Arena still in the running!

"If We Build It, They Will Skate!" is among the top 50 in the Pepsi Refresh Grant and you can vote as often as you like in November to see it through to victory. If the arena wins, it could mean $250,000 in grant money. Follow this link to the voting page.

(end)
Read more!

Food for thought

There is an interesting quote at the end of Mitch Pearlstein's "North High" column today, but he may have missed something subtle but critical:

"...please explain how American education can ever get sufficiently better as long as adequate learning and viable schools are viewed as something politicians and superintendents deliver, rather than as something for which students and their families are ultimately responsible."

Mr. Pearlstein is correct as far as it goes, a school can only be as successful if those served take full advantage of the opportunities. But in the larger sense, he misses the role a community at large has in the education of its youth.

Public education has always been a societal concern in America. As such, one generation supports another and the implied contract is that generation will carry the torch. When those already educated no longer feel like it then becomes their responsibility to pass along opportunities they had to the next generation of students, schools and communities risk failure in a much larger sense.

Community can mean what you like; the area served or the state that oversees education. Either way, when we get to the point that we want less for the next generation than we want for ourselves, we have turned our back on perhaps the greatest American tradition of all.

(end)
Read more!