Rockville: A City That Blogs

Progress for RedGate Golf Course, planning for Rockville’s future and schools teaching skills for the 21^st century were topics of conversations started by Rockville Patch bloggers in recent days.

Our “Local Voices” blogs allow Patch readers to participate more fully in their community’s conversation. Start a conversation, post photos, organize a service project, ask a question or share an idea. It’s quick and easy to get involved by being one of our "Local Voices" bloggers. Click here to learn more.

Here are some highlights from the past week of “Local Voices” on Rockville Patch:

Former Rockville City Councilman John Britton reminded residents that they can have a say on the city’s future by attending a special meeting of the six work groups planning for .

The groups will meet from 8 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at the .

The second summit will build on the gathering of community, business and government interests that  at a summit in Rockville Town Center in October.

Participants "all are contributing to this agenda-for-the-future process, a process to identify opportunities and challenges that we as a community will face, responses and resolutions to these opportunities and challenges, and their impacts throughout our community,” .

Rockville Summit II is planned for later this fall.

The city’s “is a roaring success” under new management, wrote Frank McDonough, a RedGate regular.

“More than 550 golfers played at RedGate on each of the last two weekends in June,” in a letter to Rockville Mayor Phyllis Marcuccio that he posted on Rockville Patch. “This means groups of three or four teed off from the first tee every eight minutes for 10 hours each day. Golfers are packing the parking lot 10 hours a day on weekends.”

Not everyone seems ready to declare victory.

“It’s so wonderful that you, a Potomac resident, are happy with the operations of the city of Rockville's golf course that we, Rockville taxpayers, subsidized for years for non-residents such as yourself,” Rockville resident Theresa Defino wrote to McDonough in a comment below the blog post. “I'll hold my judgment on the course until the professional operators--Billy Casper--present a report.”

Montgomery County Public Schools Superintendent Joshua Starr has repeatedly called for schools to teach “21^st century skills,” wrote education blogger Joseph Hawkins.

But Starr’s “drumbeat” sounds vaguely familiar, Hawkins wrote.

“Of course some of what Starr and other 21^st century advocates are preaching is real and some skills are new (but in my opinion that list is really short),” . “Still, a lot of what I read in the Academies report and elsewhere is just plain old-school common sense that fits any century. And I wish that educators, including Starr, would honor what was and where things really come from and stop trying so hard to sell us on the next great thing that really is just recycled wisdom from the past.”

offered a slightly different take on Starr’s “back to the future” approach.

“It looks as if Mr. Starr is trying to bring thinking and problem solving BACK into the classrooms,” Angevine, who identified herself as a teacher of 40 years, wrote in a comment below Hawkins’s post. “This will give the students a chance to make mistakes and think things through. As for being NEW, wasn't Plato one of those who taught such skills? Kudos to the previous writer and to Mr. Starr.”