January 30th's Letters to the Editor

Dear Edi­tor:

The week of Jan 28 to 1 Feb has been set apart as “National School Choice Week”. I see this abil­ity for the par­ents to choose their children’s edu­ca­tional method as the ful­fill­ment of the Bib­li­cal com­mand for par­ents to teach their chil­dren. (Deut 6:7) There are other reasons.

Par­ents love and know their chil­dren bet­ter than any­one else in the world. A par­ent should have the abil­ity to place their child in an envi­ron­ment where they will thrive and grow. Pub­lic schools must accom­mo­date every­one and fre­quently must include polit­i­cally man­dated sub­jects that detract from basic edu­ca­tional require­ments. The super­in­ten­dent of the country’s fourth largest school dis­trict in Miami-Dade, Florida said “Half our job is edu­ca­tion, and the other half is social work”.

There is plenty of data to be found on the results.

The United States has been falling behind other indus­tri­al­ized nations in edu­ca­tion for many years. Busi­ness Week mag­a­zine says we are cur­rently ranked six­teenth in lit­er­acy and lower in math­e­mat­ics. Stu­dents in Esto­nia, Hun­gary and Slove­nia are bet­ter equipped than their Amer­i­can coun­ter­parts. In sur­veys of choice pro­grams of Wis­con­sin, Florida and Wash­ing­ton DC grad­u­a­tion rates, aca­d­e­mic gains and parental sat­is­fac­tion all showed sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment when the par­ents were allowed to use their tax money to fol­low their child into a school bet­ter fit­ted to thestudent.

The key argu­ment that has been used against school choice is the dilu­tion of resources for pub­lic schools. Only Switzer­land spends more per stu­dent than the United States. The Czech Repub­lic spends about one third what the United States does and their stu­dents score higher in math. In the words of Pas­cal D. For­gione, Jr., Ph.D. U.S. Com­mis­sioner of Edu­ca­tion Sta­tis­tics, “We appear to be “near the bot­tom” at the high school level. Peo­ple have a ten­dency to think this pic­ture is bleak but it doesn’t apply to their own school. Chances are, even if your school com­pares well in SAT scores, it will still be a light­weight on an inter­na­tional scale.”

It has been over 4o years since JD Pow­ers first released their auto­mo­tive cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion sur­vey. U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ers were dec­i­mated by Japan­ese and Ger­man brands. Many pre­dicted the death of the indus­try and some called for import taxes to “save” the Amer­i­can auto indus­try. This year finds brands such as Ford, Chevro­let, and GMC on the list. For­tu­nately the Amer­i­can indus­try was not “saved” but forced to com­pete.
Most teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tors I have met are up to the chal­lenge of actu­ally improv­ing the pub­lic school per­for­mance. The first step is to allow the par­ents to move their tax dol­lars to the school they chose.

Bob Clark, Edison

Dear Edi­tor,

I won­der if any­one thinks about any­thing other than their own lives? I know I’m guilty of get­ting caught up in my own life, my own per­sonal issues. Yet I often won­der about other things as well. I think about what it would be like to live my entire life chained to a box barely large enough to con­tain me… Or, just chained to a tree for the rest of my life with no shel­ter. Where I would have to lie in the mud when it rained; bake in the sun in sum­mer or freeze to death in the win­ter. Where I had to smell my own feces and walk in it because the chain holds me to this small area. Where I would never have the free­dom my entire life to take a walk, no exer­cise and hop­ing the entire time that some­one (please God) would remem­ber to per­haps give me some water at least, maybe a lit­tle some­thing to eat. Because I couldn’t get it myself you see, I’m chained.

I real­ize that a lot of peo­ple (espe­cially in Mor­row County) think of ani­mals as unfeel­ing, inca­pable of any­thing other than being dis­pos­able to us humans. Human beings use them for their own amuse­ment never real­iz­ing or even car­ing that they hurt, feel pain, have emo­tions, love to be around us just because they love us and are social crea­tures (just like us!) Think about what it would do to you, your atti­tude and your spirit being iso­lated and chained, hun­gry and thirsty.

I see chil­dren as well as adults mis­treat­ing and hurt­ing ani­mals. If some­one was being mean to me, hurt­ing me, I’d bite them because I couldn’t stop them any other way; because I Can feel and Do have emo­tions. Yet it is Always, Always the ani­mal at fault and once again being hurt. Never the ‘per­son’ doing the pro­vok­ing and hurting.

I pray daily that peo­ple treat ani­mals with kind­ness and com­pas­sion, with a lov­ing and gen­tle touch. They give us so much and ask so lit­tle. And God made them out of the same dust that we humans are made of.…yes, we are the same and con­nected. And when He made us and every ani­mal on this planet (every­thing!) He was well pleased. He loves all of His cre­ation, all of His crea­tures and we are merely ‘just one’ of His crea­tures. I won­der what He thinks when He sees the cru­elty and dis­re­spect, the hate­ful­ness and heart­less­ness of us and the way we treat His other creations.

Denise Jan­ick, Cardington

To the Editor,

Inevitably the law in the State of Ohio must be amended that per­tains to slan­der and defama­tion of character.

Presently it’s being craftily imple­mented to tyr­an­nize and have dom­i­nance. At the com­mence­ment of the den­i­gra­tion, legal coun­sel was sought. It has been an ongo­ing issue and to resolve it legally — it would exhaust my finan­cial resources.
Foren­sic evi­dence exists that unequiv­o­cally sub­stan­ti­ates it is slan­der and defama­tion of char­ac­ter. This evi­dence was obtained with the assis­tance of an inves­ti­ga­tor and in accor­dance with Ohio state law. Hope­fully, appro­pri­ate inter­ven­tion can be rendered.

I had been diag­nosed with dia­betes when I was in my 20s and because I expe­ri­enced black­outs, I had asper­sions cast upon my rep­u­ta­tion. I am con­fi­dent that our Almighty Cre­ator ensures this mat­ter will be resolved for lies that have been spo­ken into the winds of God have hurt my loved ones.

It is writ­ten in James 4:12 “who are you to judge another.” Remem­ber that it is God that remains seated on the judg­ment throne and God will never relin­quish what solely is His.

Yolanda M. Price, Mansfield

Dear Sir or Madam:

Today, instead of deliv­er­ing an Inau­gural Address, Mr. Obama deliv­ered a Dec­la­ra­tion of War against any think­ing Amer­i­can who has a mod­icum of com­mon sense and wants a stop to the over­spend­ing of the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment, in that not only did Mr. Obama sub­lim­i­nally say that he would con­tinue on his path to com­plete Gov­ern­ment Depen­dency, aka Social­ism, it will get much worse.

He kept call­ing for civil­ity, but at the same time threw innu­endo after innu­endo, leav­ing no doubt that the Repub­li­cans were the bad guys who wanted the low and mid­dle income folks to freeze and starve. My dad used to call this ‘talk­ing out of both sides of your mouth,’ but I just call it being two-faced and par­ti­san. He is pos­tur­ing for the 2016 elec­tions, when he believes that by por­tray­ing the Democ­rats as the ones who are look­ing out for the poor, the gays and the ille­gal immi­grants, they will guar­an­tee a much larger con­stituency going to the polls and unfor­tu­nately, given how many folks who don’t mind tak­ing the Gov­ern­ment hand­outs instead of doing things on their own and for them­selves, he is prob­a­bly right.

I don’t under­stand how any­one as edu­cated as Mr. Obama can look at the down­ward slope this coun­try is on and say, “Damn the con­se­quences, right or wrong, I’m doing it my way”.

Some of his pro­po­nents will con­tinue to sup­port him, because they don’t want to and will not admit that the Repub­li­cans are right in want­ing to stop kick­ing the prover­bial can down the road and face and solve our prob­lems today, so that our chil­dren and their chil­dren won’t have to suf­fer the out­ra­geous debt his poli­cies have put on them. Con­sid­er­ing all of the Gov­ern­ment spend­ing and our six­teen tril­lion dol­lar plus deficit, every man woman and child in this coun­try owns a 280 thou­sand dol­lar share of the national debt.

If you think that his poli­cies and Oba­macare won’t have any unfore­seen reper­cus­sions, talk to me after Jan­u­ary of 2014, when the major­ity of stuff hits the fan.

Thank you. Sin­cerely, Darl Mills, Mt. Gilead

Posted by Taylor Kaser on Jan 29 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.