Are Park City Schools Actively Suppressing Discussion on the Presidential Election?
Over a week ago, we heard from a Park City teacher that teachers were directed not to discuss the Presidential election with students. According to the teacher, they were told not to talk about it because it was too controversial of a topic. Instead, if they wanted to talk about elections, the administration allegedly told them they were instructed to talk about state and local elections. We reached out a week ago to the school district for comment but never received a response.
One of the problems with this stance is that this election almost serves as a cautionary tale. The story of Icarus. Little Red Riding Hood. Every slasher film from the 1980’s.
This national election is a train wreck. In one corner, we have a man who won’t denounce the former leader of the KKK, has repeatedly disparaged women, and makes fun of the disabled. In the other corner we have someone who would likely be in jail if she was you or me.
To that, I say, what better educational opportunity is there for our kids than to learn that money and power doesn’t excuse you from the responsibly to be a kind and fair human.
I’m not advocating for our 15 year olds to learn about grabbing a women by her …well you know how that quote ends … or our elementary kids to learn about how to repeatedly lie and use political power to escape unlawful behavior. However it does provide an opportunity for discussion.
As our tteachers are good and I’m sure they are able to do what teachers have always done. If we take World War 2, in elementary school you learn that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor to start World war 2 (that’s not accurate but it is a broad stroke that enabled us to understand the war). In high school you learn that our enemy was Hitler and he killed 6 million Jews and was a horrible person. In college you learn that our ally was Joseph Stalin, who was just as horrible man, and killed more people than Hitler (maybe was responsible for up to 60 million deaths). Later in college you realize that part of the reason the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor was because of a US Oil embargo.
The point is that there is ALWAYS a way to educate and provide kids with information that teaches them information they are capable of processing. In the case of The Donald and Hillary, is there any better tale in the last 10 years related to treating people fairly, following rules, and not lying than what has been foisted on us during this election cycle? Yes, one of these people will be our President. Yet, that is a good lesson too. Nice people don’t always win and sometimes people in power are not good people and shouldn’t be respected.
I’m sure it’s easier for our schools to avoid the topic. However, if the allegations are true, we are missing a grand opportunity to educate our children about something that s unfolding around them.
in Park City
What do you say when questioned about Park City?
So, you are in an airport in St Louis and someone asks you whether they should visit Park City, what do you say?
A) Yes, it’s a great place to visit, with nice people, great skiing, and is even better in the summer.
B) No, uhhh… you wouldn’t like it. There are few evergreens like you might get in Colorado. The liquor laws make it really confusing (and people will make fun of you). Whistler (in Canada) is much more favorable due to the exchange rate. Did you know Whistler is the top rated ski resort in North America?
I oh so wanted to go with B… but I went with A.
The next time, though, I’m not so sure. I want to support my city… but do I support it more by helping overrun it with people, or do I support it more by encouraging people to stay away.
I’m afraid I know the right answer.
Questions and answers about the proposed sales tax increase to fund transportation
Yesterday we asked readers if they had questions they wanted asked about the proposed sales tax increase that will be on this November’s ballot. Transportation managers from both the city (Alfred Knotts) and the county (Caroline Ferris) were happy to answer questions on camera. Here are the questions and answers:
It sounds like the main improvement to buses would be shorter wait times. Have you considered adding additional routes?
In your presentation you talk about adding signal priority lanes. Are those the above road signs that tell traffic whether they can use a lane or not? Like what they have near USANA Amphitheater in Salt Lake?
What are your plans to get skiers, in single occupant vehicles, off the road?
What will the design of the carpool and bus lanes be on Highway 248?
What will the design of the carpool and bus lanes be on Highway 224?
Why isn’t Richardson’s Flat being used immediately as a park and ride?
Why not use existing parking lots like schools supermarkets, etc. instead of building new park and rides?
Will the pedestrian passage under I-80, between Pinebrook and Jeremy Ranch, be kept as part of the improvements to the Jeremy ranch and Pinebrook interchanges?
Is the E-Bike share program going to be delivered as part of this tax increase?
What will the impact be to traffic and school children if we build a Park and Ride in the open space next to Jeremy Ranch Elementary School?
How will we know if the tax increase has worked to help alleviate traffic and when will we know it?
There were also comments made by a few citizens during the Public Hearing portion of the meeting. However, turn out was really poor for the meeting. The public’s comments are below:
in Election
As seen at the entrance to Jeremy Ranch
So, exactly who else can we vote for? And don’t mention that former governor who never heard of Aleppo.
in Taxes, Transportation
Have questions about the proposed sales tax and it use for fixing area transportation?
Tonight the Summit County Council is holding a public hearing at 6PM to take public comment on the proposed .5% sales tax increase (really two .25% sales taxes) to fund areas designed to improve transportation. The hearing is at the Richins Building (the library in Kimball Junction). If you can make it, it’s a great opportunity to both get your questions answered and hear what other citizens are concerned with.
If you can’t make it, feel free to post a comment here with questions or email us at . We’ll do our best to ask your questions tonight. It may not be possible to ask every question (time is limited), but we’ll do our best.
Update:
We received an email from County Manager Tom Fisher reminding us that staff will also be available before the meeting (from 3:00 to 5:30 in Room 133 of the Richins building) to answer any questions. From our experience, the staff are the people who can get into the nitty gritty . While the County Council are there to listen, and there will be staff in the audience during the public hearing who probably could answer questions, if you can ask one on one questions with staff members, you’ll likely get a more thorough response. So, if you have the time, and have questions, showing up during the pre-meeting wouldn’t be a bad decision.
in Park Rag
Everytime I see this sign I think of Teri Orr
About a year and a half ago, the Park City School District was holding one of three sessions to gather public input on the design of new schools. Six months later, it would end in a bond defeat for the school district.
However the night of the second public meeting was special. Ahead of time the school district and its golden boy architect, VCBO, had created maps of the Snyderville Basin and cutouts representing schools, athletic fields, etc. Members of the public were instructed to place the cutout where they thought schools should go. The exercise appeared to be designed by the Master Planning Committee to keep almost everything on Kearns and add a 5/6 school at either Ecker Hill or a Bear Hollow property. There wasn’t much left to the imagination of the public.
If memory serves me right, five of the six public groups placed their cutouts (as designed by the powers that be) on the Kearns Campus and Ecker Hill properties. However, one group, led by Teri Orr, put one of their schools out on this parcel of land in Silver Summit. This is the open space land, south of Silver Spring and Trailside, that will likely one day become condos. As part of this exercise, a school wasn’t supposed to go there. When Teri presented the idea, she said her group knew it was a lark but that everyone else was doing the same thing.
She and her group thought differently.
Looking around at everything that is happening…I think we need a little more of that around here.
in Election
As seen on the streets of Park City
I love election season…
Citizen is concerned with Blyncsy and Park City
Last year we wrote a couple of stories (here and here) about the county and city putting in Blyncsy cell phone monitors to track phones and help monitor traffic. Today a reader wrote in with the following:
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The facts are that once information is available on anyone, law enforcement will want it, and it will be monetized by selling it to who ever will pay. Blyncsy is all about this with the PC deal. It’s wrong and it’s being misrepresented to the citizens of PC by the city and the company.
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To be fair, the Park Rag has no knowledge that Blyncsy is selling information or helping law enforcement to track minorities or protesters (and we have no reason to believe they are). In fact, Blyncsy has a privacy policy that spells out that information is anonymous. The only problem with that, given the citizen’s concern, is that what Blyncsy may consider to be anonymous information may not really be anonymous to law enforcement.
Most technology like Blyncsy’s works based on what’s called a MAC address. The MAC address is a unique identifier in every phone (and other connected devices). Monitoring systems work by having antennas that “listen” for devices as they accompany you driving down the road. Your trusty Samsung Galaxy Note is shouting to the world, as you drive down Highway 224, hey I’m “01:23:45:67:89:ab.” These antennas record that information and then can tell the city and county 01:23:45:67:89:ab is heading towards the art festival. Combine that with data from everyone else and I suppose it could be powerful to transportation specialists as long as they are manning the command center at 3PM on a Saturday and have tools that are effective to impact traffic.
I continue to have doubts how effective these systems will really be. Do they distinguish between cars and buses? If not, the 87 people on the bus, with their phones, headed to PCMR, isn’t car traffic. How about bikers? My e-bike does 20 mph, is that filtered out? My car also has a mac address (as do most recent vehicles). So, how do they know its only one car headed into town and not two? What about my Apple watch that has a MAC address. And what about your Fitbit? How about multiple people in cars? Is that 4 people with 2 devices in one car or is it eight cars? The real kicker is the iPhone. You see, in some cases Apple doesn’t like others invading your privacy. So, they put in a feature called MAC address spoofing a couple of versions ago. This broadcasts out FAKE MAC addresses to confuse systems that try to monitor your MAC address (probably like Blyncsy). So, instead of one person heading from KJ to Deer Valley, you are now magically eight people because you are constantly changing your MAC address.
Maybe Blyncsy has it all figured out and there is no potential for privacy issues… I doubt it.
But I digress on the citizen’s original topic. If there were riots on Main Street, would the Park City Police Department try and use Blyncsy? They probably would. Then, if through some means they knew that Joe Smith, a person of interest, has a phone with the MAC address 04:23:53:65:qq would they try to get the Blyncsy data before an further anonymization took place to pinpoint Joe’s location? Probably. If not, would they demand Blyncsy’s algorithm for encoding the MAC address and then apply that algorithm to the MAC address (they know) and search for that in Blyncsy’s databases? Probably. Would they be successful? Probably. It’s done every day by hackers. That’s why you get messages saying that you need to change your Yahoo password, or your Dropbox password, your bank password, etc. It’s just not rocket science.
So, I guess at best I believe a system like Blyncsy is of very limited real value. Hopefully our government hasn’t paid them much. At worst, it has the potential to be an invasion of privacy.
Now, does Blyncsy sell the data? I would really hope not. If so, anyone involved in our city or county governments that allowed that to happen should be removed from their position. Even to use a system like this, the data had better be GOLD… But my guess is it’s more pyrite.
If you care about the topic, here is an article about some people in West Jordan fighting Blyncsy.
in Environment
Summit County needs NEW and BETTER education on curbside recycling
We all know that recycling is “The everyday way to save the world.” I mean, who doesn’t want to save the world?
With that in mind, we have a question for you. Which of the following can be put in your curbside recycling bin?
If you aren’t 100% confident, you aren’t alone. In a recent newsletter from Recycle Utah, it says up to 60% of curbside recycling may be contaminated. Bins (or items in the bins) can become contaminated when they come into contact with food waste, styrofoam, yard waste, glass, etc. That may mean that your entire bin is thrown out.
On social media, people have also talked about plastic grocery bags not being allowed, with some contacting Republic Services (the people who pickup and are responsible for processing our recycling) who apparently have said plastic grocery bags are OK. Another citizen contacted Summit County and was told that it was not OK, because it gums up the processing.
We’ve also heard that if you put your recycling in a plastic garbage bag, the entire bag will be thrown out. Others have said that is not a problem. Imagine that you think you are doing great by the environment by saving up 50 soda cans and then put them in a plastic bag inside your recycling. If, of course, they really get thrown away.
It’s frankly confusing and it’s caused my family to recycle less. It’s frankly a mental hurdle. Can I put the Digiorno Frozen pizza box in the recycling? UHHH… it’s a pizza box so you’d think no… but it’s cardboard and shouldn’t have food on it, so probably? Can I put the cardboard the frozen pizza sat on (inside the box)? It is cardboard, so I’d think yes… but is that grease or just water that has stained the cardboard a bit… so, probably no? How about the plastic wrap that went over the pizza? It’s plastic, so I’d think it’s OK, but I could see how it could gum up processing… so no (I guess)? That’s confusing and that’s just one lunch.
As part of the contract with Republic Services, they are responsible for education on the topic (here is their web page on the topic). I believe Recycle Utah also has a part in that education, too, as does Summit County. Whoever is ultimately responsible for that education, needs to rethink how it is being done.
I was at a dinner party last night and four out of the five of guests said putting plastic grocery bags in recycling was fine (the equipment sorts it!). Are they right? I don’t think so… but maybe? It just highlights the confusion out there.
Oh, and here are the answers to the question at the top as to what can be recycled in curbside bins (at least as I understand it):
- Plastic milk jug: Recycle
- Plastic bag: DON’T Recycle
- Pizza Box: DON’T Recycle
- Horizon Milk (and other waxy cartons): DON’T Recycle
- Cardboard: Recycle (as long as it doesn’t have food on it… does liquid count as food?)
- Tin/Aluminum Cans: Recycle (how much food in them is considered contamination? I don’t know.)
- Glass bottles?: DON’T Recycle
- Coffee bag: I have no idea.
Finally, you can recycle many items by taking them to Recycle Utah and recycle glass at many parking lots (i.e. the Jeremy Park and Ride). However, that’s not really the point of this story. The point is that most people want to do the right thing but they generally do the easy thing.
Something needs to be done to CHANGE the way people are educated about what can be recycled in our curbside bins. It needs to come from one source. It needs to be pinpoint accurate. It needs to be complete (i.e. figure out a way to explain recycling everything in that Digiorno box…and give us real life examples). It needs to be the final word.
Until a better job is done educating residents, it’s like throwing half your recycling in the landfill. Even if you are doing the right thing, your neighbor’s choices may ruin your recycling too. That just doesn’t feel very good.
Park City drug issues are not new and may cost you everything
Days before my 16th birthday, my next door neighbor committed suicide. He drove out to a lake, wrote his parents a letter, and pulled the trigger on a shotgun. In the aftermath, and for a VERY SHORT while, people tried to explain it, but they never really understood. They missed the point and ignored the broader picture.
I somewhat feel the same with recent coverage of the teenage overdoses in Park City. The Park Record says, “Residents were stunned. Police said the boys had been talking with their friends on social media about dangerous drugs, a revelation that caused parents to fear that other children were also in danger. In a matter of days, the issue had been dragged into the light, and officials were saying it as clearly as they could: Drugs are a larger problem in Park City schools than many parents realize.”
It’s all so sanitized and medical. So, let’s please cut to the chase and avoid the niceties . Your kids are in a place where drugs and alcohol are prevalent. Your kids are in a place with lots of money which leads to lots of options. Park City kids have been associated with a drug culture for 30 years.
My wife grew up in Sandy in the late 80’s and early 90’s. It was “known” back then that if you wanted drugs and alcohol, you went to Park City.
What was our main concern when moving to Park City from Sugarhouse seven years ago? Do we want to raise kids in the alcohol and drug environment of Park City? We hoped we could instill the right environment for our kids (and educate them on the topic), so we decided to move here. Will one of our kids try alcohol before age 14? Probably.
I have no magical answers for “solving” Park City kids’ drug issues. However, I do know that treating it like something new and mysterious does everyone a disservice. Who cares if it is some synthetic opiod from China! That makes it sound like something most kids wouldn’t go to the effort to obtain. I can hear the kitchen talk, “Oh it’s not going to happen to our kids.”
So, let’s tell it like it is:
- Your 18 year old knows someone who regularly does cocaine
- Your 17 year old knows people who do heroine
- Your 16 year old knows someone who could get them vodka this Friday
- Your 14 year old can find some money, go to Smiths, buy a prepaid credit card, order who-knows-what from the internet, and then receive it via UPS on a Friday at 2 PM.
Do with that what you will, but please don’t tell me it’s unexpected.
It’s up to you to save your kids. It’s up to all of us parents, individually, to save our kids.
Our kids are in the jungle and it’s up to each of us to get them through.
To do anything less, or expect that it’s not an issue, is putting blinders on. Those blinders may cost you everything.
Parkrag
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