Letters to the Editor for Wednesday, February 8, 2012

CVTC closure endangers residents

The McDonnell administration and Justice Department’s recent announcements of a settlement agreement to close four of Virginia’s five training centers for profoundly intellectually disabled individuals evinces an alarming and exceedingly dangerous prospect for Virginia’s most fragile citizens.

It’s politically expedient to argue for the moral imperative of “mainstreaming” people who can’t vote or even complain, but this settlement harbors life-threatening consequences for the helpless ones who will suffer greatly from its effects. These citizens require intensive, 24/7 specialized care which is not reliably provided with safety in small group homes.

Widespread tragedies impacting thousands of fragile Americans have been reported in New York, Washington, D.C., California and many other states across the country where universal de-institutionalization has been implemented. How many more human lives will be destroyed before the injustice of this madness is stopped?

Congress should halt all Justice Department activities until investigations of reported community group home tragedies can be conducted. I don’t believe Virginians are prepared to accept the many deaths that will follow if this nefarious settlement agreement is implemented. Surely we will not want history to record our generation as the author of the “final solution” to the problems of the intellectually disabled.

CHARLES L. FALLIS

President

Families & Friends United for Central Virginia Training Center

The lunacy of the SOLs

I’m very pleased to see that the local community college has a remedial math class for students who need it, but I am appalled at the number and kind of students who need it! I imagined it would be for the older adult students returning to school after being away from math for a long time or for those who have a GED and perhaps did not have a high level of math instruction.

But most of them are recent high school graduates who are college bound? It seems to me that this is a wakeup call for our local school districts to make their courses more challenging and actually teach the material and stop “teaching for the SOLs.”  More actual practice doing real math problems (without calculators) and less time spent doing practice problems from past SOLs would prepare them for college math or employment.

I used to be a teacher up north, and while some of my colleagues taught “to the test” I did not. It was gratifying to me to see every year my students did well not only on the standardized state exams but also later in college. The mentality that the SOLs are the most important thing in the schools is reflected in the legislature’s rationale for allowing early (pre-Labor Day) start of the school year is to allow more time “to prepare for the SOLs,” not more time for instruction of the material.

The remediation for adolescents for math and reading should be in high school, not college. What of the ones who do not go to college? They would never get any remediation and, from my observation, are not doing well in the employment world, either. High school graduates should be able to read and do math at the least, whatever their future education may be.

N. BERONT

Lynchburg