WINSTED — State Sen. Andrew Roraback (R-30) told selectmen last week that they may be making a grave mistake by underfunding the town’s school system.Roraback had been invited to attend a special Board of Selectmen’s meeting at Town Hall on Wednesday, May 11, to discuss issues surrounding Winsted’s proposed 2011-12 school district budget. State Rep. John Rigby (R-63) was also invited but could not attend.The proposed $30.7 million budget, which is going to referendum on Saturday, May 28, includes $18.6 million for the school district.The proposed amount is below the town’s most recent minimum budget requirement (MBR) of $20,049,466, an amount estimated by the state in late April.If the budget is passed, members of the school board say, the school district will have a funding shortfall of $1,361,094 below the MBR. “The philosophical grounding behind the MBR is that when the state is a partner of funding education, there are strings attached to it,” Roraback said. “The philosophical opinion is that when we provide you with some of those funds, we don’t want you [the town] to reduce the amount of money you spend on our nickel.”Roraback told the selectmen that he understands why the town wants the MBR to be reduced.“But the MBR says it doesn’t matter how [the town] is able to save or whether you are able find ways to save that it doesn’t impact instruction, you still have to spend the same amount of money this year that you did last year,” he said.Roraback said that, as of May 11, the state has not passed MBR legislation for fiscal 2011-12.However, he added the state passing MBR legislation is inevitable.“If the state capitol burns down and if the Legislature does not go back to work this year, starting on July 1 there will not be an MBR,” Roraback said. “But the last time I checked, the fire sprinklers were working and the [capitol building] is made out of granite. So, a fire will not happen anytime soon.”Roraback told the selectmen that he asked other representatives in the General Assembly if there were any circumstances where a town was given relief from an MBR.“They all said no,” Roraback said. “Then I asked if they were given relief if a town closes a school. The people in the know said it is likely that a Legislature would recognize a school closing if it has a material impact on a district’s financial picture.”At a meeting on April 29, the Board of Education voted against closing one of the three school building’s in the district for the upcoming school year.Roraback added that if a town has a special situation with the MBR that calls for attention, more than likely the state’s commissioner of education would investigate it, and not the state’s General Assembly.“The thinking in the Legislature is that we are not equipped to undertake the evaluation necessary to come to a thoughtful conclusion to what changes to an MBR should be permitted,” Roraback said. “We [the representatives] will do whatever the Board of Selectmen asks us to do. If they are not united, then it will be hard for us. The first question [other representatives] will ask is if the Board of Selectmen are united. If the answer is no, then it makes a steep hill even steeper.”After Roraback spoke, Selectman Ken Fracasso, who supports the proposed budget, handed out to his fellow selectmen a report titled “Amending Winchester’s MBR Is Fair, Reasonable and Has Nothing To Do With Politics.”While he presented the report to the selectmen, he did not give copies to the audience. Fracasso did read through portions of the report to the audience.“The previous MBR reflected a school system that had 20 percent more students than we will have in 2011-12,” Fracasso said. “At some point in time we have to draw a line. Do we keep the MBR at $20 million when we have less students? We have experienced a dramatic decline in enrollment for the past three years. At what point do we keep funding at a level this high when student enrollment is declining?”In his report, Fracasso states that the district’s student enrollment will go down from 955 this school year to 669 during the 2011-12 school year.A reason cited for the declining enrollment is due to the seventh and eighth grades’ move to the town’s semi-private school The Gilbert School.“Our school buildings have the capacity for 2,436 students,” Fracasso said. “Through this [move], we should have closed at least one of the school buildings. We have three times the capacity that we need to teach the students that are left over.”Fracasso said that the $18,600,000 in the proposed budget for the school district is “right on target.”“Any future MBR should reflect the long-term changes we have made in town,” he said. “The MBR should not penalize us for recent changes made in this town through the efficiencies we have tried to expedite. The state is looking at a $3 billion deficit and I think they would embrace some of the things we have done in this town in order to save money. In no way do I think that this is detrimental to the education of these students. I think the real problem is on the Board of Education side, but that’s a topic for another day.”Following Fracasso’s report, Selectman Glenn Albanesius, who also supports the proposed budget, complained about criticism residents made earlier in the meeting.“A comment was made to us that we don’t have children in the school system,” Albanesius said. “I had three kids who went through the district and they all worked hard and met the challenges. This is an economic decision. Nothing more, nothing less. If you choose of your own volition to say that we are being mean to children and we don’t care, I think you are extremely off base.”Albanesius cited the town’s financial state as one of the reasons he supports the proposed budget.“This town is a couple hundred thousand dollars away from going out of business, and that’s reality,” he said. “This town is almost bankrupt. The fact of the matter is that we have to make decisions to keep the town afloat. This is crunch time for you and me and everyone sitting here. We didn’t make these decisions because we’re angry at the Board of Education. That gets floated around and it makes me angrier than you have any idea.”Selectman Lisa Smith said she supported what Albanesius and Fracasso said.“We need an MBR that reflects the changes that we have made,” Smith said. “In this district we have to look for efficiencies that other districts have been implementing. I know Region 7 passed their budget for $18.2 million for the same amount of students we have.”Mayor Candy Perez, who previously voted against the proposed budget, blamed unfunded federal and state mandates for increased costs to the school district.“It seems that every year that we have more No Child Left Behind expenses,” Perez said. “Now we are dealing with Race to the Top legislation that has come to the state. Training has started [for the programs] and it has cost a lot of time and personnel time. Even though our enrollment has dropped, a lot of people do not see what has happened internally. If I went to my father and I told him that we spent $3,000 for a speaker to help with bullying, his generation would say to me that we are crazy.”Selectman Karen Beadle agreed with Perez that unfunded mandates are a budgetary problem.“The in-school suspension program has cost a lot of time and additional costs for teachers,” Beadle said. “To place the burden on towns to come up with the MBR and to steer where the funding will go by mandate is wrong. You are taking the power away from the school district and town [with the MBR] and force us to fund it and that’s also wrong. Maybe the MBR would be okay if we didn’t have to deal with other mandates.”
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Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton\u2019s Main Street in 1985.
Provided
For Hermans, the award has prompted some reflection about why he has spent so much of his life involved in community projects.
“I was thinking about it this morning: Why do I do what I do?” he said. “And I think no matter what I’ve done, whether it’s been school board or rail trail, I’m trying to be useful to the communities I’m associated with.”
Hermans is perhaps best known as the longtime co-founder and steward of Oblong Books in Millerton, a business that began almost by accident. He and his first wife, Holly Nelson, were living in Millerton and looking for something to do during the winter. They had been painting houses, including the Grange Hall in Millerton, a job Hermans got through his aunt, who belonged to the Grange.
At the time, Hermans was also working in insurance for his father, doing collections.
“It was fine except I was doing collections, and it really kind of left me cold,” he said.
He and Nelson began thinking about what they might do together. Nelson was an avid reader, while Hermans had studied journalism and had worked in a record store. They noticed a chain of book and record stores operating elsewhere in the Hudson Valley and decided to follow that model.
And so Oblong was born.
Dick Hermans in the Oblong Bookstore on Millerton’s Main Street in 1985.Provided
“We really learned it by the seat of our pants,” Hermans said.
The business would eventually become a beloved and integral part of Millerton’s commercial life. But although Hermans may have learned the book business as he went, his affinity for retail — and for the connections that happen across a counter — had begun much earlier.
As a child, his second-grade teacher operated a little cardboard pencil shop in the classroom, and Hermans still remembers the satisfaction of selling a pencil for a nickel.
“I really liked selling somebody a pencil for a nickel,” he recalled. “I can remember that experience, and it was so pleasant.”
Later, while living in Arizona, he helped establish a food co-op and worked at the counter.
“I kind of knew that I liked doing that kind of thing,” he said. “It’s a nice way to be pleasant with people, but without making too much commitment to them.”
His relationship with Millerton also predates Oblong. His grandparents lived in the village, and he first came to Millerton as a baby. Over the years, he has watched the town change through several generations.
He remembers a Millerton with a much broader array of businesses, when stores such as Delson’s, the Main Street department store that stood for nearly 40 years in what is now Millerton’s Antiques Center, seemed to carry almost everything a resident might need.
“You could find everything from a set of dishes to a shotgun,” he recalled.
The rise of shopping malls changed that kind of downtown retail, he said, but Millerton has remained a lively commercial village.
“For us, it’s been a great place to have business,” Hermans said. “It’s a busy village.”
For Hermans, running a store was never simply about selling books and records. It was a way of being part of a place.
Music has remained another constant. Hermans continues to sell music at Oblong and hosts the radio program “New Harmony” on WKZE. The business of selling music has changed dramatically over the years, particularly with the rise of streaming, but Hermans has adapted.
He was initially reluctant to bring vinyl records back into the store because of their expense. But about four or five years ago, he began stocking LPs again, and they have become the main form of music the store sells.
He finds that many of the customers buying them are reconnecting with music they loved years ago.
“I do best with classic albums that people may have had when they were young,” he said. “And now that they’re retired, they want to hear it again.”
Hermans still reviews between 700 and 1,200 new music releases each week through the store’s distributor, Alliance Entertainment, carefully deciding what belongs on Oblong’s shelves.
That same commitment to place has led Hermans into a wide range of community projects. His work with the Harlem Valley Rail Trail is among the efforts he mentions when reflecting on his years of civic involvement. He has also served on the school board and has been involved with the Millerton Business Alliance and the Irondale Schoolhouse. He is now involved with The New Pine Plains Herald, which he sees as complementary to the work of The Millerton News and The Lakeville Journal.
“I really think that the important thing about this award is that people understand what a newspaper does to connect them to their community,” he said. “And if that means anything to their lives, they gotta support it.”
Hermans knew Mary Lou and Robert Estabrook and remembers them as people who were deeply conscious of their responsibilities to the community.
“They were really nice folks,” he said. “They were very conscious of what their role in the community was.”
There is, in fact, still plenty on his plate. Hermans admits he needs to scale back because he has taken on more than his current abilities can comfortably accommodate.
“To be given this award is very special,” he added. “But I don’t feel like I’m done.”
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Adamah Farm crew members planning out the day’s tasks on a late September day.
Janna Siller
Over my 15 years of growing vegetables in Falls Village, I’ve exerted my will over all kinds of conditions, from drought to humidity to crows with a taste for cantaloupe. That’s what farming is all about. You zip around the field, hopping on and off tractors, moving hoses and chasing weeds, all in an effort to arrange conditions in favor of your crops. It is the crops’ job to gulp up sunlight and move water through their stems, to transform solar energy into your next pesto or ratatouille or butternut squash soup. It is the job of the farmer to irrigate just enough but not too much, to slice dandelion leaves without damaging delicate cabbage roots, to pander and pamper and stay in tune with what plants need to thrive.
The easy part of farming is trusting plants’ resilience. I have seen bright green shoots barrel ahead out of a plant torn to shreds by hail. I’ve watched wilty, heat-stressed seedlings turn rigid overnight and greet the next morning with vigor. The hard part is letting go of what you can’t control. As our crops lapped up Friday’s gentle sunshine and I considered the weekend forecast, I imagined roots holding tight to wet earth and branches supporting each other in sideways, pelting rain. I made sure all of our storage crops were already harvested and tucked away. I battened down the sides of our greenhouses and wished the remaining field crops good luck.
The nor’easter didn’t materialize too dramatically in our corner of New England. A few broken branches and debris blown about, nothing like the July Fourth storm that sent half a tree crashing onto the deer fence and left crates of fresh veggies in coolers without power.
Fall storage crop harvests amid soil building cover crops at Adamah Farm in Falls Village. Janna Siller
Farming is an exercise in acceptance. To do it well and return year after year, you have to balance hubris and humility. The prize can often be a certain equanimity, a training in the art of moving into the next day even when the last one scrambled all your plans.
Epic change is not always about the unexpected. It also comes like clockwork on the seasonal calendar. As I type, the last of summer’s watermelons wait naively on the vine for a few hot days to finish ripening. Broccoli are holding their leaves wide as they did in June and July, only to find that the hours of sunlight decrease with each earlier sunset. Plants can’t pick up and go south or call the manager to order a bonus round of sunshine. Their growth slows and they get a resigned look to the hue of their leaves, so different from the frenzied growth of summer.
The release of fall is not tragic or gloomy. It is not an ending because so many fall tasks are about setting up for the new beginnings in spring.
We turn the vines that yielded thousands of pounds of fruit into the soil, where healthy microbes feast on their rotting stems. Then we plant cover crops — a mix of cereal grains like rye and oats and legumes like peas, vetch and clover. Cover crops hold the soil and its nutrients in place over winter, feeding the soil food web and adding organic matter that next season’s crops will need to grow.
We sort sprinklers and repair hoses. We inventory tarps. We take notes about which plants did well where and how we might try a new approach for this or that. We stack crates of cured garlic and onions and winter squash in a cool, dark room.
We save seeds from tomatoes and beans and lettuce, carefully labeling each variety for next season’s long, sunny days.
Janna Siller is the farm director at Adamah, a community farm in Falls Village offering CSA shares, educational programs and a food access program.
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