As Grafton residents know, there is no definitive Plan B if the proposed Grafton High School is not approved by voters. Greater Grafton recently received a copy of “Plan C,” a super-secret proposal to have a system-wide layoff of Grafton students to ease school overcrowding.
Dear Grafton student,
We regret to inform you that budgetary and space issues have forced us to terminate your education, effective at the start of the 2010-2011 school year. We realize that this may be a difficult concept for some of you to understand — indeed, some of you may not even know how to read — so we have prepared an informational booklet, “Mr. Bobo Can’t Go To School,” for younger students.
We realize that this interferes with your life plans and may prove to be rather inconvenient for your family. After all, the area isn’t exactly teeming with affordable private schools and adjacent towns, facing their own school space woes, aren’t clamoring for school choice students. Besides, we need to spend that $9,180 ($3,000 below the state average per pupil rate) that we would have spent on your education educating other children, so we’re requesting that high school-aged kids also avoid going the charter school route…. and good luck finding a spot at Valley Tech.
By remaining education-free, you will be saving the taxpayers of Grafton the cost of building a new high school. Should your family actually manage to sell their home in this economy, we ask that a “no children” clause be placed in the deed. Tough economic times call for creative measures, and we salute your sacrifice.
Sincerely yours,
The Grafton Public Schools
P.S. Police Chief Crepeau asks that you not turn to a life of crime to compensate for your lack of education, as he is unable to hire more police officers.
Just a note for anyone who is looking for a babysitter for Town Meeting on Feb. 6 — my son is a graduate of the middle school babysitting course. He’s 12, can speak the language of trucks, dinosaurs and Legos with small boys and has practiced diapering on a stuffed lion… although I don’t think I’d try him on a human just yet.
Also, he’s incredibly patient with his little sister, who frequently gives him reason to be impatient. He was a favorite of the children of our former neighbors, who have sadly moved to points south.
Drop me an email at greatergrafton (at) gmail.com if you’re in the market for a sitter. Bear in mind that this is my firstborn, so I’m sure there will be interviewing for suitability on both sides!
Also, for your reading pleasure, this fact sheet on the reason why we will all be occupied on Feb. 6 — the proposed Grafton High School.
Back when I started this blog, I touched a bit on why exactly the space problem at the high school level concerned me. I have two kids, so that’s obvious. But here’s the big issue for me: I’ve been here before.
Back in the late 1970s, I used to hear the school bus for the high schoolers in the early morning hours. I used to watch the high school kids get off the bus from the dinner table. It wasn’t that Bellingham had an exceptionally long school day — far from it. Our high school was on double sessions because of overcrowding, and the teenagers in my neighborhood were either going to school from before dawn until noon or from noon until dinner time.
Bellingham High School at the time held grades 7-12. We were supposed to get a middle school, but that didn’t happen. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it — what kind of education were those high schoolers getting in just half a day… and what were they doing with themselves the rest of the day?
We’ve been talking about a new high school here in Grafton, but I have yet to hear of Plan B — what happens if the high school doesn’t pass? How are we planning to shoehorn all these kids into our schools?
It’s never something that’s really discussed in public, although Joe Connors did mention at the school forum yesterday that some of the “scary stuff” would be discussed at School Committee tomorrow night. I have brought it up with both Connors and Grafton High Principal Jim Pignataro.
The answer is, there is no set answer. Maybe trailers in the parking lot. Maybe double sessions. The fact is, the building isn’t going to be able to hold those students — so where are we going to put them?
Bellingham’s eventual solution, from a student’s standpoint, was not a terrific one. Forced, I believe by court order, to stop the double sessions, they opted to cram the seventh graders into the elementary schools. Let’s just say that an open double classroom (this was the ’70s) that might be suitable for a first grader is ridiculously noisy and small when it comes to a seventh grader.
I don’t see that solution available to Grafton. The high school’s crowded, the middle school is even more crowded, and there’s so little space at South Grafton Elementary School they have to have a kindergarten class attend three days a week so they can offer art to the rest of the school the remaining two days.
I think it’s time to discuss the scary stuff. What is Plan B?
It was inevitable.
Oh hell, I’d vote for him just to see Scott Browne in action on the Senate floor. We’ll see you on Feb. 6 — and that reminds me, who’s up for another round of Town Meeting Bingo? We’re going to need a whole new list of box topics for this special vote on the new Grafton High School….
I used to refer to the power duo of Greater Grafton and GraftonTimes.com as “Jenn’s media empire.” I’m beginning to feel like that’s not quite as much of a joke anymore.
Today, we launched TheDailyShrewsbury.com and it covers — you guessed it — the town of Shrewsbury. I hired a fantastic new reporter to cover the town. And we’re only going to have one week at CentralMassNews.com to get used to having four sites (the other two, of course, being TheDailyMillbury.com and NorthbridgeTimes.com) because on Monday, we’re launching TheDailyAuburn.com and TheDailyLeicester.com.
Whew!
Even if you haven’t seen our sign up on Dr. Crossman’s old office, you’ve probably guessed we’ve outgrown our adorable little office at the top of One Grafton Common. We’ll be moving to the more spacious quarters — with a view of Lake Ripple, conveniently located next to the liquor store, what more could you ask for a growing media outlet? — in February.
What does that mean for Grafton? More places to find out what’s going on in the nearby towns, mainly. Right now, I’m looking at a small stack of notebooks with four Grafton-centric stories that must get written for GraftonTimes.com, I hope, today. I have interviews in town lined up for most of the week. The batteries in the Greater Grafton Camera are charged and ready, so if you see me pointing it your way, smile.
And when we are finally settled into the new digs, anyone up for margaritas at Cancun?
I fear Tim Gunn would call me a “hot mess.”
There’s a story behind this here.
At least I’m not wearing Crocs!
Our friend Bob C. has taken it upon himself to explore the mystery of the Grafton State Hospital tower and he has a theory he’d like to prove: he thinks the tower may be an Irish round tower, of which there is only one known in the United States.
That would be the Irish round tower at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Milford, which was modeled after a tower in Glendalough, County Wicklow.
Now, if you take a look at the St. Mary’s tower, you’ll notice it’s a very neat-looking structure, made with Milford pink granite of course, and it doesn’t have the same creepy charm of our Grafton tower. But it’s also been a very beloved object in Milford and had years of care in a very public graveyard. Grafton State Hospital’s graveyard, aka Hillcrest Cemetery, has been largely neglected up until last year, when the Grafton Job Corps took it on as a project.
In any case, Bob C. found an article online by Sheila Eppolito from the College of Arts, Sciences and Humanities at UMass Lowell. She wrote about UMass Lowell researchers who are working with Queens University in Dublin on the archaeological digs. He contacted her about our possibly Irish tower, and she was intrigued enough to send the photos onto her colleagues.
I’ll note my own skepticism when it was first suggested, because my experience with the towers is limited to this neat and well-cared-for tower in the town next to where I grew up, but then I started Googling for images. Yes, most Irish round towers look a bit neater than the Grafton tower. But there are a number of photos of neglected towers, and they’re looking kind of familiar.
For example, this one, which I found on a Flickr stream. She identifies it as the Aghaviller Round Tower.
And then there’s this one, identified as the Armoy round tower in County Antrim on Wikipedia.
According to Wikipedia, there’s some question about what these towers were actually used for (sound familiar?). The theory was they were used to hide from Viking raiders; the current theory says they were used as bell towers.
So is the Grafton State Hospital tower an Irish round tower? Bob C. and Michelle argued back and forth about it in the comments here and it does sound plausible.
Theories, anyone?
It was used to look for escaped patients from the hospital? Add that to the list, which now includes:
- It was used as a watchtower during the Civil War (which came nowhere near Grafton);
- It is a former water tower (with windows and a door);
- It was built by Irish mental hospital patients;
- And then used by the hospital to experiment on the affects of moonlight on mental hospital patients (did they turn into werewolves?);
- Satanists held rituals there (that one came from a certain middle school student).
Want more? Here’s where I got this theory:
I asked a former editor today for advice about sports writers. He’s one of those rare creatures who crossed over from sports into news which, in my experience, results in rather excellent news guys. He had some thoughts, but he said he wasn’t going to pass them on. He thought I owed the sports fans of Greater Grafton an apology for admitting, during the soccer playoffs, that I generally do not like covering games.
I haven’t written for this particular editor since 2001, but old habits die hard. For some people, the only response to “jump” are the words “how high?” In this relationship, my response to “write about this” is “when’s deadline?” And it may be the surprise factor as well — I may link Greater Grafton on my Facebook page, but it just never dawned on me that he ever bothered to read it, never mind remember it.
I grew up disliking sports. My first pair of glasses, obtained just after second grade, were bifocal lenses and, suddenly, gym class took on a whole new level of dangerousness. I could never get my teacher, forget about my classmates, to understand that when the ball was coming toward my head, I was seeing two balls. I guessed which ball I should be going for only half the time and my natural klutziness guaranteed that I only made contact half the time I guessed correctly. If you don’t enjoy playing the game, you generally don’t enjoy watching it either.
Yeah, funny thing about that. I went to Boston University, just around the corner from Fenway Park and my friends and I would occasionally buy Red Sox tickets off street scalpers after a game had started. I always got misty-eyed when I would get my first glimpse of the field. Always. And I enjoyed the heck out of those games. I even, it must be confessed, started picking up the sports pages to follow the Sox, especially when they were making their 1986 run. So at a certain point in my life, it became “I really don’t like sports, but how ’bout those Red Sox?”
I married a guy who loved football. I like the Super Bowl for the commercials and snacks. Steve’s tried to explain the game to me many times. My eyes glazed over much like his does when I come home from a meeting and try to tell him, in detail, about neighborhood opposition to a cell phone tower or a 40B filing or a violation of open meeting law. When I cover a community, local politics are my sports.
But let’s get to the sports. I’ve noted before that, during my newspaper career, my byline appeared in every section except the sports pages. My first sports story (that didn’t involve an athletic injury or health issue) was actually written for GraftonTimes.com and I’ve written about my pleasure at discovering I could do it. Early readers of Greater Grafton may recall that I spent my first summer writing about the ball fields of Grafton. Heck, I’ve even written about my unexpected love for sports photography when covering the softball season opener. And, let’s not forget, I stayed up all night to write about, and edit video, the night the lights were turned on in memory of Kevin Vulter.
But if you look at the few times I’ve covered games, you’re going to notice something, and it’s really the reason why I posed the question about sports writers in the first place: when it comes to writing about games, I’m really not writing about the game. There’s a score. There are quotes from the coach. The game itself…
I’m watching it through my camera and cursing the Greater Grafton camera’s weaknesses, which come into high focus during night games. I’m distracted by the players on the sidelines, by the coaches yelling (I could watch the assistant football coach at Grafton High School all night — he gets airborne sometimes in his enthusiasm), by the crowd. At heart, I’m a features writer. I want to focus on why the soccer team is singing “Lean On Me” before the game, the guys who sit on the hill for every game, the guy who is sitting sadly on the bench with a broken leg and a football uniform, the little kid with the painted face who is clearly designated team mascot. I want to take a picture of the look of pride on Jim Pignataro’s face when one of “his” kids, who refers to him respectfully as “Mr. Pig,” scores a goal. I want to chat up people in the stands. It’s a people buffet, and it’s hard to tear myself away from it… unless Obi Melifonwu has the ball, of course.
So really, when it comes down to it. I love sports coverage.
I’d just kind of like to have someone else watching the game while I eat at the all-you-can eat people buffet.
When we last tuned in, you may recall, I was just getting over H1N1.
(Cough cough cough)
I don’t get sick. I write about sick people. I write articles quoting medical experts who talk about the importance of washing your hands and using hand sanitizer. And I take their advice, too — if you ever hear me humming “The Alphabet Song,” chances are I’m remembering the advice of a nurse at Milford Regional Medical Center and washing my hands.
(Cough cough cough)
I don’t get sick. I’m a mom. I take care of sick people. Heck, my kids hardly ever get sick. They went to daycare when they were infants and were exposed to all the nasty childhood beasties well before their first day of public school. As a result, wave after wave of viruses can pass up and down our block but those kids of mine remain immune to every cough, sniffle and sneeze.
(Cough cough cough)
OK, I get sick once in a while. It doesn’t last long. I get knocked down maybe for a day, if that. Nothing a little tea and a day of TV won’t fix. Hey, everyone has to recharge their batteries every now and then, right?
(Cough cough cough)
It started with a little cough last Thursday, a dry annoying tickle in my throat that just seemed to get a little more annoying as the day went on. By the time I was at the 275th anniversary meeting, it was progressing to the phase where I was wondering if I was going to have to dig out the Nyquil to get any sleep. By the time I was home, my throat was on fire and my head was starting to go supernova. I started to get hot and cold (“not in a fun Katy Perry way,” I told my daughter), went upstairs to go to bed and found myself stretched out in the hallway, where I’d apparently fainted.
(Cough cough cough)
I spent most of Friday in bed, completely miserable. Saturday, I at least made it to the couch. Sunday, the act of sitting at the computer to catch up on email put me back on the couch. Monday, I needed a nap after doing nothing more strenuous than going to Stop & Shop.
(Cough cough cough)
OK, I get it. I get sick. Every once in a long while, I get sick.
(Cough cough cough)
Every once in a while, I have to actually sit back and take it easy.
(Cough cough cough)
I admit it. I’m only human.
(Cough cough cough)
Can I please stop coughing now????
