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The elephant in the classroom, and other tidbits

Posted on March 1, 2022 by Sonoma Valley Sun

Embattled School Board trustee, accused of shady dealings on a construction project, implored to resign by past and present peers. A counter-offensive lawsuit over Brown Act violations. Open hostility and acrimony at public meetings. The histrionics are to the point that all players should get an A in Drama. Good theater, to be sure. But when it obscures the fact that only 34.3 percent of students in Sonoma Valley Unified School District can read proficiently, it’s beyond farce. It’s an absolute crisis. Tragic, Mindy Curley Luby notes, “yet trustees spent more time discussing their displeasure of a fellow trustee than any shock about the reading data.”… Concurrently, parents of Special Ed students, Luby included, have an additional beef with the District, which they say is ignoring critical issues.

Picture the Boyes Springs Post Office building, and the adjacent parking lot on the south side. It used to be a working road spur, but the county fenced the Hwy 12 end and created public parking. Now picture that land as a parking garage, part of the long-discussed ‘Community Plaza.’ That’s the brainchild of KS Mattson Partners. The company has approached the County with an unsolicited proposal, according to Supervisor Susan Gorin. She’s keenly aware of what Mattson hasn’t done in her district (unstarted projects at Boyes Food Center, the Lanning lot, etc.) but at this point is just listening. “In broad outlines, the County is still in negotiations with Ken Mattson, so nothing is set in stone. There is no firm agreement on timeline, intent, and obligations.” Gorin said her goal is to create a community plaza in the space that is currently parking, or on top of a podium over parking. “The County’s only financial obligation might be the design and construction costs for the community plaza.” For now, it’s all closed-door. “When we have an outline and agreement, we will sponsor a community meeting on what the community wants to see in a community plaza, and its function.”… Skeptics (and the line forms on the right) wonder if Mattson’s scheme involves the properties just to the South of the current parking lot – the empty property (once grand-planned for a restaurant) and the gas station fronting Highway 12. 

As a kid growing up in Redding, Benjamin Madely, now a professor at UCLA, became interested in the history of the area that had once been Mahuk country. “I saw firsthand at a quite young age this ongoing conflict between natives and newcomers… I began to think about what this meant, to colonize a place. I began to wonder where everybody went, and I began to study this history, and the further I went into it the more terrified I became by what I was seeing.” What he learned: between 1846 and 1873, starting with the induction of California into the Union and ending with the final large-scale massacre of Native people, the Native American population in California dropped from 150,000 to 30,000. It was a systematic extermination, organized and paid for by the civil and federal government, in the form of propaganda, donations of munitions, reimbursements for militia expenses, and actual troops in the field. His research led to the grim but vital book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe. Madley presents a ‘Second Saturday’ lecture for the Sonoma Valley Historical Society on Saturday, March 12, at 2 p.m. For Zoom link write [email protected]

However inadvertent, this may be the best way to raise money yet. Because of Covid, one of the many live events to go virtual was the annual John’s March Against Cancer. Traditionally, that’s a walk around Sonoma Raceway in honor of longtime track employee John Cardinale. Instead, the gathering was strictly online, where pledges tallied more than $27,000. People paying not to walk – that’s genius. Next up, your school’s pay-not-to-cook bake sale. 

Springs John was asked how it’s going. “You know that poster of the cat hanging by its claws, with the message ‘hang in there’? I’m just trying to hang on to the cat.”

 




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