Brian Clarke welcomed two prospective buyers to a Water Street condominium where he was hosting an open house Sunday. He was pleased. Neither was from the building itself -- they had responded to his advertising and stopped in to look. Their timing was good, he said.

"If you're in the market you can't get a better buy than right now," he said. "Interest rates are historically low. ... It's a little bit harder to get a mortgage now, but overall, if you can afford it, do it."

The national decline in housing prices is hitting Norwalk. The median sales price took a sharp drop at the end of 2010, falling 10.3 percent from the previous quarter. Compared with the same period a year ago, it was down 23.2 percent, Trulia.com reports.

These comparisons zig-zag from month to month and don't measure the value of individual homes, but they show a trend. Norwalk saw its healthiest market in mid-2006 and again in mid-2008, just before the financial collapse. After that, prices dribbled down. Over the past five years, home values have depreciated by more than 21 percent.

Trulia reports that the number of homes sold in Norwalk plunged by 27 percent, compared with a year ago at this time. "Sales overall from last year were up," said Clarke, an agent in the Wilton office of William Pitt Sotheby's International Realty.

Jeff Gagliardo agreed. "It's been going very well," he said. "Winter has not had an effect, I would say. I geared up at the beginning of the year and it has paid off."

Gagliardo was hosting an open house at 1 Deerwood Manor. The home is priced at $365,000, above the local median price of $327,500. Gagliardo said he had two visitors to the open house, and that there are offers on the home.

Linda Keegan didn’t pull any punches: “I hate toll booths.” Connecticut’s legislature is considering whether to bring back tolls on the state’s highways to bring in new revenue. But many around Fairfield, Linda included, are strongly opposed to the idea of adding more reasons to stop along Connecticut’s crowded highways.

“[Toll booths] would slow things down to a crawl, and make people even more miserable,” Linda says. 

The General Assembly’s Transportation Committee held a public hearing Friday for a group of proposed bills that would bring tolls back to Connecticut’s highways. The most severe, Senate Bill 31, would give the transportation commissioner permission to begin charging tolls anywhere on any of the state’s highways.

The committee is also considering a bill that would charge commercial trucks through EZ-Pass stations around the state. Another would place booths only at Connecticut’s borders. And House Bill 6200 proposes charging drivers only on new highways or extensions, solely to recoup the cost to build them.

Connecticut stopped charging tolls on Interstate 95 in 1985. The General Assembly abolished tolls throughout the entire state three years later. One reason was the federal government’s prohibition on charging tolls on roads built with federal money. But U.S. Rep. John Larson, D-1st District, told the Hartford Courant on Friday that it has become easier to get waivers with the bad economy. "Given what's going on with the finances of the states, there might be an opportunity here," Larson said.

Douglas from Fairfield said he understands that the state has to do something to raise more money, and toll roads could be an answer. But he’s worried that giving people a reason to stay off the highway would put more stress and congestion onto other routes, such as the Post Road, especially in high-traffic areas such as Fairfield County.

Parents and residents should be asking the Greenwich Board of Education many questions about the proposed International Baccalaureate program:

• IB supporters say IB is not curriculum. If it isn't curriculum, why does IB have its own tests? You don't test students on "frameworks" or "ways of teaching." You test students on curriculum knowledge. Therefore, our current testing should be sufficient.

• IB supporters say IB teacher training focuses on HOW students should learn, not WHAT they learn. What exactly is the teacher training for a science course such as chemistry?

• Why would Greenwich need any IB teacher training? We have already been spending three times as much on mandated teacher training than is required by the state of Connecticut? Is Greenwich incapable of raising teaching standards on its own?

• What has your research shown about the many schools that have stopped using IB? What were their reasons? And what about districts that reviewed IB and rejected it, such as Scarsdale, N.Y.?

• For middle and high schools currently using IB in Connecticut, how has IB affected their CMT and SAT scores?

• It seems you are relying on positive anecdotal comments from parents at the International School at Dundee for support of IB. Why would you use comments from parents of students ages 5 to 10 when we are analyzing IB for students ages 11 to 18?

• Will you release the details of the Theory of Knowledge course curriculum and teaching methods? This course is the most controversial around the United States.

• "IBO At A Glance", an IB marketing document, says that IBO is "providing challenging programs of international education and rigorous assessment." Then it says, "IBO is accessible for students in any school – public and private – and with any special education needs." In fact, IB is in a Florida school, which the state graded as an "F" school. Which is it?

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