Printed letters, June 1, 2012

By Staff
Thursday, May 31, 2012

Our president recommends all children be able to read well by fourth grade. With the alarming increase in obesity and its related illnesses among our youth, exercise and good nutritional habits are recommended.

Businesses want to hire educated workers so they may reap profits. Our future as a nation depends on having intelligent workers in education, medicine, industry, communication, national safety, agriculture and more.

Look at some facts in this school district. Not long ago our school district got along just fine without four directors, whose combined salaries would easily support the reinstatement of the reading aides and teachers who have been cut.

Just how well do you think reading is going to be taught when these directors and the heads of curriculum (who haven’t taught in an actual classroom for how long) decide to increase the paper work (much of which is generated by bureaucrats who seek job security), and increase classroom sizes? Yet, they expect teachers to miraculously teach all students while wrestling increased paper work, shouldering all blame for any failure and seeing salaries and more positions cut.

No doubt obesity will be reduced as our district recently blindsided eight PE teachers who had jobs on a Friday and then were called into an office on Monday to be told they would have no jobs next September.

Contrary to district propaganda, these changes will create huge numbers in those classes and less effectiveness due to managing such. Suddenly more secretaries and library personnel are gone, under the guise of administrative cuts. Next, more teachers will see more jobs disappear, with more days cut.

Our wonderful county commissioners agree. Follow Commissioner Craig Meis, his decisions and rants and raves over the past years. Who always votes with him? You all elected these people twice, just because this is a “vote the party county.”

VERA MULDER

Fruita

 

 

 

 

Schultz did commendable job in recommending budget cuts

District 51 Superintendent Steve Schultz should be commended on his suggested budget cuts for the 2012-13 school year.

You can’t please everyone, and it is obvious he put a great deal of thought into prioritizing students’ safety and achievement first.

Cutting budgets is never easy, and for Schultz every choice was a difficult one. He is the most caring school reformer I have ever met.

School District 51 is very lucky indeed to have had Steve Schultz as its school superintendent for so long.

I have the pleasure of working with him as co-chair of School District 51’s Budget Committee.

DR. BARBARA ANN SMITH

Grand Junction

 

Hickenlooper needs to veto questionable ballot legislation

Gov. John Hickenlooper is facing a decision over House Bill 1036. His veto will protect your right as a citizen to verify results of upcoming elections.

However, because the hoped-for veto will disappoint as many as 64 county clerks, some municipal election officials and six or seven paid lobbyists, the governor needs readers’ encouragement to go against the wishes of these few people who control the system that elected him.

Elections in Colorado have become increasingly complex, mechanized and centralized as clerks and parties promote mail-in voting as well as early, overseas, military and provisional voting methods.

Formerly, you participated with well-founded confidence at your local precinct polling place. That’s history. Now you must trust a small number of hard-working county clerks and staff and a dwindling number of election judges, some of whom are awed by imperfect equipment outside of their pay grade.

Fortunately, newer, better technology can offer us a way to directly verify our elections.

Humboldt County, Calif., posts all its ballots online for public inspection. The ballots for the Minnesota Coleman-Franken Senate race that was recounted are still online.

Colorado could post all ballots, too, if all counted ballots were made untraceable. Sadly, our clerks instead have told their lobbyists to make a law to hide the traceability of ballots from us, and that’s what HB 1036 does.

Instead of improving their procedures and making the ballots safely anonymous and public, county clerks arranged to hobble the Colorado Open Records Act. HB 1036 obediently serves to do that.

Please ask Gov. Hickenlooper to veto a bill that passed without debate 45 minutes before the general assembly adjourned at midnight for the year.

We deserve full transparency about our elections — not midnight solutions designed by and for our election officials.

HARVIE BRANSCOMB

Basalt