OK. If you’ve checked out our post on the top of the ticket, its now time to dig down in the weeds: Town Meeting! This is Belmont’s legislature, in essence, and incredibly important. Think of your local TMMs as…
When you live in a compact, walkable town like Belmont, its easy to forget that many, many other communities across the country are what you might call “car bound.” They’re sprawling, decentralized, with poor access to critical services and lacking even the basic infrastructure, like sidewalks and bike lanes, to support citizens who choose to go car free. No surprise, also, that in these communities the collective memory of things like walking or biking places or riding the bus has disappeared, making those once normal activities seem foreign or downright dangerous. Thus, the news item that flashed across my computer screen today about high school seniors in Michigan being punished for riding their bikes to school. Crazy, no?
Live blogging here from Spring Town Meeting. We’ve been here for close to two hours and are still snagged in debate of the first substantive issue: approval of a new stabilization fund for Minuteman Technical. The idea here is to…
An interesting interview with the three School Committee candidates on online learning models like Khan Academy. Long and short: we’ve got one strong “Yes” one “Maybe” and one “I need to think about it.” First: the “maybe.” Candidate Anne Lougee…
School Committee member Dan Scharfman is the latest to pick up papers to run for a seat on the Board of Selectmen, following the decision by current member Angelo Firenze not to seek re-election. Scharfman is the third person to…
Just a note that the Belmont PTA/PTO will be screening Race To Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture tomorrow evening (Thursday) at the Belmont Studio Cinema, with half the price of admission donated to Belmont’s Public Schools.PTO/PTA’s! The…
There are three zillion different ways you can slice the school spending pie and analyze the numbers, and none of them are particularly satisfying. One way, however, is to look at how much each town spends per resident on its…
Belmont Public Schools Superintendent George Entwistle has decided to step down after two years on the job, citing “personal, family reasons.” Entwistle will be taking a position as Superintendent of the Scarborough, ME, school district.
An op-ed in the Citizen Herald charges that the O’Neil and Cushing Square developments will send more than 200 new children to our schools. But will they? A 2003 study suggests that the link between development and school population is difficult to make.
There’s good reason to be very, very, very suspicious of the Board of Selectmen’s call to delay a vote on an override. In fact, the push to delay a vote on the override is part of a well worn strategy for sinking it, altogether.