SAGE ADVICE

By MARK SAGE/Columnist

Every morning I get a coffee. Most mornings I buy a milk to go with it. Sometimes a sausage biscuit, too. Point is I do a lot of trading at the Exxon in Atkins. It’s close to my house, more or less on the way to work. The proprietors are neighbors. And I’m a creature of habit. There’re other reasons I like stopping there. It gives me a chance to witness the daily parade of friends and neighbors and, I guess, participate.
And I like it, maybe most of all, at least today, because they allow my dad to do the types of things my dad does. When I got my coffee this morning, I was met by a note from my father near the notices for a Jan. 31 charrette at Atkins Elementary School at 7 p.m. It read, “From Dictionary.com – Charrette: A final, intensive effort to finish a project, esp. an architectural design project, before a deadline.”
The charrette in question is supposed to allow my neighbors and I a chance to offer our two cents concerning the future of Smyth County schools. It’s the audience participation number during the nearly three-year school efficiency review concert.
The Smyth County school superintendent told the News & Messenger that no one could argue facilities weren’t in the need of an upgrade. I’m assuming he said that as a challenge to me to come to the charrette and argue just that, but I’ll resist.
The News & Messenger also explained that after all us charretterones get done with our charretting, the consultants will take all the information they’ve dredged up and design a master plan. That could include consolidation, the paper said. Ooops. If the “c” word, consolidation not charrette, doesn’t get folks out then nothing will. Unless everyone is scared off by the other “c” word – charrette not consolidation. In 2006, the consultants said that 13 schools too many for Smyth County, according to the paper. However, he didn’t say why. It could have been that he was just one superstitious charrette. The paper didn’t mention whether or not he said schools ought not ever pick the black cat as a mascot. It did say the word came from the French word for cart. And somehow these carts were related to architectural designs or 19th century French architectural students. Nowadays, according to several Web sites, the word refers to any collaborative session in which a group looks to solve some kind of a design problem.
Here’s what I think, despite the fact that the newspaper and my father did their best to explain it, our first design problem is with the term charrette. We should hold a charrette to figure out another word for charrette. I would turn to my father for help, but thesaurus.com didn’t list any. Perhaps we can form a charrettee committee with various subgroups with the charge of discovering a new way to take an easy-to-understand premise and convolute it so that people would rather spend their time hanging out at the Atkins Exxon talking about what charrette might mean and how one might pronounce it without sounding like a total tool or feeling like your bumming a smoke than go down and be a part of something that was billed (in my mind at least) as sort of like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” but not as fun.
Maybe we could just call the meetings public input sessions to discuss consolidation and other issues. Come to think of it, they probably thought of that. That’s why they called them charettes.
Contact Mark Sage at 228-6611 or .