Community Meeting Fever

I am fresh from a community meeting tonight where I:

• met another mom of a Kindergartener, although her child attends a different elementary school than OC;


• met and spoke in depth with a school board member who used to live in the town we just moved from;


• met the Parent-Teacher Organization president at my child's school;


• heard the school superintendent, mayor, city manager, and other school board and community members speak about issues in the town: rumors circulated over past bond levies, complaints about education, etc. Not exactly Harper Valley-juicy, but good;


• experienced a heady rush from being in proximity and interacting with other adults and having a grown-up conversation.

I even got someone's phone number. Let's just take a moment to enjoy that fact, shall we?

. . .

I MET someone! A mom! With a kid! My age! And everything!

I was at the refreshment table when I said a few pleasantries to a friendly woman getting coffee. She poured me a coffee, and we got to talking. In the conversation that followed, I found out that she knew exactly where I lived because EVERYONE knows that house, apparently. She knows the family who lived here before us.

That family is the Kevin Bacon of Redmond; everyone knows them, somehow. Everyone also seems to know this house. (I hear this all the time: "Oh, you live on the corner of blankety and blank, in the green house? I know that house"...OR..."I know the people who used to live in the house"...OR..."I waited for that house to come up for sale before we bought our house"...!!!!!)

Weirder yet? The family that used to live in our house have two daughters. One is Kindergarten-age. Oh yeah, you guessed it: she's in OC's class, and what's more is, they are good friends. I thought we could have them over to play...on their old play structure in their old backyard. Or sleep over...in their old bedrooms.

Then, I found out that my new BFF works for the library. Hello! I love the library. I visit the library a LOT. Because there are people there, and if that doesn't work, there are books to read while I'm waiting to meet the people.

I was talking about the event last night. Right. The boring part is that it was the first in a new visioning process for the schools in this town. And boy, is there some history here! There's mistrust of the school district because of a bond levy a few years ago to do with a new high school, something about how the building would be used. I don't know, I wasn't here. That confusion came about because there were rumors circulating, information was not delivered or deciphered correctly, blah blah blah. I don't know anything more specific except that it was voted down.

When we were considering in which town to live in Central Oregon, a big black mark for Redmond was that it wasn't funding a new high school, while everyone we talked to who knew this town said the high school was overcrowded. We didn't want to live in a community that would have an attitude like that. But, we have a Kindergartener, and there is a new elementary school, so we decided that we had time to see what would happen and that it was likely a new high school would be built by the time OC got to high school-age.

Now, I've met some people. Finally! I have seen my future, and it includes more community meetings and lingering by the coffee and food tables in order to get phone numbers.