My alma mater, Fenwick High School, asked alums what we want in a principal, whom the school will be hiring soon.

They asked:

What are the strengths of the School – those core values you want to honor and preserve?

I said:

Catholic identity, high academic standards, good learning environment

They asked:

What are the challenges facing the school that need to be addressed during the next 3-5 years?

I said:

Emphasizing personal responsibility and freedom in a time of increasingly statist solutions to national economic and social problems. Elucidating the diversity of Catholic-based thought in this matter.

They asked:

What personal and professional qualities would you like to see in the next Principal of Fenwick High School?

I said:

Personal integrity, keen intelligence, high managerial capability.

Off top of head, you know.  Better ideas, anyone?

Later: Reader M. approves:

Catholic identity, high academic standards, good learning environment

If the principal sees to that, he will have all the qualities within himself that everyone wants him to have.

Boy, that “Catholic identity” thing is elusive in many Catholic schools today.

“Where’s the diversity?” asks Wednesday Journal head.  “[One] minority among 36 new teachers ‘unacceptable,’ says Collins.”

Of the 36 teachers hired for the current school year in District 97, one is a minority, a development that the Oak Park’s elementary district’s superintendent calls troubling and unacceptable.

She’s not kidding:

Along with hiring one black teacher, the district hired one minority administrator, an assistant principal, who also is black. In a stern statement read during the board’s meeting last week, Superintendent Constance Collins vowed the district will do better next year in finding and hiring minority teachers and administrators.

Nothing against white teachers, you know:

The superintendent and board . . . stressed that they’re not displeased with the new staff members but only want more diversity moving forward.

And fewer whites, who do nothing for diversity.

The super feels really bad about it:

“It is disappointing and troubling to discover that we have not been true to our mission, which says that we are committed to the needs of a diverse population,” said Collins, the district’s first female and first black superintendent, who was hired in 2005.

“The needs of a diverse population,” yes.  Such as?

I asked in an on-line comment, “Is there research showing same-race teachers get better results? I’d like to see it.”

Is there?

A Short History of Oak Park: Volume 1, 2004-2005, by Jim Bowman.  A Blithe Spirit Publication, available now at Lulu.com:  $10 for printed copy, free download.  See more here and here.

What’s forbidden in the matter of black-white relations is mandated in gay-straight ones, namely a genetic explanation.  As it is not allowed in general discourse to allege racial cause for black behavior, so it is required to say gays are born gay without hope of change.

See how the issue is argued in Oak Park, Illinois:

At the time, I didn’t believe there would be any opportunity for a discussion, but rather a one-way stream of hate, which would have likely led to health care-like forum shout-downs,

wrote Oak Park Trustee Ray Johnson about the Buzz Cafe book–author appearance to talk about gays becoming straight through prayer and therapy.  The “hate” involved would be the contention that gays can change, vs. their being destined from birth to be gay.

[Buzz-owner] Laura Maychruk had a right to offer a forum to promote hate, but people certainly had a right to protest the poor taste of that event, and Maychruk had the right (and I believe the responsibility to her community) to cancel that event,

wrote Oak Park resident Rachel Weaver in the same issue of the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park & River Forest, which had run the story about cancellation of the author-appearance, the author being a black Christian clergyman of inexact provenance [oops, see below], the book self-published (and Amazon-available) as Transition: From Homosexual to Preacher. 

Again, the hate is the claim that gays can change and are not irreversibly programmed, a claim that Weaver compared to promoting “the Tuskegee Experiment” and “forced conversion of all Jews to Christianity.”

What really gets me . . . is the suggestion that people offended that Laura would offer to hype this book and make Mr. Williams money from his hatred of gay people shouldn’t have [told] her [their objections].

wrote David McCammond-Watts, referring to the reaction that led to the cancellation.  Again, the hatred accusation relates to the claim that gays can change.

We need not even consider the reaction there would be if a speaker argued for a genetic cause for blacks’ low marks in school or rates of incarceration.  It’s not going to happen, any more than the author appeared at Buzz Cafe arguing against it for gays.

Later: Not so uncertain provenance at that.  Williams co-founded his “church without walls” in 2005, calling it “Holy Remnant International Ministries.”  He was commissioned, as it were, by Rev. Leroy Elliott, pastor of the New Greater St. John Community M.B. Church, at 3101 W Warren Blvd. on the West Side, since 1978. 

Rev. Elliott: 

Missionary Baptists go a way back, to the early 1800s, in fact, per Wikipedia, which says their goal was

to organize para-church institutions for the promotion and funding of evangelism (particularly in foreign lands and on the American western frontier)

etc.

The new Randolph tot lot, Grove to Oak Park Ave., will be a park with an alley running through it.  A “speed table” will slow vehicles down to minimize danger of a tot being run over when he or she runs from one half of the park to the other. 

Gates across the alley appear in one of three plans offered, but these would be very expensive, to judge by comments by park officials.

This is what the park district is planning in its expansion of the lot’s western half to a newly acquired eastern half in land recently ceded to it by the village. 

Plans were explained to 35 or so citizens in a meeting 8/26 at Pleasant Home by John Mac Manus, a consultant on whom the park district has been relying extensively in recent months.

No one at the 8/26 meeting made much of the danger factor, though most comments were from people living close to the lot.

It’s a busy alley, however, serving several large apartment and condo buildings.  In fact, the whole block, Randolph to Washington, has only one single-family residence on the alley’s Oak Park Ave. side. 

Among vehicles who use the alley regularly are autos, garbage trucks, and moving vans, the latter more in some seasons than others, of course.

The three plans currently under discussion are Scheme 1, Scheme 2, and Scheme 3.  A survey monkey will send your comments on to the park district.  It’s not too demanding as those things go, asking what you like or don’t like about each scheme, which you like best, and what else you’d like to say.

I’m going to paste most of this in the latter portion.  You do what you feel like.  There’s no obligation.

Later: I did this, adding words to this effect, that kids amuse themselves when permitted, and this is the goal of any park.