With help from Campbell, Streeter operated a raffle booth at the Franklin County Fair from Thursday to Sunday.
“If you make up your mind to do something, you can do it,” he said.
Here we go again. A few years ago the southern Franklin County towns who send their children to Frontier Regional School wrangled over whether it was appropriate in the 21st century to have a school mascot called “Redskins.”
After sometimes acrimonious debate the name was changed to “Red Hawks.”
Now it’s Turners Falls High School’s turn. A group of Gill and Montague residents have asked their school committee to ditch their school’s “Indians” mascot.
Almost instantly the idea drew a backlash from proud alumni, with a petition gaining hundreds of signatures in two days.
Not sure where this debate will wind up, but the school board’s leaders surely saw the schism coming and have handled the request most gingerly and thoughtfully.
They plan to take all the time the community wants to air all sides of the issue, starting with a discussion later this month about the idea of even considering a new mascot. That would be followed by an actual discussion of the idea on its merits
“We wanted to think about all of the stages, and clearly this is intended to give lots of space and time so nobody thinks they have to speak loudly and immediately to be heard,” Superintendent Sullivan explained.
Greenfield’s Newton School students are about to learn whether you can pedal and perform math at the same time.
The school has bought KidsFit furniture — desks with bike pedals, bouncy seats or kneel-and-spin seats — designed to give students the sort of physical activity that research says stimulates their brains while learning, said Principal Melodie Goodwin.
The school used roughly $16,000 in grant money for the furniture, and if the experiment works, plans are to seek more money for more exercise desks.
“Kids are expected to sit in hard chairs at a desk and learn, and there’s a belief that physical activity while learning helps generate chemicals in your brain and make it a more productive experience,” explained Goodwin.
“We’re very much aware that people learn differently than they used to 50 years ago, and the kids are excited about this,” Goodwin said. “Once it becomes part of the natural environment, they won’t even notice they’re pedaling. It’s the 21st century, and we need to look at healthy sitting just as much as technology.”
Always thinking, that Principal Goodwin.
State Rep. Suzannah Whipps Lee has received an unexpected gift of a stress-free re-election campaign. Her Democratic challenger for the 2nd Franklin district seat in the state House of Representatives, Denise Andrews, just dropped out.
Andrews is abandoning her effort to regain the seat she held for four years before Whipps, to take a job in the private sector. Apparently someone made her an offer she couldn’t refused at the last minute.
Since no other Democrats came forward on short notice, Whipps Lee, an Athol Republican, has clear sailing to another two-year term. She seems to have completed her first term with good grades, even from a former Democratic candidate for the same job, Genevieve Fraser of Orange.
Whipps Lee “has been trying to represent the needs of her constituents” and was “quite wonderful” in her support of area residents opposed to the natural gas pipeline proposed and since abandoned by Kinder Morgan, she said.
Well, we’ll be glad to hold our North Quabbin legislator to that standard in the coming term.