Back to School

It is with no small amount of trepidation that I returned to school. I graduated with a degree in unemployment psychology and a faint feeling that I had been taken. Four years at USM had left me forty thousand dollars poorer. The degree that I was assured would open doors for me gave me a financial spanking as I walked off the graduation stage and realized what had just happened. I had been swindled out of forty thousand dollars and would not be getting a job that paidmore than nine dollars an hour.
This injustice has been played out time and time again. I hear college students talking about it every day I am at school. Nothing is being done about it. We have allowed colleges to rob students of their financial stability without assuring they will have a future job. Unfortunately a living wage can no longer be made with a BA or BS so the student finds themselves struggling at lousy jobs to make college loan payments. I believe the students are accountable for their own success but so are colleges. Right now they promise more than they deliver and are not penalized when they do otherwise.
The solutions to this debacle are not the easy ones. I personally think parents need to start by reinstating college as an option rather than a matter of course. Kids need to see that stability and money do not always follow the college experience. They need to be acutely aware of the financial hangover following college education without goals. Each student needs to hear before they go into school how many years they will have to pay up to a quarter of their income to get out of college debt.
The schools in Portland should not just give partnership a lip-service. The colleges here are being run as businesses, not community members. Kids who are looking at college as an option should have a better idea of what college is. Right now it is shrouded in mystery for the unknowing high "schoolers". They hear the parties but are not privy to the classes. We send our young off without having a clue about what higher education will entail. I think if more kids knew what sitting around a cruddy dorm room was like they would opt to wait until later to go for their degree. College life is not for everyone. Getting hig school kids into courses at colleges will give kids a better first idea of what they are in for.
Community job shadowing needs to be a matter of course as well. We have a responsibility to help kids educated in our community actuallize their goals and avoid our shortfalls. When was the last time you talked to a teen about your job? What would you tell a young person going into your field? If you are like me you have a whole lot of wisdom derived from personal experiences that could no doubt save some kids lots of hard work and or heartbreak. Why not have the opportunity to tell interested kids this well in advance before they repeat your mistakes and or do things the hard way?
Finally public service needs to be the norm. I feel that working in the charitable sector engages kids early in questioning what can they do for their community. Rather than asking kids what are you going to do to make a living? Ask them instead what are you going to do to earn your bread while contributing to your community? Volunteering is not put into our educational models because the colleges we are being educated at are being run as heartless businesses. We fund the education system. We should also make the choice to rectify this problem before another generation finds themselves without a clue as to how they are going to find success.
As a recent product of the educational system in Maine, I am acutely aware of its strengths and weaknesses. I would love to be your school committee representative next November. Please send me your ideas about what your vision for schools are. Tomarrow's school children will be better prepared when we all contribute to their education.

Hold Up City Council!

I have a great idea to go along with your draconian approach to drinking in the Old Port. There are some issues in town that I think could be approached in the same way you approached the drunk people problem in the Old Port.
SPEEDING A THING OF THE PAST
All we need to do is start taxing car manufacturers for every mile per hour over the speed limit. We could even expand the 20mph areas onto hills to get those pesky bike riders. I bet you could squeeze lots of pennies out of those hoity toity bike makers. The best way to stop a speeder is to fine a carmaker.
CREDIT CARD FRAUD JUST A CASE OF MISKTAKEN IDENTITY
Every time a person uses someone elses identity we they are very hard to find and fine. Credit card company's are much easier to fine so we should. Tack on all those police hours spent looking around for the lost cards. Credit card related crime solved. The credit card companies will pay for causing the crimes associated with them. They will soon go out of business in fact making identity theft on credit cards a thing of the past.
VIOLENT CRIMES
Now heres an easy one, fine the WWF every time someone gets beaten. We have looked at violence as being a product of individuals for long enough. Lets put the accountability where it belongs, on the wrestlers. No longer should our country, state, and city feel the bitter mockery of Jessy Ventura.
WEED and WEEDS
Now the drug problem we've been feeling the sting of has gotten to a fever pitch. Likewise weeds in gardens continue to proliferate. We have stopped at the point where we need to boldly contiue. The police have made the first brave steps in the race to make Portland weed-free. I will up their ante. We need to make the whole planet a drug free school zone. Penalize the earth that grows the weed to the maximum extent. It has mocked us by growing things we don't want it to long enough. Lets practice zero tolerance for the earth.
So in these elegantly simple ways we will eradicate the troubles of Portland, Maine. Where there is weed there we will pave, where there is wrestlers there will be none and where there is bar related commerce there will be vacant buildings. They will be icons of the city councils foresight.

The Cellular Division

There exists a great deal of literature about cell phone tower emissions and their health effects. I was not able to draw a decent conclusion based on any of my reading. I believe researchers don’t have a clue. The science we have does not study the effects of the emissions towers with anything but health survey models. We will have limited understanding of the issue until long after the effects of these towers can be proved using the current research models. It is for this reason I come to the table with a different approach. I decided that I thought the risk was too great and the school needs to shed its tower before I started arguing. The phone company provided me with all the ammo I need.

The facts that are provable are as follows:
1. One Portland school houses a cell phone tower.
2. Concerns over the safty of this have been raised by citizens, parents, teachers, and children.
3. At the current moment we cannot prove towers cause health issues with any real degree of certainty.
4. The cell phone company gives the school money to keep its tower there.
5. Parents have said they do not want businesses that do not have the most ethical business pracitices out of schools.

The scientific argument would not get results from the community. I enlisted the business models of the Cingular Company to help me prove my point. I have been using a cell phone for five years, have never had an unpaid bill and have excellent credit. I am a great customer. They have told me they value my business on repeated occations. I believed them.
Recently my phone stopped receiving messages so I called the nice people at Singular to get them to trouble shoot. They were quite helpful at first. They fixed the problem easily while I was on the phone with them. I thought nothing of this until later.
The problem kept coming up, my phone would not receive messages in real time, the phone dropped calls, all the messages would get erased including one of my baby’s heartbeat. I was a bit irrated. I called Singuliar to find out what they were up to. They said it was just some malfunctions of my primitive phone. They offered to fix the glitches. They insisted I talk to some other people in sales. They thought I wanted to buy a phone. I told them no thank you.
Over the next week the problems continued to occour. There were many messages missed I lost my recording of my greeting, it sucked. I was very upset because they had sworn up and down it was just a limited malfunction not anything serious.
Just as I had about reached my patience limit one of their sales reps called. He had a great deal for me if I would just sign into a new contract. He offered to give me the most excellent phone and all I would have to do is continue doing business with them for the next two years. I became very suspitious at this point. They knew about all the malfuntions a bit too well. I started calling a few friends with identical plans. My friends were very hard to phone. It seems everyone who has a digital phone in Portland has not been getting very good service. The people I did reach had just signed into new two year contracts beacuse their phones were not working so well. I looked into it quite a bit and found that I was not alone. Singuliar had been up to something right under my nose. They had made their old phones harder to use so everyone would have to get new phones.
Those of you who know me, know that I get mad at injustice. This kind of thing makes my blood boil. I called them and confronted them for more than two hours. I asked to speak with executives, supervisors and anyone who would listen. It was awful and made me very irratated and frustrated. They were horrible.
This of course brings me back to the phone message, not the ones that I missed while my cell was out of commission, rather the one we are sending our city’s kids when we do business with this kind of business.
Sing-You-Liar is what I urge all of you to demand Cingular to do. They have pulled the wool over the cities eyes for long enough. We should make them own up to their dishonesty. We need to show our children there is no place in our educational system for people who do not play fair. Cingular is a monopoly who is abusing their power. They are a bully, a liar, and a tyrant and we have their tower on top of our schools.
Now maybe you think I am full of it and that I just need to stop whining and get a new phone plan. If you are part of this camp let me provide you with some more reasons to not do business with phone companies in our schools.

1. Cell phones are used in class for texting which is very distracting.
2. Texting is not used to educate.
3. Kids paying for their own cell phones have to work more and thus have less study time.
4. Cell phones are used as everything but educational tools in schools.
5. Teachers do not want kids using their cell phones in class.

This whole phenomenon points to a problem in our schools. Why are we allowing the companies that contribute to conduct bad business. We have said nothing. “Yes give me a minute fraction of what you are earning and expose my children to wavelengths whose health effects are unknown so they can distract eachother during class with text messages not about school.
We need to revise our strategy.
Wireless web access for schools is a natural alternative.
If students and teachers with computers were provided with wireless access they could use them for learning related topics. If the school were to install wireless access to the school they could control it. That mean they could filter out distractions and show kids how the internet can be used as a source for quick information about school related topics.
Out with the old in with the new, only this time, on our terms.

This Old School House

This week a school was closed in Auburn. I watched as adults and children reacted to the emotions they felt as they spent one last day inside. I was struck by the way people spoke of the new school they were going to. It was like they were being forced to pick a new best friend. Details of this LA school closing are all rather controvercial. I just want to make sure this doesn't happen in Portland. Our neighborhood schools are community centers. Closing them would be devastating to Portland's communities.
There is a strong move towards consolidation at the state level. Governor Baldacci has put forward an incentive based program that may be entising to city reps and school committee members. The program rewards efficency it says. It however really just encourages homogeneity. A new school may have better heating systems, be cheaper to build than renovate the old one, and be in a higher density area. It lacks a history however, which is what makes my Portland what it is. I live in a community that values its past. We destroy a symbol each time we decommission a school. A school is a living symbol of our educational history. When we turn it into a condo we are rendering the areas history of education lifeless.
Portlanders have not seen the last of this issue. We house many small schools. Interested parties recently proposed a plan that would put Reiche School out of business and send West End kids elsewhere. This supposedly would benefit the tax payer but there are certain fees that are hard to assess. What is the value of a walk to school? How much is a strong community history of education worth? How much should we assess community in dollar terms? Rather than engaging in these excersizes in futility perhaps we should start thinking of how we can make our existing schools even better.
Baldacci has many good ideas for Maine, this may even be one of them but not for Portland. He has set his sites on consolodating the less urban centers where efficiency over community will assume less of a role. Community in parts north is not centered around walkable schools. This makes consolidation not representive of my city’s educational system.

Art of State

It seems every street in Portland has its own neighborhood gallery. Just today I was talking about "the state of art" in Portland with one of the three owners of the Sirens gallery. When I asked her which end of town her gallery was in she told me it was in the "gallery district". This term was new to me but I must say I welcome it. I hope to see more like it in the development of Portland's Creative Economy.
I would like to think of Portland as a place that approaches urban living and planning creatively. This appeals to me on every level. The idea of having districts reflect their interest in the arts through their name if only informally, is fantastic. We are expressing a cultural value for the creative process when we do this.
I of course am not saying we should start renaming streets. I guess what I want to say is, "What a great city I live in!" We have a gallery district. A large portion of local businesses show local artists work regularly. We have many oppertunities for education in the creative process. Our city had a creative summit. It is fantastic our city's mayor held a creative economy summit for us citizens! We are so fortunate.
I have never been to a city as welcoming to creative individuals as Portland is. I went to every major metropolitan city in the south of Australia. I toured nearly every town and city in New Zealand. Despite all of these adventures in exotic places I was very homesick. I thought it was national differences but it did not feel any better in LA, San Fran, Boston, Cape Cod, Augusta, Maine, or NYC. I missed Portland, Maine. It was not until I got out of the bus in Portland and walked up Congress Street that I felt that aching go away. This is a very special place.
Portland is a home in this way for many people. I identify myself as a creative person in everything I do. Imagination plays a role in my work with Portlands oldest residents at 75 State Street. It also inspires me to value Portlands youngest citizen's as visionaries rather than just school kids.
Last week I attended a public meeting where a teen said he felt unheard. I heard a public official in the Portland School systems say the art curriculum could be cut because of a short budget. The place where I worked was filled with lonely people. Their day would have been better if they were visited by a schoolchild from Portlands Schools. Solutions to these problems can be found by listening, thinking,then engaging in a creative problem solving.
I value innovative and integrative approaches to education. They engage our schools in a creatively vital Portland. We should treat every problem we have in Portland, educational, social, financial, even medical as an opportunity to engage in creative conversations. Portland will continue to be looked at as a flagship city if we are successful in doing this. Now more than ever the counntry needs good role models. Problems can be solved in similar ways on national levels as well.
Please engage your friends, neighbors, children, and families in creative conversations.

The Creative Economy Summit

The recent Portland Maine Creative Economy Summit at Merrill Auditorium was fantastic. The creative force in Portland is evident everywhere one goes. The graffiti here tends to be a bit more arty, there are just enough galleries to arouse suspition. Portland is an art safe zone. The fact the creative economy summit existed and was so well attended professed to the extreme amount of interest in the arts in Portland. It was scheduled in the morning on a weekday. There were probably three hundred people there.
What ends will this meeting of such magnitude have? It is hard to say. Kids attending the meeting from the experiential learning program in Portland felt it was not anything but an opportunity for local artists and business people to say, "Here I am and this is what I am selling." Many local political pundits were alternatively disgusted and exuberant. There were many there who spoke whose relation to the arts in Portland seemed peripheral. So again, what ends will this meeting have?
As an attending and a artist I was farmed off to the creatives section in the brain storming segment of the discussion. We talked about what it was that Portland could do to help us create more. Miraculously there was a conclusion: promote artists, give them a place to live, and give them some money. There were other ideas as well(45 or 46) but they were streamlined to distill three down for presentation.
We reconvened and were encouraged by an even higher turnout for lunch than had been present for the workshop part of the meeting. It was clear great things were afoot. All three groups presented their three distilled ideas. The results were put up for election as the top three ideas.
After all had been said and done, the mayors meeting seemed to be a success. I have yet to see the website but I am sure that the brilliance found there in is one of Portland marvels. My singular hope is that this meeting spawned further discussions.
It is a week after I wrote the above piece. I have seen there is activity. There has been mention of creative economy in random places throughout Portland. Hopefully success is at hand.