Chestertown was live on WYPR radio at noon Tuesday, July 31 – and the Chestertown Spy was there.
Tom Hall, the host of Midday Live, came to Sumner Hall to interview five local leaders on health care, education, and the upcoming Legacy Day festival. And the town turned out to watch – some 70 residents were on hand to applaud the panelists and to submit written questions.
The theme of the program was “Embracing Change in a Historic Community,” and the three segments – each about 20 minutes – were all related to it. The healthcare segment focused on the future of the Chestertown Hospital, which has seen cutbacks in services that have led to worries about the facility being closed altogether at some future point. The education segment looked at the difficulty of maintaining a top-quality school system in the face of declining enrollment and the reductions in state support that result from that. And the third segment focused on race relations in the community, from the post-Civil War era to the present.
Answering Hall’s questions on healthcare were Dr. Gerald O’Connor, a surgeon at the hospital and a founder of the “Save Our Hospital” group, and Ken Kozel, CEO of Shore Regional Health, the branch of the University of Maryland Medical System that operates the hospital. Hall began by noting that the hospital has seen a decline in the patient population, leading to Shore Regional Health proposing changes that have met with community resistance.
Kozel said that Shore Regional Health serves a five-county area, in which it needs to provide access to high-quality care at an affordable cost. The original vision was to convert the hospital to a “free-standing medical facility,” without inpatient beds. Kozel said that a decline in usage of the hospital, and a policy of reducing “avoidable utilization” of its facilities, were factors in that plan. But because of the lack of public transportation and the distance involved in the five-county region, it was important to keep Chestertown open so patients could be close to their families.
O’Connor said he was familiar with the hospital’s finances. He said he didn’t understand why the system was anxious to close a hospital when it was operating in the black. He pointed out that Kent County has the second-highest level of cancer in the state, and that a quarter of its population is over age 65. He suggested that surplus dollars from the Chestertown budget are going to Easton and that the hospital foundation is bearing much of the burden of supporting the local hospital.
Kozel said UMMS was working to educate the local community to come up with the best solution for maintaining an appropriate level of health care in the county. He said the plans for the hospital had changed in response to community efforts, and that the task now is to “right-size” the hospital.
O’Connor said the community needs to continue supporting the hospital and to keep pressure on UMMS to prevent it from closing.
Panelists for the education portion of the program were Karen Couch, Kent County superintendent of education, and Trish McGee, president of the Board of Education. Couch said that the school population is currently around 2,000 students – down by perhaps 600 over the last two decades. Because of the state funding formulas, based on population, the district has lost about $4 million over the last decade. Couch said the district projects that the student population will continue to decline for a few more years before leveling out.
McGee said the student population has fallen because of the lack of economic opportunity in the county, with few large employers. Students graduate from high school, leave for college or work elsewhere, and don’t return to raise families of their own. While the county’s population has remained steady for nearly 200 years, the demographic balance has shifted away from working families. The population is older, with many retirees who don’t have school-age children. Despite the image of Kent as a “wealthy” county, many of the students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. The “come-heres” — many of whom own second homes in the county — make Kent appear affluent, but the “from-heres,” who make up the vast majority of the school population, are low-income.
Hall asked whether combining with other counties to increase student population was a possible answer to the problems. McGee said that at one point, Queen Anne’s County communities such as Chester Harbor and Kingstown sent their students to Chestertown schools, but that Queen Anne’s was losing revenue because of it, and took those students back. “I don’t see it happening,” she said of a possible consolidation across county lines. Couch said that such a consolidation would also entail loss of decision-making power and community identity on the part of Kent County.
In the final segment, Airlee Johnson, a board member of the Kent County Historical Society, told listeners about the history of Sumner Hall and on the program for the upcoming Legacy Day, which celebrates the era in the mid-to-late 1960s when Kent County’s schools were desegregated. Sumner Hall, at 206 S. Queen St., was built in 1908 as a meeting place for black Civil War veterans. Following the death of the last of the veterans, it became a community center under the name Centennial Hall. But after the 1960s, it began to fall into disrepair and was scheduled for demolition before a community group took up the cause of restoring it. It is now a museum and a venue for meetings, events, and concerts.
Legacy Day, which began as a project of the Historical Society to expand its scope beyond Colonial history, began five years ago with a tribute to Charlie Graves, who ran Chestertown’s legendary Uptown Club – a venue where the stars of rhythm and blues and soul music regularly appeared. The event drew a large and racially diverse crowd to town, with live music and dancing in the street
This year’s revival honors the students who were the pioneers of the school integration era – which came a decade later in Kent County than in the country as a whole. Johnson, who was a student at the time, told some of the stories from the interviews with pioneers, as well as giving her perspective on the history of race relations in Kent County in the years since. She said that upon her return to her home county after years of living in other areas, she was surprised at how little the races interacted more than 40 years after formal integration. One of the purposes of Legacy Day has been to present an event where the African-American and white communities can celebrate together.
A video of the complete program can be viewed on the WYPR Facebook page.
All photos by Jane Jewell
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