Thursday, 8:00AM. 65 degrees, wind S, calm. The channel is mostly obscured by fog. The sky is partly cloudy and the barometer predicts sunny skies.
It is another very quiet morning, and I realize at last that another reason for it is that the school bus no longer visits our neighborhood. The few kids that had ridden the bus have graduated, transferred to Washburn or other public and parochial schools, or have moved away. The declining population of school age children in our small Northern Wisconsin communities has negatively affected all the districts, reducing state aid, making each school district more expensive, less effective and more isolated. As real estate taxes necessarily rise, more families leave, and as curriculums shrink more kids are transferred out. Everyone is reluctant to address the root causes of the decline, and so the school bus no longer visits our neighborhood.
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