Letters to the Editor for Thursday, March 11, 2010

Cuts unfairly target public education
Our best hope as a nation is to prepare our children, to the fullest of their varying abilities, to be contributing members of society. This could mean a strong vocational education, a strong academic education, or simply a strong “life skills” education. Some have the choice of private education — most do not.

To cripple an already burdened public education system in the name of “no new taxes” is shortsighted and just wrong. Teachers have already been “rising to the occasion” and “doing more with less” as the governor expects them to do after these budget cuts. When they lose their jobs, they will certainly have the opportunity to do more with less, but their enthusiasm for rising to the occasion will probably be dimmed.

I don’t think many of us can honestly say that we can’t afford, for example, a 1 percent sales tax increase. Every one of us can and should be saying that we can’t afford any decline in our public education.

We have a moral obligation to design our public education system according to what is best for our children and our country — not what is the cheapest to pay for. The cliché that “You get what you pay for” has never been more true.
LEE PERRY
Lynchburg

Targeting the schools
Once again, budget cuts in the Campbell County School system are striking first at the very backbone, but lowest paid employees of our education system: our teachers.

Many of our children will function poorly in the much larger classroom size created by teacher layoffs and the closing of schools. With more children to teach, our teachers will not be able to give that special student the extra help he or she needs to pass the SOL tests.

All our students deserve every chance to earn a regular high school diploma. Will we see students dropping out of school, feeling like failures and testing for a GED diploma simply because that teacher who would have helped him was not available? By reducing the quantity of teachers we will also be reducing the quality of our children’s education. We will leave some of our children behind!

The classroom should be the last place considered for budget cuts. We should consider our teachers indispensable instead of dispensable!
GALE SMITH
Lynchburg

Wasted tax dollars
If there was ever any wonder about our government wasting money, it was highlighted earlier this week in the mail. We received a letter stating that we would be receiving another letter from the U.S. Census in a couple of weeks. What?

I wonder how much was spent sending that letter? And if I didn’t receive it, would I realize I missed it when I got the actual letter from them a few weeks from now? And how many hours did the folks who created this letter charge us for writing, printing and sending it to us? I also have to wonder how many meetings they had to determine exactly why we needed a letter telling us we would be receiving another letter later?

I could go on and on, but then they might read this, hold another meeting and then determine they needed to send us another letter apologizing for wasting our money by sending the first unnecessary letter.

Maybe some of the money we would have saved from these idiotic letters could have been put towards keeping our schools and student programs up and running. And I’m sure we can hire people for a lot less salary that have a little bit of common sense. It was obviously not a factor in hiring these idiots!
SCOTT WADDELL
Lynchburg