The state Office of Mental Health’s listening tour stop in Ogdensburg last week didn’t offer us much more insight into what will happen to the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center than we already had.

We will still have to wait for news of its fate. Acting Commissioner Kristin M. Woodlock said she hopes to have a plan for regional centers of excellence in place by Monday, but even if the plan comes about that quickly, OMH will have to get the blessing of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo before any announcement is made. That could take a while. I don’t recommend that anybody hold their breath.

What’s really frustrating is that it’s clear OMH has a plan that it’s just not sharing. Nobody could put together a sweeping overhaul of the state’s mental health system in five days. OMH officials have obviously been working on their plan right along and already had it pretty well finished by the time they arrived in Ogdensburg.

On the positive side, Wednesday’s session did provide a little more detail about the state’s plans to revamp its mental health care system, and gave community members the opportunity to say what was on their minds. It was, at the very least, a cathartic exercise for anyone who cares about the psychiatric center.

Mrs. Woodlock also had a positive message about the state’s vision for the future of mental health services. Our system is antiquated and needs an overhaul. More people would have a chance to live productive, positive lives in the community if they have the supports they need to make it on their own. Fewer people would be stuck in institutional care. The state wants parity between coverage and access for behavioral health care and the coverage and access already available for primary health care.

That is music to the ears of anyone who has been through the mental health system themselves or has a loved one who has gone through it. And the phrase “center of excellence” has a beautiful ring to it.

But those intimately familiar with the current system are understandably skeptical. They’ve heard it before, back in the 1980s when the state gutted its inpatient institutions and decided community-based care was the wave of the future. The problem was that only a small fraction of the money saved from downsizing institutional care actually went to community supports. The rest was absorbed by the state’s general fund and spent on everything under the sun but community-based care.

Funding was not enough to care for the people who suddenly found themselves on their own back then, and that has never changed.

This latest glowing vision for the future only works if OMH can guarantee that it will dedicate sufficient money, manpower and programs to meet the increased demand for outpatient services that downsizing inpatient care will create.

Glenn Liebman, CEO of the Mental Health Association of New York State, hit the nail on the head when he told me that the state needs to reinvest every last dime of the money saved from downsizing inpatient services into community-based services.

OMH cannot be expected to do that through policy decisions alone. It’s high time the state Legislature recognized that the funding it allocates for mental health services is woefully inadequate and does something to fix it.

The state has a long-standing commitment to caring for its most vulnerable. The mentally ill and those getting alcohol and substance abuse services have not been included in that commitment, and that needs to change. Their voices have been ignored for too long.

All we can do at this point is hope that OMH will do right by its clients, its employees, and the communities in which it plays a prominent role, and that state lawmakers will act to give the department the tools it needs to follow through on its promises.

Time will tell if everybody does the right thing. We will be watching.

Wednesday is an important day for the north country.

That’s the day state Office of Mental Health officials will hold a listening tour stop in Ogdensburg to ask us what we think the future of mental health care should be in the state, and, hopefully, when they will let us know more about their plans to that end.

So far we know this: state officials think there are too many inpatient mental health beds and more reliance needs to be on community-based support for the mentally ill. We don’t yet know what that view and a nebulous plan to establish “regional centers for excellence” built around that view holds for the future of the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center, its patients and the 520 people working there.

We don’t know for sure whether that means the center could close. But that’s not a chance any of us want to take. Its closure would have a devastating economic effect, not just on Ogdensburg and its surrounding communities, but the entire county and beyond. The potential loss of 520 jobs should have every business mobilized to tell state officials that their decisions leave St. Lawrence County’s fate hanging in the balance.

That’s 520 customers no longer able to afford to shop on our stores. That’s 520 people who might have to move away to find work. And, just as important, that’s lots of patients who might join the ranks of the mentally ill currently roaming our streets without proper support or care and without hope.

If you think our area is a ghost of its former glory now, just wait.

It could be that all this worry is for nothing, and I hope it is. We already know, however, that OMH proposed four unnamed psychiatric centers for closure in the state budget, a proposal that the Senate rejected. State officials also wanted to lift the required 12-month period for it to let hospitals know they would be closing. Again, that proposal was rejected.

Being rejected then only meant that those plans didn’t get into the state budget. That didn’t kill them for good.

It’s clear that under OMH’s plans to revamp state-run mental health care, being cheerily billed as the formation of “regional centers of excellence,” hospitals will close.

We do have some things in our favor to keeps ours open. It doesn’t make sense for the state to close a hospital as geographically remote as ours, which already serves the entire area north of Syracuse. It also doesn’t make sense for the state to close a hospital that has been recognized time and again for the high quality of care it gives its patients, and the relative cost-efficiency it affords the state in delivering that care.

But those things are in our favor only by assuming that the state makes logical decisions. We know that is not always the case.

When the state closed Utica Psychiatric Center a few years ago, according to state Sen. Joseph A. Griffo, it had just invested in a new building on that campus. Mr. Griffo, who represents Utica, has told me we shouldn’t take anything for granted. We should probably listen to the voice of experience on this one.

As of Thursday, there were more than 200 people registered to attend Wednesday’s meeting, which runs from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the psychiatric center’s Unity Center. Of those, more than 50 are registered to speak. I would bet that even more have registered since then and will register over the next few days. We’ll see you all there.

To register, go online to http://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/excellence/registration.html. Our newspaper’s website also has a quick link to the registration form. It’s on our homepage, www.ogd.com, at the top of the left column.

As a note to anyone who gave us a letter on this issue that does not appear in today’s edition, they will be published over the next few days in The Journal.

Keep those letters coming so the state can see how important the psychiatric center is to our community, its patients and their families and the economic well-being of our region. We don’t know how soon decisions will be made, so it’s important to keep reinforcing the message until they are.

The squeaky wheel has gotten the grease before. Hopefully it will again.

Good things come to those who wait.

That is the phrase to keep in mind when you consider the potential for Ogdensburg’s waterfront. One day, the city’s waterfront will be attractive to tourists, merchants and home buyers.

City officials earlier this week held a meeting to get residents’ feelings on the latest plans for four waterfront properties on their way to redevelopment. Those plans are the culmination of years of work.

It’s a major understatement to say the process is long to get these sites from contaminated eyesores that aren’t fit for any use to sporting businesses and/or homes and back on the tax rolls.

It takes decades, with a lot of blood, sweat, tears and frustration in between.

It’s easy for city residents to criticize officials for a seeming lack of work on these lands, many of which still sit vacant or worse, sporting unused, dilapidated buildings.

But these endeavors take a long time. Take the former Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. property in the town of Clifton, for instance. A ton of work over the last couple of decades has gone into getting it cleaned up to this point, and there is still a lot of work ahead to get it to a point where a business will operate there. Officials have opted to break off a smaller, less polluted portion of the overall 54-acre site so that at least some of it has a chance to be redeveloped in the foreseeable future.

It has taken so long, in part, because of bureaucratic red tape and government funding setbacks, but mostly because it just takes a really long time to clean up heavy contamination to a point where the land is no longer dangerous to anyone’s health. It takes testing, assessing, digging, more testing, more assessment and analysis, lather, rinse, repeat.

In the case of Ogdensburg’s waterfront, the city first had to acquire the lands and test to see how bad the contamination was, then had to apply for funding from the right programs and jump through the appropriate hoops to get it. Once the funding was granted, the agencies involved in getting those sites cleaned up had their own jobs to do, which, as outlined above, can take a really long time. We are finally at a point where city officials are considering concrete plans to direct how those parcels are going to be redeveloped.

Once those plans are in place, they will have market the lands to people willing to invest in business and housing projects. That process will be a whole other ball game that won’t play out overnight.

In the meantime, residents don’t see anything to show for all that work. Grass grows on these sites, and they attract the occasional bit of trash, but there is no visible progress. It’s easy to understand why so many people wonder if city officials are ever going to get off their duffs and do something with those properties because nothing has been built. It’s hard not to scoff when you hear them talk about all the progress that has been made.

But a lot of progress has been made. We are a long way from where we were 20 years ago with all of these properties, and it’s not like the decisions that have been made so far have been made in a vacuum. Residents’ feelings about what should happen have played a major role in the process. In that respect, the naysayers really have no right to complain.

Officials have not sat on their duffs. They are working on it. And once the process is done, Ogdensburg will be a better place.

We have to have faith that good things are on the horizon. And good things come to those who wait.

It’s easy to get so distracted by all the negativity in the world that we ignore the good things. We in Ogdensburg know that better than anyone. I don’t know what it is about our lot, but we love to complain about everything that is wrong with our community and hate to talk about the good things going on around us.

That’s why I think it’s important to call out good things when I see them.

The Greater Ogdensburg Chamber of Commerce has done right by the community by keeping up an initiative it started four years ago to encourage residents and businesses to improve their properties.

The main point of the program is to make our community more inviting for visitors in hopes that a good-looking city will encourage them to return. But it’s also important for those of us who are here every day. We are more affected by our environment than we realize.

When large swaths of the community are in disrepair, it doesn’t make us feel great about the place we live. We get stuck in a negative community mind set that leaves us believing that our community doesn’t deserve anything good. We are skeptical of any effort to improve the community as a result.

We, my friends, are a community suffering from low self-esteem. We have to dig ourselves out of that hole.

Initiatives like the chamber’s Gateways and Corridors program can help us take pride in the place we live, which, when you get right down to it, is a pretty great little corner of the world.

This time around, the chamber is encouraging residents and businesses along State, Main, Canton and Fine streets and New York Avenue to improve their properties. The improvements don’t have to be grand; a fresh coat of paint, some flowers and minor landscaping can go a long way to improving the appearance and general feel of a neighborhood.

Home and business owners who spruce up their properties get recognized every month, which helps them take even greater pride in their efforts.

Chamber officials will probably tell you they don’t feel they have gotten enough participation in the program over the years, but they’re being too modest. Even getting a handful of businesses and homes to improve their appearance goes a long way. Although not every home or business along Ford Street has participated in past efforts, the street is looking a lot better than it did a few years ago. The city is a better place as a result.

My hat is off to the chamber for keeping the program going and branching out to other parts of the city.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the other groups working to make a difference in the city’s appearance: the Pride and Beautification Commission, the Tree Commission and the Ogdensburg Garden Club.

They are all unsung heroes, working hard behind the scenes without getting the recognition they deserve. Every square inch of earth they till, every tree and flower they plant, every bush they trim and weed they pull, every basket hung from a lamp post counts. They deserve to be thanked more heartily and more often than they are.

The Ogdensburg Garden Club works hard to keep up the gardens in Library Park, the downtown Arterial and other visible places around the city. That work isn’t easy and it isn’t cheap. To help raise some money to pay for their efforts, the club is holding a “just for the birds” silent auction and sale Saturday from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Frederic Remington Art Museum building at 311 Washington St.

The club will auction 50 birdhouses of all shapes, sizes, colors and tastes. The few I have seen are magnificently crafted. A $10 ticket gets you a chance at a door prize as well. Plan to attend, and you might win a stunning quilt made by member Debbie Bruyere.

If we’re going to make our city a better place to live and work, we need to start by taking pride in our properties and supporting those who take the lead in improving our community. With their help and some initiative of our own, we can make our city one we can be proud to call home.

The tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon last week understandably made us all jumpy. St. Lawrence County officials proved that a few days after a misplaced lunch bag prompted the evacuation of the county office building.

Better safe than sorry is a good policy I suppose, but I couldn’t help laughing when I heard that somebody’s lunch caused all the trouble. The suspect lunch was in a bag that was left in an unusual place because its owner apparently had to set it down for one reason or another and forgot about it.

It brought me back to 9/11 and the anthrax scare that followed. Just about every day for a few weeks following, our newspapers carried reports of people finding suspicious powdery substances. In each instance, the substances turned out to be harmless, but only after the police and county’s hazardous materials response team were called.

I remember one instance where the office of a local college newspaper was evacuated and the hazmat team called because a suspicious powdery substance was found on a desk. That substance turned out to be dust from a bag of mints. Another woman reported a suspicious powdery substance in her cake mix. Those are just two reports that immediately come to mind, but there were many others. There were also reports for months involving suspicious people, vehicles, airplanes, you name it. Anything out of place was cause to alert the authorities.

I don’t typically gamble, but I do put a lot of stock in mathematical probability. The probability that a person or building in our neck of the woods would be a target for a terrorist attack or some other malicious act is slim to none. We have about 110,000 people in our county. Our numbers, while insufficient to garner the attention we think we deserve from time to time from the state and federal governments, are in our favor when it comes to how safe we are from terrorists.

I needed to find out why anybody would think it reasonable to conclude that a misplaced bag in a building in Canton carried something that could kill or injure a lot of people. I figured there must be some common psychological tendency behind last week’s county building evacuation and the widespread panic a dozen years ago about powdery substances.

I asked St. Lawrence University assistant professor of social psychology Mark Oakes what he thought about the phenomenon. Turns out there’s a name for it: availability heuristic.

In a nutshell, Mr. Oakes said the term refers to how often somebody thinks a particular event occurs based on how readily they remember that event. In other words, if you hear about a bombing and that story sticks in your mind, you might automatically think that bombings are more likely to happen than they actually are.

Case in point: if you see a bag where you wouldn’t normally see a bag, and you have a fresh memory of a recent bombing that involved a bomb in a bag left at the finish line of a major race, your brain might automatically associate the out-of-place bag you see with the bombing. As a result, you would conclude that bag is likely carrying a bomb.

With availability heuristic, your brain makes you jump to a particular conclusion quickly without making time for reason or critical thinking.

It sounds like a reasonable explanation for what happened at the county building last week. The conclusion that a bagged lunch left in an unusual place was a reason to evacuate could have been the result of somebody’s brain tricking them into panicking when there was no reason to panic.

We shouldn’t laugh too hard about it because we are all susceptible to this sort of thing.

I also think there is a lesson to be learned here. Erring on the side of caution isn’t a bad thing, but we need to force our brains to think before our brains force us to panic.

The horrible events in Boston put people on edge, especially since many of us have friends and family there. But everybody needs to calm down. This was a tragic but isolated incident. Remember that in the long run, probability is on our side. Force your brain to think before you call in the hazmat team to investigate a suspicious powdery substance in your cake mix.

The news last week that the state Office of Mental Health will include Ogdensburg on its list of meeting sites to gather input on a plan to downsize its number of inpatient beds for psychiatric patients is a mixed bag for us.

It’s good because OMH won’t end up ignoring that we do, in fact, have a state-run inpatient psychiatric hospital in our back yard and we might have some feeling one way or the other about what happens to it. Until last week, Syracuse was the farthest north OMH officials were planning to travel to hold a meeting on their “listening tour.”

The bad news is that the so-called plan to right-size care for the mentally ill is really too vague for anybody to get a handle on what the state is up to. It’s hard for anyone to weigh in on a plan that isn’t more than an idea, especially when that idea is wrapped in the notion of providing the best possible care for the mentally ill. Opposing that notion is like being against puppies and kittens.

As state Sen. Patty Ritchie told me last week, it’s hard to fight something when you don’t know what you’re fighting.

The state has only made part of its vague plan close to clear: the state has too many inpatient psychiatric hospitals and that states bigger than ours presumably get along just fine with only a handful of inpatient facilities. I believe an example on OMH’s website, www.omh.ny.gov, is that New York has 24 hospitals in state with a population of 18 million, while California, with its population of 37 million, has five inpatient hospitals. That means there is a pretty good chance some state-run hospital, somewhere, is going to close. Employees at the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Hospital in Ogdensburg are understandably worried that hospital is ours.

I’ve tried to get answers from OMH about the details of this plan, if you want to call it that. They haven’t responded.

It could be that they don’t have those details, which begs a question about why they would be trying to gauge public feeling about something they haven’t even thought out themselves. Or it could be that they’re holding their cards close because they expect there will be objections to their vision for the future. Neither scenario is great.

Coupled with the notion that we have too many inpatient psychiatric hospitals is the feeling by state officials that OMH has to do more to support mentally ill people so they can make it on their own. That’s something we in Ogdensburg have known for a long, long time. We see it every day, hopeless, lost and frightened on our streets.

It’s clear that the state’s outpatient mental health services are woefully inadequate. It’s also clear that the state will have to do a heck of a lot to turn that situation around, especially if inpatient treatment options are reduced. Again, details for what OMH has in mind to bolster outpatient services are nowhere to be found.

I hate to be cynical, but let’s face it. OMH does not have the best track record for being up front with the public about its plans. Back when the Sexually Violent Predators Unit was established here, getting any answers from the state about how it would come about was like pulling teeth. As somebody who pays attention to history and tries to learn from it, I don’t expect that the meeting they will hold here May 15 - from 10 a.m. to noon at the Unity Center on the psychiatric center campus - will yield many answers to the questions we have.

But what it will do is give us an opportunity to tell the state how we feel about the prospect of the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center closing its inpatient services and forcing people to drive hours to get the care they need. It will give us the chance to tell them how we feel about the evidence we see every day about how lacking their outpatient services currently are.

It will allow us to let them know we’re paying attention to what they’re doing.

We will be at the meeting with bells on. I predict we will have lots of company.

If you can’t make the meeting but you want to weigh in, you can submit comments to OMH online at http://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/excellence/comment_card.html .

There is nothing to do around here. I hear that phrase all the time, and it drives me nuts.

I hear it from people of all walks of life, but no matter how different their backgrounds, they must all have a common need to find their fun indoors.

Those of us who don’t burst into flames when sunlight touches them know how wrong those people are. There is a lot to do around here.

Spring is here, so I have obsessively been thinking about one thing: getting outside. I love — and I mean LOVE — the great outdoors. Camping, hiking, sitting on a beach, picnicking, getting out on the water in a boat, canoe, whatever can hold a fishing pole and a bucket, I love it all.

Over the years, I have collected some favorite spots: Higley Flow State Park in South Colton, Lampson Falls in the town of Clare, the Stone Valley trail behind the Colton Fire Station, and Bear Mountain at the state’s Cranberry Lake Campground, to name a few. But we have so many publicly managed areas for hiking, fishing and camping that my list of favorites will probably change once I get to explore the many, many areas on my list of places still to check out.

Even if camping or hiking isn’t for you, there are hundreds of waterside cabins available to rent a week at a time or for the whole season all over St. Lawrence County. You don’t have to go to a tropical location for your family to have a memorable, good time. You can find lasting family memories within a stone’s throw of where you live.

When I was a kid, my family rented a cottage for three weeks every summer on the St. Lawrence River just outside of Ogdensburg. Those times gave me the best memories of my childhood, and though it was only 20 minutes from my parents’ house it felt like a different world.

You don’t have to go far to find a good vacation spot or even just a good time for the day for your family.

If you need help finding a day trip, check out the Laurentian Chapter of the Adirondack Mountain Club’s outing schedule online at http://adklaurentian.org. The club holds outings year round. The state Department of Environmental Conservation also has a comprehensive listing of public recreation areas online that tell you where you can picnic, swim, camp or just enjoy the day reading a good book outdoors in peace and quiet. Its website is located at www.dec.ny.gov. Camping opportunities are listed via the state Department of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation website as well: www.nysparks.com.

There is actually so much to do that the options can get overwhelming. If you need help making a choice, give the nice folks at the St. Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce a call at 386-4000, and they can help point you in the right direction.

If you want to enjoy summer and you’re not into camping or hiking, that’s fine, too. Our newspapers publish a series of vacation guides starting in late spring highlighting the plethora of community festivals, museums, attractions, concerts and anything else going on over the summer. Keep your eyes peeled for our first one, which should be coming out in late May or early June. We can help keep you busy.

You say there’s nothing to do around here? I scoff at you. Plan to get outside with your family this summer and make some memories.

Once again I found myself unable focus on a single topic for the week.

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The St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center in Ogdensburg appears safe. For now. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s proposals to place more emphasis on outpatient care and downsize institutionalization for the mentally ill didn’t make it into the state budget. That doesn’t mean those plans are dead.

Our state lawmakers are still wary that plans to downsize institutional care will resurface and create a vacuum in services for people who need them. The state’s focus needs to be on improving the lives of people with mental illness, not finding the cheapest options to keep an already inadequate system lumbering along. Lawmakers have said they will remain watchful and fight any proposal that means the closure of our psychiatric center. Stay tuned.

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We published an article in The Journal Saturday highlighting the fact that even though the Ogdensburg City School District’s students, programs and staff are shrinking in number every year, its annual costs are still rising by more than $3 million. The sad truth is that Ogdensburg isn’t alone. Those cost increases are mostly attributed to state mandated programs and employee pensions and health insurance, the same uncontrolled costs facing every other school district.

I have spent a lot of ink in this column criticizing a proposal to regionalize three of our high schools, and I’m still not a big fan of that idea. But at least our locals are trying to do something to improve education and lower costs for the limited things that are within their control. The state, meanwhile, seems to be content with a wildly expensive public education system that delivers mediocre results.

The inaction from our state lawmakers and education officials is disgusting. Somebody needs to take a leadership role on reforming the way education is funded and delivered before our schools are all bankrupt and the next generation is totally illiterate. We’ve been talking about it for decades. Enough talk. It’s time to do away with the staggering number of useless mandates that cripple our schools’ ability to teach our kids, rethink the way special education is delivered, reform the public employee pension system from the ground up, make better use of the technology at our fingertips to improve education and bring down costs, and the list goes on. State lawmakers, stop wasting time and get to work. Our kids and our wallets can’t wait any longer.

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The news late Friday afternoon that Alcoa will move ahead with plans to modernize its Massena plant was a tremendous relief for officials throughout the north country. Officials had worried about the lack of word from the company as Monday’s deadline loomed to move ahead with its plans. Lack of a modernization plan would have jeopardized Alcoa’s 30-year, low-cost power contract with the state, putting at risk 900 jobs held by people all over St. Lawrence and Franklin counties. The loss of those jobs would have been devastating to all of our communities.

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I’ve been reading with interest about the workshop offerings organizers of the Local Living Venture have been able to bring together. The Local Living Venture, part of the Sustainable Living Project, started off modestly a few years back with a handful of workshops to help people live more simply and economically. They also established an annual fair to bring all of that information together in one place. Its offerings have grown steadily since. Organizers offer workshops throughout the year on topics that cover gardening, food preservation, finding local foods, beekeeping, energy efficiency and living off the grid and more. If you haven’t checked out any of the workshops so far, plan to attend the Local Living Festival April 27 at the Cornell Cooperative Extension Learning Farm or check out the festival page on the venture’s website at www.sustainablelivingproject.net. The fair will offer all kinds of exhibits, experts and displays on the topics I just mentioned and more. If you have any interest whatsoever in growing your own food, living on a smaller budget, cutting your energy costs or supporting local farmers by buying directly from them, the venture’s workshops and Local Living Festival are worth your time.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about how important it is for small schools to keep their community identities.

The schools in question are the ones involved in a study looking at, among other things, the creation of a regional high school – Morristown, Hermon-DeKalb and Heuvelton.We’ve been told while reporting on community forums on the subject over the last two weeks that one of the factors central to the study is the need for the schools to preserve their community identities.

Maybe it’s just my pregnant, hormone-soaked brain not working well, but I don’t get it. For starters, I don’t really understand what they mean by community identity. Seems like a pretty broad term that could mean a lot of different things. It could be a school’s sports teams. It could be the name of the school that appears on a diploma. It could be the name that appears on their school buses, or bumper stickers that brag about the fact that somebody is the parent of an honor student at a certain school. It could be just a loose idea built around the geographic area in which a school happens to be.

I can see how any of those things I just mentioned might matter to different people, and sure, if you care about your community, it’s a source of pride. But when it comes to our schools, the quality of education they can provide is much more important, and I think the prospect of improving educational opportunities for kids is well worth the potential sacrifice of a name based on a coincidental geographic location.

My children, one not yet a year old and the other not yet born, God willing, are going to grow up in the Morristown Central School district. I care much more about the quality of education they will get than where they will get it.

I am apparently crazy to think that way, because I have been hearing much more about the need for each school district to keep its own identity than anything that could be done to make sure their students succeed academically and can move on to promising futures.

I am not going to condemn a study that isn’t even done yet. And I will keep an open mind when it is finally released for public review. Still, I’ve made it pretty clear in this column that based on what I have learned so far, I think the regional high school idea stinks. That’s why I am hastily assured by officials at these schools whenever the subject comes up that the study will also look at the prospect of school mergers.

Let’s be clear on the difference between a regional high school and a merged district. With a regional high school, students from different school districts are all under one roof, but each participating district keeps its own administration and school board. With a merger, all the students are under one roof, overseen by one administration and governed by one board of education.

I don’t know why school officials bother to point out that the study will also look at mergers. The study is building its data around the idea that it is of utmost importance for each district to keep its own identity. Since the schools’ identities would each be lost under a merger, I predict it will be a below-zero day far south of heaven before the study suggests that merging is the way to go.

The word “merger” leaves such a bad taste in school officials’ mouths because it means each school district would lose its own administration and board of education. School board members would lose their little empires, and administrators would lose their jobs with great pay and benefits.

It could be that preserving community identity is really just another way of saying that administrators and school board members get to keep their jobs.

I hope someone can tell me I’m wrong about that. I don’t want to think that the judgment of those in charge of each of these districts is so clouded by a desire for self-preservation that they will ignore what makes the most sense to improve their quality of education. We’ll see when the study is done and its findings get a good public airing.

For as long as I can remember, the Ogdensburg Boys and Girls Club Expo has been a major highlight of the city’s March calendar.

It’s the event that heralds the arrival of spring in the city. And it’s for a good cause: the thousand or so kids the club helps every year through after-school and sports activities.

The club hasn’t been immune to the financial challenges confronting most organizations and businesses since our already poor economy headed south a few years ago. Like most organizations that rely on donations to keep going, it has had less money to do the same job it always has: providing positive activities for kids.

Also for as long as I can remember, I have heard the same gripe about shiftless kids in the community with nothing better to do than cause trouble. There’s not enough for these kids to do to keep them off the streets. Maybe in some ways they are right. But at least one organization is doing something to fix that. The Boys and Girls Club works really hard to keep as many of those kids as possible off the streets, out of trouble, and engaged in healthy, positive activities.

In an age when so many kids come from households where both parents have to work to make ends meet, the Boys and Girls Club is a tremendous community asset we can’t afford to lose. The club gives kids a place to go when their only other option might be to go home to an empty house until Mom and Dad get home in the evening. As I was told many times as a child, idle hands are the devil’s workshop. A child with nothing to do and no supervision will eventually find his or her way to trouble.

The club also offers children help with homework, exposure to community service projects, and sports activities that teach them about good sportsmanship and teamwork. It helps them build good social skills that will help turn them into well-adjusted adults. Going to Expo helps the club keep doing all the wonderful things it does for our kids.

I know what you’re going to say. Expo is the same every year. You’re wrong. If it’s been a couple of years since you went to Expo, go check it out. Sure, every year there are familiar faces among the booths and displays, but there are also a lot of new ones. I went last year after I hadn’t been in a couple of years and was pleasantly surprised at how many new vendors were there. I even bought some stuff.

Even if the promise of fresh vendors isn’t enough to get you through the doors of the Edgar A. Newell II Golden Dome March 22 through 24, the lure of cold, hard cash should help motivate you. Expo’s top prize this year is $5,000 cash. There are lots of other great prizes up for grabs, too.

Ticket holders might even have the luck of the Irish on their side today. An early-bird drawing for $1,000 will be held this evening at Hosmer’s Marina. So stop down to Hosmer’s, say hello to their celebrity bar tenders, and buy a ticket or two.

After Sunday, tickets are available at the club, through club board members, and through volunteers selling them at Wal-Mart, the St. Lawrence Federal Credit Union and Price Chopper. A ticket gets you a chacne to win some cash or some cool stuff and lets you help the club keep offering a place for kids to go where they can do some positive things. Sounds like a good deal to me.

The Boys and Girls Club has done a lot over the years to help the youth of Ogdensburg and the surrounding communities. The price of admission to Expo and $10 for a prize giveaway ticket are really small things to give back to an organization that has given so much to us.