Troubled Waters

If you check the date on my last posting, you are probably wondering if I left town or died or whatever. To tell you the truth I decided to take a little time off from local political activity in the aftermath of last November's elections. In addition to that, since the completion of the Wilbur and McMahan school renovation project, relatively speaking, things have been pretty quiet. That is until the recent upheaval on the school committee.

All you local political junkies know that there was a hard swing to the liberal left in the last School Committee election. Polly Allen, Lori Craffey, and Patrick McHugh were swept into office and quickly assumed the majority position and snatched the leadership of the committee away from the hands of the more conservative former leadership.

It was clear right from beginning that things were going to be different. None of the newly elected troika had ever served in elected office before, and they stumbled into power. Apparently high on their agenda was the replacement of Superintendent of Schools Kathy Crowley. Tom Alder and Peg Bugara along with Lori Craffey apparently were unhappy with the new chair Polly Allen, and her approach to unseating Crowley. So a power shift developed that has resulted in dumping Polly Allen, and electing Tom Alder to the position of chairman.

Needless to say that the natives who banned together last November to take over the school committee were restless. They showed up in strength yesterday evening at an emergency meeting of the school committee. There was a lot of hostility in the audience. New chairman Alder imposed limits on public input, requiring those who wished to participate to sign up, and would be limited to one appearance not to exceed four minutes. Few of the speakers paid any attention to the time limitation, and beat up on Tom Alder like a rented mule. Especially former school committee member and chairperson Michael Harrington who spoke for what seemed like an eternity, lecturing Alder, talking down to him, reminding him that it was Harrington who appointed him as chairman of the former school building committee. Harrington instructed Alder that all he had to do was go to the records and find all the information he needed to write a job description to use when advertising for a new school superintendent. He said that he knew they were there because he did it twice. Harrington, a member of the bar, seem to be challenging Alder on how the agenda for yesterday's meeting was established. I smell a rat there, my sense tells me that Harrington has an open meetings violation on his agenda. Some of you may recall that the Harrington led school committee had been found in violation of the Rhode Island open meetings act during his tenure as chairman.

I know Tom Alder, we are not friends, but I know him from his hard work on the School Building Committee. Tom is a hard-working dedicated honest civil servant. He deserves our gratitude. My advice to Tom is to wear protective equipment at all times and watch your back, because Michael Harrington who was defeated for reelection to the school committee is out to get you. The handwriting is all over the place.