REMINDER

On Saturday, February 21st, the Northwood Recreation will begin holding our Annual Ice Fishing Derby.  The Derby will be held on Harvey Lake from 8:00 AM to noon. This is a FREE event. Register at the derby upon arrival.  The event will be held rain or shine, safe ice permitting. Contact the Northwood Recreation Department at 942-5586 x209 or by e-mail at [email protected] for additional information.

Suncook Valley Sno-riders Poker Run. Saturday February 21st, 2015 at Ballfield at 177 Tilton Hill Rd., Pittsfield, NH. Registration from 10:00am-12. Support your local snowmobile club, accessible by vehicle. Lots of Fun! More information visit us on Facebook or www.suncookvalleysnoriders.com

Chesley Memorial Library News

Teen Book Club, for ages 12 and up, will start up again on Thursday, March 5, from 5:30-6:45 pm at the library.  We will be reading In a Heartbeat by Loretta Ellsworth.

Registration is required to reserve your copy of the book.  To register call the library at 942-5472.

Letter To The Editor

Northwood’s Head Start

At the Northwood School District Deliberative Session the price tag for the proposed full-day kindergarten was raised from $46,000 to $100,000. Supporters fear, however, that such a huge increase may cause the already beleaguered Northwood taxpayers to vote it down. 

One problem is that even $100,000 may not be enough.  Another problem is that Northwood homeowners are already looking at a possible $1.3 million tax increase from the many other proposed warrant articles.

Voters considering this issue might want to look at research about another early childhood program.  The February 2, 2015, edition of The Washington Examiner features an article headlined, “Obama wants to expand failing Head Start program.”

It seems the President is proposing a $1 billion plan to expand Head Start to full-day and full-year. This, despite the fact that a 2012 study of Head Start by the Federal Department of Health and Human Services concluded that “there were some initial benefits for participating children, but their gains were erased by the time the children reached third grade.”

Worse still, the article cites a 2010 study by the same Department of Health and Human Services, which found that “Head Start’s positive impacts may even dissipate by first grade.”

And so it goes. Study after study shows that early childhood institutional education produces few if any long-term gains. Yet the absence of good data to support such programs apparently doesn’t deter its supporters.  Although they may believe all-day kindergarten is beneficial for children, the evidence strongly suggests that their faith is misplaced.

Michael Faiella

Northwood

Coe-Brown Students Recognized For 2015 Scholastic Writing Awards

A number of Coe-Brown Northwood Academy students were recently recognized by the National Writing Project in New Hampshire through The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. This is a remarkable achievement and milestone for young writers at CBNA who were mentored by English department faculty.  A panel of writers, teachers, and literary professionals selected their work as being among the best works submitted by New Hampshire teenagers. Students are judged against other entries in the following categories: fiction, flash fiction, poetry, personal memoirs, persuasive essays, humor, science fiction and fantasy.  Of the more than 300 submissions to The Scholastic Writing Awards which New Hampshire students sent this year, the following students from CBNA were honored:

• Gold Keys— Sophia Chartier ( Nottingham), Megan Leduke (Northwood)

• Silver Keys—Kristina Seavey (Northwood), Grace Blake (Strafford), Emily Cunningham (Northwood), Nicole Durell (Barrington) (3), Hannah Eaton (Strafford), 

• Claire Hammond (Nottingham), Kayla Pollak (Northwood), Kelsey Wallace (Strafford) 

• Honorable Mentions – Cassandra Barnhart (Northwood), Sandra Black (Nottingham), Amanda Bolduc (Nottingham), Paul Colson (Strafford), Jackson Douglas (Strafford), Sarah Dupuis (Barrington), Caroline Lavoie (Barrington), Megan Leduke (Northwood) (2), Ahna McCusker (Northwood), Alexander Mercedes (Strafford), Sadie Sabina  (Northwood), Amy Searing (Strafford)

In May, all award recipients, including those whose work was selected as honorable mention, will be invited to attend the NH regional awards ceremony to be held at Plymouth State University. In addition, every piece of writing which received a gold or silver key will be published in this year’s edition of Middle/High School Voices.  Congratulations to this next generation of writers.

2015 Northwood Softball Baseball Registration

Registration for the 2015 season of Northwood Softball Baseball is underway. We continue to offer online registration right from the website at www.nsbanh.org. Look toward the upper right corner for the links. You can pay online with credit, debit or PayPal. You can do multiple registrations per division before you check out & pay. Payment is expected at time of registration. Registrations are due by March 22, 2015. Please register early. Any registrations received after that will be accepted on a space available basis and will incur a late fee. 

2015 spring clinics gets underway Saturday March 21st for softball & Sunday March 22nd for baseball at the Northwood School gym. All registered players are eligible to participate. The cost is included with the registration fee.

Letter To The Editor

To the Editor,

Being consistent, if I’m not getting a return on an investment, then I’m not investing more money on that investment. I don’t think that you should either.

Putting more money into our roads is a waste of money because of the process. No one disputes they are slowly getting worse. While we may not be spending enough money, I contend that the process is wanting. Putting out the bid, awarding a bid, enforcing that specifications are met, no common sense or policy, and a complete lack of oversight are all parts of the problem.

Everywhere I look there are weather limitations; “mixtures placed only when the underlying surface is dry, frost-free and the temperature is above forty (40) degrees F and rising.” Yet in middle November, despite the bid specifically stating that the work had to be done by October 10th, on the morning of a black ice storm and accidents all over the state we paved Lucas Pond Road. The next morning we woke to 18 degrees. Northwood paved Jenness Pond Road. The same thing happened last year on Old Mountain Road.

Many of you will remember the debacle of the Ridge Road project in the late 90’s. With many of the same players today we still have the same problems. The similarities are eerie. History, we ignore it at our peril. Despite two public hearings on how poor the work was and specification not being met, the Selectmen paid the bill.

We are not doing the basics such as filling potholes, cleaning ditches and crack sealing. I find it impossible to support the $100K Warrant Article for road maintenance and won’t until we completely revamp our policies and procedures. Management, oversight and common sense are completely missing.

Tim Jandebeur

Northwood

Letter To Editor

Update on Common Core Petition Warrant Article 13

Vote Yes on Article 13

The petition warrant article that was signed by 47 residents of Northwood with a few additional after the deadline made it through the Deliberative Session without being amended by a slim margin in Northwood.   Please vote on March 10th to tell our School Board that we want to opt out.

SB101 did pass the Senate, but it is just a very tiny step in the right direction because it clearly states we definitely can opt out of the Common Core Standards.  Those that opposed at the hearing stated:   that the Standards are not prescriptive, meaning teachers can use the standards as a guideline, but continue to teach as they saw fit to meet the needs of their students.  Well, if this is the case, why are school districts buying expensive, Common Core aligned text books, which I personally know, do present material in a developmentally inappropriate way.  The reason, they are doing this is, so that the students can pass the test.  Therefore, we are still teaching to the test.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) tests are not measuring just your child’s knowledge.    If my children were still in school, I would not subject them to this testing.  For the test uses Psychometrics:  the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.   I already feel my children were funneled into workforce training, post high school, but the children of today are going to be labeled at a much younger age.  They will no longer be allowed the time to explore and expand on what interests them.  Instead, they are being thought of as cogs in the societal machine. 

Again, Please Vote YES on Article 13.

Sincerely,

Marie L. Correa

Letter To The Editor

All-Day K, cont.

Northwood is not the only town considering All-Day Kindergarten.  Our S.A.U. partner, Strafford, will take up a warrant article at their School District Meeting, with a similar dollar figure attached.  Bow is also considering All-Day K after a study committee recommended its implementation.

More importantly, there is action at the State level.  Four Senators – Nancy Stiles (R), David Boutin (R), David Watters (D), and Dan Feltes (D) have sponsored a bill - SB 228 - that would fully fund the State’s share of kindergarten.  Currently, local school districts receive only half of the standard education adequacy aid from the State, even where they have full-day programs.

Don’t ask me to explain this.  Maybe they thought that because the kids are tiny, the aid should be tiny.  But the good news is that this bill will correct the underfunding.

So in addition to supporting our local initiative, contact your state senator and state rep and encourage them to support SB 228.

Note that I said “rep” singular.  If you haven’t heard, our shared rep, Brian Dodson, resigned his position on the first day of the legislative session requiring that a special election be held to replace him.  Actually, there will be elections plural because there is a Republican primary.  Not a small matter at an estimated cost of $5,000 per town for each election.

But this does provide another opportunity to return former Representative Maureen Mann to Concord where she can support All-Day K and other important issues.  

How Rep. Bruce Hodgdon will vote is a mystery to me.  He didn’t bother to come to either the town or school deliberative sessions.

Tom Chase 

Northwood