Here’s my (mostly) weekly post, Register Watch™, on our local weekly newspaper, the Whitewater Register.
Frontpage. There are three front page stories.
Taste of Whitewater. The first is a recap of the September 12 and 13th events at the Cravath Lakefront. The three accompanying color photographs ably depict the variety of events at the Taste.
Two other stories are more serious.
Lakeland School. There’s a below-the-fold discussion of an amendment to a Walworth County ordinance to allow non-resident students (outside the district of the Children with Disabilities Education Board) to enroll in Lakeland School. Walworth County’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to permit the enrollment of non-residents.
Lakeland School serves special-needs students.
The story’s author notes that the new school can accommodate up to 370 students. The program has about 100 fewer students now. I do not know how many students the new Lakeland School can optimally accommodate – that might be 370, or it might be a lower number.
(I understand it’s possible to say that there’s no fixed optimal number, but the cost of the building and its maintenance would require some estimate of how many students those expenses were meant to cover.)
It’s fair to infer from the story that there are fewer students than the building can handle, but are there fewer students than the building was meant to handle now?
More important, of course, is how the thousands of special needs students in Walworth County and its environs should best be educated. The cost of the facility, and its unused capacity, hardly drive a school choice. Lakeland School is merely one choice out of several possible settings.
It would be better to let Lakeland sit with unused capacity than to fill merely to fill it, however tempting that option may be, with those unsuited to schooling there.
Bilking the Elderly. The third story involves a crime against an elderly woman, who was tricked into wiring money to someone she thought was a relative. It was a phone scam, but there are similar scams, targeted more to other age groups, through email, too. We are a small town far from other nations, but both phone calls and email messages are easy ways to trick someone across long distances.
Inside. I would ordinarily be reluctant to call attention to out-of-town merchants, as we are too insular in Whitewater as it is. It’s an irony of our situation, though, that the closest that our local publication comes to a cosmopolitan outlook is in the print advertisements that it publishes for Burlington, Lake Geneva, Elkhorn, and Delavan businesses.
There could be a travelogue for the Register in all this, if anyone at the paper had a sense of humor:
Elkhorn: Land of Mystery and Surprises.