Children Need Not Apply

Old vs.Young. Retired vs. Working. Have vs. Have Not.

Our fellow citizens, the old fogies, and our town governments, are at it again. It's reminiscent of a bygone era of xenophobia. Like hanging out a storefront sign, No Kids Allowed. Not in our community, not in our neighborhoods, and definitely not on Main Street.

The issue has reared its ugly head again in Barnstable, with the bidding war for the old 5th Grade School in downtown Hyannis.

The Catholics want to build a high school there. The Developer wants it to build housing for the wealthy elderly. Both bid about the same for the surplused municipal building. They each threw in a kicker (in-kind) to sweeten the deal. And the Town wants the money.

Aside from the $3 million to buy the building, the Catholics point to the savings the town would realize if the parochial school attracted kids from the town's public high school. (And man, would they!) The taxpayers would save a million dollars a year in school costs.

Aside from the $3.5 million offered the town, the developer proposed giving the Housing Assistance Corp. (not affiliated with the town, politically connected, private non-profit), a million dollars to move the homeless (shelter) from downtown Hyannis to the outskirts of town. Anyone else see the self-serving nature of this magnanimous gesture?

Along comes the Cape Cod Times, defenders of the everything Osterville, and proffers in an editorial that the wealthy retirees would fit better into the downtown than the school kids. Never mind that this used to be a school.

(I once met a man with a yacht, who said to me, "I've got mine, now you get yours." Whenever I remember that advise, I always think of the Times.)

There you have it, in these two competing interests for once public space, the Cape's internal struggle for identity.

It's a myth that residents of (elderly) housing for the rich, spend money in their own neighborhoods, and oh yes, that they walk to do so. What makes the housing proposal so appealing to the developer and potential residents, is not the proximity to the Main Street businesses, but to the Cape Cod Hospital. That's where they expect to spend their money, or more aptly, our Medicare dollars.

The town doesn't want to be shown up by a group of parents that wants to use the former school building for teaching. What town council would want to be known for closing a school, ostensibly because it was too costly to repair, only to have a group of parents do so privately.

Maybe the town is still smarting, having fought this battle before with the Sturgis School on Main Street. A group of parents showed that they could run a charter school better than the public servants could run a public school.

But it took the intervention of the business community to make the Sturgis School a reality. It's time for the business community to get involved again and bring our kids and our families back to the downtown.

Not Just Barnstable
In yesterday's town election, Yarmouth voters said No to Schools and Yes to Libraries. They voted not to pay for repairs to the schools, but voted to pay for repairs to the library. Not to state the obvious, but kids use the schools, while retirees use the libraries.

A local publisher, suggested once, that there should be a program to have senior citizens on Cape Cod daycare for kids so that their parents could work. (He meant the ones that don't need daycare themselves.) At that time in his life, he was between kids and grandkids. But I was still surprised at his naivete. And told him so.

If our local retirees wanted to take care of kids, they would have stayed in their hometowns and raised their own grandkids. They didn't move to the Cape to take care of someone else's kids. And apparently, they don't want to pay for them either.