Tiverton Citizens for Change

It takes a little bit of time, but it’s an edifying experience to review the first School Committee meeting after last year’s FTM and then watch the video from the committee’s recent hearing about closing the high school. A theme emerged last year, solidified in this instruction from guidance counselor and unionist Lynn Nicholas:

You need to be serious about what you plan on cutting. I am the last person on this Earth that would want to hurt a child, but you need to make a statement. I don’t know how you’re going to do it. I don’t know what you’re going to do. But you need to make a statement to get people to the town meeting.

Soon after, Superintendent Bill Rearick told the Sakonnet Times that “our kids are going to be hurt.” Having attended both meetings, I can tell you that, if you placed them side by side, as movie editors often do to draw themes from their stories, you would see the February 25, 2010, meeting — with its many calls from the committee and administrators for residents to show up at the financial town meeting and vote for a large increase — as a direct response to the open-air strategizing that I witnessed last May.

On to the present (which I liveblogged on Anchor Rising); here are the opening remarks of the School Committee and Superintendent Rearick:

In the second half of this clip, Deborah Pallasch reads the Democratic Town Committee’s statement:

Townie Mike Carreiro suggests that, rather than eliminating the high school, residents should address the “cancer on our community,” by which he means the retiree population of the town. Then TCC President Dave Nelson explains the group’s belief that no services should be cut and that the committee should be wary of taxpayer angst. At 6:56 in the clip, an outburst from Deb Pallasch instructed Dave as to which direction he could turn his head while speaking. Hey, it’s their town; we just metastasize in it.

Resident Kelly Levesque raises the interesting prospect of bringing Little Compton students into our high school as a source of revenue, followed by another resident whose name I didn’t catch suggesting better maintenance of the buildings. One could tie together the two suggestions together to develop a strategy of improving the facilities and programs of the district in order to attract out-of-town students, beginning with Little Compton, but also in preparation for a wave of school choice that might be coming our way… or the old fashioned method of school choice entailing attracting young families to the town based on the quality of the available education.

An unnamed grade school guidance counselor (not a resident, I don’t believe) suggests that Tiverton “decide what kind of community it wants to be”:

Deb Pallasch takes the podium in her own capacity to encourage the School Committee to “do whatever you can do to help people understand that they shouldn’t be complacent” about the financial town meeting, this year. She further encouraged the committee to stop planning for the future — not adding anything, not “looking at capital improvement” — and concentrate on retaining what it has (which we can understand to tie in with her play-nice-with-the-union approach):