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Photo courtesy of The Phoenix and Richard McCaffrey

To date, my new business plan for RI Future has consisted mostly of me wearing sweaters on cold nights and eating a lot of peanut butter and bread for meals. But this state’s only source of progressive news and information now needs a new computer. Since our readership is growing just as rapidly as the number of in-person and online compliments we’re getting, I thought I’d reach out to you all, our loyal readers, for some help.

The long term plan for RI Future is to have the free market support us, and in the near future you will start seeing some paid advertising on the site. But just getting there will require a small investment, and I’d like to ask for your help.

And please keep in mind:

That’s just a sample of the great news and information we’ve delivered to you, free of charge, over the past few months … if you like what we do here at RI Future, or even if you just want us to stick around so you can beat us up in the comments section, please do what you can and help support independent media.

Click on the link below to donate to RI Future:

ACLU Questions Legality of Barrington Tuition Idea


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The Barrington School Committee finally has a legal opinion on its idea to allow a small number of out-of-town students to to pay tuition to attend its high-performing public schools. It’s from the RI ACLU.

“The Barrington School Department has no obligation to establish a special program to accept students from out-of-town, but once it does so, it cannot simply declare students with disabilities off-limits,” wrote Steven Brown, the executive director of the local affiliate of the ACLU. “While in some circumstances schools may have some leeway in dealing with special-needs students, such as when significant problems might arise in providing them necessary accommodations, we are not aware of any basis whatsoever for a school to have a policy of automatically and categorically excluding special education students from an enrollment policy. Such blatant discrimination flies in the face of the numerous laws designed to treat such students equally, not segregate or stigmatize them.”

Brown’s letter assumed Barrington would not accept students with special needs, which was the initial idea. But after School Committee President Patrick Guida had a conversation with RIDE officials, he said they would likely accommodate for a percentage of students with special needs so long as they could pay the cost of their education there.

Brown wrote, “I realize that this policy is still a work in progress, but I would appreciate learning the basis behind the decision, however tentative, to exclude special education students.”

The Barrington School Committee will discuss the matter at its meeting on Thursday night.

38 Studios and the ‘Job Creator’ Logic


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Kingdoms of Amalur Cover
Kingdoms of Amalur Cover
(via Wikipedia)

Word started buzzing around the State House just prior to Gov. Chafee making his historic executive order recognizing same sex marriages from other states – but the rumors weren’t about marriage equality, they were about 38 Studios.

By the end of the day, Bill Rappleye of Channel 10 broke what very well could become the biggest story to date of 2012: the state is working with 38 Studios to help keep it solvent.

38 Studios, former Red Sox Curt Schilling’s company, was given a $75 million guaranteed loan to move from Massachusetts to Rhode Island by former Gov. Don Carcieri. The former CEO governor, who always touted his business experience as reason to trust him as a public official, pushed through the highly controversial loan to his friend and political ally as a way to shore up his otherwise poor economic development record while in office.

It worked; whatever happens to 38 Studios, Carcieri owns it.

One needn’t to be a business expert to know that investing in 38 Studios was a risky proposition. In fact, our own Sam Howard detailed why it was in a post earlier this year. 38 Studios has made some money on its new single player game Kingdoms of Amular. But the project Rhode Island is vested in is a huge multiplayer game called Copernicus. Howard points out here why the former is a much safer investment than the latter:

“…one of the things that [Amular] had going for it was that it’s single-player. Single-player games are like novels, in a lot of ways. People are more willing to get into a new one. But [multiplayer games] are in a lot of ways like a bowling league. Once you’re part of one, why join another?”

Indeed, business experts knew this was a risky investment as well. Ted Nesi reports: “Last June, PricewaterhouseCoopers audited 38 Studios and issued a “going concern” opinion that expressed “substantial doubt” about whether the company would be able to stay solvent, the disclosure filing said.”

Why didn’t Carcieri, who was lauded for his business acumen, see this? Why didn’t Keith Stokes, Carcieri’s economic development chief who lauded the loan and was then kept on by Chafee, even though the current governor vociferously argued against granting 38 Studios the risky loan? Why didn’t taxpayers? Where was the Tea Party on this one?

Why might not matter now. What matters most is how to protect the state’s investment, and its economy.

In the meantime, as the local media has been looking for the “next Central Falls,” Rappleye might just have stumbled onto it … but this time there will be no way to argue that pensions or union contracts are the problem. This time the issue seems squarely to be that the public servants simply placed too much faith in private sector.

Curt Schilling was supposed to be the state’s ultimate job creator. It’s high time Rhode Island realizes that, whether it’s tax cuts or tax giveaways, such an economic strategy is far too risky keep placing so much blind faith in.