To the editor,
How many of us have sat at large school district meetings and had an opinion to share, but were not prepared to speak in such a large public forum? How many of us would have preferred to actually sit down, neighbor to neighbor to talk about the issue at hand, rather than in such a large venue as the high school gym?
The Winnisquam School Board is providing a unique opportunity for the citizens of the district to participate in a thoughtful, deliberative conversation about the future of our kindergarten program.
Last year, full day kindergarten was voted down by the citizens of the Winnisquam School District by a very small margin. Later, I learned that there was a group convened to review what potential options there were regarding kindergarten. Several options were discussed but ultimately, the school board wanted their decision to be informed by a broad range of citizen voices.
We are not talking about some conspiracy by the school board as some would have you believe.
The people who will be facilitating are trained to encourage conversation and different points of view, ensuring all participants have an opportunity to voice their opinions — and importantly, the neutral facilitators do not come with a particular outcome in mind. The model of NH Listens has been used successfully with school districts in other communities such as Pittsfield and Portsmouth. I believe in the process and I believe that this event will serve the district well.
It comes down to the question "Are you willing to have a conversation with your neighbors about this important issue?" I encourage all citizens of the Winnisquam School District to participate in this community conversation on Wednesday, January 23 (6:00 p.m.) and do so with an open mind. I look forward to seeing you there.
Sarah Fox
Sanbornton

To the editor,
If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. I thought about that quote from Abraham Maslow when I saw the announcement for an upcoming facilitated "community discussion" about implementing all-day kindergarten in the Winnisquam Regional School District.
Such a discussion took place in open session during the last annual school district meeting. All who wished to speak had a chance to directly address everyone in attendance. We then voted on the measure — estimated to cost us nearly $300,000 in the first year — and turned it down.
Now, school administrators are cooperating with an outside group of facilitators to "structure and focus" small group discussions on the exact same topic. Like Maslow's hammer swinger, district officials seem to believe that they've nailed down the answer to our critical education challenge: We need all-day kindergarten. All they need is the voter buy-in they didn't get 10 months ago.
What has changed? Only the method, not the facts. This new effort will apply Delphi-style techniques, famous for marginalizing dissenting voices, to a yes/no question. The fact that we've already addressed this question ourselves, without facilitators leading us around, seems immaterial to those who didn't like the answer we provided. So now outsiders will attempt to create a "consensus" which will determine whether or not our school board puts the measure back in front of the voters in March.
Providing the "answer" to questions that haven't been framed is a poor way to analyze a problem. Our district does indeed have problems, but this method of problem-solving isn't acceptable in the business world and we shouldn't accept it from our public school officials. Why are we not being presented with a clear problem statement, identifying an educational challenge to which a range of options might apply? Open-ended questions such as "Given that XX% of third grade students are more than one grade level behind in reading, how can we close that gap before these students enter middle school?" would be appropriate to a process that starts with research and analysis, and then leads to an informed dialogue.
Show me a school district with all-day kindergarten, and I'll show you a district in need of improvement, a district where middle-schoolers read at an elementary level and graduates receive diplomas even when their teachers know they are unready for college or career. We all know these are real problems, yet too many think that following the path that hasn't worked anywhere else — all-day kindergarten now, publicly funded pre-K programs later — might work here.
Does anyone believe that attending a Winnisquam kindergarten program will do what the flagship Head Start program hasn't managed to accomplish? The latest Head Start assessment was released by the government the Friday before Christmas. It clearly shows that whatever measurable benefits the program had brought to 3- and 4-year-olds were entirely gone by third grade. That's right: The Head Start kids were no better off than the kids in the control group, despite all the classroom and home attention the children received, at a cost of more than $8 billion last year alone.
Back in Winnisquam, the folks from Lakes Region Listens, a group whose objectivity is at least open to question, will attempt to shape our discussion while insulating our district leaders from the voice of the voters. Nearly a year after the voters spoke, the board and administration have not managed to develop a problem statement that could be debated and discussed, preferring instead to recycle the very warrant we voted down in open session. This borders on malpractice, especially in the light of the Head Start report. More classroom time is not the answer.
Winnisquam is a small district. We should be able to focus on children as individuals, identifying those with specific challenges that can't be met within the current system and providing tailored assistance to ensure they don't end up as the lost children of the Class of 2026. We could start by promising our district parents and taxpayers that no capable child will be more than a grade-level behind in reading when he gets to middle school. There are many ways to stand behind that promise, but we'll never get there if we only focus on a single one-size-fits-all program.
Come to the meeting Wednesday the 23rd (5:30 – 8:30 pm at the middle school) and tell the board and administration that our district's children deserve better than this.
Ken Gorrell
Chairman, WRSD Budget Committee (2007-08)
WRHS Class of 1981
Northfield

To the editor,
There are a couple of points on the wind farm debate that the general public just isn't hearing enough of. First of all we need electricity 24/7 but the wind does not blow 24/7 at a rate that will produce electricity. There are currently some electricity providers offering discounts to their customers if they will elect to get 100-percent of their electricity from wind. This is an impossibility! Not only do the winds not blow in New Hampshire at the needed speed 24/7, the power produced at the existing wind farms goes into the grid and is not separated out so one can choose wind, coal, nuclear or whatever. Unless you're directly connected to the producing turbine, you can't be sure of the source of that power. Also, because of the unreliability of wind, our existing sources of electrical power generation must continue to exist so that whether or not the wind is blowing, when you flip a light switch the lights go on. When the wind is blowing at a viable rate to produce energy, these existing power plants must "turn down" the amount of power they're sending to the grid to avoid overloading it. There is nothing efficient about an unreliable power source forcing the reliable power sources to fluctuate their production rates.
The second point I'd like the public to be aware of is that while the proponents of wind energy like to call this a "green energy" source, here in New Hampshire it is anything but. The numbers the industry and wind proponents tout as the amount of CO2 that is offset by these turbines is highly inaccurate. Aside from the aforementioned fluctuating production at existing power plants, which makes them bigger carbon producers BECAUSE of the wind farms, folks don't seem to take into account the environmental impact of the building of the turbines themselves. Whether you believe God created our mountain ridges thousands of years ago or they are a result of glaciation millions of years ago I think we can all agree that clear cutting and then blasting large sections of our mountain ridges has to raise the carbon level. I have nothing against clear cutting as the trees do eventually grow back, but once the granite is blasted in order to have flat surfaces to pour tons and tons of concrete on for all of the pads and the staging area needed, the trees and other natural vegetation aren't coming back. Someone here in Grafton did the math on the number of vehicles that would be needed for construction of the proposed 37 turbine "Wild Meadows Wind Farm" and between cement trucks and construction vehicles it would be about 1500. This doesn't include the vehicles driven by the individuals working on the construction. We've all heard about how much pollution and carbon our everyday vehicles create, consider for a moment the impact from 1500 tractor trailers and cement trucks. Add to this the need for these vehicles to be on industrial strength roads much wider than the existing (often dirt or gravel) roads that are currently in the areas they propose for these wind farms and the CO2 impact from those construction vehicles as well as the asphalt that will be laid for these reconstructed (and possibly rerouted) roads as well as the loss of more trees in order to widen the roads and it becomes absurd that the wind farms could be considered "green." The turbines currently are said to have about a 20-25 year lifespan. The trees cut to make room for them can offset much more carbon for many more years.
While a wind farm in the dessert in New Mexico might make some sense to proponents of wind energy, defacing and scarring our majestic mountain ridge lines throughout this beautiful state should be a crime. Do we want to be known as the Granite State or the Turbine State? Our tax dollars fund large portions of these projects in several ways (through grants and loans, subsidies, and tax credits), so in essence WE THE PEOPLE are paying to destroy the natural beauty that not only we enjoy, but we're throwing away the income generated by the tourists who CHOOSE to come here because of our scenic lakes and mountains. Please, if you're truly concerned about "green energy" and the environment, consider these points and act accordingly. Our elected officials need to know that the voters, taxpayers and even tourists that enjoy ALL of the mountains, lakes and other natural wonders our state has to offer want them to see the truth on wind energy in New Hampshire.
Cindy Kudlik
Grafton

Look out, the "fixers" are coming.
Top corporate chieftains and Wall Street gamblers want to tell Washington how to fix our national debt, so they've created a front group called "Fix the Debt" to push their agenda. Unfortunately, they're using "fix" in the same way your veterinarian uses it — their core demand is for Washington to spay Social Security, castrate Medicare and geld Medicaid.
Who's behind this piece of crude surgery on the retirement and health programs that most Americans count on? Pete Peterson, for one. For years, this Wall Street billionaire, who amassed his fortune as honcho of a private equity outfit named Blackstone, has runs a political sideshow demanding that the federal budget be balanced on the backs of the middle class and the poor. Fix the Debt is just his latest war whoop, organized by a corporate "think tank" he funds.
This time, Peterson rallied some 95 CEOs to his plutocratic crusade, including the likes of General Electric boss Jeffrey Immelt and Honeywell chief David Cote. (Note: Both Immelt and Cote, while cheering for cuts to programs that we working Americans pay into, are themselves taking money hand over fist from taxpayers in terms of military contracts and corporate subsidies for their corporations. But they aren't concerned about defense spending and ending subsidies that benefit their bottom line.)
All of them are not merely "One Percenters," but the top one-tenth of One Percenters. Of course, a group of pampered, narcissistic billionaires would not make a credible sales argument for this dirty work. Having elites piously preach austerity to the masses would be as ineffective as having Col. Sanders invite a flock of chickens to Sunday dinner.
Presented with this image problem, Fix the Debt needed to give their campaign a more benign image, and Peterson and Co. followed a tried-and-true formula of political deceit. As described by Mary Bottari of the Center for Media and Democracy, the trick is to "gather a bipartisan group of 'serious' men, hire a PR firm to place them on TV shows, blanket the media with talk of a looming crisis and pretend to have grassroots support."
In this case, a collection of former member of Congress, each of whom had a reputation for being moderate to the extreme, were recruited to give the campaign a sheen of high public purpose. Backed by a $40 million budget put up by the corporate interests, these "elder statesman" are now the face of Fix the Debt, doing dozens of TV interviews, hosting breakfast sessions with members of Congress, making speeches about "mutual sacrifice" and generally going all-out to sell the financial elite's snake oil.
But wait — being an elder does not automatically mean you're a statesman. Let's peek at the resumes of these so-called public-spirited fixers of the debt. Start with Jim McCrery, a former GOP lawmaker from Louisiana. While urging Congress to cut people's programs, he's also a top-paid lobbyist pushing Congress to give more tax subsidies to America's richest people and to such multinational corporations as General Electric.
Former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn is a fixer, too — but he's also paid $300,000 a year to be on the board of directors for General Electric. Likewise, Democrat Erskine Bowles, a co-founder of the fixers' front group, is on the board of Morgan Stanley, drawing$345,000 a year. And former GOP Sen. Judd Gregg takes about a million bucks a year as advisor to and board member for such giants as Goldman Sachs and Honeywell.
Fix the Debt is nothing but another corporate fraud. I wouldn't let this gang of fixers touch pet my dog, much less my Social Security!
(Jim Hightower has been called American's most popular populist. The radio commentator and former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture is author of seven books, including "There's Nothing In the Middle of Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos" and his new work, "Swim Against the Current: Even Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow".)