It is always a risk due to spammers but we are going to open up the commenting a bit and see what happens.

As of right now non-registered visitors to this site can add comments to a post. The catch, the comments go into a queue and have to be approved so they could take anywhere from a minute to a day to appear the site.

The perk of being a REGISTERED member of the site is that your comments are published directly to the site without the need for moderator approval.

Our partners at Education.com have announced an exciting new contest where the PTA for a New Rochelle school can win $1,000 by collecting the most school reviews by December 20th.

To get started click on the Education.com widget on our Education Page and find your child's school.

New Rochelle schools may have a particularly good chance to win the prize (three U.S. schools will win) because Education.com is a brand new start-up company so the number of applicants will not be extremely high and the New Rochelle schools have relatively large populations. It might not hurt that the founder of Education.com actually has family here in New Rochelle with kids who attend school in New Rochelle.

Martin Daly, President of the New Rochelle teacher's union, went on the offensive Friday, attacking yet another New Rochelle parent who dared to take criticism of District officials public in two recent blog posts (here and here) on this web site. Robert Cox, one of the founding editors of Talking of the Sound, wrote a scathing criticism of the school board and administrators after attending a recent school board meeting where school officials presented phony data, made blatant misrepresentations of fact and failed to properly calculate even the simplest mathematic operations. Talk of the Sound readers will recall that Daly similarly attacked parents from Trinity School on the Journal News web site for making unrelated criticisms of the District.

If you scroll down the right rail of the home page you will see a new Google Group Subscribe Box like this one...

Subscribe to New Rochelle Talk of the Sound Email Alerts

Email:

Visit this group

A Message to our Readers

We launched two months ago in August and are ahead of schedule.

The long-term goal for the site is to get to 2,000 registered community members with 60,000 unique visitors a month by the end of the first year of operations. This site was launched on August 25th, 2008 - two months ago. Obviously, at that time we had zero readers, zero registered users, zero comments and zero blogs within the site and were invisible to search engines like Google.

We have made a great start towards reaching our goals and thus creating an active community discussion where all stakeholders in the New Rochelle community get a level playing field upon which they can raise issues of interest to them.