Chief Cronin is on the right track

What do we want for the long term - to live in a city with police on every corner, or to live in a city where kids are educated, stimulated, encouraged and too busy to engage in the activities that lead to habitual crime?

This writer's personal experience of living briefly in a Central American country under a feared military dictator, with "La Guardia" on every street corner, recalls the confidence of one's personal physical safety from street crime being more than offset by the anxiety of being watched and potentially targeted. There are many people in our community who can share similar experiences.

Contrast that to an upbringing where school was an integral part of social and community life along with the Three Rs. Kids were so busy with after school activities as an extension of classes - drama, sports, music, art, civic organizations for teens - that other than the occasional Friday or Saturday night "cruising" the local dairy bar, they had little time to get into trouble.

Almost every cultural or ethical philosophy or religious group has as part of their foundation a version of the tenet "Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he will not depart from it."

If all of our kids are not our top priority now, many of them will become our worst problem later.

We need

• Clean, well maintained school buildings
  
• Proper meals for every student regardless of family income - sell bananas, apples, milk and bottled water throughout the school day and get all vending machines out of the schools
  
• Better equipped schools - buy books, not guns; buy computers, not police cars
  
• Qualified teachers certified in their subjects, paid at a competitive level, commensurate with equally trained and experienced police officers and firefighters
  
• Fully funded athletic, art, and music programs as part of the curriculum. We must educate the whole student, body and mind, including the "right brain." Encourage creativity.

Communities with great schools and interested parents have little need for a huge police force.

We must set long term priorities now for short term budgets.

We have a choice:

• Underpaid, underqualified, transient teachers putting in their time with unstimulated, unmotivated, underchallenged students in unpleasant, unclean, unsafe classrooms - resulting in an ever increasing need for developing a paramilitary police force and more and more jails and prisons, or
  
• Professional teachers competitively compensated, who are teaching nourished, involved students in clean, safe classrooms; students who graduate prepared to continue their educations in an academic or vocational environment; tomorrow's leaders who are too busy with their lives and futures to become involved with anti-social behavior.
  

We can spend it on our schools and kids now, or on police and prisons later.

Perhaps Chief Cronin hasn't expressed his prevention efforts exactly this way, but I dare say his intention of early intervention of at-risk groups is a step in the right direction.

We need to apply the concept of prevention and early intervention to the whole of the city, not just a few high profile neighborhoods, and we need to extend diversion and prevention programs to every student, every family, of every ethnic, social and economic level.

As we citizens encourage our elected officials to develop a long term plan for Fitchburg, we must insist that that long term financial plan include investing in our most valuable resource - our children.

We hold tomorrow in our hands.

Shalom