Second Cut

The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye, or so goes the old lyric from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma.

Clearing Hurdles

Five years ago, federal investigators reported poorly on the efforts at the Oak Bluffs and Tisbury schools to serve their non-English speaking students. After a complaint that the schools’ lack of trained teachers, interpreters and appropriate materials were shortchanging Brazilian students, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights found indeed that staff were failing the needs of a growing population.

Green and Ominous

The Edgartown Great Pond is in trouble, its brackish waters out of balance and at the outer limit of their capacity to carry nitrogen. This is a well-known fact, thoroughly documented in the Massachusetts Estuaries Project draft report for the pond which was obtained by this newspaper, published on its Web site and written about a year ago this summer.

After Labor Day

September begins. It is still summer by the calendar and certainly by the weather — warm late summer days perfect for beachgoing, picnics, fishing, clamming, sailing and walks on woodland trails.

This is the season Islanders look forward to. Traffic jams are gone for another year and some of the ordinary routines have returned — children in school, coffee at the favorite morning haunt without waiting in line, trips to the post office and dry cleaners that are suddenly unhurried.

Back to School

A flutter of feet that didn’t yet reach the floor swung from chairs in the back of Brickman’s Saturday morning. It was back-to-school shoe shopping central. Kids pulled off their flip-flops and Crocs and pulled on fluffy white socks for the first time in a long time, judging from the soles of their feet. The toughened skin underfoot was proof of play in a place where barefoot and beach-free is a way of life.

Regulating Wind Turbines

With backyard wind turbines all the rage these days, planners at the Martha’s Vineyard Commission would be wise to take up the matter of drafting a set of uniform wind turbine regulations for the six towns to consider.

It’s good that the Vineyard is going green, with turbines large and small in various stages of planning in every Island town.