Amish community building (photographer unknown)
The New School Blues. I’ve got ’em bad. The “new school” being my shorthand for the Malone School District’s two-phase school renovation & construction project. Whose advertising blitz in the Telegram is surpassed only by the daily series of approving articles by Connie Jenkins, the editor.
(Photographer unknown)
To: Wayne Walbridge, Superintendent of Schools Malone Central School District
From: Calvin Luther Martin, PhD Associate Professor of History (retired), Rutgers University
Re: Proposed new school project
I greet you as one retired teacher to another. I have a warm place in my heart for all teachers, as I know you do too. Like you, I consider teaching to be a high and sacred calling. (Remember that schools began in the Middle Ages as extensions of the Church, and for many years all faculty were clerics. Knowledge, itself, was sacred. Indeed knowledge is always sacred.) I regard teaching as the finest of professions.
That’s why I’m writing about the proposal to overhaul our existing schools (some of them). An ambitious plan, which comes with a huge price tag. I want to suggest we rethink this. As a community: rethink this.
