I can totally believe this, pretty much every Stew’s baked good seems to get moldy after like 3 days.

Again, if the school would out the kid and the kid doesn’t want to be outed, that’s not going to result in the parents finding out - it’s just going to mean the kid has to hide their identity at school so the school doesn’t out them.

So there’s little possibility that this would enable parents to help their kid - absent the kid making a mistake, they’re not going to find out either way, you’re just taking away the one other potential safe space the kid had.

You're essentially proposing to take something that is currently a judgement call between the student and the school and replace it with an inflexible requirement; this seems risky.

If a child's parents are likely to be supportive - if they're not going to use this "critical information" to kick the kid out of their home or send them to conversion therapy or some other awful thing - then the odds are that the child and the school are going to work together to figure out a way to come out to them anyway.

If, on the other hand, they're likely to respond badly, you're creating an impossible situation for everyone; the kid has to go through school hiding their identity, terrified that somebody might find out they're gay + tell their parents. And if some teacher does find out, then they're in a situation where their career is in jeopardy unless they out this kid to their parents and thus subject them to abuse.

I'd like to think that in 99% of cases - at least in Connecticut - parents would continue to love and support their children even if they had deep moral misgivings about their sexual orientation, but even if that were the case, you've still got that 1% of kids whose lives would be utterly destroyed by their school outing them. It may have worked out for you - which is great, and congratulations on surviving that absolutely awful situation - but it might not work out so well for others.

We had one definite ideologue run here in Wilton in 2021, but he lost by a landslide.

He may try again in 2023 when the Republicans are guaranteed 2 of the 3 seats that are up due to those minority representation rules, but I expect they'll run candidates for all 3 seats, and so even if they nominate him I expect he'll get the fewest votes + remain off the BoE (unless they find someone else even worse and nominate them too). Or alternatively the Democrats may dig up somebody to run as an independent petition candidate, which doesn't count against their board representation but would reduce the number of guaranteed Republican seats.

That, incidentally, is the best way to keep people like this off the BoE - you have to both a) be a registered independent (for at least 3 months, I believe) and b) run as a petition candidate, not with either major party's nomination, but as long as you do that, you don't count against the Democrats' representation and so can take away one of those 3 seats that would otherwise be guaranteed to go to a Republican. There's no minimum number of seats for any party, just a maximum - it wouldn't break the rules for Republicans to have zero seats on the Stamford BoE as long as there were three independents.

Çka Ka Qëllu in Stamford is excellent and authentic if you include Albanian/Kosovar food in that category.

Good - welcoming in all of the lovely people Texas and Florida are driving away.

It’s not about feefees, it’s just that antiracism isn’t a project they’re particularly invested in (or feel any sense of obligation to assist with). The tax / cultural benefits to adding new residents are a much better carrot than earning KendiBucks.

Route 7. Which is already cluttered and ugly and jammed with trucks, and as far as traffic costs go, it’s a state road so any extra paving costs or whatever are their problem.

They fret about declining enrollments at every Annual Town Meeting, and as for capacity I was specifically thinking of Miller Driscoll (which was overbuilt even at the time) but if enrollment is declining then that necessarily means every school now has more room.

And yes, there are marginal costs, but they’re lower than the current per pupil cost. We spend millions of dollars a year running half empty buses because they have so much ground to cover and we only have one school for each grade - you could add a bunch more students without significantly increasing the money we spend on those, not to mention that we’d be spending the same amounts on utilities and IT and coaching and assistant principals and curriculum / testing people and so on.

As for apartments adding lots more kids, they discussed enrollment projections a few BoE meetings ago - they don’t expect apartments to make that much of a difference even if every current proposal gets built, enrollment will still decline.

This. Very often people have hugely inflated notions of how many new students a new development is likely to bring - my understanding is that relative to the property taxes paid, apartments are often more profitable for towns than single-family homes.

Also: stop bringing affordability and equity into it; make it simply about building more types of housing because new young residents make your town more vibrant and interesting.

The downside of 8-30g is that it makes it seem like every new apartment is some sort of charity case; build more housing and it'll get cheaper regardless of whether there's an income requirement or not.

Honestly: explain why it's in their own selfish best interest.

In my town for example (Wilton) we have extra physical capacity in our public schools - too many classrooms, not enough students - and a bunch of vacant commercial buildings that would be perfect sites for new apartments; more housing means more tax revenue and more customers for our local businesses, and it won't even blow up our school budget.

A lot of other towns also have school systems with a lot of extra classroom capacity or high fixed costs due to administration / physical infrastructure / having to run buses to every little corner of town / etc; Westport may spend an average of $24,000 per student or whatever, but the marginal cost of adding a new student to that system is considerably less than $24,000.

(also, contrary to what a lot of people might think, people do not in fact move into apartments to mooch off your school system, at least not for very long - there was a BoE meeting recently discussing some new apartment building proposals and the added enrollment numbers they were projecting from them were - to me, at least - shockingly low; people at the apartment-renting point in their lives are mostly young workers or empty nesters)

I think they can be useful to make names familiar - if you're generally inclined to vote D/R but don't follow local politics much, you're less likely to omit (or cross parties for) a local candidate from your party if you've seen their name in a bunch of places. There's also the social permission thing - lets you know that you're not the only person around who votes this way.

That being said, they come out way too early, are often larger + visually louder than they need to be, and the benefits of signs for statewide / federal races are harder to justify; nobody needs to read a sign to know who Ned (or for that matter Bob) is.