What is it about Cambridge that
they get to just say, "Hey we don't want that facility here" and the
state turns to Somerville and says, "Well, this is where we are putting
it." Really now? Someone should explain to the backward-thinking folk
behind the idea that this Somerville and it's 2009 – not the West End,
circa 1958.

Maybe they think there's only a couple of nutty
artists at Brickbottom that are going to raise a little stink and they
will just do what they want. You don't have to live at that specific
area of Somerville to really hate the idea of a train maintenance
facility located in our city. There are people living in West
Somerville that are almost as crazed about it as the artists.

Think
about it – it's about as appealing as having a new county jail here.
Hell, why they're at it, why don't they just have Waste Management
expand the incinerator?.

Just because that area of the city
wasn't stupidly over-developed in the 1960s through the 1990s doesn't
mean it's wasteland available for whatever use the state deems
suitable. Oh sure, we all get the little wink, wink, nudge, nudge when
it comes to "available funding for future expansion possibilities,"
which is pig-Latin for "Hey, don't give us a hard time about this, or
we will make sure you don't get what we promised later on."

The
state should really slow down and work with our community on ways to
accomplish what they want, with us being able to ensure long-term
growth and sustainability at the same time. Think about it – in the
ring of available land in and around Boston, two out of three possible
public/private projects have been completed already – the convention
center and federal courthouse.

The only thing left is an
entertainment/sports complex – and it will probably not be popular with
many people in this community if/when it gets proposed, but, at least
we will be able to discuss it, be a part of the process and own it for
ourselves. Anything would be better than having a singular-use train
maintenance facility jammed down our throats. Maybe we should all lay
down in front of the bulldozers.

The Green Line Extension Project,
mandated by the federal government as mitigation for the pollution
caused by the Big Dig, will reach from the current terminus at Lechmere
Station through Medford and Union Square. The recently released Draft
Environmental Impact Report/Environmental Assessment (DEIR) analyzes a
variety of environmental issues in extending the service.

The
meeting, held at Somerville High School, began with a presentation from
Green Line Project Manager Kate Fichter but quickly became a forum for
a wide variety of officials and residents to explain why the DEIR is
lacking.

The majority of those commenting spoke against the
proposal to put a Green Line maintenance facility on a site in
Brickbottom known as Yard 8, adjacent to a converted industrial space
that now serves as an artist community.

Residents and city
officials argued that in addition to quality of life issues Brickbottom
neighbors would face, the real estate should be used for economic
development or risk losing millions in lost tax base revenue.

Aldermen
Rebekah Gewirtz, Dennis Sullivan and Bill White registered their
opposition to the Yard 8 plan, demanding to know why alternative
proposals created by the city were not taken on instead.

White
said that unlike those who decided to route I-93 through the city, the
decision makers at the Department of Transportation would not be able
to hide in obscurity.

"I'll promise you folks, if Yard 8 goes
through where it's sited I'm going to ask the Somerville library to
create some shelf space, and we're going to call it 'DOT's Folly,'" he
said. "We're going to have the information there."

Brickbottom
resident George Gabin, a painter, said he had lived through the
commuter rail line maintenance facility being put in a half-mile away
and isn't willing to put up with the noise just across from his home.

"We
are a creative group of people, and we are being threatened," Gabin
said. "From the moment your bulldozers come, we will be in misery."

"I'm 78-years-old," he added. "If it comes to it, I will be the first one laying down in front of those bulldozers."

Others,
including Medford city officials, picked apart the report's lack of
detail in areas relating to disability access, storm water management
and traffic issues.

Steve Mackey, president of the Somerville
Chamber of Commerce, said state officials need to include a plan for
economic growth in addition to studying the project's environmental
impact.

"Let's not have another meeting without the Office of
Housing and Economic Development," Mackey said. "Let's not
underestimate the gateway to Boston and Cambridge — the Innerbelt and
Brickbottom area — and let's not submit a $1 billion project without
an economic development plan."

The DEIR can be found at www.greenlineextension.org or public libraries in Somerville, Cambridge and Medford.

Written
comments will be accepted until Jan. 8 through e-mail to
Holly.S.Johnson@state.ma.us or by mail to Secretary Ian Bowles,
Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs, MEPA Office,
Attn: Holly Johnson, MEPA Analyst, EEA #13886, 100 Cambridge St., Suite
900, Boston, MA 02114.

The Nov. 18 meeting, organized by Ward 6 Alderman
Rebekah Gewirtz, saw residents, city officials and project attorney
Rich DiGirolamo at times shouting over each other to make their points
heard. Despite concessions from the developer, an offshoot of Dakota
Partners, residents said they were largely unsatisfied with changes
made to the long-embattled project.

"I still think the size of
the building is inappropriate for the neighborhood," neighbor Sue Hill
said of the current 32-unit proposal during the meeting. "I've been
working on this for nine years and I feel like the neighbors aren't
being heard."

The struggle began in 2002, when the project began
as a 14-unit condo project, and has since been the subject to two
lawsuits from neighbors and a third from the developer against the city
for blocking the removal of a public shade tree to make room for a fire
lane.

The fight over the tree essentially halted progress on
the project, leading to a potential lapse in the construction license
until the Zoning Board of Appeals granted an extension in earlier this
year, using justification residents say was faulty.

In April,
DiGirolamo announced the developer had a new plan for a "land swap"
with the adjacent Dilboy Veterans of Foreign Wars Post that would
involve building a new facility for them and a new condo development
they hoped would satisfy abutters.

Since then, the four-story,
30-unit condo project that was to include a ground floor of commercial
space has since morphed into an exclusively residential floor plan of
32 units, with the fourth floor decreased by five units in response to
concerns raised at a September meeting.

The majority of
residents' issues raised at that meeting, however, remained unanswered
two months later – especially regarding noise and privacy issues with
the new proposed VFW site that would directly abut residences.

Both
VFW members and city officials stressed that the Dilboy Post needs a
new facility, as the current one does not meet Americans with
Disabilities Act standards. Residents are concerned about the
facility's potential use as a function hall and windows that face into
yards just a few feet away.

"The VFW is a member of our
community, and an important member," said Monica Lamboy, executive
director of Somerville's Office of Strategic Planning and Development.
"To think of veterans not being able to get into the post is really
disturbing."

Mickey Curtin, who served as the city's director of
Veterans' Services for 41 years, pointed out the current VFW gives much
of its use to community events.

"I think we've shown we're a
good neighbor," Curtin said. "We're not monsters. I think in 90 years
we've shown we're not here to infringe on anyone's privacy or safety
… I hope the neighbors would accept us for what we are."

DiGirolamo
also fended off accusations that the project would take parking space
away from the already tightly-packed Davis Square neighborhood. The
current proposal calls for 45 underground spaces for condo residents
and 68 for the new VFW post, which neighbors doubt will be sufficient.

Nancy
Iappini, one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit attempting to block the
Zoning Board of Appeal's ruling to extend the project's construction
permit, said the back and forth seems to be going nowhere.

"(This process) seems unnecessarily not straightforward, and it's really frustrating," Iappini said.

DiGirolamo said the developer is listening, but, "quite frankly, they have a prerogative."

Meanwhile,
DiGirolamo promised residents would have a chance to weigh in on the
plans submitted to the city in January, after resident Evdokia Nikolova
wondered allowed if they would be submitted over the holidays to avoid
scrutiny.

That's why Somerville
Local First and Cambridge Local First launched the "Shift Your
Shopping" holiday campaign, asking people to make the 10 percent shift
by shopping at local, independently-owned businesses from November 29
to December 31.

"This is an opportunity to get people to think
about their shopping, and to make it a purposeful attempt to buy from
local independents," said Kanter, the owner of Cambridge Naturals and a
Cambridge Local First executive committee member. "People need to
better understand that doing so can build strong, local economies."

Both
the Somerville and the Cambridge Local First will hold a press
conference this Friday at 10:30 a.m. in front of 253 Washington Street
in Union Square (the former Hope & Glory shop) to officially
divulge more details.

As for a sense of community, spending time
with local business owners gives people more of an awareness of the
people around them, he said. One will probably conduct a more
meaningful conversation with a business owner and experience better
customer service, rather than trying to find help at a mall super store.

"People
appreciate the more thoughtful gifts that local shops can create,
rather than just mass-produced items," Kanter said. "The appeal of the
local movement means that at the end of the day, what people really
need are other people and to have others support them and to not feel
alone."

The month-long Shift Your Shopping effort is an
extension of the annual buy local week that occurs the first week of
December, said Joe Grafton, the executive director of Somerville Local
First. Somerville and Cambridge, as well as Portsmouth, NH and
Portland, ME are trying out the month-long movement, to capitalize on
the shopping focus that the holiday seasons bring.

Somerville
and Cambridge Local Firsts will hold a series of events during the
Shift Your Shopping month. On Monday, Dec. 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the
Somerville Theater, there will be a panel discussion and talk about the
New Orleans study, "Thinking Outside the Box," by Civic Economics that
shows that local retailers have twice the local economic impact of big
box stores, while taking up a fraction of the land area. WBUR's Robin
Young will be the moderator and the panelists include Kanter, Alderman
Rebekah Gewirtz, and Grafton.

The businesses that sponsor
Somerville and Cambridge Local Firsts will hold special sales and
events throughout the season, including casual photos with Santa,
sing-alongs and tastings, Grafton said. Shift Your Shopping sponsors
include Ball Square Fine Wines and Spirits, Downtown Wine and Spirits,
GRAND, Kickass Cupcakes, and Poor Little Rich Girl. Sponsors A complete
list of Shift Your Shopping events and participants can be found at www.shiftyourshopping.org

Rachel
Solem, the owner of Irving House and Harding House in Cambridge, and an
executive committee member of the Cambridge Local First, is excited
about the Shift Your Shopping program. She added it will be a long,
slow process to get people to think about buying at local, independent
businesses as it's about a shift in thinking.

Many busy people
prefer the ease of the Internet or dashing to a department store for
something like lingerie, for example. Chances are they will find
something in their size. At a smaller, local store they may not. But,
often times they can order something, and they will also receive a more
personalized and quality shopping experience.

"The main reason
to do this is that you are in an independent shop dealing with the
person in charge who makes the decisions, so that you as a customer are
not part of the random world of shopping," Solem said. "You have a
better quality experience, which is what we want people to know."

From the office of Senator Anthony D. Galluccio

The
call was brought to Brickbottom's facility manager Bob Martel's
attention by the description of a "vagrant" that was outside of the
building who allegedly witnessed the activity. Somerville police
officers searched the entire area sealing off the premises.

The situation is still under investigation.

Without
much notice, Somerville is becoming one of the more innovative schools
systems in the U.S. That is the subject of this series. Recent
gatherings involving some of the nation's leading thinkers on the
future of education provided evidence of the depth and value of
Somerville Schools' innovation.

Alan November was the keynote
speaker at a national conference on visual literacy. "Visual literacy"
means recognizing how a message is shaped by the medium that is
delivering it. Alan describes a phenomenon that will transform K-12
education as we know it. With the proliferation of digital technology
and media as educational tools, schools will become the equivalent of
one-room schoolhouses, where everyone learns from everyone else, and
the teacher is more coach and choreographer than attendance taker and
grader.

A diverse group of Somerville High kids were the only
actual K-12 students at the conference. They deeply impressed
conference goers by presenting videos that they had created. They
discussed the videos' style and substance with greater sophistication
than could be managed by a number of the graduate-school students in
the room. In so doing, they proved November's thesis.

In our
last column, we discussed how Somerville Schools have reduced by 50% in
one year the rate at which they hold back students in grades
1-through-8. So I (Joe) was fascinated to hear Jay Smink, director of
the National Dropout Prevention Institute, when some Somerville School
staff and I attended a workshop on the subject in Worcester.

Jay
emphasized the critical role of identifying students who are
struggling, and the areas in which they are having a hard time. He says
that such assessment can begin as early as the third grade. He
advocates a range of interventions-projects, after-school programs,
summer school, mentorships – to change a dropout pattern into higher
achievement. Any of them is more effective than "retention in grade,"
that is, holding a kid back for more of the same thing that didn't work
in the first place. In other words, he advocates the innovations that
Somerville is already successfully implementing.

Smink's theory
and Somerville's practice are consistent with some compelling insights
that emerge from exhaustive research conducted by John Hattie. Hattie
was the Chairman of Educational Research Methodology at the University
of North Carolina and is now based in New Zealand. He examined
thousands of studies and compared the results of fifty years of
evaluations and experiments in K-12 schools.

He identified 138
practices used by teachers, schools, and parents, and compared their
effects. Some of the practices were conscious methods, like teaching
kids to assess their own work. Others were simply behaviors that had an
affect on kids' ability to learn, like families moving so often that
they didn't establish social networks. You can take a look at this
research at
http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/about/staff/j.hattie. On
almost all points, his conclusions coincide with Smink's-retaining kids
in grade is an educational disaster, with no educational justification
whatsoever.

Last week, I spent two days at meetings in Boston
with a team from the US Department of Education (DOE) that is planning
the development of Race-to-the-Top assessment methodologies.
Race-to-the-Top is the new program that offers competitive grants to
innovative schools and educators. It's funded by $4.3 billion in
stimulus-package money, $350 million of which is for new assessment
methods.

Part of the conversation involved the use of
"portfolios." These are collections of papers or projects that a
teacher and student believe are noteworthy. They accumulate in a file,
or more recently on a CD Rom, over the student's middle- and
high-school years. The Massachusetts' 1993 Education Reform Act that
created MCAS also authorized the use of portfolios as an alternative or
supplement to MCAS. There is even a budget line item for it.

If
America and our children are to be successful in the world in which we
now live, we must teach kids how to think, rather than what to know.
What is important to know is constantly changing, so they need the
capacity to think effectively about any situation in which they find
themselves. The factory jobs that could pay a living wage have been
vanishing for decades. Increasingly, the only economic sectors in which
the U.S. can be competitive and that provide jobs with a future are
those that require critical thinking, defining objectives, problem
solving, and the skills needed to work well with others.

Assessments
like the MCAS don't measure these capacities. Instead, they measure
knowledge and some fairly trivial skills. Organizations like FairTest
and elected officials like Carl Sciortino have been working to get
policy makers to recognize this for years.

Better assessments
would lead to more interesting teaching and smarter kids. That was the
point made by the consultants who were at the Race-to-the-Top event. In
response, the DOE officials seemed cool to the idea of portfolios. And
Massachusetts has done little to develop the practice, despite its
recognition in legislation.

But-you guessed it-Somerville High
School has been compiling portfolios for some time. That's the good
news. The bad news is that the portfolios have never been used. The
other good news, though, is that there is now a committee in the high
school reviewing how portfolios might be made more useful.