Archive for November, 2007
As we ramp up for our second dinner this season “Energy Alternatives a la Carte: Fossils and Sunshine and Garbage, oh my!” we’ve drawn up a draft of what we’ve learned, so far. Find it here.
Here’s hitting the high points:
1. Diversify energy sources to minimize economic risk.
2. Make 50-year decisions despite 4-year terms.
3. Bank on correct principles, not prophecies.
4. When possible, let the market find the solutions.
5. No one size fits all: Seek local solutions to specific local energy demands.
6. Scale matters. So pay attention.
7. Energy independence is a national security issue.
Do you agree? Disagree? What would you add to or take off of this list? What qualifications would you add? The Village Square will make our conclusions public at the end of this season, so we want to keep this conversation going until then.
November 18th, 2007
Remarks as prepared by Lea Marshall for the “CC” middle school rezoning meeting. Delivered while munching on McDonald’s fries. Has there ever been such a selfless reason to eat french fries?
I drove through this fast food drive through on the way to this
meeting tonight. I drove through for several reasons but the main ones
were that I was hungry and it was convenient. I made a fast food
decision based on convenience and I feel that this rezoning of Raa is
also a fast food decision based on convenience.
It meets one need and one need alone, the need to have a neighborhood
school for Killearn. And you know what, my French fries met one need,
my hunger need, very nicely. But the empty calories and lack of
nutrition is really not doing me any favors in the long run.
A fast food or convenience based eating policy does not meet my future
needs of having a healthy body. Likewise, this school rezoning does
not meet future needs of a healthy school system and healthy community.
Fast food eating decisions lead to my doctor having to prescribe pills
to lower blood pressure and pills to lower cholesterol. Fast food
education decisions lead to prescribing magnet schools and taking
students from other areas to fill in gaps. Prescription drugs may have
some positive effects on a person’s health just as these prescribed
school initiatives may benefit a school, but there are always side
effects.
Wouldn’t it have been better to make the harder and wiser decisions
to begin with?
Look at me, i have made a lot of fast food decisions in my life. I am
an expert in convenience based eating decisions. I also realize that
there is a price to be paid for making fast food convenience based
decisions in my body. There is a price also in our school system, in
our community and in the legacy we leave behind to our children.
Consider the long term health of our city and work harder to make a
better choice. We may be “lovin it” now…but will we love what a
steady diet of convenience based decisions does to us in 5 years?
November 15th, 2007
I do not come to this rezoning discussion without bias… I have a dog in this fight, in fact I have three of them… three children ages 13, 11, and 8 and all are housebroken.
We are in the Gilchrist, Raa, Leon school zones and we will still be there after this rezoning. We chose our neighborhood based on ethnically diverse and excellently thriving schools. I don’t think that you should fix what isn’t broken. Those three schools are WORKING well.
A tipping point exists in schools. Schools close to that tipping point of 40% free and reduced lunch number (Raa is around 35%) start rapidly sliding toward less effective and more expensive education. Rezoning will make a BIG difference. Ten percent of the population of Raa will be gone when the rising 6th and 7th graders leave next year- even MORE the next year as the new school adds 8th grade.
I have a vested interest in Raa because my children are there and will continue to be educated there. I also have a vested interest in my community being strong and my city being healthy and successful.
A few years ago there was a plan to rezone Gilchrist and our neighborhood was being looked at to change to Ruediger Elementary. I was the parent waving the “Heck no, we won’t go” banner UNTIL another neighbor challenged me asking, “Have you visited Ruediger? I went and met some great teachers. I think it could be like Gilchrist if we all went there.”
I was stunned and silent (and that doesn’t happen often). I had not even thought beyond my own agenda for keeping things convenient and comfortable to what might be a bigger picture.
I know the goals I had for my life and for my family. I want to raise children who love God and love others. I want to leave this world a little better because I walked here for this short time.
Could those goals be accomplished at Gilchrist or Ruediger? Yes, they could.
Would it have been more convenient and comfortable at Gilchrist? Yes, it would.
However do we strive only for convenience and comfort in our lives? I hope I am striving for more than that.
I realized that comfort and convenience are not our family’s goals. Instead we strive for character, courage, compassion, and good citizenship. Great goals, however there is work and sacrifice involved.
The rezoning didn’t happen. In some ways, I was sorry. I would have liked to have seen what would have happened if we had been inconvenienced and challenged. Would we have left that school and our community a better place? I will never know.
We are increasingly becoming a society of convenience. Fast food, email, cell phones…and that spills into what we want in our schools. Demanding everything when and where we want it. I type this as I sip a Starbucks and check my cell phone for messages. I am just as guilty as the next gal. I throw stones from my own glass house.
There is a proverb that states “Every convenience brings its own inconveniences with it.” What is going to happen if we put convenience at the top of our rezoning goals list? In the end we will wind up more inconvenienced.
Currently the list of goals for the zoning committee is to try to…
Keep neighborhoods intact
Send students to the nearest school
Reduce overcrowding
Plan for future population growth
Strengthen feeder patterns
Build racial and economic diversity
So it seems the Raa rezoning (even though it doesn’t meet the criteria for the other 4 goals) is all about the convenience.
Rezoning the Killearn students that attend Raa will NOT reduce overcrowding as Raa is under-capacity. It will not plan for future population growth which includes substantial growth near the new middle school. More dangerously, I believe that it will NOT strength feeder patterns unless in the future students are rezoned out of other elementary and high schools to keep them all together, expanding this issue into other centrally located schools. Finally, this rezoning also does NOT build racial and economic diversity.
Convenience will lead to inconvenience as these schools “left behind” cost more tax dollars to continue to educate students. Magnet programs are wonderful, and wonderfully expensive. We will see in 5-10 years the results of what happens at this rezoning, for better or for worse in our community and our checkbooks.
Neighborhood schools are comfortable and convenient. Do we pay the price for that comfort and convenience now or in the future? There will be a price to pay someday…
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
Ironically, I stand at the corner of Tharpe and MLK Boulevard to pick up my daughter from Raa. I hope to see some of you there too.
- Lea Marshall
November 10th, 2007
The course of democracy seldom runs smoothly. Any veteran of middle school history class knows that, as does anyone who has ever attended a school-rezoning meeting.
If you were snoozing during 7th grade and need a refresher, you might want to join Leon County Schools at the rezoning meeting for the new middle school tonight at 6PM at Roberts Elementary. At stake? Where my child will attend middle school, along with many of yours. I won’t be there, though, as The Village Square will be discussing our first Local Roundtable topic, economic segregation.
The Village Square came from the sense that politics, while it won’t ever be “beanbag”, has taken a notable turn southward of late. Missing? We think it’s the local conversation between people who share little league teams and drive carpools together, but don’t agree with each other politically. Instead, well-paid partisan talking heads turn our neighbors into an evil “they” who have “special” interests, and probably hate America too.
The Village Square thinks we can defy that trend right here in Tallahassee, by – go figure – talking with each other instead of about each other. From those conversations come common sense and a measure of common purpose.
Of course, few things will test this civility concept quite like rezoning.
My very own civility may be at risk, as my child is involved. We live in a pocket of Killearn currently zoned for Raa Middle School that may be rezoned to the new school. While for me the commute is only marginally shorter, rezoning would correct a poor feeder pattern that requires our kids to leave most of their elementary school friends to join a middle school full of strangers (middle schools are scary enough without strangers), only to return in high school to their former grade school peer group, which – uh - no longer includes them. In other words, they’ve been living in the plot of a high school cheerleader movie.
Left with the short straw of the rezoning is Raa Middle School, which will lose a substantial number of its gifted and higher socioeconomic students. From what The Village Square has learned so far in our conversation about economic segregation, that matters.
Critically important to this conversation is the concept of a tipping point, which seems to exist both in school systems and in neighborhoods. Apparently schools absorb a certain amount of economic diversity successfully, maintaining a high quality of education for all students while providing additional benefits that seem to help students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds achieve their potential. The many parents whose children have thrived in diverse schools like Raa Middle School and Leon High School know this first hand.
But when the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch exceeds somewhere between 30 and 40%, the school risks tipping. Those families who have the resources to move to a new school zone, attend private school or provide transportation for a child with a tuition voucher, may leave the school. What’s left behind is a more challenged school that has tipped, in it the students who don’t have options.
Also left behind is a higher education bill for the taxpayer. We pay over $9,000 annually to support a student in the recently tipped and under-enrolled Nims Middle School, compared to about $5,400 per student at Swift Creek Middle School.
Whatever the decision, it won’t make everyone happy. Nevertheless, it’s worth aspiring to have an informed conversation that remembers, as neighbors, we are all partners in the ultimate long-term outcome.
We’ll do world peace next week.
- Liz Joyner
November 8th, 2007
I, like Lea, love scrapbooking. Unlike Lea, however, it never actually gets in a scrapbook. (Is too still scrapbooking.)
Pop quiz: Do you remember which one of us is a Democrat and which a Republican. Hint: Study pictures.
I want to be Lea, really I do. I’m just not.
Quickly changing the subject from my maternal incompetence, we have suspected something all along, but we’ve now got proof positive that Newsweek is reading the Village Square blog, no less than a stolen story idea, and we’ve caught them red-handed.
If scrapbooking conjures up images of kindly suburban women passing pictures around the kitchen table, then you don’t know the modern hobby. . . it is a cutthroat business.
(New York Times, Washington Post, we’re watching you. . . )
If we really want to put our finger on the pulse of what’s fueling our current lack of civility, there’s got to be some insight in this scrapbook story somewhere. I think a good hefty majority of us would agree that this isn’t exactly America putting our best foot forward. How can we lead the free world when we can’t scrapbook without plunging zig-zig scissors into suburban eyeballs or knocking teeth out with butterfly-shaped paper punches?
At least the end of civilization will be decorative.
-Liz
(whose negligence in scrapbooking was actually prophetic moral superiority**)
**Footnote on moral superiority: As the administrator of this blog, I have the power (muah ha ha) to change the dates on posts, which I have done without a second thought on this post to cover for my negligence in not actually answering Lea’s post for a full week and a half. Because of my high moral standards, I confessed to Lea that in doing so I would have to lie to you, our readership (pish, not you Newsweek). Lea advised me that this wasn’t lying, it was blying, being on a blog as it is. And my mother never once told me not to blie.
November 5th, 2007
I can hardly find time to write, I am so busy following the latest scandal… questions left unanswered, ethical lines crossed, people pointing fingers, researching into the past, did she really do that? did he not know the rules? It is all too much dirt to even climb out of the sludge without needing a shower and some Bath and Body works products….
No, I am not referring to any political event or candidate; this is about something MUCH MORE IMPORTANT…. the latest debacle in the scrapbooking world.
Yes, I know I brought in the “s” word…. I am a scrapbooker (by the way, my computer spell checker does not ever think scrapbooker is a word, how wrong is that?). My personal mantra is “no memory left behind”. A girl needs a mantra.
Scrapbookers should be the nicest people in the world (have you met me?), the hobby should be scandal free, and it is only paper, glue and family photos, right?
Oh my, you are so wrong, as wrong as rubber cement is on the back of a photo, that kind of wrong. Several events have ROCKED the scrapbooking community recently (or should that be “cut and pasted” the scrapbooking community?).
First there is the Hall of Fame controversy. Yes, there is a scrapbooking Hall of Fame and no, I am not in it (and yes, I should be in it). Creating Keepsakes (the premiere scrapbooking magazine) runs a Hall of Fame contest. Scrapbookers enter pages that they have done and they are judged on the photos, the page itself, AND the journaling (all three are very important to a scrapbook page, a complete platform one might say). Then a Hall of Fame group of scrapbookers are announced and they publish a book of the HOF pages and you get the picture (hee hee, that was a pun and I didn’t even mean to do that one).
Well, the HOF rules CLEARLY stated that you had to use pictures that you took yourself and the HOF people signed an affidavit that it was all their own work and then lo and behold several of the HOFers had photos in the book that clearly were not their own photographic work (like who can take a photo of their own group white water rafting that looks EXACTLY like the photo taken by the rafting company and on the rafting company’s website, I mean I am a good phototgrapher, but I am not that good. And WHO had the time to find the rafting
company’s website and found the photo from that day and published it to bring down the gal who used that photo?).
One gal stepped down when allegations started flying and admitted (”yes, I did use someone else’s photo”) and others were not so forthcoming with confessions and kind of danced around the question (“ummm, really, I set up a tripod and a timer and got that white water rafting photo exactly like the one of the company’s website”) and then quit and never admitted any wrongdoing. And there are still others remaining under suspicion and a low lying black cloud of shame is covering the entire scene (can you tell that I am good at
scrapbook journaling with metaphors like that one?).
Then in the same week, a major scrapbooking message board is hacked (yes, there are scrapbooking message boards and more amazing, there are people who hack them) only to find a secret message area and the “celebrities” of the scrapbooking board are talking about other scrapbookers’ work and demeaning their personalities behind their back. Ouch, it is those little paper cuts that hurt the worst, isn’t it?
All this to say… no wonder we can’t all get along! When scrapbookers are dishonest, evasive, catty, and downright dirty and mean, how can we hope for our political arena to be any better? Is the knitting industry any better; is there an inner quilting circle that holds the rest of the quilters in contempt; is there a calm and polite port in any storm?
And am I a part of the problem? Is my interest in this shameful scrapbooking secret world, my kind of thrill in seeing someone go down (even though they didn’t follow the rules), is that fanning the flames of this fire storm that exists everywhere today… in the world of celebrities, the arena of politics, and even in our own PTO organizations where we talk about others as a daily sport?
No wonder my middle school daughter comes home with the daily drama report… she has learned the drama from her mama. Maybe if I clean up my own habits (go cold turkey on the People magazine and the scrapbook smack sites, watch what I say about others, and avoid the drama that is only for the sake of drama), “be the change I want to see in the world” (thanks for the quote Ghandi), and clean up one little area of the world, then maybe I can scrapbook (and vote) with a cleaner conscience. I may not ever make a Hall of Fame, but I think for me, it is more important to avoid the halls of shame…
-Lea
November 1st, 2007
