Town Meeting in any New England town ought to be a simple thing. A motion is brought to a vote and people hold colored cards in the air to indicate whether or not they support the motion. If the color associated with the Ayes dominates the color associated with the Nays, they Ayes have it. That’s pretty straightforward. Shouldn’t take a lot of time.
Since the earliest days, the annual Town Meeting in Uxbridge, Massachusetts has been rife with passion when questions are put on the table relating to the public funding of schools. In 1732, the town had to hold two votes before it could set aside the funds for a school.
Like many religious institutions in the United States, the Catholic Church has struggled over the last decades. Fewer families are joining established churches and parishes are shrinking. What changes needed to be made to ensure the vitality of the Pittsburgh Diocese?
More than 10 million people in the greater New York metropolitan region rely on Con Edison (ConEd) to keep the lights blazing, the gas burning in their furnaces, and the steam running through their pipes. But who empowers the employees of ConEd when it comes to ensuring that this sprawling service and delivery infrastructure is operating properly?
The bloggers at Meridia Interactive Solutions have posted several articles about the use of audience response systems (ARS) in school settings – mostly showcasing the value of ARS when it comes to pre-testing students, facilitating student engagement in sensitive conversations, and the like. Those make perfect sense, but the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) showed me a whole new role for ARS in an educational setting: RIT used ARS to help calm the frayed nerves of parents dropping their kids off for freshman orientation.
“Laws are like sausages,” is it said. “Best not to see them being made.”
While that may be true for most people, if you’re a member of a conference committee or a subcommittee charged with creating laws, you need to pay close attention to how those laws are made.
Police training is a serious matter, particularly when it comes to use of deadly force. Under what circumstances does an officer merely put his or her hand on the holster? Draw a gun? Under what circumstances should the officer actually fire the weapon?
