Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • June 20, 2012 school and at home with rather lurid computer games and cartoons which, in substance, encouraged him to distance himself from reality. The result was that, until late in the game, the one literary genre he liked was mythology. My hope for Wally is that he never gives up on himself, finds gainful employment with the help of his strongly supportive family, and eventually learns to enjoy reading. This is not a big reach from where he is now, based on the sort of spelling and knowledge of the world one encounters on the Web, especially with regard to politics. Most people who write responses to online news stories see the world as polarized between good guys and bad guys. Wally can analyze problems better than a lot of people even now. This is not a great challenge for him. Was my time spent with Wally a failure or a success? I think it was both. Wally did not get into Princeton, like my student from down the street, nor did he get his choice of three architectural and engineering schools, like his older brother. But the young woman who was accepted to Princeton had a different issue: No one in her family, or apparently on the faculty of the competitive high school she attended, knew enough about literature or American history to engage an IQ that is higher than my own. Smart people have issues with boredom. They are easily stultified, rather as a healthy athlete might be by having no dumbbells that weigh more than 10 pounds. She is now working on her second graduate degree after internships in international journalism and diplomacy. Three of my other students have been admitted to medical school, and one has already graduated. Three more have served as translators for articles published in national magazines. In perspective, I did not fail Wally, and Wally did not fail me. He went the distance, improved his performance, vastly improved his socialization skills, dealt with his anger issues, and became a full-fledged, worthwhile human being. Over the distance of three generations, I think I can also say he became a friend, just as Milo, and my researchers and translators did. Wally succeeded in one important aspect: He survived. I would never dream of commenting on individual cases, but a lot of the teen suicides that have become a heartbreaking feature of life in northwest Bergen County have academic overtones or, let us say, academic undertones. Where I grew up – a town with few aspirations to the Ivy League – people who committed suicide generally did so for romantic reasons that sometimes verged into economic reasons. I try not to write about these cases when they happen to avoid inspiring copycat suicides, but the police and the emergency personnel all know about them. I try not to judge, either. Most of us have at least thought about it. Today, a lot of kids kill themselves not because they could not get into a college, but because they could not get into their dream college. This happens a lot. Still more harrowing are the more isolated cases of students who do the sleep-deprivation thing, get into the dream school, and then decide it was not worth it. My daughter told me about a case some years ago where a young man she knew by sight, having graduated from Princeton with honors, got into Harvard Medical School and graduated in the top half of his class. He now had a chance to save and improve lives and make a lot of money at the same time. At the graduation party at the shore, the new doctor – a competition swimmer in college – had just a few drinks, swam out to sea, and was never seen again. Nobody who knew him thought he was dumb enough to do something like that by accident. College is important, if you really want to be there and have the cerebral wiring to handle it. College is not to die for. The one college you insist on is especially not to die for. A live EMT who saves 20 lives a year and supports a family has done America and the world a whole lot more good than a Harvard Medical School guy who kills himself to send somebody a message. I cast no stones. The death of a person with that kind of brain power and self-discipline is a major loss to America. People who have studied the near death experience report that the two messages survivors bring back are: Never kill anybody else, and, above all, never kill yourself. The third message is that many survivors regret not spending more time with their families, but no survivor regrets not having spent more time at the office or having more money in the bank. I suspect that my signal failure was a success of sorts. Wally may skip or postpone college, but he is alive, and aims to stay that way. ing the names of parties to, and the approximate dollar amounts of any contracts to be acted upon, which the council claims would delay the award of contracts and could lead to the loss of grant monies. The OPMA reform contains a requirement that the governing body may discuss, but not act upon, an item brought up by a citizen at a public meeting if it was not published as an agenda item. The council believes this would not only run contrary to the time honored tradition of holding a public meeting for the very purpose of soliciting such input and acting upon it, but is impractical, ineffective, and unnecessarily inhibits the operations of municipal government. The legislation would require advance notification of estimated start times for the public portion of a meeting and the portion of the meeting from which the public is to be excluded. The council described this requirement as unworkable and disruptive. According to the council, a proposal that recordings of meetings become a part of the minutes/permanent record is not only counter to the established records retention schedule of Division of Archive and Records Management, but would be costly to carry out. The proposed OPMA reform would also require that emails and text messages concerning public business among an effective majority of the members that occurred prior to a meeting become part of the minutes and would make them permanent municipal records. The council claims this proposal is unworkable and unmanageable as the technology does not always exist to make hard copies or digital copies of text messages, and the records custodian does not always have access to them. The proposed legislation would also require that public bodies be permitted to exclude the public from discussion of personnel matters only with the written consent of the employee and potentially affected employees. The council claims this would inhibit the public bodies’ ability to take necessary actions on personnel matters, could lead to costly litigation, and would require that comprehensive meeting minutes include each council member’s stated reason for their actions or vote, the identity of each member of the public who spoke, and a summary of what was said, so that the information would be available to the public as soon as possible but no later than 45 days after the meeting. The other night, I said farewell to Wally, who represents a failure of which I am rather proud. Wally is my first tutorial student who did not get into college, but he is still alive. I inherited Wally from the family of Milo – neither kid lives around here, and these are not their real names – and I worked with him for three years. Wally was a troubled student from Square One, as his parents and teachers had the honesty to admit. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, and while he also has a high IQ, he could not concentrate on taking tests or discipline himself to keep from letting his teachers know that he knew some of them were clueless. Milo had different issues. He had a congenital weak heart, so much so that he had taken several trips to the hospital and was not expected to live. He was bright, and very brave. At one point, he reportedly corrected the terrified young ER physician’s procedure, talked the physician out of a momentary panic, and got his own treatment back on track. Based on this and on his almost uncanny ability to learn Japanese, which was not his first language, my wife dubbed him an honorary samurai. (She has the credentials to do so.) By focusing on the academic subjects he actually liked, and on his superb skill at scale modeling, Milo got himself admitted to three different four-year colleges that specialized in architecture and engineering. Wally gave me a greeting card at our last lesson last week. He wrote: “Of all my tutors that I have had not one was able to understand me or push me in a way that I was willing to work with then. No one but you. So thank you once again and I hope you have a happy and healthy life.” In final tribute to my diligence, every word was spelled correctly. I told Wally what I hope and believe is true. His sort of mental wiring tends to palliate with maturation, and five years down the road he may actually be able to attempt some sort of academic performance. Wally is definitely not stupid, and I never took him to be stupid. The teachers he dealt with professionally told me he had an IQ of 28, but this was because they evaluated his written test without realizing that his problem was his catastrophically short attention span, not his ability to absorb knowledge, especially from visual sources. When I first encountered Wally, he could barely be forced to read a paragraph or write a sentence. When I left, he had finished “The Star Rover” by Jack London, and described the various episodes of that amazing exercise in imagination so I knew he had actually read it. He was capable of writing sentences that showed he understood SAT words that were almost free of error. He also wrote poetry to imaginary girlfriends and ultimately to a genuine girlfriend. Unfortunately, the years when he had been diagnosed as having a seriously sub-normal IQ as opposed to a very bad attention span had enabled Wally to avoid reading and writing to such an extent that he never developed the affinity for the written word one needs for academic completion without extreme self-discipline. Wally spent most of his time in My signal failure was a success of sorts Bills opposed (continued from page 12) is a special service charge, the requester must be provided, at no cost, an index generally describing the responsive government records to be provided. To the greatest extent possible, the index would have to include the name of each record or a brief description of the record or general categories of records, a detailed breakdown of how the special charges were assessed, and, if records are exempt or redacted, the records custodian must provide a description of those records. The proposed OPRA legislation would also prohibit the assessment of a special service charge for requests for budgets, bills, vouchers, contracts, and public employee salaries and overtime unless the request is deemed voluminous, which the council claims is undefined and subjective. Regarding the OPMA reform, the council supports the right of the public to be present at all meetings of public bodies, and to witness in full detail all the phases of the deliberation, policy formulation, and decision making of public bodies because it considers that right vital to the enhancement and proper functioning of the democratic process. The council believes, however, that the proposed legislation will not only be a cost driver for local and state government, but will make government less effective. The council strongly urges the State Senate and Assembly to oppose these bills. The OPMA reform includes a number of proposals which the council claims involve costly unfunded mandates, impractical requirements, and impediments to the democratic process. Those proposals include a new definition of subcommittees that is so inclusive that even research projects assigned to one member of a public body could be covered, a requirement that all subcommittee meetings include notice of their meeting and the preparation of minutes, which would, among other things, necessitate additional administrative support for all meetings of subcommittees and increased legal advertising costs. The bill also contains a new requirement that meeting agendas provide a description of all agenda items, includ-