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 film takes on the “culture of hollow achievement and pressure to perform that has...
The question for those of you who are planning to attend tonight's meeting of the Board of Selectmen should be "what has changed" for Belmont since last Spring, when both Selectman Jones and Paolillo ardently supported passage of an Override. If the town needed it in June, why is it suddenly unworthy in January...
What are the long term impacts of the cuts we're making now in public education?The Cassandras in the board room and executive offices are already telling us: warning that the U.S. education system is failing the country and that presages a loss of U.S. competitiveness and future generations with fewer economic opportunities.
A proposed budget using the Warrant Committee's "Available Funds" for the school proposes eliminating five full time teaching positions, art and music instruction at the elementary school level, language instruction at the middle school level and steep cuts to support services district wide. Time to get angry, people!
What's the Chinese method of mothering? According to Yale Prof Amy Chua's new book, its a kind of maternal totalitarianism that encompasses a numbing collection of do's and even more don'ts. As in "Don't...attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV...
Two events to put on your calendar: an October 13 chat with Massachusetts House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Murphy on the state of the State's budget. Then set aside the evening of October 27 for an important Community Dialog on the future direction of the public schools.
I don’t know what Rupert Murdoch has ever done for me, but I’ll say this: Ted Kennedy’s work opened doors for my three daughters that will transform their lives, helping them build confidence and insuring that they will be treated as full equals of their male counterparts in the classroom, on the playing field...
An interesting article in yesterday's New York Times on changes coming to a classroom near you: digital textbooks. The article, by Tamar Lewin, talks about pilot projects in school districts in Arizona, Louisiana and California that are replacing traditional printed textbooks with online, digital equivalents, or even "open source" texts compiled from materials...
If nothing else, the Wellington reminds us all that investing in our public schools -- investing in the future of Belmont -- is something that's just...good. It enriches us all far beyond the meager costs we pay (around $1 a day, on average, for the new Wellington school).
This year's marathon, multi-session Town Meeting might be best remembered for what wasn't heard last night: a single dissenting voice among the more than 200 assembled Town Meeting members to a motion to allocate more than $39 million for reconstruction of the Wellington Elementary School. The unanimous vote in favor was sweet victory for...
