TWF 346: Public Hearing On Proposed Charter School: Thursday, August 22, 2024, 6:00 PM EST. Plus, my thoughts on the idea.

 

[EDIT:  I received some additional documentation, reported on below]

Hello, friends!

It's certainly been a while.  I was thrilled to get a chance to visit Freeport's second-annual Pride On The Mile event back in June, but I wasn't physically well enough to put an article about it together.  I just wanted to start with that belated shoutout because, well, they deserve it!

On to the star of today's article:  Maven Charter Academy School is interested in opening, well, a Charter School in Freeport, and I want to discuss that a little bit.

Now, before I say anything else:  I am biased on this issue.  I spent eight years working in public education.  Nearly five of them were spent as a Teaching Assistant at Freeport High School.  I am very big into public education, very confident in Freeport's academic strengths, and based on my experience in education, I am very hesitant to think that a charter school is going to do the best job it can with the resources its given.

With that out of the way, I want to encourage you to undertake all the possible research you can if this issue at all attracts your attention, because it is a community-redefining one.

For starters, here's a Freeport Public Schools public hearing flyer for you to peruse.  I'll have more to say after you look at it.

You don't necessarily have to have something to say to go to a public hearing, by the way.  You aren't required to speak.  You can go and listen.  Remember a decade and change ago, when myself and my sometimes co-conspirator Jason Bass would go to the Village of Freeport Board of Trustees meetings and take notes, then report back?

You can do this for yourself, or report it for others through your own publication, Facebook group, whatever.  Freeport School District meetings are (or at least used to be) usually easy to get in and out of, usually have plenty of seating, and are generally polite affairs.

I was also able to get a more detailed briefing for the meeting, along with some initial information on the School District website:

This letter stresses that the State University of New York's Charter Schools Institute, and the State Education Department itself, are deeply involved.  This document goes so far as to imply, if not directly state, that the final decision will be made by the SUNY Board of Trustees, and so how much actual say the Freeport Public Schools has over this issue is...Questionable?

I legitimately don't know.

Now, On To Maven.

One of the first things any parent considering where to send their school - or any citizen trying to evaluate a school - should do is research their website.

Maven does have a website laying out some of their plan, which is nice.  And, I'll be up-front about fairness:  They don't exactly have a school running yet, so I don't expect there to be too much information.  But let's see what they've got.

 - They say they provide Youtube content, but I can't find any that's clearly related to them.

 - Their "About" page is two paragraphs long with an invitation to reach out to find out more.

 - Their "Academics" page is one paragraph long with a few Eduspeak buzz-words and little concrete information.  There is a "Learn More" button on this page that does nothing so far as I can tell.

Of greater interest:  Their "Student Life" page has some actual information, if you know how to translate it out of Eduspeak.  Their thoughts about "Social Emotional Learning" are, though not detailed, at least the boiler-plate for what I'd expect a good school to be.  They talk about restorative justice as a cornerstone of discipline, which is a practice I'm familiar with and happen to think works well about 85% of the time.

Then it starts getting weird.

Maven Might Be Religious.

The commentary about "Emotional, Moral, and Ethical" development raises "spirituality," which I find incredibly dangerous.  Spirituality tied to moral and ethical growth?  Is this a religious school?

Well, I went looking around their site and didn't see much, so I hopped on their Twitter account and found, well...

And it gets...Less pleasant.

When trying to research who exactly was behind this project (because their website lacks details), I discovered this Long Island Herald article.

Maven's ringleader seems to be Craig Mercado, a former principal of - among other things - a religious school, St. Ephrem Catholic Academy.  All the talk about "classical education" I see on their website, plus those references to spirituality, plus those posts about doing information blitzes outside of churches and also the concerns about faith-based charters coming?

Add that to a religious educational background and you get me deeply suspicious that this would be a religious charter school.

I know Maven goes to great length to try to claim they don't take money from public schools, but that's obtuse at best.  "Charter school students are removed from public school enrollment, and the per-pupil funding for those students is then directed to the charter school. The community is paying the same cost for the child's education, and the local public school continues to be funded for every child it educates."

Not only is that still tax dollars going to what I can only assume, at this point, is a religious institution, but the idea that the Charter School is somehow going to pay for its own building and infrastructure, it's own material resources, and its own teachers - all without any taxpayer dollars - and turn around to make a profit based solely on average per-student expenditure?

Well, here's one way that Maven's other mastermind, Dr. Patrick Fogarty talks about achieving this pipe dream in his Long Island Herald article:  Using non-union labor.

In other words:  The plan is to provide teachers less job protection - and probably lower wages, since unions typically raise wages.  This means that the students get inferior teachers who are constantly fearful that their job could screw them over at any moment.  After all, that's what "lower overhead as far as teachers we hire" must mean, because how could you spend more money on a teacher that's got lower overhead?

The Bottom Line - It's A Bad Idea.

The goal of a charter school isn't student outcomes.  It's to turn a profit.

Supporters might argue, "If the school doesn't produce good outcomes, enrollment will fall off and it will fail!"  And, yes, it might.  But school results aren't super hard to fake, especially at the lower grade levels that Maven seems to be targeting.  There are some state-wide tests, of course, but a lot of that could be resolved simply by teaching students how to take the test, and not actually teaching them what they should be learning at those grade levels.

I know I'm not an elementary specialist, but I've worked in elementary classrooms.  It's not easy.  It's definitely not something you're going to want to do without a union to protect you if you rub your principal the wrong way.  You're not gonna wanna put as much effort in when you find out that you don't have the same kinds of retirement, health care, and compensation packages that your union teacher at the public school has.  I know because I've talked to Charter school teachers who have felt this way.

Never mind that this school seems awfully shady when it comes to whether or not its a religious institution, talking about "spirituality" and the unleashing of faith-based charter schools, but not clearly delineating a particular faith, and also not clearly delineating that it is non-faith-based.

The truth is, there's not enough information available about what these guys want to do:  And if you're heading into public comment to try to get public school money to pay for your private profits?  And you don't have enough information for curious readers to decide?  When you aren't clear if you'd just be accepting Freeport students, or if you'd also accept from nearby communities?  When you don't even seem to have a shortlist of locations to actually build your school in a Village that doesn't exactly have the most prime real estate available?

I would be strongly against this.

-----ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CAME IN-----

I managed to get hold of a bunch of documentation regarding this school.  I found this page particularly disturbing.

"While not explicitly stated," they are aligning with Catholic school values.

This is a Catholic school in disguise.

Jesse Pohlman is a recovering teacher, sci-fi/fantasy author, and the publisher of The Weekly Freeporter, which is no longer Weekly nor a Freeporter's perspective, but rather an occasional former Freeporter's take on topics that generally go broader than just the Village.

TWF 345: Nassau County Bans Masks In The Name Of Safety, Makes County Less Safe

 Hello, friends,

As per the NY Civil Liberties Union, as well as many other sources, Nassau County has passed a ban on wearing any form of face covering.  There are supposedly medical and/or religious exemptions to this, but those are reportedly unclear and vague.

Friends, let me tell you:  For the chronically ill, for those who are headed to or from a doctors' office, for those who will be in a confined space with strangers?  Masks are a lifeline that allows them to participate in public life with less fear of getting sick and dying.

Now, those people may be subject to fines and possibly - I am not kidding - a fucking YEAR of imprisonment.

Just a month ago, our usually-inept governor issued a warning that CoVID infections were once again on the rise.  Thus, our county's ban flies in the face of basic public health.

The rationale I keep hearing is "public safety."  The idea that everyone on the street must be identifiable so that crooks can't hide who they are.

I may not love our governor, but she's right to warn us that CoVID is still a serious threat.  I may not choose to mask under most circumstances, but I damn sure don't believe in taking that right away from others. Should our police really be playing "Check people wearing a mask for a doctors' note"?  Is that what you want our tax money spent on?

I promise you this much:  At least once, while a cop is harassing someone over their mask, a real crime will be committed that they could have stopped.  And that'll be on the cop for enforcing the stupid law, the legislature for passing the stupid law, and county executive Bruce Blakeman for signing the stupid law.

Because it seems like our county doesn't give a damn if innocent immunocompromised people die.  They just want to watch those peoples' face as they choke down their last agonizing breath.

This ban needs to be overturned, and people need to speak out about it.

TWF 344: Lego At The Library!

Hey all,

Been a while.  Hoping to make it to Pride On The Mile this year (June 15th I believe), but in the meantime I just had to share this.

After all, I am a huge Lego fan.  I just wish there were more opportunities.

TWF 343: Hurricane Lee Isn't Quite Coming to Town

 Hello, friends,

This is a short update to let you know that Hurricane Lee is in the neighborhood, this weekend.

I've found Ryan Hall to be a pretty good meteorologist to listen to.  His prediction is that Hurricane Lee will pass Long Island to the east.  It'll push a lot of water our way.  I was listening to another meteorologist talking about how we aren't likely to get rain or super-heavy wind, but we will experience a pretty severe high tide that might, I suspect, flood parts of the south shore of Long Island.

That means South Freeport might flood, too.

Image courtesy of Accuweather

I was unable to find anything on the Freeport website or the Facebook page for the Office of Emergency Management about predicted impacts, so maybe it won't be that big a deal, but it's still worth being weather-wise.

Jesse Pohlman is a sci-fi/fantasy author and part-time journalist who occasionally publishes The Weekly Freeporter when there's important news like hurricane information.  You can find his website here if you're interested in a fantastical adventure of some kind.

TWF 342: Sparkle On Stage At The Esplanade On Thursday, 8/17/2023, at 7:00 PM!

Hello, friends!

This is just a quick signal boost about the Long Island Arts Council and its partnership with Sparkle On Stage to put on the original musical 'Woof!'  If you're in the area and especially if the weather is good, I hope you can make it to the 7:00 PM showing at the Nautical Mile Esplanade.

The Weekly Freeporter is no longer a weekly production, but it gets broken out when a good cause can use a signal boost.  Jesse Pohlman is an author born and raised in Freeport; you can check out his sci-fi/fantasy novels and other projects here at his website.

TWF 341 - Some Randall Park & Lifeguarding Stories

 Hello, friends,

It’s summer-time, and the other day, as I sometimes do I, was driving around south Freeport where I spent thirty years of my life.  My plan was simple:  To swing by Randall Park and say hello to any of my old lifeguard friends who might be working there.  For those who are new to The (once-)Weekly Freeporter, I was a lifeguard for the Village for, give or take, twenty years.

It was, surprisingly for 3:30, closed, with what looked like maintenance work in-progress.

That’s got me feeling like telling some of my stories today.  Nothing too crazy, just some of the experiences I had.

To begin with:  I grew up two blocks away from Randall.  I didn’t go there too often as a child (I did a lot of swimming at the Rec on swim teams), but I started lifeguarding primarily at Randall when I was 16 years old.  It is, by and large, a wonderful thing for the community to have a local pool.  Freeport has two such facilities besides the Rec Center:  Randall at the mouth of the Nautical Mile, and Martin Luther King Jr. Park up on Stevens Street.  I’ve worked at both, and both are fantastic resources that by-and-large have nice people that visit.

Randall Park, photo by the Village.  I know it's not the pool area, but it's a big Randall Park sign!

Swim Lessons At The Rec

Some of the best were my times as a Water Safety Instructor (WSI) for the Rec.  I had a practice mostly oriented towards adults.  I taught a few years worth of the Wednesday night Adult Swim classes, but I also did private lessons where I primarily taught adults - many of whom were terrified of the water.

You see, here’s the thing:  When my mom was a kid, she was pushed into water over her head and nearly drowned.  For the rest of her life, she never went into water above her knees.  She never learned to swim, even when I became a swimmer.

Her story was not unique.  I came across many adults who were afraid of various swimming components.  Some were comfortable going into water they could stand in, but couldn’t put their faces in the water.  Others were trickier, being afraid to get in the pool altogether.

It takes a lot of time to get people to trust the water.  My usual method was to let the student hold on to my arm when putting their face in the water.  Oftentimes, this resulted in them clamping down on my arm.  This, in turn, meant that there were definitely days at which I went home to my wife with fingernail wounds.

That was always fun.

I also have to give a shout-out to my time not so much with the Village, but with the Freeport Schools (who I TA’d for) as the assistant boys swim team coach.  I got to watch a whole generation of Freeport lifeguards start as swim-team kids, some of whom were hardly able to swim, and help them elevate their skills so that they could not just compete, but make a bit of cash as lifeguards.  I’m still in contact with a lot of swim team folks.

As a side-note:  I believe that between her work as the head for aquatics at the Rec Center and her role as the head swim team coach for many years, the Rec Center pool should be named in honor of Carole Murphy.  She was an amazing boss, an excellent coach, and an all-around cool person to know.

The Scariest Day Of My Career

I won’t go into too much detail about this, but even though about 90% of lifeguarding is just sitting back in a shade-umbrella and watching a pool, maybe while twirling a whistle, there are emergencies.  They can be all sorts of unnerving - sometimes bloody, sometimes heat-related, sometimes fall-related.

The scariest day of my career, one of the scariest in my life, happened when I was at Randall.  I was patrolling the deck when I observed a woman floating face-down, someone who hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago.  I blew three whistles - our code, at the time at least, for “I need a backboard” - and leaped into action.  I rolled her over with training long-ingrained in my muscle memory, and I threw up a prayer (a successful one, I suppose) that I could observe her breathing.

I will never forget her eyes - she was unconscious, but her eyes were open, staring at the sky, absent.

We put her on the backboard while EMS was on its way.  She regained consciousness as we lifted her out of the water and was clearly terrified. I can’t honestly say I know what happened to her because information doesn’t usually flow back down to us, and what we get are often just rumors.  But we know she survived.  We know that on that day, everyone worked to keep her alive, and we succeeded.

So the next time you see a lifeguard just chilling in a chair ‘doing nothing,’ just remember that somewhere else there’s a lifeguard saving a life.

Filter Follies And Rain Days

Of course, a pool is only as safe as the water is clean.  By and large, Randall (and MLK) are clean pools, but filters are hard to operate.  I received a decent amount of training on how they work.  I know how the water traveled through the pipes, I know how to clean and maintain the waffles in the vat, and I know how to shovel chlorine tablets into a chlorinator, usually without accidental inhalation of anything unpleasant.

With that said, as far back as when I was a kid, there were days when the filters simply would not work.  These situations often led to relatively easy days where one or both pools were closed and our job was to stand by in case of some kind of medical emergency in the park - or, at the very least, there was a lessened demand on our attention with one pool closed, and we got a little extra time away from the sun.

Of course, sometimes this led to patrons getting agitated - and I can't blame them! As much 'fun' as it might have been to be on standby, many of us like our days to be 'the usual day' for better or worse, and unusual days can be good or bad. We get it, we're lifeguards because so many of us grew up in the water and we like to swim, so we sympathize. We just can't help that sometimes old filters don't hold up.

But I’ll never forget the rainy days, the days where we knew there’d be a few hours where we were going to be closed while thunderstorms filled the sky.  We hung out in the office.  Back in the day - in the early 2000’s - we had someone bring in a portable TV to watch. This was a time before cell phones had touch-screens.  Other times, we played board games (Risk and Monopoly were favorites), and we imagined what it would be like if we suddenly had to face a zombie invasion.

Zombies were popular at the time, you see.

All This To Say

Lifeguarding is a great ‘starter job’ for young people to learn responsibility.  You can start saving lives as early as 16.  But it’s a hard job, too.  Sitting outside in hundred-degree heat is draining even if you’re in the shade.  Training and staying in shape for the job is difficult (I resigned in large part because my neck issues became overwhelming).  The easy times seem easy, but the hard times require quick decision making to save a life.

That's training that can last - and start! - a lifetime.

I picked up the Long Island Herald at my dad’s house and I saw that Freeport was talking about how it’s police department had expanded and promoted officers.  I recognized a name on the list of promoted officers and I smiled to myself because I knew that man when he was a youngster.  He wasn’t always the best behaved of the bunch, either, being a little sneaky-sneak with his cell phone once upon a time!  But he turned out to be a good dude, and last I saw him we had a nice chat.

And he’s not the only one I’ve known who has gone into either policing, fire-departmenting, or EMS work.  Many lifeguards use lifeguarding as a starter job for a career in public service, either as first-responders or in some other capacity.  Many others, like myself, become teachers and lifeguard as a summer job while educating during the rest of the year.  It’s like public service was a calling to most of us.

But at the end of the day, the vast majority of lifeguards at the Rec are young folks who are charged with no less a task than saving lives in an emergency.  Whether they’ve been there two decades like I was, or a few weeks like the young man who was second in the water on the day that woman I talked about nearly died, they deserve to get paid well, to be taken care of, and to get respect.

I hope that happens. With that said:

It’s my understanding that contract negotiations are rapidly approaching, and I hope the Village will consider that those young people who are just getting their start in civil service could use a fair paycheck for a fair day’s work. I won't lie - it was widely known that our salary was some of the lowest in the county.

The world is only getting hotter - Last week it hit new record highs - and Freeport is not immune from the weather. Yes, we're on an island where there's some breeze and air exchange, but it still gets hot.  Freeport needs as many lifeguards as it can get, and higher salaries will make sure that when the mercury is high, the pools are open and ready to cool residents and outsiders alike down.

Thanks for reading The Weekly Freeporter.  Jesse Pohlman is a sci-fi/fantasy author from Freeport.  You can check his novels out at his website.

TWF 340: First "Pride On The Mile" In Freeport!

 Hello, friends,

Beautiful beginnings are small.  This is just a quick report on my experience at the Freeport "Pride On The Mile" event I talked about in a previous article, the first such event that's been put together.  It's an ongoing event at the time of reporting, with a Drag Show taking place at 8:00 PM.

The event consists of three major events, disclosed here:

I spoke to a wonderful person at the Vendor Fair who referred me to many other events taking place all across Long Island.  The Vendor Fair is small, yet cozy; but that's to be expected for a first-time event.

I stuck around for a couple of performances at Halfway Down.  They were nice, and the place was fairly crowded so that was an awesome thing to see.

Unfortunately, prior obligations have kept me from being able to see tonight's show.  I would have loved to check it out.

Other considerations?  Parking was plentiful (I remember a time when parking was free, too!), though that might fill up as the night goes on.

And it was wonderful to look down the street and see people like me.  It reminds me of the best parts of Freeport.

Which is why it's strange that I didn't see any endorsements from the Chamber Of Commerce.  That was a bit unusual, and should be rectified next time this event is held.

Anyway, you've got some time to get down to Pride On The Mile!

Jesse Pohlman is the editor and all-around show-runner for The Weekly Freeporter.  He's a Sci-Fi/Fantasy author born and raised in Freeport (Well, born at South Nassau, but that's about as close as it gets, these days), whose website can be found here.