.1 standards, the decision also continues and endorses a pattern of large-scale development within our downtown area. Where will this growth end? Oddly enough, today's Chapel Hill News reports that the Chamber of Commerce is considering the establishment of a Sustainability Certificate program for local businesses.

Apparently our local Chamber, who enthusiastically endorsed the Lot 5 proposal at every one of the public hearings, is not familiar with Donella Meadow's essay on What Does Sustainability Mean?

If we decided to live sustainably, we'd start by eliminating waste. We would discover that we could run this country with half as much energy as we use now (some technological optimists say one-fourth as much). We could also cut our materials budget in half by better recycling, by increasing the useful lifetime of products, and by reducing extravagant practices such as overpackaging and junk mailing.

Those are efficiency gains, not lifestyle losses. Our showers would still be hot and our beer cold, our motors would turn, our drain on resources and flows of pollution would go down, and so would our monthly bills. If we used the savings to grow more -- more people and more stuff for each person -- we would quickly find ourselves unsustainable again. Halving the energy and materials use per car or house but doubling the number of cars or houses would put us right back where we started.

The question our elected officials continue to overlook is how much growth are we willing to accept and over what kind of timeline? Do we need large-scale development in our community in order to protect the rural nature of the county or do we need to impose more obstacles to slow down population growth in the county without penalizing economic growth? Hasn't the unrestricted growth over the past 20 years created the problems we now have with unaffordability?

Our present world is much better at producing quantity and technology than quality and morality. But that's culture, not scientific law or immutable destiny. It would take a big change to turn from quantity to quality, but the change would start with just a small click in our heads. It could happen with the speed of a thought. The thought would be that we should stop working so hard to produce growth and instead produce what we really want.

Does Chapel Hill want to grow into a larger and larger city or would we prefer to slow down growth and improve quality of life, ensuring the protection of our environment as well as maintaining affordability and diversity of population? Can we nurture a healthy, sustainable business community, without the current overgrowth in residential population?

The current unaffordability in this community is a feedback signal to elected officials. Our community is stuck in a positive feedback loop. We build more and more residential developments and get further and further in debt and lose more and more of our long-term residents. "So how big do we have to get to reach that magical, mystical place where growth will finally start lowering taxes? Or maybe it would be better to ask: how much more evidence do we need before we stop believing that myth?" (exerpted from The Real Cost of Growth in Oregon)

Lot 5, Greenbridge, and all the other new developments planned in Chapel Hill and Carrboro will not improve affordability, adding retail to our downtowns won't support sustainability economic development regardless of how green their business practices are, and concentrating the county's overgrowth within our urban boundaries won't protect our air and water quality unless we step back and take a hard look at the big picture of what is happening and where we want to go as a community. We need analysis of the overall situation, including the economic and social impacts growth are having on this community. We need to engage the entire community.

A Valentine from the Cat...

A Valentine from the Cat...

You are an amusing playmate,
a good provider,
a prompt & efficient litter changer.
You're excellent at stroking & brushing & you clearly adore me.
So let me say, from the bottom of my heart,

you'll do.

Downtown Redevelopment

Within the next couple of months, downtown Chapel Hill could be set to house hundreds of new residents. The Lot 5 redevelopment project of the town council is a done deal for all practical purposes, and hopefully the contract with Ram will assure some degree of sustainability comes with that project. Greenbridge, on the other hand, is a great concept gone bad and there is still time to stop it.

But my personal opinions about Greenbridge aside, the implications of the growth represented by these two projects and the scale of their physical presence is a community discussion that should have been addressed outside of the development review process. Better late than never though, the Chapel Hill News tackles the question today.

Village or city?

In her online Web log, Town Council member Laurin Easthom wrote that coming decisions will determine "whether or not Chapel Hill remains a town in which you seem to know everyone, or a small city."

Easthom said increasing density downtown is the price to pay for preserving the countryside north and west of Chapel Hill-Carrboro. As long as people want to move to Chapel Hill, she said, developers will want to build here. The Town Council wants to push them downtown rather than into the wilderness.

"I lament the fact that we are going to see density, but I also understand that we need to do that in order to preserve the rural buffer," Easthom said. "I want Chapel Hill to be the small town that I've known it to be forever."

Council member Mark Kleinschmidt, on the other hand, does not believe a denser downtown will destroy the small-town appeal. He envisions a small city where neighbors do know each other, perhaps better than they do under the dominant pattern of developing vacant land into sprawling subdivisions on large lots.

That pattern, he said, "diminished the village quality that a lot of people romanticize when they think of Chapel Hill."

If downtown develops as Kleinschmidt envisions, residents will be able to walk to work and shop, greeting each other and shopkeepers along the way.

"These kinds of redevelopments, particularly in our downtown core, actually bring us back to those elements of our village past that made our community such an attractive place to live," he said.

Can this community continue to support a rapidly growing population? Looking at this from a sustainability perspective, there has been proactive planning to protect farmland and natural areas through the rural boundary agreement that has been in place for close to 20 years. But is that agreement working? Are we achieving the environmental protection benefits anticipated by the planners? Do we really have the water and sewer infrastructure needed to support all the growth planned for Carrboro, Chapel Hill and the University?

What about the economic and social impacts of the decision to push growth into the towns in order to protect the environment? Are we sacrificing those aspects of sustainability through our efforts to protect the environment?

The cost of living in the towns has become unaffordable. Is this the result of the managed growth policy? Are we protecting farmlands and open spaces at the expense of our local economy? Should the county be looking at how tax revenues are distributed to help offset the burden on the towns? Clearly both towns need an economic development plan beyond just downtown growth. But if Lot 5 and Greenbridge are both approved, will that provide the stimulus for economic development the Council expects?

What impact is this growth having on the social aspects of the community? We know our community demographics look very different from 20 years ago. How much of that change is the result of growth pushing out long-time residents who can no longer afford to live here? How much is the result of the school system reputation?

I'm glad to see other people asking these same questions. "Can we steer Chapel Hill's growth in a way that will allow us, in 10 or 20 or 30 years, to express the same sort of sentiment? The village has grown up, and it has more growing yet to do. The challenge, as it always has been, is to grow not just bigger, but better." (CHN Editorial)

Sustainable Growth

www.planetizen.com/node/22812
….the dominant focus of sustainable development, at least as stated in the published policies and plans of many institutions of government, is more concerned with sustainable growth than ecologically sustainable measures, such as averting global warming, limiting resource depletion and loss of biodiversity. Further, social issues are rarely given significant concern in what is theoretically supposed to be an equal balancing of the three dimensions: environmental, economic and social. This produces a very different policy response than the traditional planning policy of looking after the disadvantaged in pursuit of the wider public good.