Current Editorials

Will we see a day in the near future where a newspaper story regularly carries the byline of a chatbot rather than a human journalist? Count us among the skeptics that the kind of reporting that has brought down presidents or just the local coverage of papers like the Current about goings-on at municipal board meetings is ever going to be replaced by artificial intelligence. The dangers of generative human-like text tools like ChatGPT have been flagged in this paper and others as applied to education. Our school district is on high alert for — and indeed has seen some cases of — students using the popular chatbot to cheat on writing assignments. That and other applications will and should garner the attention of regulators. It’s also a positive sign that ahead of government interven...

The crises with mental health and substance abuse in America are well documented. For too many years, there was not enough attention focused on the scale of what is now seen as a twofold epidemic.  Seeking professional help and admitting to mental health struggles would often lead to stigmatizing the very people needing help. Complicating the need for more access to professional care, we had to confront the COVID pandemic of the past three years. Fortunately, the tide is turning, and more attention is being focused on the need to provide services. Marblehead has not escaped this crisis, but it has long made mental health a priority for its citizens. For over 50 years, the Marblehead Counseling Center has existed to provide mental health and social services to our residents and to ...

When Marbleheaders attend Town Meeting this spring, among the decisions they are likely to face is whether to place on the ballot a question to raise their own and their neighbors’ property taxes.  The 2023 Town Meeting warrant will be published later this month. A permanent override for school costs was defeated in June 2022, and the town hasn’t approved a general property tax override since 2005. We won’t use this space to comment now on the merits of past or upcoming overrides. Rather, it seems fitting that in light of the opportunity for determining taxation with the most basic kind of representation — one’s own vote —  that we take a moment to remember the Marblehead citizen most responsible, Barbara Anderson. Anderson, who once remarked that her trademark red hair...

Kudos to the Planning Board for approving a zoning proposal that could help Marblehead chip away at its long-standing affordable housing needs should Town Meeting adopt it in May. And Marblehead, a community where 77 percent of its housing stock is single-family homes, is desperately short of affordable housing, according to the 2020 Marblehead Housing Production Plan. Of the 8,135 households in Marblehead, 2,404 — or 29 percent — are classified as low-income. Two-thirds are cost burden, meaning they spend 30 percent of their income on housing. Yet, just 333 housing units of Marblehead's entire housing inventory qualify as affordable housing. That's well short of the state-mandated 10 percent for every town and city. According to the housing production plan, one must make $76,...

We wish Marblehead High School Principal Dan Bauer and Assistant Superintendent Nan Murphy well as they step up to the corner offices in Danvers and Dedham, respectively. They are well-deserved promotions for both. And no, the sky isn't falling on Marblehead schools. Bauer was the right person for the job here when he was hired in 2016. The High School needed a lot of TLC, and he was the one uniquely qualified to offer it. His hale and hearty persona was welcomed in the high school halls. It seemed as if he was everywhere. We challenge anyone in the student body who would disagree. There are some who will see the departure of two highly respected school administrators as a sign that there is a crisis in the Marblehead Schools. We disagree. The fact that troubled school distric...

“Garbage.” That was one reader’s assessment of our story exploring the legality of duck hunting on Crowninshield (Brown’s) Island, which was published in our Jan. 11 edition. Specifically, the reader charged the Current of “condoning illegal activity.” He then — helpfully — pointed us to Section 5C of Chapter 131 of the Massachusetts General Laws, which makes it a crime to “to intentionally... block, follow, impede or otherwise harass another who is engaged in the lawful taking of fish or wildlife." In other words, the reader was letting us know that, while the premise of our story was to investigate whether the hunters were engaged in illicit activities, we should have instead — or at least also — set our sights on the resident who acknowledged that was seeking to “intimidate...