I was really excited to someone sent along a photo for Hanson’s Around Town of their son reading the Hanson Express while on tour in Iraq.  I love seeing all the traveling Express photos come in, but the pictures of soldiers reading the paper mean something special to me.  It makes me really happy that someone a world away, living in the middle of the war, can check in with what’s going on in their hometown through our paper.  I hope that we give them some sense of normalcy in what must a completely insane situation.

We welcomed a new paper into the world this week, the Pembroke Express. If you’ve seen our sports reporter Dave around this week, and he’s looked like Christian Bale from The Machinist, he’s been a little busy trying to cover sports from four towns.  It’s always an exciting feeling to start a new paper, the East Bridgewater Express was the first I really oversaw from start to finish, and it was an exhausting, frustrating and ultimately rewarding experience.  I didn’t have too much to do with the Pembroke Express, but Josh Cutler our publisher and Becca Manning, our new reporter, have done an outstanding job and I have high hopes for the paper.

It’s a bit of a weird thing for me to sit through all these school budget hearings, and finance committee meetings at this time of year.  My wife is a teacher in Cambridge, and she was recently told along with other young teachers (those without what they call professional status) to “have a backup plan,” in the face of looming budget cuts.  This dosen’t mean have a backup plan for another teaching job, it means have a backup career plan.

The last time this happened was after the passage of Proposition of 2 1/2.  If you look at the population of teachers in Massachusetts, you’ll notice teachers are either really old or really young.  When Prop 2 1/2 passed, teachers without tenure lost their jobs and never got them back, going into other fields as the schools dealt with massive budget cuts and layoffs.  It scares me to think we’re headed in that direction again.