PRESCHOOL
OPENINGS!
Are you thinking about enrolling your child in preschool for
next fall? The Center School in Northwood is accepting
registrations for the 2016-2017 school year. The Center School
is a parent cooperative preschool located next to the town hall
in Northwood, which provides an emergent developmental program
for three, four, and five year-olds of Northwood and surrounding
towns. There are openings in our two-day (T/Th) program and
three-day (M/W/F) morning programs. Call or email us soon to get
an information packet or to make an appointment to come for a
visit! For information, please email at director Karen Andersen
[email protected]
or call her at the school at 942-7686. Check out our
Facebook page at
https://www.facebook.com/TheCenterSchoolNorthwood.
The Northwood Democratic Town Committee will be holding a caucus
on Wednesday, April 20, 2016 at 7:00 pm at the Northwood
Community Center, 135 Main St. in Northwood Narrows. Lucy
Edwards is stepping down as chair and we will be electing a new
chair for the committee, and making any other changes to the
officers needed. All Northwood registered Democrats are welcome
to attend. Please call or text Lucy Edwards at 603-312-6049 or
e-mail her at [email protected]
with any questions.
The Friends of the Northwood Libraries invites everyone who is
either a member or interested in becoming a member of the
Friends to its annual meeting on Monday, April 25. The
meeting will be held at the Chesley Memorial Library in
Northwood, starting at 6:45. Topics that will be covered
include: a review of Friends’ accomplishments; review and
approval of the bylaws; completion of plans related to the
upcoming Humor and Harmony event; discussion of the Friends’
participation in the 2016 Bean Hole Bash; and election of
officers. Questions may be directed to the Friends’
President, Sue Robinson, at 942-8325.
CBNA FBLA Chapter Attends State
Leadership Conference
CBNA senior Brittany Guillemette with
FBLA advisor Dr. JoAnn Zylak at the recent NH FBLA state
conference.
Sixteen members of Coe-Brown Northwood Academy’s Chapter of
Future Business Leaders of America, along with their advisor Dr.
JoAnn Zylak, attended the FBLA State Leadership Conference held
on March 24 & 25 at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, NH.
The students competed in five chapter competitions and 16
individual or team events. Senior Brittany Guillemette won
the Who’s Who in FBLA award and placed second in the team
competition for Business Ethics along with Nicole Beaupre and
Meghan Percy. These three students not only won medals for this
competition, but also earned scholarships to SNHU. In
chapter competitions, the CBNA chapter won first place in the
largest increase in membership for NH (attributed to Brittany
and all past members for their recruitment efforts), an Honorary
Chapter award for achieving points for various activities
(attributed to all the officers and members), second place in
the Go Green Officer Project (with special thanks to Megan
Elwell, Tayla George, Ambar Mercedes, Alexander Mercedes, Amaya
Newport, and Aiden Ahern), and the NH FBLA State Chairperson’s
Award for participation in ALL state-wide projects throughout
the school year which included Green Schools, Red Cross Blood
Drive, Make A Wish, Revealing Invisible Illnesses, and Save the
Animals programs, along with tab collection for David’s House
and Walking for a Cure for Multiple Sclerosis.
Congratulations to all the members and officers.
So how can you help? The CBNA FBLA Chapter is always
looking for more connections with local businesses and seeking
more professional memberships. Community members are asked to
bring in their tabs (from tops of cans) which are recycled at
the end of the school year with proceeds donated to David’s
House. You may drop off your collection of can tabs at the
CBNA main office for our local FBLA chapter. The chapter
will be walking for MS in Manchester on April 17, as they have
done for the past 18 years, and are looking for sponsors to help
find a cure for this debilitating disease. Please forward all
donations to Dr. Zylak at CBNA before April 15 and with
everyone’s help, we can make this disease disappear!
Contact Dr. Zylak at CBNA for more information about these
meaningful and charitable activities.
Letter To The Editor
Medicaid Expension
As you might have heard, the NH House
and Senate voted to extend the Medicaid Expansion program for
another two years. There were many reasons to continue this
feature of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
Over 48,000 of your friends and
neighbors now have health insurance. Last year, this saved
hospitals over $140 million in “uncompensated care” which
occurs, in part, when those same uninsured friends and neighbors
show up in the emergency room.
Looked at another way, people are now
receiving the care they need to avoid more expensive treatment
later. And some are being treated so that they can continue to
or return to work.
One of my friends had a much-needed
joint replacement and is back on the job.
Because of these and other benefits
(e.g., providing coverage for addiction treatment), I was
dismayed to find that all of our representatives - Senator
Reagan and Representatives Hodgdon and Dean-Bailey - voted
against the expansion.
It wasn’t a totally partisan issue.
Even the former Speaker of the House, Bill O’Brien, voted for
it. So you may want to ask them for an explanation. And keep
this in mind at the polls in November.
Tom Chase
Northwood, NH
Letter To The Editor
Suspended from Kindergarten
More than 100 NH kindergartners were
suspended last year, according to a recent Concord Monitor
article. Our legislature wants to know why.
The reasons may be many, but one
possibility is that we’re expecting too much of young children.
Nancy Carlsson-Page, Professor Emerita
at Lesley University, is a founder of the University’s Center
for Peaceable Schools. She sees a connection “between these
suspensions and ed reform policies.”
“Play is disappearing from classrooms. Even though we know
play is learning for young kids, we’re seeing it shoved aside to
make room for academic instruction and rigor,” she says.
Kindergartners find themselves “enduring play-deficient
classrooms where they get heavy doses of direct teaching and
testing. They have to sit still, be quiet in their seats,
and comply. Many young children can’t do this, and none
should have to.”
Peter Gray, research professor of
psychology at Boston College, echoes her concerns.
He says that kindergarten teachers “are battling the effects of
No Child Left Behind, and now Common Core, which have trickled
down from the higher grades to K and preschool. They are
battling policy makers who know nothing about childhood, who
ignore the piles of research showing the value of play and the
long-term harm of early academic training, and who see
standardized test scores as the end-all and be-all of
education.”
These beleaguered kindergarten teachers, Dr. Gray says, are also
feeling pressure from administrators, who want high test scores,
and from “teachers in the grades above, who tell them that their
job is to prepare little children for the next stage in school
by teaching them to sit still, do worksheets, and suppress their
urges to play and explore.”
Maybe a reason for so many
kindergarten suspensions is that we’re just not letting children
be children.
Michael Faiella
Northwood
This Weekend’s LRPA After Dark
Feature:
1940’S “Santa Fe Trail”
Join Lakes Region Public Access
Television at 10:30 PM this Friday and Saturday night (April 15
& 16) for our “LRPA After Dark” presentation of 1940’s Western
melodrama “Santa Fe Trail,” starring Errol Flynn, Ronald Reagan,
Olivia de Havilland and Raymond Massey.
“Santa Fe Trail” tells the tale of
recent West Point graduates George Custer (Reagan) and Jeb
Stuart (Flynn), who, in 1854, are assigned to Fort Leavenworth,
Kansas — the Army’s most dangerous post. While their original
mission was to help secure the territory as the railroad was
built from Missouri to New Mexico, they get caught up in the
conflict between the Army and abolitionist John Brown (Massey).
They also both fall in love with the beguiling Kit Carson
Holliday (de Havilland).
“Santa Fe Trail” has been described as a “Western fantasy movie”
by some critics, as it plays fast and loose with historical
events. In reality, the film’s historical figures did not
graduate together from West Point and were likely not friends,
as Stuart rose through the ranks to become a Confederate
general, while Custer served as a major general in the U.S.
Army. Historical inaccuracies aside, “Santa Fe Trail” remains a
solidly entertaining film, featuring excellent performances by
all of the film’s leads (particularly Flynn and de Havilland,
who starred in nine films together), as well as a notable
supporting cast that includes Alan Hale, Ward Bond and Van
Heflin. The New York Times noted that “Santa Fe Trail” “ … has
about everything that a high-priced horse-opera should have —
hard riding, hard shooting, hard fighting, a bit of hard
drinking and Errol Flynn.” It’s a film not seen very often
television; reason enough to grab your popcorn and join LRPA
after dark for this “horse-opera” from the past.
You can’t find television like this it anywhere but LRPA TV,
MetroCast Channel 25. Not a subscriber? Then log onto Live
Stream through our website (www.lrpa.org) where you
can catch all the fun.
About Lakes Region Public Access
Television (LRPA):
Lakes Region Public Access Television
(LRPA) is a nonprofit, noncommercial public access TV station
and community media center located on the Laconia High School
campus in Laconia, NH. LRPA cablecasts locally on MetroCast
Channel 24 (public bulletin board), Channel 25 (information and
entertainment) and Channel 26 (government and school meetings)
to nearly 12,000 viewers in our member towns and cities of
Belmont, Gilford, Laconia, Meredith and Northwood. Programming
is produced by and for the people of the greater Lakes Region.
LRPA’s mission is to empower our community members to produce
content that • fosters free speech and the open exchange of
ideas, • encourages artistic and creative expression, • promotes
a well-informed public through governmental transparency, and •
unites our communities through the power of media and
technology.
LRPA’s slogan: Community empowered by media. Visit us on the
web at www.lrpa.org.