Learning at home on the computer

The new school year about to begin will be rolling out in apartments and homes throughout the city with the kids studying and learning, taking classes and becoming informed citizens in front of their computers and their teachers doing the same.

We endorse the beginning of the year being devoted entirely to a remote learning platform.

Given the circumstances with the Coronavirus so prevalent throughout our society and now largely in an uncontrolled growth period, it is better to safe than to be sorry.

We believe administrators and teachers all know what they are doing and will work hard and smart to make a success of home learning, remote platform learning at least until November, when the situation will be revisited.

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Everett had no slaves or plantations

As the nation comes to deal with our slave-holder democracy history in a way we have never acknowledged it in the past, there’s just a few local bits of history to note.

In more than several hundred years of recorded history in Everett, there have been no slave owners, no slaves and certainly, no plantations.

Everett then and today was not conducive to slavery and or to plantations.

What did exist for all people who lived in this city for the past several centuries and beginning with the rise of the industrial era were horrible jobs at slave labor pay in deplorable factory environments where pollution and job accidents, sickness and horrible working conditions did not discriminate against the early Irish and Italian immigrants who came to Everett seeking out the promise of America.

That promise was about the old-time Protestants who owned the land and the means of production here treated their Irish and Italian and Eastern European workers – who were almost entirely white – the way plantation owners down south stole labor from their slaves, who were entirely black.

The early European immigrants to this city were treated like chattel and slaves. They toiled like slaves and were paid meager wages like slaves.

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A final thought on the shame of the donated basketball nets

(Photo By Jim Mahoney)

Three professional grade basketball nets and stanchions manufactured by the Under Armour Company and donated to the city of Everett by Catholic Memorial High School did not end up where they were supposed to go.

These costly nets – about $30,000 for the three of them – became the property of others living in this city and elsewhere due mainly to avarice and what some of us might call theft.

The mayor should be ashamed of himself for dishonoring the generosity of Catholic Memorial High School.

The mayor, however, has no shame.

The return of unemployment add-on essential

Those of you who are unemployed – and there presently about 1 million unemployed in Massachusetts and many thousands in Everett – are sitting on the edge of your chairs praying the US Senate and the House will agree to reinstate the Federal $600 a week stipend that ran out on July 31.

Republicans try to make the case it is simply too much money to pay to the unemployed, that is disincentivizes people from going back to work.

This is where the disconnect between working people and our national leaders reaches a wide divide.

Most Republican senators, nearly all of whom are millionaires, complain that by giving the unemployed a chance to survive without sweating like animals hunting for their next meal, that the nation is hurt.

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To Everett parents of public school children

In slightly more than a month, the Everett Public Schools are likely to reopen.

What shape and form that opening will take remains a work in progress.

Events connected with the rising spread of the Coronavirus throughout the nation are destined to have some kind of palpable impact on the reopening.

Science and safety, above all, are the two most important guideposts being followed by Superintendent Priya Tahiliani and the administrators and teachers employed by the EPS.

Right now, it appears that the reopening will take the form of in person classroom instruction as well as remote learning in private homes on the Internet.

It may be one or the other at the start but the likeliest outcome after everything gets underway is for classroom instruction to take the lead.

However, this depends on what parents wish to do.

Many parents will want to protect their children in the EPS from contracting the virus by keeping them home.

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