ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” story. It is an editorial by the editor.

There are two very different things going on right now in two local school districts. One is a visionary, forward-looking policy decision in Martin. The other is continuation of a tired old practice in Wayland.

First the good news.

The Martin Board of Education earlier this month agreed to a contract that will enable installation of solar panels on the roofs the school buildings. Board members and Supt. David Harnish should be commended for passing an energy policy that takes the district out of sad sack dependence on oil and fossil fuels and instead boldly moving forward into the 21^st century. Furthermore, the schools get ownership after 20 years.

The time has come for American to lose its painful and deadly addiction to oil. Our fossil fuel habit has resulted in very costly and immoral wars in the Middle East and I believe strongly it has contributed to climate change.

We’ve been warned that the last two months of the summer of ’16 were the warmest on record worldwide. We also have been warned almost every evening on the Nightly News, which nearly always has some kind of story about weird and ugly weather.

The vast majority of scientists agree that climate change is happening and it’s our fault and we need to do something about it.

Getting off fossil fuels and moving toward cleaner energy is not just installing solar panels, though it’s a terrific start. Countries like Germany and Sweden have demonstrated excellent results.

Kudos to Martin for its courage to move past the abyss our reliance on oil has caused.

Meanwhile, in Wayland, the school district is having a polling company conduct a telephone survey about the potential bond issue in May 2017. I received one such call last Friday and found the survey to be as tedious and cumbersome as a speech by John Tuinstra.

There were far too many questions and too much required of Joe Citizen. Most people I’ve spoken with and heard from already have expressed irritation with these calls, as if they are about one level above telemarketing.

In these modern, now a-go-go days, the telephone is becoming more and more a source of annoyance. A phone call interrupts a person’s day and privacy. I myself prefer to send people e-mails so they can respond when they wish.

I call people only when I have to or in cases of emergency. I learned long ago that I could get my work done much more quickly if I didn’t have to answer irrelevant telephone calls that I could have dealt with later that day.

Phone polling is doing absolutely nothing to further the cause of passing the bond request. If anything, it is helping to ensure its doom from a public relations standpoint.

Telephones are yesterday’s tools. I urge Wayland schools resolutely to ditch the tedious and irritating phone surveys and come up with another way to communicate with citizens. E-mail would be one option. There must be others.

I’ve already gone on record as supporting the bond proposal next spring, but I fear it will go down in flames unless a course correction is made.