Excellent and compelling presentation today from Father Cutie, Rolando Llanes, and Mater President Antonio Roca. They told us all about the proposed school. Or at least as much as they possibly could.
Let's start with history. The Village has been here since 1933. The Church since 1940. It was a time, we're reminded, when a community was built around its church. The Village didn't have the population then that it does now, and it may well be that everyone in town went to church. That church. Our church. The one that was no doubt for "white" people. I don't know if they had those "No Jews" signs then, like they did on Miami Beach, but they might have. But anyway, it was a happy time. And it results in our having our very own and beloved church. It's true that it isn't well attended any more (better since our local celeb Alberto Cutie took the pulpit), and the vast majority of BPers don't go there, but it's still our church.
Let's now jump forward right to today. Or maybe last year. Someone was in a hurry to get a school in there, and the original proposal was nearly on-the-spot. The plan was for a month from our having been informed, so as to ensure proper care in the preparation. (Quickly, children, quickly now!) There was some information our Commission wanted, though, and it asked the church/school to provide it. Those were the old days, when that version of Bryan Cooper was demanding "five-year business plans" and other documentation and precautions the new Bryan Cooper doesn't care about. The c/s never gave us what we wanted, and a proposed workshop was thus cancelled. Somehow, this coincided with a delay from the c/s' end, too, and the matter lay dormant until a couple of months ago. Back came Cutie/Llanes. They're set to go ahead, and are ready to answer questions. The biggest question was who is the target audience, and most specific questions would come from residents: those whose Village would be invaded by a school, and who would perhaps send their children to one. So Cutie/Llanes were to send out a flyer, and we planned an informational meeting. That meeting happened today.
Well-attended? You bet! The room was packed. It would have a bit less packed without some of the ringers and shills. Like the snickering, applauding woman who doesn't live in BP, but goes to the church, and might be planning to move to BP, maybe if we had a school for her kids... Or the guy from Miami Shores who's on the Board of Mater Academy... Father Cutie, demonstrating some of his charm, commented on the new faces. Many of them were new to me, too.
So the watchword of the day was "choice." We don't have enough school choice, so we're told. We have WJ Bryan on 125th St, MS Elementary School less than a mile over the bridge (those are free), St Rose, Miami Country Day, and a Montessori school a few blocks over the bridge, another elementary school about a mile down 103rd Street, another elementary or middle school, Gratigny, on 119th west of us, and a Charter School with a Montessori component on 86th and NE 8th Avenue, so about 2-3 miles away. The last three are free. But we need more. We don't have, for example, a free Charter school for K-5 in walking distance and within Biscayne Park. Something like that would really round out the choice nicely. Until the kids hit 6th grade, at which point we have a crisis on our hands.
But for now, people like choice. The people with the kids did. And we were put on notice by some of those people, too. Like the woman who threatened not to move here if we don't have a school in the church. And John Mayhew, who said people are moving out of BP, because we don't have a proper school for their children. I think John Mayhew needs to talk to Carmen De Bernardi. She says people moved away, because Roxy Ross is a tyrant and a dictator. I thought maybe the economy and foreclosures, but what do I know?
Anyway, we need choice, and we need to establish a K-5 Charter School here to provide that choice. So here's what I'm thinking. If that's what we need, and we don't have enough choice without it, maybe we need more houses of worship, too. One church, and it's Episcopal? What if our people are Catholic, like Chester Morris? Chester has to drive over the bridge and fight that school traffic to go to St Rose. Shouldn't we have a Catholic church here in BP? We don't have any Baptists, or Lutherans, or Methodists? I'm guessing there must be some Jews, now that they're allowed to live here. How about a Temple? Three, I'm thinking, for the Orthodox, the Conservatives, and the Reforms. Oh, wait, the Hasids. Which leaves a glaring neglect of the Muslims, both Sunni and Shia. And shouldn't we disguise them all for the sake of the atheists?
Dizzying, right? In the meantime, we have to decide how big this one school should be. A charter school in BP for how many kids, exactly? Well, they're waiting for us to tell them what we need. What we need? Nothing. This was their idea, not ours. They somehow figured out the K-5 part, so shouldn't they decide how many of us there are? I suggested they should (long ago) have sent a survey to every house, to see who lives there, how long they've lived there, how many kids they have, of what ages, to what kind of school they send them or are planning to, and whether they plan to walk their kids to school (this was a primary consideration in view of the imagined traffic problem, though one speaker calculated that the influx of new kids going to a newly founded school would lessen the traffic). Mr Llanes thought this survey might be one way to find out. Is there some other way? Is there any other way? And why they haven't yet done this thing that was the only way to answer the only real question was unrevealed. So until the c/s does the only thing anyone can do, it's a standoff.
But we did agree about one thing: some people want a school in BP. As it turns out, some people don't want a school in BP, too, so I'm not sure where that leaves us.
We are also encouraged to consider some of the indirect advantages of a K-5 Charter school. Like an increase in property values. This idea was proposed. And it's an interesting idea. Would a school, of any kind, increase property values? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it would lower property values. I suspect that in reality, no one knows. What about a micro shopping mall, high end stuff, arranged as booths or kiosks around the park? Would that increase property values? Should we look into it? And our own Whole Foods? In discussing the easy and pure advantage of our new school, as the c/s pitched it, I informed them that something as seemingly uncomplicated as replacing a few wood telephone poles with a few concrete ones was the cause of essentially tragic discord here, and that simply popping up a new school for us might not be so inconspicuous or noncontroversial. And "property values" infected the telephone pole matter, too. Some thought harsh-appearing concrete poles would lower property values. Others thought sturdier and longer lasting concrete poles might raise property values. So I think the real answer is a resounding "Who knows?"
But here was my underlying and sustaining thought about the school, and the church. As Father Cutie correctly put it, the church is the only non-residential, non-Village structure in BP. We say BP is purely residential, which it almost is with the exception of the church, our Village Hall, the recreation center/park, and the public works building. So why do we want to compound an error, the error being to contaminate a peculiarly purely residential neighborhood with a church? If a church somehow made sense in about 1940, in a new municipality, it doesn't any more. I told the c/s people my idea: that they should sell off what they can, we would buy them out of the rest, and they can take the show just over the bridge and build whatever church and school they want. They told me to forget it.
So since we're getting the school, whether we like it or want it or not, I think I should allow myself to enter the trance and come to like the idea. By the way, Mr Llanes acknowledged that of course it isn't up to us, and of course the church and the school will decide, but he wanted us to experience it as less of a steamroller job than that. He wanted us all to pretend it was collaborative.
Well said Fred..
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