Thursday, July 28, 2016

Planning board express concern in heated meeting


A Planning Board  hearing on the new Templeton Elementary School building grew contentious on Tuesday,ending with hints from some members that they may vote to REJECT the project or simply abstaining. An action the chairman Kirk Moschetti called a spineless way out.
One planning board member said he doesn't think questions have been answered adequately.
  Issues with traffic flow and other issues with drainage retention ponds are just a coulple things.
   When the idea for another review of traffic was suggested the chairman Moschetti said your wasting the taxpayers money and time. Being prudent and sure prior to a 50 million dollar vote is no waist for a project of this size.
Wouldn't the tax payer want to be sure all the data input was correct and double checked before the town changes the center of Templeton forever?
Would it be a second look may show a problem for traffic flow at a time when people least expected it?
For the school area to go from a population of only 170 to 517 will do doubt cause a higher amount of traffic. As we all have seen in the center of Gardner over the years change after change to curtail traffic flow problems will only alter issues and not correct the main problem of rush hour.
Templeton should be wise to the fact we have but one time to do this right if we don't do this right we won't need a planning board or the Moschetti's power struggle.
With at least 25-40% of the kids being dropped of by the parents that's a busy one way street for 2 hours at least per day. With only a short distance to exit the center of Templeton any one who came from south road to drop the kids will need to go back up Wellington again. Double the flow and on top of that if a backup happens stop all traffic, GRIDLOCK ,MELTDOWNS,BAD HAIR DAYS, not to mention cell phone call to work informing of a late arrival again.
So Mr. chairman who's waisted money is it you speak of and how much would it be for the study by a independent firm.
As for the town not getting a new school as Moschetti sees it.With the 25 million we will need to borrow  we could build our own without the state dictators MSBA.
Templeton has been lured by those who say we have to do it this way or on that property or lose the MSBA support of less than half of the cost.
Without a bond rate or audits complete  the state should be the first to see we do this right or it could all wind up in their laps.
Are we financially fit to do this or did the voters care to think about the towns future status.
Recievership is a very UGLY word to the town of TEMPLETON.

4 comments:

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  2. In my opinion being a member of any board or committee in town does not mean you just rubber stamp what ever comes your way. If you believe the project is wrong then it is your duty to vote it down not go along with the crowd so that you can remain a popular person. People in town had no problem letting the existing schools fall into disrepair so that the town would have few options when it came to doing something about our schools. In my opinion these people who let the schools fall into disrepair betrayed the sacred trust of taking care of what was already in existence. If you feel this project belongs elsewhere then vote no. If you knew more about public schooling you would think twice about placing a great deal of trust in this institution.

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  3. 1. Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up! : The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

    Bianca, You Animal, Shut Up!

    Our problem in understanding forced schooling stems from an inconvenient fact: that the
    wrong it does from a human perspective is right from a systems perspective. You can see
    this in the case of six-year-old Bianca, who came to my attention because an assistant
    principal screamed at her in front of an assembly, "BIANCA, YOU ANIMAL, SHUT
    UP!" Like the wail of a banshee, this sang the school doom of Bianca. Even though her
    body continued to shuffle around, the voodoo had poisoned her.

    Do I make too much of this simple act of putting a little girl in her place? It must happen
    thousands of times every day in schools all over. I've seen it many times, and if I were
    painfully honest I'd admit to doing it many times. Schools are supposed to teach kids
    their place. That's why we have age-graded classes. In any case, it wasn't your own little
    Janey or mine.

    Most of us tacitly accept the pragmatic terms of public school which allow every kind of
    psychic violence to be inflicted on Bianca in order to fulfill the prime directive of the
    system: putting children in their place. It's called "social efficiency." But I get this
    precognition, this flash-forward to a moment far in the future when your little girl Jane,
    having left her comfortable home, wakes up to a world where Bianca is her enraged
    meter maid, or the passport clerk Jane counts on for her emergency ticket out of the
    country, or the strange lady who lives next door.

    I picture this animal Bianca grown large and mean, the same Bianca who didn't go to
    school for a month after her little friends took to whispering, "Bianca is an animal,
    Bianca is an animal," while Bianca, only seconds earlier a human being like themselves,
    sat choking back tears, struggling her way through a reading selection by guessing what
    the words meant.




    In my dream I see Bianca as a fiend manufactured by schooling who now regards Janey
    as a vehicle for vengeance. In a transport of passion she:

    1 . Gives Jane's car a ticket before the meter runs out.

    2. Throws away Jane's passport application after Jane leaves the office.

    3. Plays heavy metal music through the thin partition which separates Bianca's
    apartment from Jane's while Jane pounds frantically on the wall for relief.

    4. All the above.



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  4. You aren't compelled to loan your car to anyone who wants it, but you are compelled to
    surrender your school-age child to strangers who process children for a livelihood, even
    though one in every nine schoolchildren is terrified of physical harm happening to them
    in school, terrified with good cause; about thirty-three are murdered there every year.
    From 1992 through 1999, 262 children were murdered in school in the United States.
    Your great-great-grandmother didn't have to surrender her children. What happened?

    If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who
    needed work you'd think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay
    that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so
    docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a schoolteacher?

    I want to open up concealed aspects of modern schooling such
    as the deterioration it forces in the morality of parenting. You
    have no say at all in choosing your teachers. You know
    nothing about their backgrounds or families. And the state
    knows little more than you do. This is as radical a piece of
    social engineering as the human imagination can conceive.
    What does it mean?

    One thing you do know is how unlikely it will be for any
    teacher to understand the personality of your particular child or
    anything significant about your family, culture, religion, plans, hopes, dreams. In the
    confusion of school affairs even teachers so disposed don't have opportunity to know
    those things. How did this happen?

    Before you hire a company to build a house, you would, I expect, insist on detailed plans
    showing what the finished structure was going to look like. Building a child's mind and
    character is what public schools do, their justification for prematurely breaking family
    and neighborhood learning. Where is documentary evidence to prove this assumption that
    trained and certified professionals do it better than people who know and love them can?
    There isn't any.

    The cost in New York State for building a well-schooled child in the year 2000 is
    $200,000 per body when lost interest is calculated. That capital sum invested in the
    child's name over the past twelve years would have delivered a million dollars to each
    kid as a nest egg to compensate for having no school. The original $200,000 is more than
    the average home in New York costs. You wouldn't build a home without some idea
    what it would look like when finished, but you are compelled to let a corps of perfect
    strangers tinker with your child's mind and personality without the foggiest idea what
    they want to do with it.

    Law courts and legislatures have totally absolved school people from liability. You can
    sue a doctor for malpractice, not a schoolteacher. Every homebuilder is accountable to
    customers years after the home is built; not schoolteachers, though. You can't sue a
    priest, minister, or rabbi either; that should be a clue.



    If you can't be guaranteed even minimal results by these institutions, not even physical
    safety; if you can't be guaranteed anything except that you'll be arrested if you fail to
    surrender your kid, just what does the public in public schools mean?

    What exactly is public about public schools? That's a question to take seriously. If
    schools were public as libraries, parks, and swimming pools are public, as highways and
    sidewalks are public, then the public would be satisfied with them most of the time.
    Instead, a situation of constant dissatisfaction has spanned many decades. Only in
    Orwell's Newspeak, as perfected by legendary spin doctors of the twentieth century such
    as Ed Bernays or Ivy Lee or great advertising combines, is there anything public about
    public schools.

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