Restoring Veterans Park

War Veterans Memorial Park was built more than half a century ago by hand by a small group of Vineyard Haven veterans who were members of the George W. Goethals American Legion Post. The men spent their weekends hauling fill and toting rakes and shovels to convert ten acres of swamp in an area known as Cat Hollow to a public park.

Shrinking Island Schools

Growing communities traditionally have meant growing schools, both for the number of students attending them and the teachers and staff charged with educating them. So it has gone on the Vineyard, where the regional high school has never had to cut staff.

Now a budget squeeze has led administrators to eliminate a half position for the coming school year in the music department, a move that has sparked a grass roots Islandwide effort to raise funds to restore the position.

Cases in Point

The recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in an esoteric Norwell case — a case that relied heavily on an earlier Edgartown ruling — offers a reminder that the Vineyard has generated a good deal of solid case law over the last thirty years, especially in the area of land use.

A Place for Planning

More than thirty five years ago, an engineering firm looked at the six towns on the Vineyard and envisioned a possible seventh town carved into the Island’s center, around the regional high school and along the Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Road.

The firm, Metcalf and Eddy, saw the area as a social and economic center, a place for larger development not appropriate for the down-Island downtowns or the ecologically sensitive up-Island towns.

Subprime Lending in West Tisbury

Fallout from the many-headed monster otherwise known as the subprime mortgage crisis certainly seems to have no end, and now the crisis which is national and growing has landed — of all places — in West Tisbury.

Tisbury Tilting at Windmills

The decision by the town of Tisbury to challenge the state school funding formula in court is a wasteful expenditure of public money and a near-certain recipe for deepening the rift among the six Island towns over how they divide their payments for the high school budget — precisely at a time when a regional approach and mindset are needed.