It has come as a surprise to some of my friends in neighboring towns, but Windham doesn’t have all-day kindergarten. In days gone by, it was called sub-primary.

I think I’ve done well not to e-mail or call every school board member in my hometown to explain that all-day kindergarten does no harm and that the kids will get used to it a lot quicker than their parents will.

In fact, most of us older folks who crowd the voting booths on election day can probably remember when five-year-olds went to school all day and didn’t suffer a bit. We went to school all day – including Wednesdays – when we were five years old.

One board member mentioned the age when kids start school. The starting age back then was five. One of my sisters started at age four since her birthday was Oct. 2. Another didn’t start until the following year because she didn’t turn five until mid-November.

Did school management or parents have to have proof that more hours for learning would pay off down the line? No, it’s just the way things were. And look at us, those of us who walked to the end of the road in the dark winter mornings, clambered onto the school bus (filled with kids of all ages – we hadn’t learned yet that older kids didn’t “mix well” with younger ones. Most of us managed to get through 12 years of school, some of us even went longer and here we all are, trying to make sense out of some of these discussions.

The function of pre-school, when I was a child, was generally handled at home. That was a different time when it didn’t take two incomes per household to support a family with perhaps two children. Of course people generally lived within their means in those days. In my family there were several children (eventually six) and we spent a lot of time playing school, learning to read and write before we started school. Mostly this was accomplished by osmosis, the younger ones wanting to do what the older ones could.

Competition was a healthy concept in those days. Today, it seems the focus is on eliminating competition so that everyone “feels good.” In some schools, the best ranking student is melded in with the top ten. Pretending competition doesn’t exist, is a real disservice to young people. They will discover that after school, in the real world, life is all about competition.

Something else I wonder about is whether kids really need sidewalks to walk on to the bus stop if they live in a subdivision. I’ll bet they could walk there anyway. And if I know anything about kids, they will wander off the sidewalk at the first opportunity. Yes, they need a bus shelter and parents can just pray they’ll stay under it until the bus arrives.

In my opinion, putting sidewalks, and/or streetlights in a subdivision, in a farm zone further erodes the whole concept of “rural,” which we hear so much about. You can’t move into a 30-house subdivision with all the amenities of a city neighborhood and expect to also have rolling fields and hills and lots of full-grown trees to provide a beautiful view.

I probably should stop watching these town board meetings. Being an optimist, I keep thinking that sooner or later, common sense and/or reality is going to appear.

See you next week.