The Commuter Rail from New Bedford and Fall River to Boston will be completed soon. The tunnel vision perception is that now people from New Bedford can get to Boston just as easily as people can get there from Boston. Commercially this is a good thing as the people of Boston and those along the rails can come to New Bedford for its culture, entertainment venues, and museums.

This will make trips into Boston convenient and will bring people to spend money in New Bedford. The city wins all around.

However, for practical reasons and profits, speculators from outside the city and state are buying up property for a very practical reason.

The cost of living in New Bedford is lower than in Boston. If my rent were to double, I could no longer live where I do now, but it will be far lower than the rent for the same apartment in Boston. The difference in rent would make a commuter rail pass a pocket change purchase and leave more money for whatever purpose it is used. So, there will be an influx of people wanting to pay less in rent than they do in Boston and will want to move to the less expensive cities of Fall River and New Bedford.

When they arrive, they will bring certain assumptions and expectations, and where these are not met, will take necessary steps to bring more of what they left to where they are.

An example of this sort of thing happening is Cape Cod.

In the fifties more people began to go to the Cape than had before as the highway system made easy access possible and the post war economy made automobile purchases affordable, and these people fell in love with the quaintness of the little towns and villages with their cute shops and eateries the Cape had. After years of being tourists on the Cape, people bought land and cottages so that they could retire there to be a part of that quaintness year round. Locals foolishly sold land to developers thinking more of the money they would be getting than what they were losing. Eventually the quaintness waned as the “Wash Ashores”, as non-native Cape Codders refer to the newbies, wanted to bring some of the conveniences they left on the mainland closer to them on the Cape.

Malls were built, as were McMansions along the beaches used only a few times a year while blocking the view of the ocean that the Cape Codders had enjoyed before the great influx all year. Beaches were “improved” for the sake of the number of tourists on the beaches and the Jetties, those long piles of huge boulders that jut from the shore into the water whose original purpose was to keep harbors and ports open and protected, in their new usage blocked the natural millennia long process of the currents around the Cape moving the sand along it so the beaches did not erode. This natural sand flow stopped, the sand from beaches leached into the bay on one side and the open ocean on the other with the constant ebb and flow of the tides, and required beaches to occasionally be re-sanded using work crews and dump trucks. The greed expressed through manic land sales produced tract housing neighborhoods that replaced to wilderness areas that were part of the experience and part of why people moved to the Cape. Big box stores overshadowed the Mom and Pop places when one can conveniently buy Cape Cod Tourist trinkets as they shopped at the mall. The cost of living went up to the point where for the average person Cape Cod is just too expensive for those born and raised there. Once children grow up, they find it necessary to either live in their parents’ homes or move off Cape to more affordable places.

Those who moved to the Cape because they fell in love with what they met as tourists destroyed the very thing they wanted.

I moved to New Bedford from Cape Cod because of all the places I looked and of the ones that had interesting possibilities, it was the least expensive. What I pay for a well-located apartment in an historical district is what I would have paid for a single room in someone else’s house or a spot in a garage on the Cape.

Long and short, I know people will move to New Bedford from Boston for the rent decrease because I did it. I also know that when they get here, they will want it to be more Bostonish and will take whatever action necessary to make it so because I saw how this happened on the Cape. The attraction of New Bedford for me over Fall River was that having taught high school American Literature, there was the whole whaling thing and all the other history. I am surrounded by historical buildings, mansions, and cobbled stone streets, so I like it the way it is.

I adapted to the place and do not want or need it to adapt to me.

Moving here merely to save money without an affinity to the place or its spirit is not a good thing.

New Bedford had gone through a series of rough times since whaling ended and manufacturing companies found it cheaper to head to the South or to foreign countries where wages were low so profits would be higher, and like most older cities prior to a rebirth its public schools suffered.

For ten years the school district worked to improve the schools by introducing new, innovative programs that did just that and raised the graduation rate from 59% to over 80%. It instituted college level courses and worked with area colleges and universities along with businesses to make for a more inclusive education with more future opportunities for students.

Along with the already existing two charter schools, a group of out of state and out of town businesspeople want to begin another charter school with no one with any real educational experience listed on their board. The charter school would not introduce new programs to the New Bedford students but offer what the public schools already do. This is grounds for denying the charter school application as it is not innovative but redundant.

The city would have to take millions of dollars out of the public schools so the money could go to a school that is supposed to offer something different, not what is already there, and in the process weaken the very programs that revived the school system over the last 10 years.

When desegregation came to Oklahoma City two decades before I got there, the school at which I taught was the first middle school on the white side of the city that the kids from the Black side of town attended. It sits on the only totally East/West street in the city, a direct shot from the eastern border to the Western, so the buses with the black kids would not be meandering around town, but taking a direct route.

The school was the highest scoring middle school in the city with consistently good test scores and accomplishments when I took the job. However, anytime I mentioned the school at which I taught to any local, they would caution me that I was working at a bad school.

By bad, as it turned out, they did not mean now. This reputation for being bad was a hold over to the opposition to integration. It was called bad two decades previous because it had Black Students, and the locals have held to this in spite of existing reality.

When the first charter school was proposed there, offering a middle school as an alternate to that “bad” school was a strong point. Concerned parents, influenced by tradition, applied to the new charter which scooped the highest performing students from the “bad” school so that when test scores came out, the charter school had done very well, while proof that the school I taught at, the bad one, was, indeed, failing was our school standing in regard to test scores going down.

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You do not take a tire off another person’s car so yours can move and then point out the other car is useless because it cannot move.

If New Bedford’s school district had made the improvements it had and offered some innovative programs in conjunction with higher education institutions and businesses, why the need for a redundant charter school that would syphon money from the school district and weaken the existing, effective programs, and why now?

The answer is simple.

The train.

Ignoring or beig unaware of the actual renaissance that the city has experienced and its own neighborhood by neighborhood quaintness, the people who may choose to move here will most likely hold to the old image while ignoring the new.

They will anticipate moving to the ccity that earned a bad reputation unaware that itm is no mlonger that city.

I grew up just Southwest of Boston in one town among many where the connection to Boston was strong. New Bedford is on the South Coast, close to Rhode Island over which part of Massachusetts droops and rather inconvenient for doing the convenient things in Boston. People in the upper three-fourths of the state really never went to New Bedford and knew only of it what they heard. To people in my area, the city was one with dying industries and a love of Drum and Bugle Corps.

It was and still is considered to be the city you heard about but never went to, and what you heard was not good. I know this to be true as the reaction to telling people I moved to New Bedford is largely the same reaction when I told people what school I taught at in Oklahoma City.

I am sure, because I came here with my now dispelled biases, people moving here from Boston will be bringing some of that bias with them, and when they get here, if they are kept from learning the truth of the success of the New Bedford Public Schools, like those who ignored the reality of the OKC school, they will want alternative education opportunities.

There may be some reluctance or hesitation having their children schooled among the great rumored unwashed.

A requirement for a charter school charter is to offer what the local school system doesn’t. With a new charter school offering the same thing, newbies will assume the public schools don’t.

This third charter school will not be for the people already here. It will be for those who come here from Boston and those who will arrive when the attendant gentrification kicks the locals out.

At a community meeting on the future train held before the pandemic in the function room of the New Bedford Whaling Museum with a panel of state people connected to the project of bringing commuter rail into Boston to the South Coast, I presented the above-mentioned rent scenario and how this will spread city wide so locals cannot afford to live in the city they kept alive to be revived. The person from the state informed me that the big picture was the financial life of the city and if that means some people have to move, they will just have to move. It could mean a whole new demographic would come in and change the city, and, as this official stated, this could mean people from New Bedford would have to move either to more expensive places or Fall River.

Where are the Fall River people expected to move.

When a charter school that offers nothing that the public school district doesn’t already while taking millions of dollars out of successful schools for duplication thus weakening the other programs while offering nothing that the public school district doesn’t is proposed by a board that has only one person born locally  but living elsewhere and with six of its board being connected to the same bank at the same time the Commuter rail is schedule to be completed and gentrification coming with a vengeance is an expectation, a person has to wonder who the new charter school is for and how it fits in with the bank’s involvement in gentrification and property speculation.

There is no need for a charter school that duplicates what is already being done in the public schools.

Charter schools are supposed to a public/private partnerships.

However, considering that this new school will be simply duplicating existing programs and taking public money to do so weakening these programs for those not in the charter and reducing  what can be offered to the children in the school district, it appears this partnership is a little less than balanced as the charter school gets millions of dollars and copies successful programs claiming them as their own for its public relations purposes wwhile the public side of the equation gets bupkis.

This is not a partnership.

The city is about to be sold from under itself if dots are not connected. This coincidently timed charter school proposal is one of the dots.

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