Oak Ridge Now is an online community magazine/portal for the South Montgomery County residents of what Conroe ISD likes to call the Oak Ridge High School feeder zone.
It is a website dedicated to chronicling the lives of the good people who choose to live across the street from The Woodlands. It’s goal is to be a resource to help foster the “unity” portion of our diverse community (Does one foster unity? Develop unity? Can an English teacher help me out here?).
There are a number of terrific websites focusing on the day-to-day activities of the residents of The Woodlands: woodlandsonline.com has been providing a great service to The Woodlands for 15 years or so. thewoodlandsvillager.com is probably the best source for up-to-date news in the area, given its size and long history in South Montgomery County. More recently, ultimatewoodlands.com, produced by the Houston Chronicle, has added it’s own voice to the South County conversation. There are also numerous magazines, like ReviewIT and Living that highlight the lives of the beautiful people living in The Woodlands.
These are all very good sources of information if you want to know about what’s going on in The Woodlands. The Oak Ridge area not so much. Oh, they’ll carry Oak Ridge High School sports stories occasionally, and they may highlight a business in the Oak Ridge area, but their main concern is a different demographic. They are unlikely to ever do a profile on the ladies who have worked at the Food Basket for 20 years (I personally am looking forward to that one).
Don’t think I despise The Woodlands. Far from it. I lived in The Woodlands for nearly 20 years, and had three kids graduate from The Woodlands High School. We have tons of friends there, our church, and I still frequent The Woodlands shops and restaurants, as I am sure all of us do.
I really enjoy living in the Oak Ridge area, though. There is a different cadence to life here. The folks are real and the traffic is light (Rayford and I-45 not withstanding), and I am a whole lot closer to my day job. There are a lot of beautiful places in the area also; you just have to look for them. How many of you have ever seen the fountain in the picture above?
What I don’t see here is the sense of community that The Woodlands has. It’s difficult to even explain to people where we live (across from The Woodlands? North of Houston? Spring? None of them fully capture our community). I would like to see that change, and I am not the only one. Jeffrey Fuller, the principal at York Junior High, has tried to host community-building events. We had a community night at an Oak Ridge High School football game last fall. I’d like to eventually see more. I want to see adults wearing Oak Ridge baseball caps in local restaurants, not because they have kids on the high school team, but because they are proud of the community in which they live. I’d like to see an Oak Ridge Taste of the Town, an Oak Ridge arts festival, some community event where kids get their faces painted and mimes wander about. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Pardon the current under-construction nature of the website. Two of us, myself and Doug Sarant, are building this website, piece by piece, story by story, feature by feature. We do this in our copious spare time, outside of our regular jobs and families. We don’t have the cool publishing technology that allows us to do it all really fast. We’ll make mistakes, and by our very nature, probably offend a few people along the way. But we are getting there, and Oak Ridge Now will continue to improve. Suggestions are always welcome. This is a community website, and I’d like to see the community as a whole shape its future. If you don’t like something, tell us. If you really do like something, tell us that, too. Just tell us.
OK, maybe we could do without the mimes.
Comments to Chuck Briese at cbriese@oakridgenow.com.
