Lessons from one-room schoolhouses
Outside a one-room schoolhouse in Norwich, Vt., about 1937
Back to School: Lessons from Norwich’s One-Room Schoolhouses is a new documentary film that explores the effort to preserve two remaining schoolhouses in Norwich, Vt.
Hear from the last generation of students who went to school there, and find out how the community uses these historic buildings today.
Back to School is part of Historic New England’s Everyone’s History series.
Chris Powell: Conn. GOP’s ‘Parental Bill of Rights’ should be just the start
— Photo by woodleywonderworks
MANC HESTER, Conn.
Call it an opportunistic feint in the "culture war" if you want, but the "Parental Bill of Rights" proposed the other week by the Republican nominees for Connecticut governor and lieutenant governor, Bob Stefanowski and state Rep. Laura Devlin, raises important issues that Connecticut should stop evading.
Several of the Republican proposals are vague. The Republicans say that they oppose presenting sexual topics to the youngest students but don't specify an age or grade at which sex education in school becomes appropriate. Of course, this vagueness is not likely to protect the Republicans from the Democratic demagoguery that in Florida misrepresents the state's fourth-grade threshold as a "Don't Say Gay" law.
The Republicans oppose student masking and vaccination requirements that deny parents "any recourse to object," but that recourse isn't defined either. Should Connecticut reinstate a religious exemption from vaccination of students for the basic childhood diseases? The Republicans don't say.
The Republicans call for expanding school choice for students in underperforming schools and endorse vouchers in principle. Would church schools qualify for these initiatives with government money?
While the long decline in public education's performance argues strongly for making church schools eligible, especially in the cities, again the Republican candidates aren't clear. Gov. Ned Lamont contends that state government's system of magnet schools provides sufficient choice, but in a recent court settlement his administration admitted that the system is not sufficient, that it is unable to meet demand for escape from many failing schools and should expand. Meanwhile, Catholic schools have been closing even as the need for their old competence and economy has exploded.
The Republicans propose spending a lot more money on tutoring students whose education was set back the most by the closing of in-person schooling during the virus epidemic. The Republicans also propose spending more to secure schools against attack. The Republicans don't say exactly where the money should come from, but then as state government rolls in billions of dollars of free federal money, the Democrats don't care much about where money is to come from either.
At least the Republicans are specific in calling to prohibit biological males from competing in girls sports in public schools. But the Republicans frame this as a matter of safety when it is really a matter of fairness, of preserving equal opportunity for girls under Title IX of federal civil rights law.
No matter, since Democratic demagoguery here will accuse the Republicans of "transphobia" and worse, even as Governor Lamont is trying to dodge the issue by contending that policy on transgender athletes should be left to local option -- that is, that the rights of female students should vary among school systems, even as many high school sports events involve two or more towns that could have contradictory policies.
The Republicans dodge a little here too, saying that some mechanism should be developed so that boys wanting to be girls can keep competing. But of course they already can compete in events for their biological sex.
Unfortunately omitted from the Republican proposals is any reference to the policies of deception already adopted by school systems in Hartford, New Haven and some other places in regard to students with gender dysphoria. Such policies forbid schools from notifying parents if their children are getting their school's help in changing their gender identity and names, unless the children approve of informing their parents.
Such policies usurp parental custody, may prevent parents from controlling the medical treatment of their children, and may cause critical delays in treatment before irreversible harm is done.
While such policies have been adopted nominally in the open, at public meetings, they have not been widely publicized and, at least in Hartford and New Haven, not directly publicized to parents at all. That's because any school that made sure that parents fully understood that they will be kept ignorant about the health of their children might face much angry objection.
Of all the rights parents have or should have, none is greater than the right to know exactly what schools are doing with the health and very identities of their children.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Connecticut. He can be reached at CPowell@JournalInquirer.com.
The Dr. Daniel Lathrop School is a historic school building at 69 East Town St., in the Norwichtown section of Norwich, Conn. It faces the village green next to the Joseph Carpenter Silversmith Shop, another historic building. Built in 1782, the school building is one of the oldest surviving brick school buildings in the state. The building, on the National Register of Historic Places, now serves as a visitors center for the local historical society.
— Photo by CLK Hatcher
‘Utterly without pretense’
Dan & Whit’s, the famous general store in Norwich, Vt., where Peter Welch lives when not in Washington.
“I represent a rural state and live in a small town. Small merchants make up the majority of Vermont’s small businesses and thread our state together. It is the mom-and-pop grocers, farm-supply stores, coffee shops, bookstores and barber shops where Vermonters connect, conduct business and check in on one another.”
— Peter Welch (born 1947), Vermont’s sole member of the U.S. House.
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“Vermonters are not only charmless of manner, on the whole; they are also, as far as I can judge, utterly without pretense, and give the salutary impression that they don't care ten cents whether you are amused, affronted, intrigued, or bored stiff by them. Hardly anybody asked me how I liked Vermont. Not a soul said 'Have a nice day!'‘'
“Vermonters, it seems to me, are like ethnics in their own land. They are exceedingly conscious of their difference from other Americans, and they talk a great deal about outsiders, newcomers, and people from the south.”
— Jan Morris (1926-2020), British historian, author and famed travel writer
Proper places for gossip
Dan & Whit’s general store, in Norwich. Vt. It’s one of the rural area’s best known meeting places.
“I see no truth at all in the myth that rural New Englanders are taciturn — they love gossip as well as anyone I ever knew — the talk takes place mostly on neutral ground: in stores and barnyards, at auctions and church suppers. Your home is private”
— From The Amateur Sugar Maker (1973), by Noel Perrin
Chris Powell: ICE's bizarre refusal; 'radical forgiveness'
Connecticut has a failure of immigration-law enforcement just as big as the recent one in San Francisco, although its location -- Norwich -- hasn't been glamorous enough to gain similar attention, despite outstanding journalism by the local newspaper, the Bulletin.
In San Francisco an illegal alien and repeat felon who has been deported from the United States many times has been charged with shooting a young woman to death on a tourist pier. Before the murder city police were holding the illegal alien on other charges, and federal immigration authorities had asked to be informed of his release so they could collect him. But San Francisco is a "sanctuary city" whose political correctness obstructs immigration-law enforcement. So the Feds were not notified and the illegal alien was not deported again as he should have been.
In Norwich an illegal alien who had just been released from prison after serving 17 years in prison for attempted murder in that city was charged there again last month with the murder of a young woman in her apartment. While Connecticut has declared itself a "sanctuary state," its obstruction of immigration-law enforcement does not go as far as San Francisco's.
At least Connecticut will cooperate with federal immigration authorities for the deportation of felons, and the state apparently notified the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office of this illegal alien's imminent release.
But ICE did nothing about it, and the agency's explanation is contemptible. That is, ICE claims that, upon his release from prison, it couldn't deport the illegal alien now charged with the Norwich murder because he would not produce any documents associating him with his native country, Haiti. So having attempted murder once already in Norwich, this illegal alien was simply set free and ICE forgot about him. Now he is charged with murder itself.
If ICE maintains its excuse -- that illegal aliens can't be deported unless they cooperate by producing adequate documentation -- then every illegal alien in the country can gain permanent residency here simply by destroying his documents.
Norwich's U.S. representative, Joseph D. Courtney, is pressing ICE for a better explanation. He should be joined by the rest of Connecticut's congressional delegation, the state's news organizations, and all concerned citizens. Even in politically correct Connecticut an innocent life must be worth more than this.
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In a recent letter to the editor a reader from Tolland scolded this writer's June 29 column for not having been impressed by the forgiveness given the racist mass murderer in Charleston by the survivors of his victims. "Powell apparently knows little about the teachings of the New Testament," the reader wrote, adding: "Radical forgiveness, even of one's worst enemies, is the way of the cross."
But one can be familiar with the New Testament and willing to let people follow "radical forgiveness" and the way of the cross i their personal lives and still maintain that these things can be contrary to national survival -- and national survival was the point of that column, national survival as sustained by the astounding loyalty of black people to their country despite centuries of abuse, abuse that continued with the mas murder in Charleston.
People can make of forgiveness whatever they will in their personal lives, as a matter of religion, as a psychology of life, or whatever. That won't harm anyone else. But a nation is infinitely bigger than that; it is a collective for which responsibility is shared, and all who are part of it will share its fate.
If one believes that this country, more than any other, aspires to uphold individual liberty within democracy and is, more than any other, the universal nation, then any subversion of it, such as an attempt to terrorize one of its components and start a race war, is the worst treason and, in the national sense, must never be forgiven.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.