An effective vision for Greenfield differs greatly from just keeping it the same. Rather, a forward looking vision prioritizes growth, modernization, and sustainability, while maintaining the same focus on tradition, heritage, and stability. We are fortunately blessed with a group of younger people who have stepped forward to take Greenfield on a pathway to economic resilience, sustainability, and community. They are the the new guard. This group both love Greenfield as it was and is, some of them born and raised here, others are local historians. Simultaneously, they have a clear vision about how we need to adapt how we go about our government business so that our children thrive in peaceable, accepting schools, our businesses are housed in a densely populated downtown, our elderly citizens have central city housing to downsize to, and who follow the steps other rural towns have taken to turn themselves around.
How can you know that these younger people have these skills? Because they have already been successful at what they say they are going to do. Let’s use the younger slate of School Committee candidates as our starting point. How did Elizabeth DeNeeve win the school committee member of the year for the whole state of Massachusetts? She created the Pioneer Valley coalition of school committee representatives to go lobby at the State House for two days because our schools were not getting our fair share of state funding. She worked for three years on the committee to redistrict our schools, something that parents have been asking for a decade. This was partially implemented last year, but the fifth grade move back to the elementary schools was about to happen when two of the candidates on the other slate voted against the additional funding to the budget needed to do this.
Jeff Diteman, who has won numerous awards at UMass for teaching excellence, is a teacher working on turning the Pioneer School district culture around to some initial success. As a parent he is also a knowledgeable and passionate advocate for starting early in combating the lack of literacy in our schools. Adrienne Craig-Williams is a math teacher with degrees from MIT, and with past experience in finance. This rather quiet individual has the unique skill of understanding complex school district spreadsheets and then the ability to explain them clearly to the public. All three have been working day and night for the past two months collaboratively with the City Council candidates who bothered to pull papers and get your endorsement to run and are on the ballot.
This is a group of younger people who know how to collaborate. Many of the city councilor candidates actually have that as their specialty in their professional lives during the day. Many of the candidates, including the current president of the City Council, have children in the school system, and others have begun the Unhoused Community Committee, served on the Historical Commission, co-founded the Valley Housing cooperative, and founded the Greenfield trash pick- up Club. They walk the walk. Their collaboration is demonstrated by completely embracing and carefully listening to the one retired, but young at heart, member of their group.
Of course they all suggest you vote “No” on having a parking lot on Hope Street because many of them as city councilors have looked at the three years of research that the city has done before they voted on declaring this land surplus. What the law says has to occur before they can work collaboratively with their constituents and the mayor’s office in creating an RFP for the type of housing that would best work for our community.
The way older, mostly men, on the “Yes we want a parking lot” who keep saying untruthfully how much revenue it will make, and the people who are running on the other slate for School Committee who have voted for SROs and other unsuccessful approaches to fixing our schools, including one who has demonstrated how to not work collaboratively, are guilty of fitting into the group described by the famous saying: “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome is the definition of insanity.” It is time for a new vision and boundless energy.
Paul Jablon, a retired 46 year educator, lives in Greenfield.