Why all the hate toward public school teachers from the Republicans and tea partyers?
Could it be that the teachers belong to a strong union? Don’t get me wrong, unions can at times be hard to deal with, but usually only after they have been backed into a corner.
Giving millions of dollars of public school funding to parochial and charter schools is insane. Every year, for-profit charter schools score lower than public schools.
Years ago, parents paid to send their children to private schools if they refused the local public schools.
Look at the Strongsville public schools contract negotiations. The board wants a pay cut, higher medical premiums and, get this, a lifetime pay freeze. At the same time, the city government gave its safety forces a 7 percent pay increase. So don’t cry the poor mouth.
Teachers, by law, have to have a master’s degree within five years, which they pay for.
If you have lazy or bad teachers, make sure you get rid of them and get the right ones, but don’t condemn all public teachers.
Union wages and labor laws are a safety net for all workers, union and nonunion. To lose or weaken the right for workers to organize and negotiate such things as pay, work rules, work hours and safety would be taking a giant step backward.
Tell the school board in Strongsville to negotiate in good faith.
Jack Hefner
President, United Steelworkers Local 2L
Akron
With a crowd like that we’re cooked
On Feb. 25, a letter described the largest demonstration yet against global warming and the need to do something to deal with climate change (“Re-energizing the planet”).
The letter stated there were 35,000 people in Washington in support of efforts to reduce global warming.
Thirty-five thousand people in support of the cause? If that is the largest demonstration yet against global warming, then how important to the American people is it?
The annual “March for Life” this year had several hundred thousand attending, as it has had for many years, far more than the 35,000 who showed up to protest global warming. Ohio State at-home football games often have over 100,000 people attending.
If the crowd is evidence of support against global warming, you might as well give up now.
John F. Kline Jr.
Akron
Memories of Roe v. Wade
As a senior citizen, I remember much of the commentary surrounding the Roe v. Wade case.
One of the major arguments supporting abortion rights was the potential for death or injury to women who depended on “back alley” providers of abortions.
To some degree, making abortions illegal is akin to Prohibition. Prohibition did not stop the distribution of alcoholic beverages, but it did result in deaths due to “bathtub” gin, moonshine and the like.
Likewise, if our country reverts to prohibiting abortions, those with money will still get safe abortions, while poor families will once again rely on back-alley providers, with the ensuing deaths and injuries.
My late wife didn’t like the idea of abortion but did view it as a necessity. Her solution to stop abortions was for anti-abortionists to pledge to support every child that would otherwise be aborted, financially and emotionally. Will that ever happen?
James H. Trapkin
Akron
Drilling brings unwelcome changes
Just a few days after I had seen a devastating article elsewhere regarding the threat of overwhelming injection wells in Ohio with waste water from Pennsylvania fracking, the Beacon Journal published on Jan. 28 a report on billions in gas drilling royalties transforming lives (“Owners reap big drilling royalties”).
The article talked about “transforming lives.” But at what cost to the general population, the state of Ohio, the United States and, eventually, conceivably, the world?
The study cited by Ecowatch (the first article I read) was done by Duke University and Kent State University.
It said: “Though hydraulically fractured natural gas wells in the Marcellus shale region produce only about 35 percent as much wastewater, per unit of gas recovered, as conventional wells, according to the new analysis, the volume of toxic fracking wastewater from Pennsylvania is growing and threatening to overwhelm existing injection wells in Ohio and other states.”
The monetary riches from fracking are far outweighed by the risks to the environment, our health and our potable water.
Janet Daily
Doylestown
Texting ban protects all
I was repulsed upon reading the irresponsible editorial (“WRT texting,” Feb. 28) which simply stoked the embers of what it suggested is racial profiling by this city’s honorable men and women in blue.
The editorial board would have its readers accept that the very lives of all of us as the city’s motorists (who, might I remind the board, come from more, far more, than just “some neighborhoods”) are a lesser priority than the alleged “deepening distrust” of those same honorable men and women in blue.
I would like to see the board come out from behind the sanctum of its editorial cloak and invite Akron Police Officer Alan Jones, himself an African-American, to a public forum of its choosing and say and defend to his face, aloud, for all of us to hear, that mere “distrust” (of any kind) trumps in importance the empirical, data-proven, hazardous danger that is “texting while driving.”
That would not only be a slap in Jones’ face, given that he actual buried a child due to the deadly menace that is “texting while driving,” but a public rebuke of every single man and woman in blue serving honorably on the city’s front lines.
Bill Fairweather
Akron
Debt relief
The president did not hesitate to spend $50 billion for aid to the victims of Hurricane Sandy. How can reducing the budget by $85 billion cause nationwide panic?
James M. Rummer
Barberton
