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Manhattan grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump, showing he, like all other presidents, is not an imperial king
A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict former President Donald Trump on March 30, 2023, for his alleged role in paying porn star Stormy Daniels hush money. Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina confirmed the indictment.
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Norwalk Charter Revision Commission update
The Norwalk Charter Revision Commission – authorized by the Common Council and comprised of seven Democrat, Republican and Unaffiliated volunteers – has been meeting bimonthly since September to review and recommend changes to the City’s charter. Largely unchanged since 1913, the charter is in desperate need of an update in order to make the document…
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Rising numbers of pedestrian deaths and injuries need everyone’s attention
She was just walking her dog. Seconds later she became the latest statistic in a growing list of pedestrians killed or maimed this year in Connecticut by motor vehicles. Donna Joy Berry, age 63, wasn’t on the road or even the sidewalk as she walked her dog in the Glenville neighborhood of Greenwich. She was…
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URGENT: Support NancyOnNorwalk by writing a note to State legislators
A bill up for a public hearing Monday in the Statehouse could help NancyOnNorwalk expand its news coverage. House Bill 6347 would require the Department of Administrative Services to award more state contracts for print and digital advertising to nonprofit entities and Connecticut-owned media outlet entities. If some of this advertising were directed to NancyOnNorwalk, you’d…
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ChatGPT’s opinion on Norwalk’s future
An NoN reader recently asked ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November, to use its future-predicting capabilities to advise Norwalk City government. This is the result. Prompt: hypothetically, could an AI be invented that could more accurately predict the future by making calculations of probabilities based on events in a large…
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Impact of employee benefits on FY2023-24 BoE Budget
In the Board’s continuing effort to be as transparent as possible through this budget process, we are sharing some of the finer points involving employee benefits and how they both impact, and are impacted by our FY2023-24 budget situation. First, it is important to note that the district’s overall budget is not where it was…
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Tonight, we will set the Budget Spending Cap; We must be mindful of all Residents’ Needs
I joined the Common Council in February of 2019. Since then, each budget season has presented its own challenges, and this year is no exception. While the Board of Estimate and Taxation, the City’s budget-setting body, is the ultimate decision maker on the City’s operating budget, the Common Council is responsible for setting the operating budget cap, which…
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Response to the Common Council’s Feb. 28 discussion of the FY2023-24 Budget Cap
As we wait for the Common Council to set a budget cap for FY2023-24, the Norwalk Board of Education and I want to address several lingering questions regarding our request for more funding from the City of Norwalk to maintain a level of operation that our scholars and our families have come to expect from…
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Derailments here and in Ohio are cause for concern
Americans have been thinking about the safety of our railroads a lot in recent days, and with good reason. On Valentine’s Day a Metro-North train made a slow speed crash into the protective rail bumper at the end of the line in New Canaan. The train was unoccupied (aside from its crew, one of whom was slightly injured)…
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An open letter to students – Your Voice Matters
Dear Scholars, Throughout my time serving on the Board of Education, one thing remains constant – you are the best investment this city can make. You are not only the heart of this district, but you will serve as the next leaders for Norwalk’s community, and I am sure that the future is bright. So,…
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Now is not the time to give our students less
I have been grateful to serve on the Norwalk Public Schools Board of Education since 2021 following a more-than 40-year career as an educator. And with that experience, I know one thing is certain – as students begin to regain a sense of normalcy and belonging following two years of pandemic-induced trauma and interrupted learning,…
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Response to the Mayor’s recommendation for the 2023-2024 Operating Budget
Coming into this year’s budget season, Norwalk Public Schools understood the uphill battle we faced in securing the funding necessary to ensure all our scholars had the tools to be successful in the classroom, stay socially and emotionally healthy, and graduate future ready. With the Mayor’s recommendation of a 4% increase, announced at the Common…
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Tyre Nichols’ death underscores the troubled history of specialized police units
The officers charged in the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols were not your everyday uniformed patrol officers. Rather, they were part of an elite squad: Memphis Police Department’s SCORPION team. A rather tortured acronym for “Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods,” SCORPION is a crime suppression unit – that is, officers detailed…
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Achieving equity in education funding
We can no longer afford or wait to leave kids behind in any community. Only through a fully funded state Education Cost Sharing (ECS) formula can we achieve that. Today, I stood with over a hundred state legislators, religious leaders, and education advocates in a unified voice to say that this year we will fully…
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Partnership can work
Many have said that this will be a challenging budget cycle. I do not disagree, but I do feel that we are looking at the challenges we are facing with the wrong lens. In recent weeks, I have sat in on presentations from both the City and the Norwalk Public Schools (NPS). I have read…
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Pain of police killings ripples outward to traumatize Black people and communities across US
As the video goes public of Black police officers in Memphis beating Tyre Nichols to death, it is a stark reminder of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. That set up the largest protests in U.S. history and a national reckoning with racism. But beyond any protests, every police killing –…
