Tonight at BOE meeting in Norwalk, and by special request a musical guest.
Open Thread Today
by turfgrrl
May 20th, 2008 · 35 Comments
Tags: current affairs
35 Responses so far ↓ “Open Thread Today”
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and groovy.
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Last Friday I attended a Fashion Show at the George Washington Carver Community Center, which showed fashions created and worn by locals.
The clothing was impressive and inspiring, the turn out was amazing and the vibe was pure fun. I wish functions such as this would be publicized more.
Congratulations on a success event!
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Norwalk Historical Society hosts Memorial Day Open House, May 26, 2008
The public is invited to the Norwalk Historical Society’s Open House at the Town House Museum on Mill Hill, 2 East Wall Street, on Monday May 26, 10:00 am to 12 noon, immediately following Norwalk’s Memorial Day Parade. NHS Advisory Board Member Madeleine Eckert will present a PowerPoint lecture entitled “Nor Let Their Glory Be Forgot: The Origins of Memorial Day.” There will also be a slide show of vintage Memorial Day postcards. Light refreshments will be served.
The Norwalk Historical Society was incorporated in 1899 with the purpose of promoting and encouraging historical research in Norwalk. That vision is kept alive today with the re-establishment of the NHS in 1949 and the continued focus on “the research, preservation, and promotion of interest in the history of Norwalk.” The NHS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and is not affiliated with the City of Norwalk, the Norwalk Historical Commission, or the Norwalk Museum.
For more information, please call the Norwalk Historical Society at 203-846-0525 or email info@norwalkhistoricalsociety.org. For more information about the Norwalk Historical Society, please visit the NHS website at www.norwalkhistoricalsociety.org.
All donations received will be used to fund the programs of the Norwalk Historical Society.
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I think that more attention should be paided to the education system. We must allow teachers to teach. Time after time teachers are forced to put up with nonsense from parents and students.
Also how about a thought to grouping studnets by ability not heterogenously? (spelling)
Raise the bar instead of lowering it! I feel if the bar got any lower.. we would trip over it.
Some schools need a change and other need leaders.
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Are the BOE meetings open to the public?
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yes newbie they are open to the public.
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So if all the stars are in alignment we’ll be able to fund all the literacy coaches/specialists???? Aquarius!
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#3 “The NHS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and is not affiliated with the City of Norwalk, the Norwalk Historical Commission, or the Norwalk Museum”.
Doesn’t the HS receive money from the city of Norwalk? Don’t they report to the Historical Commission? Isn’t the curator of the Norwalk Museum staff to the Historical Commission? Didn’t the city of Norwalk crown the curator the Queen of historical Norwalk? Or was that the historick commission?
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#3 “The NHS is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and is not affiliated with the City of Norwalk, the Norwalk Historical Commission, or the Norwalk Museum”.
Doesn’t the HS receive money from the city of Norwalk? Don’t they report to the Historical Commission? Isn’t the curator of the Norwalk Museum staff to the Historical Commission? Didn’t the city of Norwalk crown the curator the Queen of historical Norwalk?
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The Norwalk Historical Society leases the Mill Hill Historical Park from the City of Norwalk and receives a scant $7,000 a year to run the properties for the City of Norwalk.
The only obligation that the Historical Society’s lease states that it has to the Historical Commission is to report on the use of the properties by other parties who want to use them, such as the event last Friday where Bob Duff announced his re-election campaign.
As a courtesy, the Norwalk Historical Society provides a monthly Buildings and Grounds Report to the Norwalk Historical Commission.
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Letter to NHS’s principal:
My husband, Councilman Michael K. Geake met you Thursday, May 15th at the Land Use & Building Management meeting that was held at Norwalk High School. It was there that you suggested that we attend the Norwalk High Schools’ Fiddler on the Roof which would be held for its final presentation Friday and Saturday nights. Since it rained Friday night, we were able to get tickets for Saturday and it was there that we saw a magnificent performance. The orchestra was so sweet, it seemed as if the music just flowed from their instruments. Then the students, were can I begin. From Beilke (played by Isabel Donahue) all the way up and including Trevye (played by Paulo Araujo) and anyone that wasn’t included in the program book, they all acted as if Russia was where they were living right now experiencing all the things that Trevye’s family and friends did. We have never been to a play at your school before, but we feel that we were blessed to get a chance to witness an art form that we feel will contune for a long time to come. Each and every one that had anything to do with Fiddler on the Roof should be proud for ‘a job well done’. My thanks to you for suggesting that we attend. It is something that we will not forget for a long time.
Sincerely,
Mary Geake
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Normally, I don’t like cut-and-paste posting but this was too good to pass up. Apparently it’s got Boy George’s panties in a bunch as he’s sicced his thugs on NBC recently over what he considers unfair press treatment:
Mr. President, the war isn’t about you — or golf
By Keith Olbermann
Anchor, ‘Countdown’
updated 10:00 p.m. ET, Wed., May. 14, 2008President Bush has resorted anew to the sleaziest fear-mongering and mass manipulation of an administration and public life dedicated to realizing the lowest of our expectations. And he has now applied these poisons to the 2008 presidential election, on behalf of the party at whose center he and John McCain lurk.
Mr. Bush has predicted that the election of a Democratic president could “eventually lead to another attack on the United States.” This ludicrous, infuriating, holier-than-thou and most importantly bone-headedly wrong statement came during a May 13 interview with Politico.com and online users of Yahoo.
The question was phrased as follows: “If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what’s the worst that could happen, what’s the doomsday scenario?”
The president replied: “Doomsday scenario of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face is, it’s bigger than Iraq, it’s this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives.”
Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created, includes “cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives?” They are those in — or formerly in — your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.
Through your haze of self-congratulation and self-pity, do you still have no earthly clue that this nation has laid waste to Iraq to achieve your political objectives? “This ideological struggle,” Mr. Bush, is taking place within this country.
It is a struggle between Americans who cherish freedom, ours and everybody else’s, and Americans like you, sir, to whom freedom is just a brand name, just like “Patriot Act” is a brand name or “Protect America” is a brand name.
But wait, there’s more: You also said “Iraq is the place where al-Qaida and other extremists have made their stand and they will be defeated.” They made no “stand” in Iraq, sir, you allowed them to assemble there!
As certainly as if that were the plan, the borders were left wide open by your government’s farcical post-invasion strategy of “they’ll greet us as liberators.” And as certainly as if that were the plan, the inspiration for another generation of terrorists in another country was provided by your government’s farcical post-invasion strategy of letting the societal infra-structure of Iraq dissolve, to be replaced by an American viceroy, enforced by merciless mercenaries who shoot unarmed Iraqis and then evade prosecution in any country by hiding behind your skirts, sir.
Terrorism inside Iraq is your creation, Mr. Bush!
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It was a Yahoo user who brought up the second topic upon whose introduction Mr. Bush should have passed, or punted, or gotten up and left the room claiming he heard Dick Cheney calling him.
“Do you feel,” asked an ordinary American, “that you were misled on Iraq?”
“I feel like — I felt like, there were weapons of mass destruction,” the president said. “You know, ‘mislead’ is a strong word, it almost connotes some kind of intentional — I don’t think so, I think there was a — not only our intelligence community, but intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment. And so I was disappointed to see how flawed our intelligence was.”
Flawed.
You, Mr. Bush, and your tragically know-it-all minions, threw out every piece of intelligence that suggested there were no such weapons.
You, Mr. Bush, threw out every person who suggested that the sober, contradictory, reality-based intelligence needed to be listened to, and fast.
You, Mr. Bush, are responsible for how “intelligence communities all across the world shared the same assessment.”
You and the sycophants you dredged up and put behind the most important steering wheel in the world propagated palpable nonsense and shoved it down the throat of every intelligence community across the world and punished anybody who didn’t agree it was really chicken salad.
And you, Mr. Bush, threw under the bus, all of the subsequent critics who bravely stepped forward later to point out just how much of a self-fulfilling prophecy you had embraced, and adopted as this country’s policy in lieu of, say, common sense.
The fiasco of pre-war intelligence, sir, is your fiasco.
You should build a great statue of yourself turning a deaf ear to the warnings of realists, while you are shown embracing the three-card monte dealers like Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
That would be a far more fitting tribute to your legacy, Mr. Bush, than this presidential library you are constructing as a giant fable about your presidency, an edifice you might as well claim was built from “Iraqi weapons of mass destruction” because there will be just as many of those inside your presidential library as there were inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
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Of course if there is one overriding theme to this president’s administration it is the utter, always-failing, inability to know when to quit when it is behind. And so Mr. Bush answered yet another question about this layered, nuanced, wheels-within-wheels garbage heap that constituted his excuse for war.
“And so you feel that you didn’t have all the information you should have or the right spin on that information?”
“No, no,” replied the President. “I was told by people, that they had weapons of mass destruction …”
People? What people? The insane informant “Curveball?” The Iraqi snake-oil salesman Ahmed Chalabi? The American snake-oil salesman Dick Cheney?
“I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction, as were members of Congress, who voted for the resolution to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
“And of course, the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes.”
Mr. Bush, you destroyed the evidence that contradicted the resolution you jammed down the Congress’s throat, the way you jammed it down the nation’s throat. When required by law to verify that your evidence was accurate, you simply resubmitted it, with phrases amounting to “See, I done proved it” virtually written in the margins in crayon.
You defied patriotic Americans to say “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” only with the stakes — as you and the mental dwarves in your employ put it — being a “mushroom cloud over an American city.”
And as a final crash of self-indulgent nonsense, when the incontrovertible truth of your panoramic and murderous deceit has even begun to cost your political party seemingly perpetual congressional seats in places like North Carolina and Mississippi, you can actually say with a straight face, sir, that for members of Congress “the political heat gets on and they start to run and try to hide from their votes” — while you greet the political heat and try to run and hide from your presidency, and your legacy — 4,000 of the Americans you were supposed to protect — dead in Iraq, with your only feeble, pathetic answer being, “I was told by people that they had weapons of mass destruction.”
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Then came Mr. Bush’s final blow to our nation’s solar plexus, his last reopening of our common wounds, his last remark that makes the rest of us question not merely his leadership or his judgment but his very suitably to remain in office.
“Mr. President,” he was asked, “you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?”
“Yes,” began perhaps the most startling reply of this nightmarish blight on our lives as Americans on our history. “It really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander in Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as — to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Golf, sir? Golf sends the wrong signal to the grieving families of our men and women butchered in Iraq? Do you think these families, Mr. Bush, their lives blighted forever, care about you playing golf? Do you think, sir, they care about you?
You, Mr. Bush, let their sons and daughters be killed. Sir, to show your solidarity with them you gave up golf? Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn’t give up your pursuit of this insurance-scam, profiteering, morally and financially bankrupting war.
Sir, to show your solidarity with them you didn’t even give up talking about Iraq, a subject about which you have incessantly proved without pause or backwards glance, that you may literally be the least informed person in the world?
Sir, to show your solidarity with them, you didn’t give up your presidency? In your own words “solidarity as best as I can” is to stop a game? That is the “best” you can do?
Four thousand Americans give up their lives and your sacrifice was to give up golf! Golf. Not “Gulf” — golf.
And still it gets worse. Because it proves that the president’s unendurable sacrifice, his unbearable pain, the suspension of getting to hit a ball with a stick, was not even his own damned idea.
“Mr. President, was there a particular moment or incident that brought you to that decision, or how did you come to that?”
“I remember when [diplomat Sergio Vieira] de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life. And I was playing golf, I think I was in central Texas, and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, it’s just not worth it any more to do.”
Your one, tone-deaf, arrogant, pathetic, embarrassing gesture, and you didn’t even think of it yourself? The great Bushian sacrifice — an Army private loses a leg, a Marine loses half his skull, 4,000 of their brothers and sisters lose their lives — and you lose golf, and they have to pull you off the golf course to get you to just do that?
If it’s even true.
Apart from your medical files, which dutifully record your torn calf muscle and the knee pain which forced you to give up running at the same time — coincidence, no doubt — the bombing in Baghdad which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello of the U.N. and interrupted your round of golf was on Aug. 19, 2003.
Yet CBS News has records of you playing golf as late as Oct. 13 of that year, nearly two months later.
Mr. Bush, I hate to break it to you 6 1/2 years after you yoked this nation and your place in history to the wrong war, in the wrong place, against the wrong people, but the war in Iraq is not about you.
It is not, Mr. Bush, about your grief when American after American comes home in a box.
It is not, Mr. Bush, about what your addled brain has produced in the way of paranoid delusions of risks that do not exist, ready to be activated if some Democrat, and not your twin Mr. McCain, succeeds you.
The war in Iraq, your war, Mr. Bush, is about how you accomplished the derangement of two nations, and how you helped funnel billions of taxpayer dollars to lascivious and perennially thirsty corporations like Halliburton and Blackwater, and how you sent 4,000 Americans to their deaths for nothing.
It is not, Mr. Bush, about your golf game! And, sir, if you have any hopes that next Jan. 20 will not be celebrated as a day of soul-wrenching, heart-felt thanksgiving, because your faithless stewardship of this presidency will have finally come to a merciful end, this last piece of advice:
When somebody asks you, sir, about Democrats who must now pull this country back from the abyss you have placed us at …
When somebody asks you, sir, about the cooked books and faked threats you foisted on a sincere and frightened nation …
When somebody asks you, sir, about your gallant, noble, self-abnegating sacrifice of your golf game so as to soothe the families of the war dead.
This advice, Mr. Bush: Shut the hell up!
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#12 All true! Keith Oberman Rocks!
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#4 - oh,if it were only that easy! I totally agree with you.
Also, while it is true that some schools need a change and some schools need leaders, there is one school that needs a change in it’s leader - fast! Marvin has gone so down hill and it’s all because of their principal. She is awful. She took a top-rate school and has turned it into a joke (unfortunately the jokes on us - the taxpayers and attendees of Marvin). Somebody at the BOE, please take note - get rid of this principal! -
There is no room for treating people with anything other than respect in the education field. This has not be the case with Ms. Tortorello. She is rude, unkind and on a power trip. I agree with #15 that they need to get rid of her, however, the one good thing to remember is that there is still a school full of outstanding teachers at Marvin, and they will continue to do a great job despite poor leadership.
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Congratulations to Robin DeJesus who has been nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway hit, “In The Heights.” Robin attended Naramake, Nathan Hale and graduated in 2002 from Norwalk High. He is extremely talented, a wonderful role model to other students from the area and truly an exceptional young man. Those that know him are so proud to be his friend. Good Luck, Robin!!!!
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Ah! There’s a subject worth writing about. Marvin’s leadership is really based on a dictatorship where no one has a voice except the principal. It was once a school that thrived on collaboration between parents,staff, & administration, and it is so sad to see the loss of parent involvement. Anyone that knows anything about education knows that the most successful schools are schools that have these three groups working together. In this school now, there’s only one way things get done! Yep, HER way. At one time you could enter Marvin on any given day and you’d be greeted with parents there who were happily helping students and teachers but, alas, the halls are void of parents now. One could argue that it is because there are many more working parents now, but then why aren’t there any parents at least at evening meetings when decisions are being made? Because parents feel their opinions don’t matter, so why bother. It’s sad that no one in Central Office seems to care, probably because test scores are okay thanks to the teachers that are hanging in there. I guess they’ll wait until it hits bottom. Too bad.
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Wow! Marvin was once a model school in Norwalk. Just look at what Corda et. el. have done to our school system–all with the rubber stamp of a “sold out” BOE. I hope everybody understands that Marvin’s poor leadership is just the tip if the iceberg. There are other schools that make Marvin’s administration look like a day at the beach—get into YOUR schools, people, and help save some of the great students and teachers in our city. The current regime does not want educators but edu-robots–they must play the game for the overpaid downtown dummies–Hey, it’s your money, but more importantly it’s your kids.
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Again… when oh WHEN oh, Lord?
PLEASE GIVE US AN ADMINISTRATIVE EVALUATION TOOL THAT INSISTS ON ACCOUNTABILITY!! How long must we sit by and watch our system crumble without standards FOR EVERY SINGLE PERSON who is entrusted with the education of Norwalk’s children?
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definitely agree with #20. How are administrators evaluated anyway? Are parents, teachers, kids interviewed? Does anyone from the Superintendants office drop in un announced and chat with people in the building to see how its going? do they even care?
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I am with you #20 and #21. Why, year after year, are there Principals who abuse their teachers? There are house masters and vice principals who are also rude or inept on the job, who writes them up and leaves notes in their down town file? I hope that a new assistant superintendent will feel that administration needs to be held accountable for how the community views them and their practice.
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Thanks for keeping on the principals on these web sites. I had no idea that Marvin was bad, but I’m not on that side of town to know.
Enough is being said, though, to warrant a mass riot downtown by parents. We can’t keep passing this around.
#21: Administrators are not evaluated. Only the teachers at this point and it’s biased. Trust me. The facts are there. Teachers who are quality educators are being harrassed and they leave. Please: If any of you are parents, get yourselves together and demand answers from Corda, but not just once, keep at him. And who says you can’t go to the schools to demand answers? It’s your school, you pay the taxes, and some of these administrators don’t even pay back into the system. They live elsewhere - and FAR elsewhere. Parents love their children. You entrust them with great teachers. Please help them by fighting for better administrators. Not all of them are bad, as you know, but let’s get them all to be accountable!
Thanks for reading this and hope it’ll light a positive fire
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Let’s just hope the BOE has learned not to hire retired carpetbaggers for key positions.
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Are people communicating their concerns about principals to the superintendent? Has he been told about the principals of Marvin, NHS and other schools?
Contrary to common opinion, administrators are evaluated. However, the evaluation tool is ridiculously cumbersome, and it fails to address some of the most important responsibilities of a principal. It is a piece of doo-doo. Also, there is question about how much the evaluators of the principals actually know about what the principals do on a day-to-day basis.
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You know, there are only about 5 weeks left to this school year. I hope that things don’t “die down” just because summer vacation’s around the corner. Parents: if you want change, do something now, for the sake of your children and the teachers that you admire! Trust your instincts. Good luck!
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CRRA Electronics Recycling
Saturday, May 24, 9 a.m.-1 p.m.Where
Scalzi Park, Bridge Street, StamfordNorwalk residents are eligible. Proof of residence required.
What
The items you can recycle include:* Answering machines
* Camcorders
* Compact disc players
* Copiers
* Duplicators
* Electric typewriters
* Fax machines
* Hard drives
* Laptops
* Mainframe computers
* Mobile telephones
* Modems
* Microwave ovens
* Pagers
* Personal computers (CPU, monitors, keyboards, mouses and peripherals)
* Printers
* Printed circuit boards
* Radios
* Remote controls
* Stereos
* Tape players
* Telephones and telephone equipment
* Televisions
* Testing equipment
* Transparency makers
* Uninterruptible power supplies
* VCRs
* Word processors(Electronics from businesses and institutions are not acceptable.)
Sponsors
Participating municipalities, Keep Stamford Beautiful and the Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority (CRRA) -
#27,
That’s nice.
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#25 Some parents have spoken to the superintendent. The problem with speaking to him is confidentiality. What happens to the people (especially the people that work in the buildings) that stick their necks out and their names get out? Fear can be crippling.
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What transpired from the parents that met with Corda?
