Madam Editor,
The lead article on page one of the Thanksgiving week issue of the TIMES is titled “Grow Your Own taking root at PCHS”
”Grow Your Own is a program in which high school students, who want to become teachers, start their college courses in high school which, in turn, leads to them graduating college with a Bachelor’s Degree in two to two-and-a-half years”.
The first question that occurs is “Does compressing an educational program into a shorter period of time guarantee quality results? Teaching young people is not the same as processing vegetables; speed does not necessarily result in quality results.
And a more important question is: Does producing new teachers on a speeded-up timetable directly lead to those youngsters becoming part of a long term answer to our state’s chronic teacher shortage?
I would submit that it will not. Until we raise teachers’ salaries up to the level of surrounding states and provide a competitive benefit package (Hello, PEIA rate hikes!), young teachers will stay home for a year or two and then jump ship for a state where teachers are more respected and more fairly compensated.
Gibbs Kinderman
Union
Member Pocahontas
County Board of Education 1986-2000
Editor:
Report on County Commission Meeting Viewed as a Humor Column ~
I was away for Thanksgiving but, upon my return, I began perusing The Pocahontas Times which arrived in my absence. I was reading what I thought was perhaps a story about Bill Lepp telling a shaggy dog story at a liar’s contest. Then I realized I was reading Tim Walker’s report on the County Commission’s recent meeting which described a burlesque show of three comedy acts – all presented spontaneously and without rehearsal.
In the first skit, Walt Helmick, playing the straight man, insisted on purchasing a piece of property next to the courthouse, not for the purpose of building an annex building but so that a future county commission would have the option of doing so – because he has run out of time – or possibly building a parking lot. Regardless, after spending $85,000 for no specific purpose, the county commission would assume responsibility for demolishing an unusable house on the newly acquired property. Walt had a second vote to carry the motion while Jamie Walker bit his tongue waiting for things to change in January.
Hilarious.
Next up was a quick joke about asking the acting prosecuting attorney – with only a month to go in her tenure – to prepare lease agreements for haymaking rights at the East Fork property owned by the county that will satisfy the issues among several competing parties, despite the fact that the commission promised those parties that the matter would be settled last summer. Shirk responsibility for a problem of your own making. Classic irony.
The next act was another chapter in the endless saga, “The County Commission Tries to Purchase the Landfill Property After Decades of Leasing It” – which asks the question: How many lawyers does it take to prepare a deed of purchase? And, whether side agreements should be included in the deed. After years of discussion, there is still no agreement about whether the landfill road is a state road or a private road. And, what about fencing along what may or may not be a state road? Meanwhile, the Solid Waste Authority is insisting that it will not accept the landfill property even though funds for the purchase are coming from the county commission and the SWA does not have a lawyer involved in the negotiations. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. We’ll have to wait for another episode before learning the answers to these questions because Walt Helmick cut off discussion out of his heightened sense of disgust. (Never mind the disgusting things he’s doing on his way out.) The ensemble cast of this running gag will reassemble at a future meeting.
The final comedy sketch featured the main plotline of the often-promised expansion of John Rebinski’s ambulance service with a subplot featuring a challenge to his authority to manage the project. When asked who the other members of the Board of Directors for the Rebinski ambulance service, John added a twist by volunteering the other members of the county commission as heretofore undisclosed Board members. That was news to everyone. John then said he had previously asked the EMS Authority to run the ambulance service, but they had declined. He was then dared to ask to question again at the next meeting of the EMS Authority in January – and he might get a different answer. The plot thickens.
It should not be the case that county residents have to continually worry about what the county commission is up to – or not up to – every day and every week. Stay tuned.
Jay Miller
Hillsboro
