Raymond town manager reflects on first weeks on the job
Crocker, who was officially appointed to the position on May 20, previously served as director of parks and recreation for five years. According to a Facebook post from the Parks and Recreation Department celebrating his appointment to the role of town manager, Crocker's tenure saw major new installations such as a snack bar and bathrooms at Tassel Top Park, as well as the construction of tennis and pickleball courts, and over 50 programs and events being "built from the ground up."
Crocker first took on the role of interim town manager after his predecessor, Sue Look, stepped down after a year in the position. Crocker told Lakes Region Now that Look accepted another job closer to her home in Pittsfield.
When asked about what the most important issue facing the community of Raymond was, Crocker said his main focus in the early days of his tenure has been the Jordan Small Middle School Visioning Committee. The committee is in the later stages of presenting possibilities for what could be done with the soon-to-be-vacant building. Noting that the committee was charged by the Select Board to gather information in a relatively short period of time, Crocker praised their efforts, particularly committee head Peter Lockwood.
The middle school is due to be shuttered in 2027, when Raymond and Windham plan to merge their middle schools into a single building, and the old building will be turned over to the town. The committee, which includes representatives from the Comprehensive Plan Committee, the library and a senior citizens group, among other stakeholders, was formed earlier this year to discuss potential uses for the school building. Possibilities include facilities for seniors, and a new home for the library or community center.
While Crocker did not directly indicate his preferred use to Lakes Region Now, at a Select Board meeting in late 2024, he mentioned how Westbrook had successfully converted a former school into a community center.
When asked what lessons he is carrying over from his previous role as parks and recreation director, Crocker said he was hoping to focus on community development. Parks and recreation, he said, was about community building, and providing services that are valuable to all community members, whether children, adults, or senior citizens. As town manager, he said, he wanted to make sure that he kept building on those services, and trying to adapt as those services are implemented.
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Yahoo
42 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Threat to close beloved Pierce Co. Facebook group of 10K had a surprise ending
It's weathered the COVID-19 pandemic, intense political divisions and community drama. It's where you go when you've lost your dog, need a helping hand or need a laugh. It makes a peninsula spanning 65 square miles, much of which only has one dwelling per ten acres, feel a little less like an island. It's the Key Peninsula, Washington Facebook group. 'We had some marriages out of it,' Susan Freiler Mendenhall said, recalling when the group hosted a meet-up at a local restaurant, and a couple left together and later tied the knot. (She attended their wedding.) The Key Peninsula resident, age 70, has lived in the community for 38 years. After 14 years of administering the Facebook group with a small team of other admins, keeping it 'family-friendly' and prohibiting profanity or discussions of partisan politics or religion, she finally believed it was time to bring it to an end. She posted in the group on July 7, announcing her intent to close the group of nearly 10,000 members by the end of the year. She explained that an accident in April left her hospitalized and dealing with some serious health issues. She figured participants could just switch over to other existing Facebook groups for Key Peninsula residents. Her announcement sparked a flood of messages from people reaching out to tell her how much the group meant to them, she told The News Tribune. Several offered to become admins themselves. 'That surprised me,' she said. It also got her thinking. Maybe she didn't need to close the group down. On July 23, she made another post in the group, announcing her intent to let it continue, with two new admins. One of the new admins is Thomas Lancaster, a 25-year-old Key Peninsula resident who said he's been part of the group for going on a decade. His memory of the group goes back even farther, when his dad was part of the group, he said. One day, his dad lost a uniquely-designed cane that he used regularly to walk around and had owned for 30 years. The cane was special because it had grown directly off of a tree and wasn't 'something anyone carved or made,' Lancaster recalled. 'He put out posters and stuff and posted on the local Facebook page, and eventually somebody actually got back to him because they saw one of the posts,' he said. There are many other stories about how the page has helped build community. In 2023, Key Peninsula resident Connor Wiley posted a fake message for an April Fools' Day prank saying that a stalled restaurant project, 2 Margaritas, had finally opened, The News Tribune reported. After the post gained traction, Richard and Cheryl Miller added to the conversation and announced they'd be making tacos for the community in the 2 Margaritas parking lot. They served nearly 150 tacos in the first 90 minutes. 'And did I mention how many lost dogs we've reunited with owners? Often it's one a week!' Freiler Mendenhall wrote in a follow-up message to The News Tribune. She added that neighbors have helped one another through power outages, getting stuck in snow and running out of gas. Some time ago, Freiler Mendenhall started the 'Blue Tarp Awards' as a way to recognize those who did 'something outstanding in the group.' The name came after someone left the Facebook group in a fury, posting that they would 'rather not be associated with you kp elitist trash,' and members started joking about 'how the KP had a lot of blue tarps, or how you had to own a blue tarp to live in the KP,' Freiler Mendenhall wrote. They later adopted a blue tarp as the group's flag, and would put one up during meet-ups, she said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the group started a new tradition: Meme Mondays, to give people something to do, she said. And they've always had Traffic Tuesdays, a designated day to share traffic-related concerns and prevent traffic from dominating the discussion every day. A particular guardrail has become a running joke on the page. The barrier is on the right side of state Route 302, a mile or so coming off of the Purdy Bridge toward Key Center. 'Someone always hits it,' Freiler Mendenhall wrote. 'We ran a contest once to guess what date it would get destroyed again.' Other community groups spawned from the Key Peninsula, Washington group, including Key Pen It Clean, a group that gathers volunteers to clean up local roads. Volunteers recently collected 50 trash bags across 3 miles on Lackey Road and the Key Peninsula Highway, the group posted on July 13. Key Pen It Flavorful was another subgroup that exchanged meal photos and recipes. Another group, KP Cares, came together after Key Peninsula resident Mindy Taylor had the idea of raising money for victims of the Oso landslide in 2014.A bake sale raised over $3,700 in two days, and additional donations through Facebook brought the total to $4,000, according to The News Tribune's archives. Taylor joined forces with Freiler Mendenhall, Sylvia Wilson and Marilyn Hartley, and they started the KP Cares group to raise funds for other residents in crisis on the Key Peninsula. KP Cares became a 501(c)(3) organization, stating that its purpose or mission was to 'help people in crisis with resources and financial assistance, primarily on the Key Peninsula,' and that funds 'will be raised primarily through bake sales, car washes, and donations from local businesses.' Taylor posted in the Key Peninsula, Washington group in 2021 that she was closing down KP Cares in September of 2021. By then, the group had raised $55,000 for residents in crisis, she wrote. 'We have been able to assist with rent, mortgage payments, power bills, funeral expenses, and Christmas gifts,' Taylor wrote in the post. 'During the heat wave we provided 25 fans for our vulnerable residents.' Freiler Mendenhall said that the community is grieving Taylor's passing from cancer this month. Hartley, one of the other founders of KP Cares, died in June 2022, according to her obituary in the Key Peninsula News. Lancaster, the 25-year-old Key Peninsula resident who offered to be a new admin, said he wants the Key Peninsula, Washington Facebook group to remain 'a good community resource.' The page has always been family-friendly, hasn't allowed profanity and asks users to steer clear of partisan politics or religion as topics of discussion, Freiler Mendenhall said. Lancaster said he believes a good admin is one who's impartial and keeps personal opinions or feelings from affecting how one monitors the page. 'I'm not too worried about it,' Lancaster said. 'You just got to police it a little bit.' Freiler Mendenhall has had to do a fair share of that. She recalled the admins years ago spending 'a lot of time personally asking people to tone it down' or trying to get them to understand the group's purpose and parameters for appropriate participation. 'We've gone through a couple of periods where people chose a subject and then hung on to it to the point where we needed to intervene and so some people were removed,' Freiler Mendenhall said. She had an experience recently where someone whom she described as 'a very decent person' took over the page and began posting in the group 'as if it was their own personal profile.' She tried talking to the person in private, but the person's constant messages took up a lot of her time. And it gets old when upset users talk badly about you in other groups, she continued. ' ... it's probably what contributed to me thinking I got to stop doing this,' she said. Asked if a recent dispute that played out on the Facebook page about flags on Purdy Bridge affected her decision, she said 'no, not at all.' The News Tribune reported that some two dozen rainbow Pride flags appeared on the Purdy Bridge in mid-June and were taken down shortly after, leading to speculation on social media about who might have removed them. The Washington State Department of Transportation confirmed that state employees took down Pride flags on the bridge between June 10 and June 11 because it is illegal to attach flags or banners to state-owned bridge structures. Most of the time the members of the Key Peninsula, Washington Facebook group know what to do, Freiler Mendenhall said. 'That's probably one of the biggest reasons I'm not as active is that the members self-regulate,' she said. 'They know the rules and they tell each other what the rules are.' The News Tribune's archives contributed to this report. Solve the daily Crossword
Business Insider
13 hours ago
- Business Insider
Welcome to the college parent group chat
The anticipation of moving into a college dorm brings a flurry of questions: Do RAs monitor who cleans the bathrooms? Are the windows drafty, or should students bring a fan to beat the heat? Are there schedules for using the laundry room? Where can you hang up your wet towels? But the above aren't questions from incoming freshmen. They're typed out from anxious soon-to-be empty nesters in Facebook groups for parents of college students. They want to know as many details about the unknown as possible, down to whether their children need to bring their own toilet paper. Some questions are practical and logistical: where to find parking spots or places to eat when visiting for parents weekend. Others are so inane they offer a glimpse into a new era of helicopter parenting, when moms and dads micromanage every aspect of their children's lives into adulthood, from scheduling their medical appointments to arranging their bathing routines. For Gen Xers — who make up the majority of parents of today's teens and young adults — access to unlimited information about their kids started early. There are apps that allow parents to record the color, texture, and size of the contents of each soiled diaper. Youth sports and extracurriculars have become so competitive that parents are tapping into group chats to learn the secrets to securing spots with the best coaches and instructors. They're looped into emails from schools with constant updates about their kids' grades. And as getting into top colleges has become an American Ninja Warrior obstacle course of extracurriculars, parents have become round-the-clock managers and chauffeurs. Even once their kids are off to college, many parents don't want to let go: Tracking family members with location sharing has become a norm rather than an invasion of privacy. Scrolling through some of these Facebook groups (there are thousands), parents post dimensions or video tours of dorm rooms and beds and ask whether desks will come with or without shelves in certain rooms. TikTok abounds with screenshots from the worst offenders, including a parent asking how to contact professors to introduce themself before any issues arise with their kid in class, and another floating the idea of asking a college to install a camera in their child's dorm room to check whether they're sleeping enough. There are also reports of some trying to set up playdates for their lonely 18-year-olds on campus. Meanwhile, professors are taking to Reddit to anonymously share horror stories of parents intervening in their kids' coursework, by emailing, calling, or even showing up and peeking into classrooms to see whether their kids are at their desks. One exasperated professor wrote that a parent "helpfully advised me that my (college algebra) lecture was a little dry and maybe if I told more jokes her daughter would come to class." Professors are taking to Reddit to anonymously share horror stories of parents showing up and peeking into classrooms to see whether their kids are at their desks. Much of Gen X — the latchkey generation stereotyped for being laissez-faire and adrift — has evolved into stressed, overwhelmed, hypervigilant parents. Parenting is "like a pendulum where we tend to overcorrect," says Amelia Kelley, an author and therapist who's also a millennial parent of young kids. "You have all these Gen X parents who were raised much more independently and free range, who are now being inundated with incredible amounts of information and technology and pressure for achievement with their kids." "Part of me thinks it's like, because we didn't have involved parents and maybe there was something missing, and they're trying to fill those gaps," says Christine, a Gen X mom of three kids (two still in college and one graduate) who asked me not to use her last name. Christine adds that tech, especially the arsenal of surveillance tools at their disposal, has played a huge role in her generation's hyper-watchfulness. Many Gen Xers became parents just as Facebook groups and Listservs were born, and their arrival upended old parenting trends. "You have so much access to everything that's going on," Christine says. She regularly watches all three of her children's locations from her phone, just to make sure they make it home safely. (She swears she doesn't really care whether they're out partying.) Even though she can track their every move, Christine says she wants her kids to be independent and views college as a safely bubbled state of quasi-adulthood. Part of that quasi-adulthood is financial — everything is too expensive for 18-year-olds to buy themselves. Whether it's lingering on the family phone or health insurance plan or getting help paying for rent, tuition, and meals, the financial web between parents and their children has grown more complex. With recent graduates struggling to find work, the half-baked adulthood era can continue even longer as they move back home. "We all know our kids are coming home after college for at least a year or two," says Tobey Grumet Segal, a freelance journalist who's the mother of a high schooler and a rising college sophomore. "We have to be part of their lives. They don't want us to completely step away, but it's a matter of deciding how much you want to put into it and when you feel it's best to stop." But there's no clear stop sign. Thanks to Facebook, Reddit, and group chats, parents can gossip with one another about what's happening inside that college bubble. A support group for parents of New York University students boasts nearly 8,000 members and averages several posts a day; one for the University of Wisconsin has nearly 9,000 parents. "We've been groomed, so to speak, to be part of these groups way before the kids left for college," says Erin Mantz, the author of the blog Gen X Girls Grow Up. The messages and group chats of parents started as early as preschool, she says, when she was organizing carpooling and sports with other parents. It's been a natural progression to join the Facebook parent groups at her two sons' colleges. And kids, Mantz says, want parents to be tapped in. "They don't necessarily want us to be sharing personal information or asking questions on their behalf to figure stuff out for them, but they don't want us to miss anything," she says. "And we're scared to feel like we might be out of the loop." But some of the questions lead her to wonder why parents are even posting. Mantz tells me she once saw a parent post that their kid had a headache for days, and they asked for advice on whether the kid should go to the doctor or take pain medicine. "That's kind of scary, honestly." For all their worrying and attentiveness, Gen X parents aren't sparing their Gen Z kids from stress. Seeing past groups she had joined devolve is why Grumet Segal hasn't joined an online group for her college-age son. What started as groups to share hand-me-down baby items within the community evolved into nasty fighting and divisive parenting opinions, she says. All of this over-involved parenting makes her wonder whether the pendulum will swing back when Gen Zers become parents. "I do wonder how we get out of this," she says. "It's almost like a death spiral of helicoptering." For now, the groups serve as outlets for parents to commiserate or vent their ever-rising stress. Last year, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy put out a public health advisory on the mental health and well-being of America's parents. "Something has to change," he wrote, and fixing the issue "will also require us to rethink cultural norms around parenting." In a 2023 American Psychological Association survey, one-third of parents with children younger than 18 reported feeling high levels of stress, up from 24% of parents in 2019. Parents of children under 18 were also more likely to report feeling stressed about money and to say that most days they were so stressed that the pressure interfered with their ability to function. But for all their worrying and attentiveness, parents aren't sparing Gen Z from stress. In the same 2023 APA survey, people 18 to 34 reported being more stressed than other generations on average. The amount of time young people spent socializing with friends in person dropped by about 70% between 2003 and 2020, a study from researchers at the University of Rochester found. Pew Research Center found in 2019 that the time spent on homework had doubled compared with high schoolers in the 1990s. All of this comes as colleges have become increasingly competitive. In the 2010s, college-bound high schoolers were applying to more universities than ever before, and admission rates at nearly half of the nation's colleges dropped by at least 10% between 2002 and 2017. For parents, the message has become that top students, athletes, and performers need full-time management to succeed in crowded pools. There's a balance to strike between parental involvement and suffocating kids with care. Dr. Gene Beresin, the executive director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, says that while the government deems you an adult at 18, adolescence lasts from about 14 all the way to age 26, when the brain fully develops. Still, some parents overcompensate during these years and may rob their kids of the ability to cope with failure and adversity. "They're trying to prevent unhappiness, and they're also trying to give the kids a hand," Beresin says. "Sometimes it's really important to let our kids fall and let our kids fail." All this said, it's not just parents who want the constant connection — many young adults continue to badger parents with Adulting 101 questions. Chip Leighton, a father of two who started posting his kids' zany questions to TikTok and wrote the book "What Time is Noon?" about the phenomenon, says it's mostly positive that teen and young adult children and parents yearn to stay connected, especially when there are so many search and AI tools that provide instant answers. "At the extreme, if the kids' first instinct is always to reach out to their parent for the answer, that's probably not great," he adds. Parents submit text messages from their kids to Leighton's TikTok, which takes lighthearted jabs at the pressing questions young people ask that seem dumb to those of us who have been filing our taxes for several years, such as: "What do I put for make of car? Metal?" "Why don't I get the child tax credit?" and "Am I tax exempt?" If college students and recent grads still get a helping hand from mom and dad, that might ease the transition to real adulthood. But for parents who stay plugged in, there comes a question of when the time to cut the chord actually is — is it graduation? When their kids get their first job? Not until their kids get married? I recently received a LinkedIn inquiry from a parent of a young journalist looking for her first "real job" who wanted networking advice for her daughter. The best advice I could think of was that it's time for her kid to start sending the networking DMs herself.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Woman Driven 'Mad' by Sister-in-Law's Posts About Dad Who 'Died 10 Years Ago': 'At What Point Is This Just Attention-Seeking?'
"It drives me mad. I've gone so far as to silence her," the woman said A woman is taking issue with her sister-in-law over social media posts she makes about her late father — who died a decade ago. In a post on the U.K.-based forum Mumsnet, the woman said her in-law's dad "died 10 years ago, and yet, it's almost daily, but definitely weekly, she's posting her grief on Facebook." The woman further detailed that her sister-in-law will write about "[how] much she's missing him, how grief is so silent and misunderstood," and it "escalates" on holidays — including Father's Day, Christmas and Easter — as well as "the day he died [and] the day they found out he was ill," plus "her kids birthdays [and] her birthday." "I used to get on with her well, but she's always driven me mad by text and socials," the woman continued. "At what point is this just attention seeking? It drives me mad. I've gone so far as to silence her because I can't bear the 'hope you're okay, hun,' stuff." The Mumsnet user added that her sister-in-law's "behavior has absolutely trashed my opinion of her," and it was exacerbated when she claimed her in-law "even got in competition with a relative of hers raising money for charity, because she had to be the one seen to be doing it and wouldn't collaborate." Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. In the comments section of the post, the woman was met with support from others, many of whom suggested that her sister-in-law needs professional aid to help her cope with the loss. "It sounds like she needs some counselling to help her manage her grief," one Mumsnet user wrote, as another said, "This sounds like an abnormal grief reaction. She really needs therapy, if she has not had this already." The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now! Others, meanwhile, couldn't help but feel that the woman's sister-in-law was taking things a step too far — and possibly continuing to post about her grief solely to get the reactions she has become accustomed to. "There's a huge difference between missing someone on special occasions or memorable dates and actually posting about it ... No need," wrote a commenter. Said one more: "It may be cruel of me, but I have no tolerance at all for performative or over-sentimental public grief." Read the original article on People Solve the daily Crossword
