Everybody’s welcome here

You can imagine my bewilderment, as a starry-eyed new Facebook user, to find that I am, for undisclosed reasons, persona non grata at one of the local Facebook sites on which school district issues are discussed. (Insert sad emoji here.) It would be nice if that site, on which our district’s chief operating officer and at least one school board member regularly comment, were accessible to the entire public, but apparently I’m too hot a potato, or something. I think I’ll survive this blow to my social standing, if only because I didn’t have much of a social standing to begin with.

This post is just to reaffirm the policy of this blog: Anyone can read this blog and post comments here. I don’t spike comments that I disagree with, and never have. I moderate the comments because I get a lot of commercial spam—which usually looks something like this—and I do delete the spam. It’s also true that I won’t let you post under someone else’s name, as someone did earlier this week, though you’re welcome to post anonymously or using a screen name. I suppose I’d rule out violent comments or comments that run down people’s kids by name, etc., though I’ve never had cause to. But I don’t spike comments because I disagree with them, as a quick look through prior posts will demonstrate.

It is true, unfortunately, that Blogspot’s comment system is bug-filled and just generally sucks. Sometimes, you may have to post a comment more than once to be sure it goes through, though most of the time it seems to work fine. It sometimes takes me a while to check the email and approve the comments, but if your comment doesn’t eventually appear, please post it again. If it’s a continuing problem, let me know by email (the address is in the sidebar) and I’ll try to find a workaround.

On the Hoover issue in particular, I’d really like to hear the pro-closure arguments (and, yes, respond to them). It’s always seemed so strange how seldom anyone has publicly articulated the arguments for the closure, not just on this blog but anywhere. If they’re sound, they can withstand a public airing, no?
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