Left In Lowell

Lowell School Committee incumbent and candidate Connie Martin stopped by today for a podcast interview to talk about her candidacy. We spent roughly 30 minutes chatting about school curriculum, progress from our students and where we might go from here.

Any candidate who’s interested in a podcast interview (I have to come up with a better title for our podcast series…any suggestions?), please email me (lynne [at] leftinlowell.com, replace [at] with an @).

I have to say thanks to my husband for his original music, which really pulls the audio together. Enjoy!

 Left in Lowell Podcast: Interview with Connie Martin [33:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I am going to bring up another issue now that we are looking at comments before posting them. And that’s the definition of fair use in regards to using the text of someone else in your post or comment.

Fair use is defined thusly (from Wikipedia):

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review.

Note the “limited use” and “for scholarship or review” parts especially. How “limited” is limited is a hard question to answer, especially for the internet age, but certainly, copying whole articles, book chapters, etc will most likely fail the test of “amount and sustainability.” If you quote an entire article, even with a provided link to the original, you are denying that other venue which holds the copyright its revenue stream or even, one could argue, just the web hit count from people who would otherwise click through to read the whole article. (For instance, in quoting Wikipedia above in a limited way, I’m also showing an instant of fair use, as I am taking a very small portion of said article for use in illustrating the concept I’m talking about, and then also linking to the whole.)

Comments which cut and paste too much from another copyrighted work, especially without comment or review of said quote and/or a link to the original, will be deleted from here on in (even after we stop moderating comments). We won’t bother to edit it down (we have enough work to do, Mimi and I), though you can try reposting it with the appropriate usage if that happens. We are asking writers on this blog to be careful in the use of other authors’ copyrighted material, because as writers ourselves, we would hope that someone would treat us in such a manner.

We sent out our questionnaires for each city race over two weeks ago, and though I was hoping that all or most of the candidates would take advantage of this opportunity to reach out to voters, we did get a decent turnout.

First up, the Technical School Committee questionnaire. We got a response from Fred Bahou, a challenger. Though there are four slots and only two incumbents are running besides Mr. Bahou, we are glad to post Mr. Bahou’s answers here (PDF format). Answers from the other races are forthcoming.

The following is the list of questions which were sent on this questionnaire:
1. How do you think the MCAS scores affect students at Greater Lowell Technical School, and how do we mitigate any negative effect?
2. What is your view on M-CAS requirements for graduation?
3. Per-pupil spending and teacher salaries rank in the top 50, and our teachers are highly qualified, according to statistics from 2002-2005 reported by Boston.com. Yet the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability placed the school on “watch” in 2005 for low performance. In your opinion, is this still the case? If yes, how will you address this? Do you feel the standards are unfair for vocational schools?
4. According to the same statistics, the number of students per computer is 8.3, which ranks 279 out of 327 districts. Do you feel that computer access at the Technical School is adequate?
5. The same stats show a student attendance rate of 92.4%, making Greater Lowell Technical number 310 out of 328 districts. The average absentee rate of students is 14 days per year. How would you address this problem?
6. How can the Technical High School serve low-income students better?
7. The school turns down a lot of that apply and are deemed qualified do to lack of space. Are you committed to putting the expansion of the school on a fast track? If yes, what will be your approach?
8. Do you think Lowell gets its fair share of student number allocation and how do you respond to those who suggest that Lowell’s representation is disproportionate?
9. What is your opinion of comments made by some that students at the Technical High School who become disciplinary problems are not kept at the school but dismissed and sent to Lowell High School for that entity to deal with these difficult students?

It is over a week that the 5th District Congressional election took place and the national press is still trying to analyze the election result. On Tuesday, the Globe’s Peter Canellos in his column, “Tsongas’s Slim Victory Signals a derailed Congress;” and then yesterday, Reuters had a story with a Lowell by-line that asked “Now political strategists across the country are trying to figure out what Ogonowski’s strong showing means for the nation as a whole and how worried Democrats should be about next year’s elections for president and Congress.”

My answer is nothing. The “strong showing” is not an indication of what will happen next year; first I question how strong it was. If the Republicans intend to follow Jim Ogonowski’s campaign strategy and start beating the drum of “anti-immigration,” they will meet the same fate he did, defeat. Needless to say, neither of these articles analyze the voting results nor discuss the voting history of the 5th District. What was the margin of victory that would have satisfied these observers of the national political scene?

Needless to say, I do not share the concerns that were expressed last week on BMG. Dick Howe is on the right track when he asks “But the bigger issue here is not why Tsongas won …but why Republicans like Jim Ogonowski and Kerry Healey do so well in the towns that surround Lowell.”

If you look at the detailed election results, Niki Tsongas, received 54,363 votes and won 18 communities and Ogonowski, received 47,770 votes and won 11 communities. And if you look at the cities and towns that he won, you will see the impact of a Dracut residency as well as a conservative bend. So, I disagree with both The Globe and Reuters, I would not say that as Billerica, Methuen, Chelmsford and Tewskbury go, so goes the nation.

And if you read the Reuters story it refers to a Mary Burns with a “Democratic pedigree” who voted for Ogonowski? I am not sure which Lowell resident the reporter is referring to but I thought the Mary Burns active in Lowell politics was a Republican.