Wanted: Good Families

Over this Winter break, I had the chance to catch up with an old high school buddy of mine (in fact, we went to Wesleyan together as well) who now lives outside of San Francisco with her husband and their three children. Though they appreciate much of what Marin and the Bay area have to offer, Johanna and Rich love the beauty of Lake Tahoe and the quality of life up here.

As we were stretched out in front of the fire, sipping mulled cider, and watching our children play together, they talked about the crazed nature of their lives: the difficulty of doing business in CA, the challenges of separating work from home (they own their own computer business, which they run from an office in their house), of carpooling to get the kids to their various sports, the traffic, of finding their kids schools where they'd be challenged by teachers who respected them and where they'd find the courage to exercise the creativity and compassion inside them, of . . . .

"Enough whining," I interrupted. "Why don't you just move up here?"

Of course they had thought about it . . . but they couldn't quite see giving up access to the city or to Cal football games, and they liked the diversity their kids were exposed to, and they had something good going with their business, and the cost of living was brutal, plus the schools up here weren't as good, and . . . .

"Stop right there," I said.

Now I'm new to Incline Village, and there is much about the community that I do not know, but I do know a few things about schools. In addition, I have been serving on the Incline Vision Schools/Education committee, so I have a sense of the educational vision that our Incline Village/Crystal Bay community is pursuing.

The educational vision that the Schools/Education committee has articulated is as follows:

"We are a diverse community offering educational excellence through a collaborative of public, independent, collegiate, and communal resources that provide individualized educational opportunities to all members of the community for life-long learning in the academics, arts, culture, and athletics."

While this may be an ideal, the whole point of a vision is to articulate where it is that we want to be in the future. (If you're interested in contributing to the Incline Vision Schools/Education committee, we will next meet on Wednesday, January 11th at 4:00pm on the third floor of the Prim Library on the campus of Sierra Nevada College.)

Though Johanna, Rich, and their kids cannot make the meeting, I know that they are exactly the kind of family who would benefit from living in Incline Village/Crystal Bay, and I know that they are exactly the kind of family our community would benefit from attracting.

So I am still working on convincing them to relocate here, and though it's early yet, I think I'm making progress: just before heading back to Mill Valley, they bought chains so that they wouldn't have to worry about the blinking yellow signs when they come back this way for Super Bowl weekend.

--Steve McKibben
1/8/06