As reported by the Salem News, the new charter school, Salem Community Charter School is looking for space. Museum Place is one possibility they’re looking at; the former Saint Joseph’s Rectory is another.
As well, the Saltonstall School is being renovated and Salem is scrambling to find space for their students, and for a special-needs program at the Collins.
The rectory will need a year’s worth of work before it is useable as a school. The Boston diocese did not offer their other properties such as St. John’s School and one official has speculated it is due to ADA issues.
A regular member of the commentariat at the Salem News weighed in on both stories with a refrain I am too familiar with as a member of the disability community in Salem. To paraphrase: “Why do we have to serve a small minority of students. Forget that touchy-feely stuff of [disabled kids]. It’s an emergency—use the parochial schools!”
(It’s an emergency; does that mean emergency no-bid contracting? The member of the commentariat is a Tea Partier and I presume for less government and taxation and against the charming “emergency” measures that have often concealed thefts of the public purse. I’m getting off the point here.)
Here’s a scenario the hardest-bitten conservative can relate to:
John Jones is a decorated veteran. A wounded veteran who came home from Afghanistan or perhaps Iraq. There’s no way he’s gonna get up and down stairs unless he rolls. Downhill, possibly not under his own control.
He has kids. He has a daughter, a true daddy’s girl that goes to the Saltonstall, or perhaps the new charter school or the Academy charter school.
His girl isn’t one of these special-needs snowflakes; she’s a normal active girl. Except that she’s an athlete and a ball player and there was that unseen posthole in the outfield one day when she was running out a grounder.
She’ll be hopping around for some time.
Now, Dad is deciding on schools, perhaps his family’s moved to Salem or his girl is making a change. Remember choice? That’s what the charter schools were supposed to be about. Choice, choice, choice!
You will tell Dad the vet, wounded for our sins (“freedom isn’t free”, mind?), that he and his daughter cannot participate as parent and child in their own school system?
Good luck with that.
While many people use patriotism to worship respect our soldiers, few of them realize something I’ve thought of.
If you count all the veterans still living from all wars, and those that are wounded and disabled, I suspect they don’t make up a large number.
In Salem, I have heard estimates that 20% of Salemmites have a disability. Not all of them are of school age, of course.
I am certain that the 20% is not all made up of veterans.
Yet if I suggested that veterans should not get help because their numbers are so few, I’m certain I would be assaulted in an alleyway. (Freedom isn’t free…)
I have no animosity towards veterans—I’m too young to have ever spat upon a Vietnam veteran, and have never said a word of disrespect to them (perhaps, I have done this to the politicians who task them, but…) Salem’s veteran groups are natural allies of the Commission on Disabilities and always will be.
I have to wonder why the diocese of Boston is not aggressive with its surplus properties. Despite what Rand Paul would have you believe, in Massachusetts, any given building does not have to be made ADA accessible to current codes merely as if the authorities waved a pixie wand and made it so.
The requirement to make a building ADA compliant per current code very much depends on the use of the building, the age of the building and the intended use of the building. There were several revisions to Massachusetts building codes for handicapped access and by the current law, a building constructed say, in 1978, only has to meet accessibility requirements for 1978. I have several large (and large-print) binders with all the laws to date.
If a building is used for general business purposes, it may or may not need to be brought up to ADA access. Often in Salem, buildings have been repurposed and have never been made accessible because there were very few if any renovations performed.
A benchmark the Commission often discusses is the “one-third rule” or “30% rule” or “hitting 30%”. That refers to the current value of the building. If any proposed renovations exceed 30% of this value, the building must be brought fully up to ADA and Massachusetts code.
Even then, developers and architects have considerable wiggle room. The law does not say absolute accommodations, merely reasonable accommodations. The Mass. Architectural Access Board (MAAB) will grant variances if the regulations are burdensome or do not benefit.
A few years ago, the state renovated a home in North Salem to use as a group home. By the letter of the law it would have needed an expensive elevator. The developer convinced the MAAB that the only space that the public would access was the ground floor. The ground floor of the building was brought up to code with HP parking and no steps, but there didn’t need to be an elevator.
I’ve been in St. John’s School before, and is not so much a charming old fashioned parochial school as it is a dump, no disrespect to Catholics meant. There are stairs everywhere. It could be impossible to get variances for this or any of the other school buildings involved.
Don’t forget, too, that the staff and teachers have to use the space as well. People get old and infirm, or have a negative encounter with an icy front step. If you think there’s controversy over accommodating students, just wait until it’s a teacher with a grievance!
I have to wonder if the diocese fears that the values of their properties have fallen so much that any renovations at all to them would require them to be fully up to code. After all, it isn’t only handicapped access at stake but also electrical, plumbing, fire safety and communications cabling that need to be upgraded as well.
Whatever the case, this is something you can’t blame on the special-needs snowflakes, “those people” or the ADA activists. Salem schools are indeed in a pickle. But they would be anyway even if you deported all the disabled to Lynn.
As is my tradition, I pay tribute to my late Mom and mark the anniversary of my blog. As is also my tradition, I am tardy with it. By at least two weeks!
Before I explain the picture, I want to give my belated welcome to Keep It Klassy, Salem, a relatively new blog that has been around for several years. I don’t agree with the blogger on many things but I am delighted that someone is following Salem politics after the demise of the old Salem Politics blog. His blog is in my blogroll now, as is the new Salem Patch, which has flashes of excellence and could be the future of news media on the North Shore, at least if AOL lets it.
Now, the picture. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I came from a foster home, and Jeannette Moisan was my foster mom and for all purposes my defacto Mom. On the left is Pauline, Jeannette’s biological daughter. If we were related by blood we would be brother and sister. But she wasn’t my foster sister; we had many girl foster children but none of them was ever, or ever could be, a “sister”. So Pauline was also my defacto sister.
The cute little toddler with her is Monique. Mom looked after many kids like her, but she was one of the sweetest. She would turn on the charm and be manipulative as only a toddler could. We had a dozen Monique stories, such as when she learned to say my sister’s name—and then kept her up all night saying “PAU-LYLINE!” Or the time Pauline was in a fruit stand in Peabody and Monique yelled “DA-DA” (her name for me.) Pauline tells her, “Da-da’s not here!” Unknown to her I had, for whatever reason, walked down from Varney St. to find Pauline and walk into that same fruit stand…
What a sweet kid she was. It was hard to see her go back to her Mom. I hope she’s doing well today.
One last picture with Jeannette:
Via Flickr:
Nature finally turned a switch to "Summer" today, as these folks are realizing.
And I've turned a switch, too.
I haven’t posted in almost six months. I’m dispirited.
Last winter, my building had the bedbug hysteria that has affected many households in recent years. Dealing with bedbugs has combined the worst aspects of moving and losing your house to fire or flood. The Salem News covered the story in my building and it brought out the worst aspect of pest infestations—the moral opprobrium that comes when your betters can look down on you for being “dirty” and “unclean”, even though bedbugs, roaches and mice are blissfully unaware of class distinctions.
In a building with a shared laundry space, like I have, I’ll never know how I got bedbugs and I just don’t care who or what “gave” them to me. I just know that pest infestations don’t make me or my neighbors “immoral” or “unclean” or “lazy”, but that was on the minds of many of the Salem News commentariat.
There’s more, too. Last spring I had quite a screaming match with my ward councilor Mike Sosnowski over a parking proposal at the Jail.
What I learned from that affair is that it doesn’t matter what neighborhood I live in, or what stake I have in anything, if someone more important than me thinks different. At that meeting, a person from the Northfields neighborhood association asserted that me and my neighbors did not want commercial use at the Jail no matter what.
It doesn’t matter that that Northfields guy probably doesn’t even have a view of the Jail from his house. And he never cared before about the apartment complex I live in.
As far as I can see, Mike Sosnowski has more or less aided and abetted groups like Northfields. If you live in cheap rental housing, you will not get representation in Salem.
You will not get it.
Better that you show Mike your mortgage statement—or proof of McIntyre architecture—before coming to him with a problem.
I was at a meeting this past Saturday of the Alliance of Salem Neighborhood Associations. It was held at the function room of Beverly Cooperative Bank, which is where the Downtown group meets.
I had my own problems with that group, and didn’t want to attend this meeting, except that I made a verbal commitment on recorded video and had to go.
(I know the camera is on during our Commission meetings. If I make a gaffe or a curse, then I do. I don’t try to walk back what I said. I said it and it’s on tape and that is that.)
Several people in the Alliance complained about being “outsiders”. I wanted to say to them: “Where’s Lucy [Corchado, head of the Point association]? Where are they? The Point is a neighborhood, isn’t it?”
Those people have their own advisory board at the highest level of city government. They have Jason Silva’s [Mayor Driscoll’s chief-of-staff] private number on speed-dial. I have no doubt that someone like Michael Coleman can have Mike Sosnowski swing into action at 3 AM on a Sunday if he so commands it. If Teasie Goggin wanted to repeat Mike Bencal’s Al Haig moment (“I’m in control here”, after the attempted assassination of President Reagan in 1981) when he tried to take charge of City Hall when the mayor was away a few years ago, she has more than enough social capital to do so!
They have that advisory commission in addition to the Alliance! Tell me they are outsiders again?
As it happened, the meeting was a waste of time for me and and my colleagues on the Commission on Disabilities, since it was supposed to pertain to the MBTA parking garage, but was instead an unfocused rambling about pedestrian access and getting traffic usage stats, only to find out the state had already done that but nobody from the Alliance even read the report. The Commission probably could have used that, but the person presenting that report didn’t bother to tell us where we could find the data from the state website.
(I’d filmed video of the meeting. It would have been nice of them to tell us when the MBTA part of the meeting would get under way so I wouldn’t have to guess how long the batteries in my camera would last. Not long enough as it turned out.)
If I can’t be involved in the workings of my own city, the one that I have spent 47 years in, I think, why am I bothering to blog?
I’ve asked myself that question over and over during the past six months.
The only thing keeping me going is the Commission—whose purpose I believe in with all my heart and soul—and Salem Access Television, where I have been applying my IT talents for 11 years.
I’m very proud, in fact, that SATV now has much of its local programming available over the Net. Public meetings—including the Commission’s—are now available through our Government page.
I worked very hard with Sal Russo and the staff over the past year to make this possible and I am inordinately prideful. I’ve been delighted to flip the figurative “bird” to a few former board members who thought this was a “fad” or “something for Dave and Sal to spend money on”. (In fact, video-on-demand has been a roaring success at SATV.)
There are many other thoughts, ideas and initiatives at SATV and the Commission to make fodder for many more years of blog posts, which is why I’m continuing to blog.
But I will never, ever, let myself believe that I have a stake and a say with what happens in Salem.
I don’t. And I won’t.
[Creative Commons photo by cjbrenchly]
Nelson Benton, editor of the Salem News, is scared of the Second Amendment advocates of violence:
One of the more disturbing aspects of all the back-and-forth about the tragedy in Tucson is that there exists an element | and it may be growing | that views the right to bear arms as an essential adjunct to their right to overthrow the government by violent means.
Nelson, you’re right to be scared. The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords of Arizona, and the deaths of a federal judge, and a nine-year old girl, is intended to scare us all. It was an act of terrorism no less in its emotional impact than Oklahoma City or 9/11.
You’d be wrong to assume that this has happened out of nowhere. And you’d be wrong to assume your own paper didn’t have at least a small role in the violent rhetoric.
This goes back at least 30 years.
When I was in college in the early 1980’s, Massachusetts government was in bad shape. We had, and still have, a legacy of corruption, patronage and just plain incompetence. Our state buildings were constructed, and fell down, on the take, while numerous connected contractors had their hands out.
It was, and is, shameful. The anti-tax activist Barbara Anderson made her bones during that era.
So too did talk radio. I, and numerous other Salemmites and Bostonians, listened to the triumvirate: Jerry Williams, Gene Burns and David Brudnoy. They were all libertarians.
And they all preached that government was bad, private sector was good and the best government was the least government. That philosophy influenced me almost to this day.
We’ve heard the narrative against public employees, politicians and government for so long we take it for granted, and take it as truth. We’ve taken these beliefs as faith for 30 years.
Second Amendment advocates have been promoting the right to bear arms for just as long; indeed, libertarians have often been natural allies in their fight.
Now, Nelson, you’re surprised and alarmed by the violence?
In recent years, your newspaper has been an unpleasant one to read. Barbara Anderson has written op-eds for the News for years, and they are not of the mild-mannered housewife I often heard with Jerry Williams, but of a harder, almost insane tenor. She started going off the rails with her 9/11 column, but her most recent column on the Tucson shooting is just nuts.
Another of your op-ed writers, Taylor Armerding, was once a fiscal conservative, though a hard one. Nowadays I’m afraid that he has a carry permit and will make headlines like Jared Loughner did.
And that says nothing of the cesspool that is the comments section of the Salem News web site.
I fear, Nelson, that your paper has done its part to further today’s political violence and that your paper’s owners are OK with this just as Roger Ailes and Fox News are fine with Glenn Beck.
Nelson, don’t look to Tucson for the Second Amendment Brigade. Look to Arlington, and perhaps, even Salem.
Salem City Hall finally has an elevator! We saw the elevator under construction when the Commission attended Mayor Driscoll’s proclamation of the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act this past summer.
Here is the ceremony:
And here is a walkthrough of the new elevator. Notice that there are two elevator doors, as you sometimes see in hospitals; one door covers the ground floor from the sidewalk while the other is at the level of the existing ground floor at City Hall.
This is "The Whirlybird", the old chairlift on the front staircase into the Council Chambers:
Beth Rennard, our city solicitor, used this lift every day.
She won’t miss it.
