Fate of Prudence up to Council

By John McDaid | Tuesday, 26 May 2009

By a unanimous vote this evening, the Portsmouth School Committee resolved to keep the Prudence Island school open for one year only if the additional funding needed for operations was received from the Town.

"We would love to keep all the schools open," said Michael Buddemeyer, who chairs the finance subcommittee. "There simply aren't funds available to do this." And, he added, "it is our duty to consider total population of Portsmouth's schools."

Several on the committee spoke of their desire to keep the school open, but no one could identify a place in the school budget where sufficient cuts could be made.

"I hope that the Town Council will work with us and help us get the $44K," said Committe member Angela Volpicelli.

After taking comments from several of the 7 residents in the high school library, the vote was unanimous. The issue will be taken up by the Town Council tomorrow night as they continue their provisional budget process.

One final note. Chair Dick Carpender took the opportunity to respond to the "article" (those are my scare quotes) in the Newport Daily News today, which, in my opinion, was rehash of the PCC letter featured here.

Calling the PCC statement "argumentative and misleading," Carpender said the School Committee had gone to the Council meeting last week with no sense of the role Prudence would play in the discussion. "We went over to see what they had to say. We never went over there with the intention of bargaining to get more money for the school. The insinuation that we went over and bargained is just not accurate. We had voted to close Prudence Island last year, and when we went in there that night, had the Council not brought it up, there would have been no discussion. I take exception that we bargained. The Council was having its own debate. Our intent was to see if we could cooperate and move the process along."

With the ball now in the Council's court, I would just like to point out that saving Prudence Island would cost the average taxpayer of Portsmouth five bucks.

Not five bucks a thousand. Five bucks.

I would happily pay five dollars to keep our one-room schoolhouse open. How about you?

Tags: 
Localblogging, 02871, School Committee

Comments

Terri Cortvriend

Tue, 05/26/2009 - 11:24pm

John,
I appreciate your scare quotes when you refer to the "article" in tonight's Daily News. This is the second time the NDN thought is newsworthy to run the opinions of the PCC as a news article. I always thought that thoughtful news reporting aired both sides of an issue. Why is our friend Mr. Fitzmorris not relegated to the Opinion pages like everyone else? I have been meaning to cancel my subscription for a while now - this was the motivation I needed to move that chore to the top of my To Do List.

Thanks again for keeping us all informed.
Terri C.

John McDaid

Tue, 05/26/2009 - 11:45pm

Hi, Terri...
It's easy to see how these things happen. Controversy sells papers, and as we've discovered, what the Daily News cares about is print circulation. (viz, their proposed online rate: QED) So if this irate screed lands on their editorial desk, gosh, it might be hard to resist turning it into a big splashy article with an attention-grabbing hed and dek. And hey, there was at least the fig leaf of he-said-she-said reporting with the attempt to get a balancing quote, so that constitutes journalism, right? Right?

No. That was the old journalism before localblogging, crowdsourcing, and active reader/writers ready to catch errors. As we say in programming, "With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow."

Don't thank me -- you, we -- are all keeping each other informed. It's not just broadcast anymore, and they just don't get that.

Cheers.
-j

craigi

Thu, 05/28/2009 - 9:17am

Don't worry folks, given their projected electronic subscription costs of hundreds of dollars a year, they won't be reporting for too much longer anyway. Sad, but true. Maybe they will get a couple subscribers from Ocean Drive, but not many elsewhere.

"you can never explain everything to everyone"

John McDaid

Thu, 05/28/2009 - 10:35am

Hi, craigi...
This very day, newspaper execs are meeting in Chicago to brainstorm their digital future, according to a story in The Atlantic (which I picked up from Jay Rosen's Twitter feed.)

It's now safe to wager that most attendees, who were scheduled to include Michael Golden of the New York Times, Gary Pruit of McClatchey and Tom Curley of the Associated Press, will be dragged into charging for at least some online content. Cross one's fingers that a dirty little industry secret, namely the qualitative decline of many papers (the New York Times a notable exception) amid rampant cost-cutting, doesn't now give even long-loyal consumers legitimate pause about paying up.

Ultimately, many in attendance will start charging for some online content because they don't know what else to do.
— via The Atlantic

When in doubt, yell "MINE MINE MINE" at the top of your lungs and ignore any opportunity to innovate. Pretend the future never happened and we're still living in that beautiful Black and White world of the Fifties where Dad read the paper while smoking his pipe, the kids read the Funnies, and Mom clipped coupons and recipes.

"Next stop, Willoughby!"

Cheers.
-j