Monday, March 8, 2010

Important Meetings Tonight, Monday March 8 at EDC and BOE

According to agendas, the Economic Development Committee will be considering requests for proposals (RFPs) for former CVH lands in the Maromas section of town.  These proposals include a golf course, a new home for ArtFarm and hiking trails proposed by the Connecticut Forest and Parks Association.  In addition the Committee will be discussing improvements for the harbor area on the Connecticut River.  The EDC meets at 6PM in room 208 of City Hall.

The Ad Hoc Committee of the Board of Education will meet tonight to discuss redistricting plans, and to vote on a final report to be presented to the Board of Education tomorrow.  Tonight meetings, one with the Attendance Boundary Redistricting Subcommittee at 5:30 pm, and one following with the entire ad hoc committee will take place at the Board of Education building on Hunting Hill Ave.  The calendar does not designate a room location for these meetings.

1 comment:

Sally said...

I've read in a number of posts that everyone should have seen this coming. But as someone whose child attends a diverse neighborhood school that we love and in which we have invested lots of energy, it didn't occur to me that I would be gerrymandered out of our geographically rational school district in the name of neighborhood schools. Yet I now find that after carefully looking at and visiting various schools and choosing to buy a home less than a mile from Snow school, my child is now slated to go to Macdonough, which is a mile and half away. And it appears to me that our street was selected not because it is part of the downtown neihborhood, which it isn't, but because we are needed for number-crunching. I resent that.

I agree in the main with the logic of this redistricting and have hopes that Macdonough will continue on the path of steady improvement. But technical transparency is not the same as actual functioning transparency. I for one can't afford to send my child to private school if this plan doesn't work out as well as we are being promised it will. I certainly hope the committe will listen to parents who don't want their children taken away from their neighborhood schools in order to make this bureaucratic numbers game work on paper.