Opinion Legislative actions suck life from public schools Smoky Mountain News
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Meadows will be held accountable for vote To the Editor: I read with great interest The Smoky Mountain News’ Oct. 23 Op Ed page and particularly the piece by Robert G. Fulbright of Waynesville. Fulbright’s piece was right on and I totally agree with him! As a matter of fact, I had written Rep. Mark Meadows, R-Cashiers, while the shutdown was underway, asking him to vote for the bill coming over to the House from the Senate to reopen the government and forego any possibility of default. I mentioned in my email that the shutdown, which he himself helped bring about (and he bragged about doing so), was doing great harm to citizens in his district, to families, businesses, and folks all across North Carolina, and indeed to our nation! Further, I reminded Rep. Meadows that default would be catastrophic for not only our nation but for the entire global economy. I also pointed out that we — his constituents — would be watching and taking note of his vote. So for Mr. Meadows, yes, as Mr. Fulbright suggested, we did take note of your vote on the government shutdown and taking the nation to the brink of default! You, Rep. Meadows, will be held accountable for your reckless vote on this matter come November 2014. Dr. Paul Y. Thompson (retired) Franklin
ents select the top 25 percent of their teachers, our surgeon cut directly into our heart, into teachers’ passion for the classroom and loyalty to a shared profession, because the mandate requires that these top 25 percent of teachers be offered a $500 a year raise in exchange for giving up tenure. Five hundred a year, about $35 a month after taxes, is the cut that feels more like a stab, and asking us to relinquish our tenure is the salt in the wound. Tenure is the one aspect of teaching that allows us to consider ourselves professionals whose value is worthy of Columnist protection over the course of our career. Tenure is what allows thinking teachers to produce thinking students without the fear of losing our positions to someone powerful who merely disagrees with us. This slice, made with a dull scalpel, is of such offense to the body that there is a real danger we will be bled of what is best about us — our passion for our profession and our loyalty to each other. But the inept and experimental procedures do not stop there. The brain is also fair game. And since public school’s brain must be the knowledge teachers have of content and pedagogy, and since, in every other profession, holding degrees is valued, when our governor and General Assembly decided to
Dawn Gilchrist-Young
f I could create for you an apt metaphor for public education, it would be that of public schools as a sentient being. And, as such a being, it would have a body, much as we do, with a heart, with a brain, and with hands. The heart of public school, in my metaphor, is the loyalty, passion, and dedication of its teachers. The brain of public schools, the part that has foresight, is the knowledge of those teachers in pedagogy, in content, and in current thought. The hands of public schools, to complete the conceit, are the resources teachers have available to them, with time being the most important resource of all. And so, you have in your mind the living, breathing body that is public education, and, like all such entities, it requires sustenance and nurture. To extend my metaphor, this entity takes its health advice from an appointed physician, the state government of North Carolina. This government, these legislators, have as their task the maintenance of public education’s health. This is a task that normally involves frequent checkups, occasional tests to indicate the lack or presence of pathology, and advice on how to improve public school’s wellbeing. However, rather than finding our physician to be a friendly family practitioner with 21st century skills, we find instead an overly ambitious, scalpel happy pseudo-surgeon well-schooled in 19th century vivisection, longing to begin cutting away at what was once a largely thriving body. With the most recent cut, the mandate that all superintend-
LOOKING FOR OPINIONS The Smoky Mountain News encourages readers to express their opinions through letters to the editor or guest columns. All viewpoints are welcome. Send to Scott McLeod at info@smokymountainnews.com., fax to 828.452.3585, or mail to PO Box 629, Waynesville, NC, 28786.
We should have seen ACA red flags To the Editor: Red flag warnings that the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obamacare, is a flawed bad law have been flying around from the get-go. The bill was ramrodded through Congress during a Christmas Eve session in the Senate. Who would have been paying attention on the eve of a serious U.S. holiday? House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., demanded that, “We have to vote for the bill to know what is in it!” Pelosi and Democrat leaders did not want anyone to know what was in it because this bad law, more than 2,000 pages long, raises taxes, penalizes businesses and therefore kills jobs, steals funding from Medicare, burdens younger citizens with high premiums and deductibles, is loaded with confining regulations, costs government far more than originally predicted and creates more than 150 new agencies, boards, and commissions made up of unelected people who are not account-
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stop rewarding financial incentives for masters degrees and higher, what they did was a poorly performed lobotomy because any teacher wanting to know more is being told that knowledge is worthless, that, in our profession, we need not look to the future either for ourselves or for our students. And, finally, before the surgical procedures have ended, the surgeon, now with the villain’s smile, will have amputated the hands of public schools. In setting the class size higher, as high as 29 to 1 in the high school classroom, and in removing numerous teachers’ assistants, and in cutting teaching positions, the time a high school teacher will have to devote to individual students in a 90-minute class period is only a little more than three minutes. In three minutes per student, little information can be explained, little dignity can be offered, and little humanity can be afforded. If my metaphor, my conceit, is correct, then when voters put in place in the last election the legislators who now walk the halls of power, I would like to think some part of those voters actually believed they were electing an innocuous Dr. Jekyll. However, when we go to the polls in the next election, I, for one, along with my colleagues, will be going to those voting booths with one goal in mind: to vote out the diabolical Mr. Hyde. (Dawn Gilchrist-Young is a teacher in Swain County Schools and a writer. She can be reached at dawngilc@gmail.com.)
able to us! Red flags! To secure the necessary votes to pass the ACA, senators and congressman were bribed with funding promises (Mary Landrieu, Louisiana) or waivers (Ben Nelson, Nebraska). Michigan Rep. Stupak, a Democrat abortion issue holdout, was convinced to change his vote to “yes” and retired from politics. Red flag! Up to 16,000 new IRS employees will administer the mandate that all citizens buy health insurance. The same untrustworthy IRS agency whose agents denied or delayed conservative leaning groups their nonprofit tax status will now have access to our personal health care records. Objections to the Affordable Care Act surface from all around the nation but we are reminded that the ACA is “the law.” Nevertheless President Obama, without congressional approval, has changed the law by granting 1,000 waivers, delays and additional subsidies, mostly to favored groups — unions, corporations, Congress and their staffs. But, no delays, waivers or exemptions are granted to ordinary individuals who are now burdened with insurance cancellations, additional taxes and penalties. Red flag! The ACA website is under-functional after millions of dollars were spent to program the site. President Obama kept saying that if you like your insurance plan you can keep it and you can keep your doctor. Not so! Millions have been cancelled by their present insurance company and therefore their doctors because the policy they like does not meet ACA requirements … all policies are mandated now by government not by what the insured
chooses. Employer funded insurance will be mandated by ACA/Obamacare requirements in 2014, causing many to be cancelled as well. We were told that ACA insurance will cost only $2,500 per year but even if premiums are low, deductibles are exorbitant. We have less choice and less competition. There is no doubt that some areas of our healthcare system should be fixed, but the Affordable Care Act is not the way. Tell your congressmen and senators it is time to repeal and redo this bad law and replace it with one that is affordable, improves the quality of our healthcare care, and maintains our personal choices. Carol Adams Glenville
We are headed down the wrong path To the Editor: What has been happening in Washington is more than a catastrophe. Congress is allowing unshared economic growth and prolonged economic insecurity for millions. One in five North Carolinians live in poverty. One in four children live in poverty and hunger. Here, in Macon County, 65 percent of our students now qualify for free or reduced lunch. Medical costs have risen so much since Medicare lost the ability to contract pricing that people are having to do without critical medicines and treatments. By dismantling many of our sup-
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