In the May 8 news release announcing the hiring of Reed McCracken as principal of the newly merged White River Valley High School in South Royalton, Superintendent Bruce Labs is quoted as saying, “After a lengthy search, and careful vetting of our candidates, we are pleased to have Reed step into this leadership role.”
I am extremely disappointed in the White River Valley Supervisory Union board, including our superintendent. This was too quiet a process. If the search was so “lengthy,” why was there not more information or communication forthcoming? Making decisions that impact our kids, my kid, should have been transparent from the start. I am extremely disappointed that this process was shrouded in so much secrecy. Why is that?
Joanne Melanson has brought much needed healing, unity and happiness to our school. She stepped in at a time when we needed strong leadership and someone to bring us back together, to help steer us through trauma, and I wonder why we didn’t give her a chance to continue to lead us forward? I’d like an answer, and unfortunately don’t think one will be given.
I am disappointed in the leadership of this School Board, which is supposed to work for and represent all of us. In turn my perception is that it chooses not to reach out for input, and not communicate in a manner it should so we are all informed. I am hopeful for our communities, however I feel we moved backward about a half mile instead of forward.
Not OK, WRVSU, not OK.
Carrie Wright
South Royalton
The community of South Royalton needs to ask some pointed questions about how the new high school principal was hired.
Why didn’t the hiring committee ask the South Royalton community at large to meet the candidates? Why did the committee replace the current interim principal, who has experience and already provided much-needed stability and infused a feeling of community into the school, with a candidate who has no experience as a school administrator? Have they forgotten the main lessons we learned from hiring inexperienced principals after Shaun Pickett retired?
It seems the input provided by the South Royalton School staff and faculty was ignored? Why?
Who put the hiring committee together? Why was the hiring committee populated primarily with people from Bethel?
I have grave concerns that we are making the same mistake all over again in hiring someone who is new to the position and will not be up to the demands of our newly merged school, especially when we had a candidate in place who has proven her ability to heal and strengthen the school.
Kate George
South Royalton
Regarding the Concord Monitor editorial “Old Man’s Immortality,” published in the May 7 Valley News: I first saw the profile of The Old Man of the Mountain when my Boy Scout troop climbed in the White Mountains in 1943. With binoculars we could see the lines of mature age (paleozoic, 350-300 million years ago) and character scarring of the last glacier (110,000 to 10,000 years ago), smoothed over by trillions of gallons of water from the glacial melt and rain.
I rode in a van to the top of Mount Washington in September 2016. At the base shop in Pinkham Notch I bought a small rock from the top that was labeled “schist.” So, instead of being the Granite State with granite mountains we are living in the “Schist State.” Schist is a metamorphic rock, white and gray, with bright flakes of mica. But most of the White Mountains perhaps are granite — Cannon Mountain certainly is as it looks just like Half Dome in Yosemite Valley, which is granite.
Jeremy Belknap “discovered” Pinkham Notch in 1784, and I discovered Yosemite Valley in 1951 while in the Coast Guard. Actually, the Algonquin peoples (maybe the Coosucs?) were the first to see the White Mountains, not Belknap.
Millions of years ago, buried underneath the 4½-mile high tectonic plate above Cannon Mountain, was the face of the Old Man of the Mountain, ready to be chiseled out. My Abenaki ancestors snuck across the Connecticut River from Bloomfield, Vt., and overnight climbed up Cannon Mountain and carved out the Old Stone Face to tease the Coosuc Indians, that their cousin, Canonicus of the Narragansetts, would be watching them from the Great Cliff of the edifice that was named after the Rhode Island chief.
The Dutch put double vowels in words like “groot” for big; “noord” for north and the family name Beethoven. We Abenaki put in double consonants for important people.
Dick Holbrook
Hanover
Just a note in defense of Dartmouth College professor emeritus Ned Lebow’s “ladies’ lingerie” remark that raised the hackles of two women in an elevator in San Francisco. I’m female and I found the remark funny and not a gibe.
And I think perhaps the difference in gauging the remark has to do with age. I’m in my 80s, and I well remember riding in elevators in fancy department stores way back in the Dark Ages, with the elevator operator calling out the goods sold on each floor. “Ladies’ lingerie” was always on his list.
I just thought professor Lebow’s remark was simply a funny step back in time, not aimed at the women, but aimed at amusing the whole group.
Janet Burnham
Bethel