Sam Bungey
Principal Steven Nixon’s decision to cut five and two-fifths positions at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, potentially an unprecedented measure, met with very little opposition at a public hearing on the school budget Monday night.
The hearing was attended by about 50 Vineyarders.
If the school committee votes to certify the budget at its meeting Monday, as now appears likely, the $16.5 million budget, a 1.7 per cent increase on 2008, will reflect a significant tightening of purse strings.
A second attempt to attract a quorum failed in Aquinnah last Thursday, with just 17 voters turning up for a special town meeting.
Four per cent of the electorate made the journey to the old town hall on Thursday night. The minimum quorum requirement is 39 voters, or 10 per cent of the 396 registered in Aquinnah.
As a result, town moderator Walter E. Delaney dissolved the special town meeting, already continued from October, and in the process indefinitely delayed action on some $25,000 in spending requests.
The story of a hostile, feral turkey that prowled the neighborhood of Old Ridge Road terrorizing residents with beak and spurs ended on Father’s Day, June 15, with its fatal shooting by Chilmark police officer Jeffrey Day.
Responding to a distress call about an aggressive turkey, Officer Day shot and killed the bird, though not until it had chased him and his partner officer Matthew Gebo around the yard and onto the hood of a police cruiser respectively.
How to handle a $40 million school budget — ratified months ahead of other annual town budgets — during a recession. That is the vexing question now facing school and finance committee leaders across the Island.
Move the town budget season forward? Push the school process back? Scrap the current budgets and start over with a fixed, lower bottom line?
A proposed Edgartown affordable housing trust, which would streamline purchasing and take spending out of voter control and put it into the hands of a seven-member board, is the subject of a public forum set for Tuesday.
The forum, scheduled for 6 p.m. at the Baylies room of the Old Whaling Church, comes ahead of a Dec. 9 special town meeting at which voters will be asked to approve the formation of a trust and an associated bylaw.
The Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School currently lights up the NStar energy grid brighter than any other single client on the Vineyard, but a high school green committee formed this year by students and faculty has a comprehensive plan to dim its glow.