Currently regionalization is being considered on the Lower Cape on two fronts. The towns of Wellfleet, Eastham and Orleans have been meeting to discuss the possibility of merging their police departments. Meanwhile a committee in Provincetown considers bussing the town’s children an hour or two each way to the Nauset district in Eastham and Orleans.
Both these possibilities would, if acted on, have historic and far-reaching consequences for the towns affected and the whole Lower Cape area. From newspaper accounts of the deliberations , it would seem that in both cases there is a lot of emphasis on feasibility—affordability, efficiency– and too little on those consequences.
The history we learn in school—written by the winners, of course– suggests that the world inevitably goes from smaller units to larger ones and that that’s a good thing. 13 colonies become the United States, principalities and feudal fiefdoms become modern European countries and then the EU. Big units, with accompanying homogenization, are all seen as necessary and progressive evolution.
Those considering regionalization at the skinny end of the Cape seem to suffer from that same prejudice in favor of homogenization. As one Provincetown school committee member is quoted as saying, “Regionalization, we know, is inevitable. We all know it is coming. We’re trying to find out what is the easiest exit plan without upsetting the communities.”
However it may be at the national and international level, our towns offer a considerable amount of natural, inherent resistence to this trend–a model, in fact, of what’s good in staying small and discrete. Wellfleet and Eastham and Truro may look alike to a casual passer-through, but those living here cherish the distinctions. Dilute those wonderful differences by sharing a police czar ruling over the whole region? (Including, a Wellfleetian might grumble, such a fundamentally different country as Orleans for heaven’s sake? Why would we want to do a silly thing like that? Saving money would be nice, but heck, we might start voting Republican.)
Of the two proposed changes, the subsuming of Provincetown schools in the faroff district is the more poignant. The committee’s meetings as reported in newspaper articles have the feeling less of deliberating than of agonizing over the fate of its school children and potentially of the town character.
In a recent newspaper story it was revealed that studies have shown that there really is not much money to be saved by shipping the kids elsewhere anyway. Still there is the sense of the school, with its dwindling enrollments, as an anachronism, a vestigial organ.
A cartoon in the Provincetown “Banner” showed chagrined kids being handed pink slips.
The relevant text for this discussion is the famous cautionary tale about what happens when the kids leave town: the Nauset region as Pied Piper seducing kids from town, leaving it profoundly empty and soulless. Some, if not all, believe that a town without children isn’t really a town. There is a sense that for years the P’town has been leached o ut of P’town through gentrification and second home money. This loss of its schoolchildren would complete the process.
If ever a situation cried out for a Charter School, (or other such innovation) this is it. To bus kids away from Campus Provincetown with its rich background in the arts and its cultural and ethnic diversity would seem a huge disservice to kids and town alike.
Regionalization is too important a change to be decided on bottomline feasibility alone or unexamined prejudice in favor of combined units. One obvious place to start the deep study this issue deserves is the decision 50 years ago to bus Wellfleet’s middle and high school students upCape to the newly formed Nauset region. In all those years there has been strangely little interest shown in the effects of that momentous decision on students or towns.
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