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Top stories: Reporter reflects on year of coverage

Times file photo Teacher Koral Fleming interacts with students in the transitional kindergarten class at Harmar Elementary School in October. The new class is intended to provide its students with a foundation for success going into the early grades of the Marietta City Schools system.

In reporting the deliberations of public bodies, what we often see is reactive changes when things go wrong, or at least, aren’t working right. Less frequently, we get to report on long-term strategies that are crafted to improve the social environment and create richer opportunities for the future.

As the education reporter for The Marietta Times, I stand as a witness at the intersection of nearly every walk of life and individual interest in the city. It encompasses the aspirations for the future.

The story that I most enjoyed reporting this year had its beginnings late in 2017, when Marietta City Schools, somewhat belatedly, released a plan to restructure the elementary grade system in a manner that would consolidate grades in the district’s four elementary schools. The plan had a number of merits, from an administrative and teaching perspective, but public backlash was focused on the need for students to switch schools as they moved through grades and concern that the network of neighborhood schools would be disrupted.

Change is often met with resistance, and the district could have done a better job of incorporating public discussion into the plan. It dovetailed with an overall vision of replacing the district’s aging buildings, which ultimately would see Marietta with a single elementary school. After taking a scolding from parents, the district walked the elementary grade consolidation idea back, but one important element of the plan survived: transitional kindergarten.

It is not often that we can report on an important, far-reaching development in public policy that comes to fruition within a year, but in a classroom in Harmar Elementary School during October, a few weeks into the new school year, I saw the reality of transitional kindergarten, a group of children placed in a two-year program to prepare for first grade. Under the tutelage of an extraordinary teacher, Koral Fleming, they are being given an opportunity to develop their full potential under a simple but persuasive concept: instead of starting their school careers under the adversity of being behind, they will start, as one teacher put it, as leaders among their peers.

The great scientist and author Stephen Jay Gould once said he found the physiology of Einstein’s brain less interesting than the near-certain knowledge that people of equal talent had lived and died under adverse circumstances that prevented their potential from being realized. The next 12 years for those children hold the potential to make a significant difference in their lives, and this program holds the sort of promise that makes public education the most important element of our society.

If that story is an example of public policy at its apex, another I reported during 2018 illustrates its nadir: the over-simplified, knee-jerk reaction of senior governments to the opioid crisis.

In the United States, tens of millions of people live in chronic pain and for most of them, the judicious use of prescription opioid compounds is the only method of making their daily existence bearable. This population far outnumbers the group that abuses prescription drugs, but the largely misguided efforts by federal and state lawmakers have made these people collateral damage in a new war on drugs, one directed at throttling the supply of legitimate painkillers by stigmatizing their use as a medical solution to pain.

I had the privilege of telling the stories of Marietta residents whose lives have been made substantially worse by denial or reduction of medication that has held their pain at bay for decades.

This is the largely untold story of collateral victims of policy created on an all-or-nothing basis, policy that is reactive and fails to take a nuanced approach to a vast threat to public health. Although deaths from accidental drug poisoning are thought to have plateaued, the CDC still has registered more than 70,000 fatal events this year for people suffering from substance abuse disorder, more than half involving fentanyl. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have seen a drastic decline in their quality of life as the result of policy which ignored their needs.

I am grateful to Christina Gardner, Pam Sullivan and Orland Bragg for having the courage to come forward and trust me with their stories. Bragg, though research and determination, discovered a combination of alternative treatments that made his situation better, but they unfortunately do not work for everyone, and even for those who find some relief in procedures such as acupuncture and physical therapy have been failed by medical insurance companies.

The social cost of the current set of policies on this issue is incalculable – the contributions these people and others could make, whether as artists, healers, mechanics or other professionals, are being lost and it impoverishes us all.

I had the privilege of telling many other stories over the course of 2018. I met Decker Sleek, the “mayor” of Waterford Elementary School, and watched with admiration as the WAVE team from Ewing School assisted at a farmers market event in the fall at Washington Elementary School. I saw a group of Air Force pilots generously give their time to visit the Washington County Career Center. For sheer fun, the Halloween party organized at Peoples Bank Theatre by Brad and LeeAndra Smith would be difficult to top. Teachers, students, parents, administrators, elected officials and ordinary people all trusted me with stories of ways in which they and others have enriched the community.

The year gave us a seemingly bottomless well of events, people and issues to worry about, but it also disclosed, at least for me, an abundance of reasons to be hopeful for the coming year.

Michael Kelly is the education reporter at The Marietta Times.

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