Sam Bungey
The town of Gosnold is divided into two districts. The first covers a tiny knot of municipal buildings at the center of Cuttyhunk; the second is the sparsely populated remainder of what is also known as the Elizabeth Islands.
Initially Margaret Martin thought the want ad for a Cuttyhunk schoolteacher contained a typographical error. Scouring a jobs Web site for the Cape and Islands area in the spring of 2003, she saw an entry for a school with one student. She wasn’t reassured when she traveled to Rehoboth to meet Russell Latham, the district superintendent, and found that the listed address was actually a private residence. Sensing the whole thing might be an elaborate joke, she almost drove home to Long Island.
The Boston Pops had a “don’t call us, we’ll call you” arrangement with the more than 200 high school students vying for a place in the finals of the orchestra’s first statewide singing contest. So when the phone hadn’t rung by 4 p.m. Sunday, Katie Mayhew, a sophomore at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, was resigned to her fate.
This week Edgartown was bustling — mainly with landscaping crews who were renovating, refurbishing and touching up properties in time for the official start date of the tourist season. Lumber hung from the back of trucks and the smell of paint and fresh mown grass breezed along Main street and its peripheries, where many businesses are preparing to reopen to the public, and several more to just a few high-paying members.
The town of Edgartown and Martha’s Vineyard Commission have won the right to participate in legal proceedings on the Cape Wind project.
The decision, made earlier this month by the Massachusetts Energy Facilities siting board, gives the town and commission a sort of legal watchdog status. Both entities have limited participant status which means they can file comments on a tentative decision and write a brief at the end of the hearing, but they will not have the right to appeal the final decision.
This time last year the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School had no budget. Following months of acrimonious debate, Oak Bluffs had voted for a state tax formula which saved them hundreds of thousands of dollars, but cost other towns considerably. This sent the high school committee budget makers back to the drawing board.