Adjusting to small town life.

[rue]

^ Sounds perfect! You're very lucky to live there

 

[Captain Neon]

The best place that I have ever lived was a town of about 25,000 people in Southern Minnesota. Just small enough that you knew people, but just big enough to have easy access to day-to-day needs and wants. One could go months and never leave the city proper, and not even really realise it until they did leave town for some adventure. I knew my neighbours, and we all respected each other. I would move back in a heartbeat, despite the nasty winters, but my career aspirations and the town's largest employer do not coincide, i.e. I asked them for a job once I was qualified and they have turned me down multiple times. I have stopped trying. They want kids straight out of college, and I have 14 years of employment baggage. Probably the only company that I would consider leaving my current job for.

I most recently lived in what can only be characterised as a dying rural town. Population has been steadily declining since 1946. I worked for the only remaining big employer in town. I worked the afternoon shift (3 PM to 1 AM), 6 days/wk. Town has a population of about 5000. 90 minutes to get any where. All community activities take place while I was working so I rarely had opportunities to interact. When I did meet people in the community and told them what I did for a living I was usu. shunned or pitied. Once I had been there a few months, and closed on my house that I now can't sell or get rented, I found out why. Most people holding the position I had lasted about 4 months. Locals got shifted to positions away from the guy, and non-locals that had moved there had quit and moved away. I managed to last about 26 months, a record. Hindsight being 20/20, my now ex-boss is so incompetent that he hires people, works them to death, and then bullies them so badly that they eventually quit. When his annual reviews come up, he simply blames every thing on the person that had just left. Now that I have an equivalent position at a plant of similar size, I honestly do not know what the man does all day, but sit in on conference calls and meetings, and take credit for every thing his subordinates do, and blame them for every thing that goes wrong. After 10 years, one would think the huge conglomerate that owns the factory would have long since figured out what is going on, but the facility is so inconsequential that it is all but forgotten in the day to day shuffle. As long as it continues to show a meagre profit, it really isn't noticed.

The schools are horrible. Most kids graduating from the school flunk out of remedial classes at the local juniour college. The kids that don't have family at the local factory join the military or farm. The kids that have family in the factory, and the best chances at a job there, believe that the factory exists solely for them to get a paychecque. Management knows that if the plant were to go on strike the plant would close so the local union has gotten such a good contract that it more or less amounts to a workforce that comes to work when they feel like coming to work. In my tenure there, I never saw or heard of an hourly union employee disciplined for any thing but attendance issues. The attendance policy is so generous that the only way one could get fired for absenteeism was if one really put some extra effort in not coming to work. I won't go into all of the details, but there are employees that are gone over 50% of the time, have been missing that much for over 10 years, continue to keep their job, and have even gotten promotions and raises. With few exceptions, the whole town is like this.

 

[O2BSwank]

Makes me glad that I live in a big, impersonal, anonymous city.

 

[DNO]

Makes me glad that I live in a big, impersonal, anonymous city.

No kidding! The comment about the schools really shakes me. I spent 35 years as a teacher and dept head in a high school...if our students had been performing that poorly, we would have viewed it as a serious failure on our part. We'd have worked hard to improve...really hard. "The schools are horrible"...makes me wonder about the staff, the board and the parents...what's wrong with them? I think I'll just stay put in my city...there may be more than 3 million of us crowded on the shore of Lake Ontario with a serious embarrassment as a mayor, but we don't have stories like this one.

 

[sheeplady]

No kidding! The comment about the schools really shakes me. I spent 35 years as a teacher and dept head in a high school...if our students had been performing that poorly, we would have viewed it as a serious failure on our part. We'd have worked hard to improve...really hard. "The schools are horrible"...makes me wonder about the staff, the board and the parents...what's wrong with them? I think I'll just stay put in my city...there may be more than 3 million of us crowded on the shore of Lake Ontario with a serious embarrassment as a mayor, but we don't have stories like this one.

Some of it has to do with the way schools are funded- they are not desirable places to work and cannot raise the taxes to fund stable programs. They are basically a revolving door for new teachers who get burnt out. The students who graduate don't typically stay in the area and the cycle remains unbroken. My rural school had a 80% graduation rate- the city school district where I live now has a 45% graduation rate. Hands down my school was better just by the odds of graduating.

I want to send my child to a rural school district. I can supplement their education as a parent, and I think it's important to see economic diversity first hand and not have it be some abstract concept that is learned as an adult. I also think we're all in this together. If all the more prosperous families who can afford private education pull away from the public schools, that will not improve the situation. In addition, unlike the cities, rural areas typically do not have private programs or charter schools available; moving away from the public school systems in general hurts those who do not have those options.

But I am also a strong supporter of free public education.

 

[DNO]

Some of it has to do with the way schools are funded- they are not desirable places to work and cannot raise the taxes to fund stable programs. They are basically a revolving door for new teachers who get burnt out. The students who graduate don't typically stay in the area and the cycle remains unbroken. My rural school had a 80% graduation rate- the city school district where I live now has a 45% graduation rate. Hands down my school was better just by the odds of graduating.

I want to send my child to a rural school district. I can supplement their education as a parent, and I think it's important to see economic diversity first hand and not have it be some abstract concept that is learned as an adult. I also think we're all in this together. If all the more prosperous families who can afford private education pull away from the public schools, that will not improve the situation. In addition, unlike the cities, rural areas typically do not have private programs or charter schools available; moving away from the public school systems in general hurts those who do not have those options.

But I am also a strong supporter of free public education.

Couldn't agree more about public education...not a fan of 'private' schools.

I taught at an all-boys high school. We had a uniform, etc. but it was public and free...no tuition, no entrance exam. We viewed it as our job to educate every single boy who walked through the door...gifted, challenged...all. Over the 35 years of my career, the school had its ups and downs but the philosophy never changed. When other 'public' schools were adopting the 'academy' approach and weeding out the more challenging students we continued to welcome them. The school still does and it has become one of the highest rated high schools, public or private, in Ontario and, frankly, in Canada. And it deserves it. I was proud to spend my career there.

 

[Gregg Axley]

I attended a Christmas event in a small town Friday night.
This was in the town my inlaws live, in South East Texas.
The last census showed 4100 people, now that's small!
One grocery store, one small Walmart, and a Dairy Queen that used to take personal checks (some truckers came through and wrote a few hot checks 5yrs ago and the policy was changed).
Back to the Christmas events. They had 2500 people out to see the town square lit (there was a count down to turn the lights on), Boy Scouts selling brownies and cookies, hot chocolate, and the HS band playing Christmas songs. Yeah I live in an impersonal town, like many, and events like this are long gone.
Instead of things like this in the paper, I get to read how many died as a result of senseless violence or drugs.
The event I went to Friday night really set me in the Christmas spirit, because it showed me that there are still small towns out there that get together as a community, to celebrate something simple as lighting the town square.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We do that here every Saturday-after-Thanksgiving -- after dark in the early evening there's a parade thru downtown with local businesses sponsoring floats, and the final float of the evening is always Santa Claus. This year it was unnaturally mild, so there were more kids than ever, and they ended up stalling the parade and allowing St Nick to hold court until all the kids were attended to. The sleigh was stopped right in front of our theatre marquee, so there was plenty of light, and they must've sat out there for an extra hour.

We did a killer business that night selling takeout popcorn, so I was as in the holiday spirit as I ever get.

Our community Christmas tree is a gigantic pyramid of lobster traps. You won't see that in Manhattan.

 

[AtomicEraTom]

They just did the Christmas Parade in Portage a couple weeks ago. It was nice and the tree is beautiful, but they picked the worst time to close off two highways, 5 o'clock on a Friday night.

 

[rue]

We just had our town square parade and courthouse lighting too

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

This is the Topix page from my hometown. Warning: it's pretty ugly.
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/winchester-in

:eeek:

I've never seen so much high school drama in one small town. It seems like every other topic is something on the order of this person or that is a total skank. I looked up the page for the city where I live and it's comparatively sedate.

 

[Carl Miller]

I have always felt that Santa Rosa (pop. 167,815) was small town compared to the cities around me (San Jose, San Francisco, Oakland, and Fremont)

I think I'd go crazy in a town that rolls up the sidewalks after dark.