Unless I've missed something, the school committee members and city council members that have responded to the garden being destroyed all claim they knew nothing about it and had no idea it was going to happen. It also appears that Dave Gass and other members of the Highland Coalition and community who have worked taking care of the garden for years were not notified of its destruction. At a recent meeting, I recall John Ford mentioning the plan to have "salad days" school gardens and Donna questioning him about who made that decision because it appeared it was not made by the school committee or the garden committee. I do not recall any mention of the community garden being destroyed by a bulldozer. The main issue and cause for concern I have with this situation, is the blatant lack of respect, concern, and compassion shown to the community by Dr. Latham, Principal LaRivee, and other school and city officials if they knew of the plans. Perhaps they did not care much for this community garden, but members of the community certainly did. At the very least, they could have and should have notified these individuals and the community of their plans to destroy the garden. For the city and school officials who have chosen not to comment about this situation, I think their silence speaks volumes.
We never voted to destroy the garden. We did vote to approve the garden plan. We knew that there would be changes and that there would be a plan to roll them out in other schools and that LPS would be in control. We understood that HICO would be involved in the Ford garden and that has been mentioned in meetings and correspondence.
ReplyDeleteI asked for a garden update on May 14th and was told no new update. I asked again on May 29th and was told that the committee was being formed and that they would commence activity in the fall. I heard nothing further until I began seeing FB posts over the weekend. Even when I kept hearing though those posts "bulldozing", I thought "no way" and that it was an overreaction to cleaning up. I was wrong. As soon as I heard about the machine up there yesterday, I ran up there and starting questioning the operator who called his boss. At the same time, the Supt showed up as did Leslie. I told the Supt that perhaps if she did a better job communicating with everyone including keeping the SC in the loop, most of the confusion and hurt could have been averted.
I feel really bad. I thought that through the efforts of HICO on trying the get LPS to see the benefits of the garden, LPS was finally accepting of the idea as they were going to put gardens in more schools, create procedures for consistent operation and place Liz Gaeta in charge of them. I thought that it was a great idea even knowing that HICO wouldn't be running it but would still play a role. HICO seemed amenable to the idea as long as they could be involved.
I understand that this is school property and it is not the norm to have organizations operate on school property in the manner that HICO did with the garden but they have been doing it for over seven years, we have all been up there, attended their events and many of us have donated money to their cause.
I think that yesterday and the days leading up to yesterday could have been handled a whole lot differently mainly through better communication.
I understand your position and do applaud your past efforts. You have been very involved but lets be honest this action illustrates how little power committee members actually have.
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