To the Editor:
What’s going on with our website, www.nobleborocares.com, and why are we buying ads in this paper to promote it? We pose a question to the people of Nobleboro: “Is a lack of attendance at our annual town meeting, town committee or board meetings evidence of a non-caring attitude?”
This is the stated and inferred message we two have been hearing for several years now, but we heartily disagree!
We feel there’s something else happening here – a combination of burdens working on us all: busy lives for young and middle-aged families as well as limited mobility for the older ones among us.
As a grammie and grampa who just returned from New Hampshire chasing three granddaughters and three days of their various activities while mom and dad were out of town, we can actually attest to hitting all the categories above. Even with written instructions, we barely had time to keep the girls fed and the car gassed up, much less even think about civic activities.
Thank heavens for GPS, texting, email, Barbie bandaids, and cellphones! Those three days reinforced what we’ve been feeling for the last year or more.
We Nobleboro folks need more town information online at our fingertips – when it’s convenient and in an understandable format. Who knows? It might be midnight when the house is finally quiet, and we are most curious. We care about how our town is being run. We care about how our taxes are being spent, but many of us are simply overwhelmed by life, by town regulations, multi-page school budgets in our Nobleboro Annual Town Report, and meetings where the lingo and procedures are hard to decipher.
If we can Google just about any subject worldwide and receive an instant answer, doesn’t it stand to reason that we should expect on a smaller scale a bit more information online about our town?
Change happens slowly for us all. Can we love our school and teachers but dig into its budget, including pay? Yes, we can. To their credit, our school board and AOS 93 do indeed publish some meeting and budget information on the AOS website, but it’s rather dry and hard to locate. User friendly? We think not.
Feeling strongly about the need for clearer online information, we talked with our lawyer about forcing the issue through a citizen’s petition. Our lawyer said, “Why don’t you just do a website yourselves? Public information belongs to everyone.”
We requested more from the superintendent’s office. What happened next? A website we created simply for posting the information we had been given took on a life of its own. It entered other areas – history, our wonderful people – and it evolved into an expression of our love for a town worth learning about. We hope you see it as that.
We invite you to nobleborocares.com as a casual visitor – or as a participant. Content will be updated periodically. New postings will be easy to find. Be sure to visit the “Public Info” tab to see the two items from the AOS93 Central Office we most wanted published from the start: the current teachers contract between our school board and the invisible but all-powerful teachers union, as well as the actual current pay and benefits in effect right now for the school staff at our Nobleboro Central School and our AOS93 superintendent’s office.
Information here is the goal. What you choose to do with it is strictly up to you.
Let’s be very clear. This website is not an official Nobleboro town government site. It is paid for and managed by both of us – as two of her many citizens who do indeed care. Contact us. Send respectful blogs, opinions, your organization’s activities, solutions to common problems found in other towns.
We truly respect our town leaders and school board members. They do their best against forces like the teachers union and complex state regulations of all kinds. However, if they were supported by an informed and concerned citizenry, now that’s power!
Perhaps this website www.nobleborocares.com will help inform us all. We figure it’s worth a try!
