Fogarty called it spot on last night when he went before the school committee and talked about having three of his own children in the athletic program at MHS and the fact that since Melrose has no family cap, it is costing his family something like $3300 annually (can't recall exact figure), for a PUBLIC school! He compared MHS to other schools, and MHS is the highest in the League and also has no family cap, which other schools do have. He talked about the unfairness of balancing the budget on the backs of Melrose parents who have students participating in extracurricular activities (sports, music), meanwhile these parents are also paying via their taxes. This got quite a rise out of those like Casatelli and Dugan who are only interested in self-righteously defending their actions.

The committee did agree to wipe out the stupid and indefensible transcript fees, but they are clinging to all their other fees. The ECC continues to charge far more than many other public school systems because they have duped the young parents into believing they are getting a good deal with their boutique preschool (they are not). They have now farmed out their elementary summer program (Ed Stations) to an outside agency, and they're still sputtering with stupid and contradictory statements about that. Program by program they are debauching the quality one way or another, losing the best faculty members and leaving those remaining (except for the newbie gullible ones from the bottom rungs of the application dregs) demoralized and most looking for another district where they will be treated with a modicum of respect.

Thank you, Mr. Fogarty, for sticking up for Melrose families! Surely there will be nasty consequences, based on the death glares from CT and the SC. But the facts were said as they needed to be. Too bad there were no other parents except Mr. Mroz to stand up there with him. They should be storming the place (and should have been for years now, but instead just hang back and do nothing--that's on them!). My family at least as spoken up. But everyone deserves better than what this district is providing for the copious tax dollars being spent here on the schools.

If anyone is confused about how someone like Trump could win the election and is getting away with the open criminality his entire administration now embodies, all they have to do is look at how Melrose has operated for years now, with mostly DEMS (or rather fake dems), along with spineless Repugs, abusing their power and fiscal authority, and a bunch of mostly college-educated and well-heeled parents sitting by and either letting it all happen and/or openly colluding.

good for Fogarty

These fees are killing us. They aren't fair or excusable. The tiered system is better than the untiered system, but it's still extortionist in nature. This local government has no shame about hitting the taxpayers with exorbitant fees in every direction--water/sewer rates are out of control and wrong (THAT tiered system is not fair or sustainable!), abusive tax assessments that don't comport to reality, trash fees (illegal taxes disguised as fees), double-size pet license fees, student fees: athletics, music, transcripts, photography, E-camp, PTO, MEF; cheering uniforms, international field trips (totally inequitable and not ever made available to METCO or poor students) in the mega amounts, library fundraisers, band fundraisers, mattress orchestra fundraisers, test fees, tutoring charges (on our own because the district can't get the students through the basic college tests with their lousy, subpar teachers and curriculum), student activity fees, parking fees, middle school fundraisers, endless elementary fundraisers, you-name-it, they think it's okay to hit us up. And we're the same population they are hitting up, over and over and over again. They are utterly shameless in their expectations and demands.

yes to previous posters

AND the SC and BOA are always hand-wringing about a lack of money, even though the school system has netted additional millions each of the recent few years that Taymore and SC have demanded them, with zero accountability or near-zero transparency in their processes. It's always a tale of woe about the "mandates" that clearly this district does a poor job of adhering to.

Yet they seem to have plenty of money to send administrators and the Rebecca Mooney types on taxpayer-funded junket trips to four-star hotels or paying for handsome raises across the board for administrators. They seem to have plenty of money to pay a totally unqualified business manager $134,000+ and run a boutique ECC at taxpayer expense (though it is totally not an educational requirement for the district). There seems to be a bottomless pit of "bonds" and other boondoggles for their multi-million-dollar school building projects that still leave MHS students with a certifiable dump of a building and the city with condemn-worthy public safety buildings (fire and police). But the realtors will continue to portray it all as 5-star excellent and oh-so-"quaint"!

The Wakefield Superintendent just submitted a budget that would reduce all user fees by 25%, the first step in a plan to eliminate them entirely. Just sayin'........

Glad Fogarty is finally seeing what parents have been asking for the past few years. Now that he has to dish out the money he see's the problem hmmm. Like he is even going to pay the fee another joke.

You left wing liberals still have not gotten over losing the election - it has to permeate every comment you make! Get over it - the crook and liar lost and the successful businessman won! Forward and up with President Trump!

"successful businessman"

That's a funny one! He's bankrupted more things than are even conceivable. But Putie there and his Deutsche Bank/Cypriot thugs keep bailing him out, as the perfect idiot puppet that he is.

Those standing up to Drumpf the Nazi and President Bannon are doing so not because they "lost" (note: Drumpf did not win the popular vote). The deranged cheeto sexual predator is reviled across the globe and a national embarrassment, except to the crazed sick ones who somehow don't understand what a mockery they are of themselves. Sad that there are so many Nazi-lovers in Melrose, but actually the way this sick burb is run (into the ground), it's easy to see the parallels with the local Bannonite wannabe's. The self-proclaimed "education expert" Doughboy is a perfect little caricature of himself with his bloated bloviating and crazed minions, like his Exemplary CynSin, the mouth-smacking, tsk-tsking Kellyanne Margaret, Dopey Sycophant Jess, the so-called scientist, the frothing Martha, the slimeball simpering Patrick, the duncecap Vanny, Failed Farrell, Eddie the Felon, Morty the Mental Case, Gail and MB the Dynamic Buttki$$ing Duo, Frank the Failed, the head-bobbing SC Mental Case (who's sending her kids to the charter school!), Chris the Crass Lifer, and on and on. Melrose has its own special stable of crazy power abusers and wannabe's that are right up (down) there with Spicey and Flynn and Price and Sessions and that whole stable of Nazi crazies. But Melrose could give lessons to President Bannon in how to suppress the public (kill all actual public engagement, in truth), hide and misuse the money while convincing the idiot public to pay more and more and more, misrepresent everything problematic as Wonderful Wonderful (with a nice added whitewash by GuiltyFoil PR firm), eliminate any real reporting, wrack up enormous legal costs by mistreating any and everyone not deemed friendly and then "defend" it all with grossly incompetent lawyers.

Thank - you just made my point! Keep up this crap and the 2018 mid-term election will be a complete Democrat wipe-out! Juist keep it coming!

In truth Melrose needs a clean sweep of most of its elected and many of its hired officials, on a bipartisan basis. There is no actual difference, Dem or Repub, when it comes to the corrupt and terrible way that so many of these officials have behaved in our local governance. Instead of transparent, fair and open management, they have behaved very much like the worst of the Trump administration are doing now (and previous Dem administrations).

This city has been in trouble from an ethical governance point for quite a long time, despite whatever positive community gains, or fake news rhetoric by the hired spin machine (Guilfoil), that have been carefully positioned to capture our attention. The serious problems are quickly hidden, but that hasn't made them go away.

Only when enough of us rise up to demand better and put forward decent candidates will this change.

And here is a correlating piece in today's Globe:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/02/26/how-baby-boomers-destroyed-everything/lVB9eG5mATw3wxo6XmDZFL/story.html?p1=Article_Trending_Most_Viewed

" Even before the election, Americans were asking just how we got here — to this sullen moment of national reckoning. Since November, the autopsy has dragged on so long it seems there could be nothing left to dissect. But the search continues, because no truly satisfying answer has yet been offered. Deplorables, deportables, economic malaise, rural resentment, coastal hauteur whatever — these are just symptoms. The root illness remains undiagnosed, but here it is: the baby boomers, that vast generation of Americans born in the first two decades after World War II. The body politic rests on the slab because boomers put it there, because decades of boomerism produced the problems and disaffection of which 2016 was merely the latest expression.

It’s a shocking hypothesis, but then again, America has suffered a shocking decline. In 1971, Alan Shepard was playing golf on the moon. Today, America can’t put a man into orbit (or, allegedly, the Oval Office) without Russian assistance. Something changed, and that something was the boomers and the sociopathic agenda they emplaced.

My indictment of boomers may seem overbroad, but the thesis is quite specific: the unusual prevalence of sociopathy in an unusually large generation. How does that disorder manifest? Improvidence is reflected in low levels of savings and high levels of bankruptcy. Deceit shows up as a distaste for facts, a subject on display in everything from Enron’s quarterly reports to daily press briefings. Interpersonal failures and unbridled hostility appeared in unusually high levels of divorce and crime from the 1970s to early 1990s. These problems expressed themselves at generationally unique levels in boomers, to a greater extent than in boomers’ parents or children at comparable ages. (My forthcoming book lays out all these data in detail.)

Boomers weren’t genetically predestined to be dysfunctional; they were conditioned to be. They were the first generation to be raised permissively, the first reared on television and subject to its developmental harms, and the only living group raised in an era of seemingly effortless prosperity. Can too much license, TV, and unearned wealth distort personalities? May I suggest looking south toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

The boomers’ sociopathic inclinations might be of sociological, but not political, interest except for one fact: Boomers have a lot of voting power. Although boomers peaked at just over half the voting age population in the early 1980s, their influence kept growing as they voted more frequently, unleashed a flood of political money, and elected co-generationalists, all in reckless pursuit of the sociopathic agenda. In the 1970s, the older establishment had already begun bending to boomer power, though not always cravenly enough, a problem boomers resolved by becoming the establishment itself. Boomers’ notable early achievement was electing Bill Clinton, who began the long saga that meandered through Bush II and ends — well, who knows how exactly it will end? ...

If Trump has given America one gift, it’s a free hand to condemn the generation of which he is the impeachable id. Henceforth, let us expect no more from people who achieved so little, who have such small interest in the future. Let us dispense with ideas that aging flower children have substantial claims on goodness, as boomers liberal and conservative alike engaged in warrantless wiretapping, extrajudicial assassinations, gratuitous assaults on the dignity of minorities, mass disenfranchisement, the erection of a vast and useless penal state, and policies of cavalier disregard. Let us turn boomers out from offices high, corner, and otherwise, and keenly assess boomers’ contributions to society against their demands for interminable subsidy, finding some reasonable settlement. And let us do it soon. "

Yikes!

We need to keep our students active and involved with sports, music, or other clubs. We have a huge drug problem in this country. Melrose has lost several young adults recently to drug addiction. Let's try to keep them focused and busy doing what they love after school. We need to keep these activities affordable to everyone.

The reality is parents are working all day long, raising families and simply don't have the time to get involved anymore, never mind get to SC meetings only to get abused by Margaret Driscoll and Rob Dolan. The days of single earner households that can support a family and the 9 to 5 job is over. This allows the parasites like CT, RD, RVC and school committee lemmings to take over and operate their criminal enterprise with little or no oversight from the reputable folks in the city.

http://boingboing.net/2017/03/01/rachel-maddow-connects-the-dot.html?utm_content=buffer970c8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"Why would a savvy Russian billionaire buy a tear-down, mold-infested house from Donald Trump for $100 million, and what does it have to do with newly confirmed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross?

In a 20-minute video, Rachel Maddow exposes the shady connections between tens of billions of dollars of international money laundering, Putin's close friends and relatives, crooked banks, Wilbur Ross, and Donald Trump. The fact that Republicans in Congress have blocked every attempt to open an investigation into Trump's ties to Russian money laundering makes them complicit in the ongoing coverup."

Then....Nixon's attorney general was prosecuted, resigned over same thing Sessions did, and WENT TO JAIL, as should happen with Sessions and Flynn and anyone else who is found to have lied under oath. Trump himself has been found to be implicated in countless illegal activities (Trump "University" scams, etc.). Anyone who cannot comprehend these things has more than just a blindspot; they must actually admire such brazen contempt for legal and ethical behavior.

From Slate: "Freshman Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions had some thoughts on that very question during the Bill Clinton impeachment imbroglio, when the president stood accused of lying to a federal grand jury about his assignations with Monica Lewinsky.
“I sort of assumed perjury occurred, but I want to read what was said, what the established fact is, and decide how clear that is and whether or not there is any wriggle room or realistic defense there," Sessions said in 1998. Back then, the senator described perjury as a “big-time issue,” adding, “I have no doubt that perjury qualifies under the Constitution as a high crime. It goes to the heart of the judicial system.”
Sessions ultimately joined 44 of his Republican colleagues in voting to convict President Clinton of perjury. His hard-line view on lying public officials did not win out. The perjury charge and a separate obstruction of justice charge (one Sessions also voted for) both failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to remove the president from office.
After failing to remove Clinton from office for lying under oath, Sessions told the Associated Press in February 1999 that he feared Clinton’s acquittal would “send the wrong message to a future generation of American leaders.”"

and this: "Vice President Mike Pence reportedly used a private email account to conduct public business, including homeland security matters, while he was governor of Indiana. Records of the emails were obtained by IndyStar through a public records request. Dwight Adams/IndyStar"

and this: ""The Trump administration has announced plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants.
"In Nazi Germany, there was a paper called Der Stürmer — which published stories of supposed Jewish crimes.""

"Anti-immigration sentiment is so poisonous in the U.S. that it may have caused the death of an innocent Indian engineer in Kansas over the weekend, so it's more crucial than ever to go to the root of things: the numbers. Yep, data is where it's at when it comes to identifying the truth about immigration and its impact on the American country: Are immigrants really bad for the economy and for wages? Are they stealing everybody's jobs? Do they raise the crime rate and cause a massive burden on welfare? "

"The Myth: A depressing study from back in 2000 found that 23 percent of Americans thought the statement that "immigrants cause higher crime rates" was very likely, and another 48 percent thought it somewhat likely. But this just isn't borne out by the numbers. For all President Trump yells about "bad hombres," the data says that more immigration actually means less crime.

The Truth: One study looked at 200 American metropolitan areas over 40 years, from 1970 to 2010, and found that as immigrant populations increased, rates of murder, robbery, larceny, and burglary actually went down."

and this: "The information that was posted on the Iowa Senate Republican’s website used to suggest that Mark Chelgren, a state lawmaker, held a business degree.
But that wasn’t exactly the case, according to NBC News and other media outlets, which this week reported that Chelgren instead held a certificate for a training program for the chain restaurant Sizzler."

and this: One by one these liars are lawyering up for immunity. "In a reversal, former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page now says he did have contact with Russia" (PBS) "The Trump campaign has repeatedly denied communication with Russian officials during the 2016 elections and its transition to the White House. In fact, USA Today has counted at least 20 denials since last summer."

And the response, nationally and local = total silence and/or more lies and denials. Rank hypocrisy from the "Lock her up" contingent! Beyond sad. Outrageous and Unacceptable. Unamerican!

And now for the connections with Melrose, starting with the local Nazi admirers who persist in their infatuation with the out-and-out treasonous crooks.... Even if you couldn't stomach HRC (as is the case with many of us who found her despicable), being able to accept the dark and demented fantasies of this utterly crooked swamp administration now in power automatically discredits anything else you might say in support, certainly now as the multitude of heinous scandals are unfolded to make it obvious even for the dunces who couldn't see it before.


How about all those "alternate facts" by paid political cronies/staff presented for that 26% raise or the "rationale" for the extortionist Water & Sewer rates, or giving the school committee unfettered power to award "a pot" for administrative raises, or all that cooked data given to GuiltyFoil and realtors about the not-stellar MHS, or that bogus crap concocted to give Paymore trumped-up awards just exactly after the United States OCR found her guilty of having fostered a racially hostile environment and broken civil rights laws, or all that Alternate BS put forward by MEF and Dolan to extort the taxpayers in that failed override scam, or any number of other inexcusable and continuing fiascos associated with our so-called "leaders"....?????

Good on the AD for telling the truth this week about the trumped-up athletic fees that are simply not fair or reasonable in a PUBLIC school system. Too bad he doesn't care about music fees, ECC fees, racism & bullying (that he and his staff have taken part in), or alternate facts when it comes to school data that this administration has put forward for the past 15 years.... But now that it's hit home for his own family, he suddenly comes forward and cares. Better late than never.

Right now the SC and Paymore are doing it to Melrose again with their Alternate Reality "Budget" so-called process. Wake up parents! Or don't, if you really don't care what happens to your children's school system and your hard-earned dollars. Keep your head in the sand and go back to your preoccupations. Don't be surprised when you wake up a few years from now and have to work hard to justify just how "successful" and content your children are (sad fact is that many won't know the difference, since Life becomes a continuation of the MHS foolishness for too many). You'll get plenty of "help" from the realtors, who'll be glad to continue telling the unpretty fairy tales, or from the mayor, who'll be glad to call you a "hater" if you dare to challenge his Alternate Facts.

Wow! You must be a joy to live with

I'm all for fees. As a taxpayer, I'm willing to pay over 1/2 my taxes to educate the children of the city even though I feel tons of money is wasted. But extracurriculars should be 100% on the students and their families. What do I care if Melrose has a football, lacrosse or tennis team, or band for all that matter. I like all these things but if my kids want to participate I should pay.

Now there's and old school attitude you don't see much of anymore these days. I happen to agree, but given the amount of money that is being flushed down the drain, there would be no need for fees were that not the case.

I agree also. It's "nice and all" that there are all of the different programs available, but they are indeed EXTRAcurricular, and as such do not seem like they should be my responsibility to provide for from my tax dollar.

Just look at how much money has been spent in legal fees defending guilty school committee chairs (MD, KT), school administrators (CT, MC, BC (and in rare instances teachers (SH, NB). How many holes has city solicitor VBC dug us into with his disgraceful and unethical behavior? If we could get these lying criminal thugs out of the system, we could save easily two to three hundred thousand dollars a year in legal fees, settlements and increased insurance premiums. Then maybe we could have sharply reduced extracurricular fees.

Melrose has never had a teenager use alcohol or drugs, Linda O'Con-eski told me.

Was she under oath when she said this? If not - no case - because we know that realtors always tell the truth!

I think she was being sarcastic when she said this....or maybe not.

Ask her what happened to her kid, and where he was when it happened.

Malden were all the Melrose alcoholics went to buy booze. It's under ten years for having liquor stores. So many drinkers in the city.

Not fair to families trying to just make the rent and will not come forward out of shame.

This is her again on not telling the truth about Melrose schools. Wake up people do research on the schools turmoil.

Let's not kid ourselves folks. He's only interested in what it's costing him.

Oh no I have to pay what! As a employee do my children have to pay?

Just as mayor dolan does with the water Sewer budget, The schools use the overcharging of sports fees as a profit center. They use the excess cash to fund their other pet projects. If a truly independent outside auditor audited Melrose City Hall and the school department budget, we would be first page headlines in the Boston Globe. Wholesale corruption going on here, but with a city form of government it is so easy for Dolan to circle the wagons and plug the leaks.