Chestnut Hill Photos and Movies: January 2006

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Private Religious Academy Schools Public School CEO's Children

philadelphia montgomery christian academy

Note: this photo appeared on PMCA's website and appears here in reference to the article below, an interview with Paul Vallas' wife, Sharon.

"Q: Your husband says it was part of a "premarital agreement" that your children would attend Christian schools, not public ones. True?

A: True. I'm Presbyterian, Paul's Greek Orthodox. Religion's important to us. I want the kids to have the freedom to talk about God and Jesus Christ in their everyday lives, and pray for themselves or for each other without any problems in the way."

Paper: Philadelphia Daily News (PA)
Title: Vallas also follows the rules - SCHOOL CHIEF'S EX-COP WIFE 'TELLS ME WHAT TO DO'
Author: RONNIE POLANECZKY
Date: August 6, 2003
Section: LOCAL
Page: 09

AT WORK, he's a take-no-prisoners CEO, charging through the Philadelphia School District, firing commands at an entourage of order-takers forever at his heels. But at home?"My wife was a cop," says Paul Vallas. "She tells me what to do." Ah, yes, the ex-cop spouse. Talk to Vallas long enough, and the fact that his wife, Sharon, used to bust perps for a living eventually makes its way into the conversation. When it does, he always sounds like he's bragging. "Sharon's great," he says proudly. "She's got a cop's great instincts - she's smart, patient and real no-nonsense. She'd have to be, to deal with me."

Sharon Vallas doesn't disagree. Especially after the past 12 months, when her husband - in his inaugural year as the district's top dog - spent far more time at Parkway headquarters than in the Chestnut Hill home the family shares with their three sons. "I tell him, 'Thank goodness I'm independent, or you'd be in trouble,' " she said of the many nights she has played single mom to their three boys, aged 14, 12 and 11. I recently chatted with friendly, younger-looking-than- 46 Sharon Vallas about pulling up her family's deep Chicago roots to come east to Philly.

When I met her at her home, her husband had just gotten in the door from work. As we talked, the boys - who are very, very tall and unabashedly affectionate with him and each other - climbed on the CEO like he was a piece of gym equipment.

Q: You used to carry a gun, eh?
A: Yeah. In the Palos Heights Police Department [in Illinois]. I was a dispatcher for four years, then on the street for five. I was the department's first full-time female police officer.

Q: Did you always want to be a cop?
A: I didn't know what I wanted to be until I was about 16. In high school, I waitressed at the restaurant Paul's family owns; Paul worked the register on weekends home from college - that's how we met, although we didn't know for about 10 years that we'd eventually be an item. A lot of police officers ate at the counter, and I'd ask them, "What kind of calls do you get? What do you do out there?" Their stories fascinated me and made me think I'd like police work. They encouraged me to give it a try.

Q: How do the kids like Philly?
A: They've adjusted really well. They love school. They're doing sports. One just got an electric guitar. They're very independent and sociable. When they squawk about missing home, I tell them, "You now have friends in Philly and Chicago, and who could ever say that?"

Q: Do they buy it?
A: Pretty much.

Q: Do you?
A: I love it here. It's so hilly and pretty, compared to the Midwest. I'll always miss Chicago. I was born and raised there, our friends and family are there, so it's hard to drop all of that. But that's what the phone is for.

Q: Your husband's hours look insane.
A: It was worse in Chicago, really. But it didn't matter so much, because we lived near our families. When Paul was late, I'd take the kids to their grandparents, or we'd get a pizza and bum with the cousins. To be honest, there were so many people around, it never seemed like he was away . . .[Moving] made the boys closer, though; they rely more on each other. What I miss is girl talk - going to a cafe at night with a good girlfriend, you know, after Paul gets home and the kids are in bed. It can be a little lonely. But people have been so nice here, so I'm making friends.

Q: Your husband says it was part of a "premarital agreement" that your children would attend Christian schools, not public ones. True?

A: True. I'm Presbyterian, Paul's Greek Orthodox. Religion's important to us. I want the kids to have the freedom to talk about God and Jesus Christ in their everyday lives, and pray for themselves or for each other without any problems in the way.

Q: Before coming to Philly,your husband almost won the primary for governor of Illinois. What was that like?

A: It sounds crazy, but it was almost a whim for him to run. We knew he could do the job - he'd been revenue director and head of schools in Chicago, and he was a revenue analyst for a senator . . . So we said, "Let's just do it!" We had zero money, we knew nothing about running for office, and yet we came within 1 percent of winning the primary. The campaign staff was so upset; they'd worked their tails off. But we were thrilled we even got that close.

Q: Any chance there's a Philly mayoral run in the future?

A: Don't even go there. Don't even think about it. Running for office would be fine if it was just about your good name and your record. But you have to raise so much money, it feels like begging. Paul would rather stay with the schools and build on everything he learned in Chicago.

Q: Speaking of Chicago schools, Paul said it was your idea to introduce a required community-service component to the curriculum there.

A: We tell kids all the time how important it is to give back to the community, but kids are kids - you've got to make them do things if you want them to get into the habit of it. They have to learn that it feels good to give.

Q: Speaking of which, I hear you're joining Town Watch?

A: Yeah, in the fall, after the boys go back to school. I saw a sign in a Chestnut Hill store asking people to sign up for daytime shifts. After you've been a cop, you feel like you're on watch half the time anyway. I might as well put it to good use. *

Send e-mail to polaner@phillynews.com

Caption:
PHOTO

Caption:
GEORGE REYNOLDS/Daily News

School district CEO Paul Vallas and his wife, Sharon.

Author: RONNIE POLANECZKY
Section: LOCAL
Page: 09

Copyright (c) 2003 Philadelphia Daily News

SUSAN SONTAG ON PHOTOGRAPHY

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Chestnut Hill Photos and Movies

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Private Religious Academy Schools Public School CEO's Children

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