‘Burdensome’ comment revealing

At the East Allen Community Schools board meeting Jan. 24, I was stunned by a particularly galling admission by school board vice president, Terry Jo Lightfoot.

The longtime board member casually reminisced and publicly lamented the good ol’ days of past board financial decisions when EACS wasn’t “burdened” with the referendum procedure now currently “holding up” Superintendent Karyle Green’s redesign plan. Lightfoot remarked about the less “burdensome past” like in 1997 when projects such as the multi-million dollar Cedarville Elementary project could be approved by a mere board vote, as opposed to the current lengthy process of actually having to formally ask (via referendum) for taxpayer permission before spending millions of taxpayer funds.

With Lightfoot’s admission, the longtime board member indicts herself and reminds voters that she’s partly responsible for the system’s short-sighted past, which has undoubtedly caused the wobbly nature of its current financial state. And frankly, any elected official – board member or not – who moans in the present for a bygone past has clearly been in office for far too long.

KRISTINA KOOS New Haven

Poor proven expendable again

Have you heard about House Bill 1091? To avoid “nuisance lawsuits,” combined animal feeding operations seek to exempt these huge pig and cow farms from any evidence of disease, contamination or animal abuse. How’s this? Another bill stipulates they be excused from any secret videotaping. If any videotapes surface, the person providing the videotape is punished, not the CAFO owner because, after all, the bill writers say, “the CAFOs were ‘in the process’ of complying with regulations when the tapes surfaced.” Smell fishy?

Consider the authors: Sen. Travis Holdman (R-Markle) and Reps. Donald Lehe (R-Brookston) and William Friend (R-Macy), a CAFO owner himself.

If a situation occurred that caused contamination of the food chain, by the time anybody figured out what it was and where it came from, many, many people would be sick and much groundwater contaminated, too.

This sounds a lot like the desire of generic drug companies to be exempt from needing to report new and adverse side effects of their drugs (such as coma and death).

A lot of us would like to ask: “What are they trying to hide?” Some of us already know.

Who takes prescriptions that are always generic? Poor people. Who buys cheap CAFO meat? Poor people. Who has always been expendable all throughout history? Poor people. Feel like a guinea pig yet?

TAMMY DRISKILL Decatur

Unions make vouchers necessary

Your Jan. 19 editorial decrying the latest judicial decision upholding the constitutionality of the Indiana school voucher program (“Vouchers’ next step”) was predictable but disappointing. It’s interesting that those who insist on a mother’s right to choose to kill her unborn child are so often the same people who decry that same mother’s right to choose a better educational opportunity for her born child.

It’s a sad fact that inner city public schools in Fort Wayne, South Bend and Indianapolis, as in most of the country, are generally the worst schools in their systems. The children of inner city families need the best schools, not the worst. The Indiana voucher program gives them that chance.

The editorial’s allegation that the voucher program somehow “strengthens churches” with public money is unfounded. Your editorial board seems not to recognize that the voucher program is about the children’s welfare, not that of the teachers and administrators and their union cohorts.

There are many things that the inner city public school systems could do to improve the quality of education they are providing the students, but as long as the teachers’ union continues to protect the status of mediocre teachers and unneeded administrators, there seems little hope of significant improvement.

BILL DOTTERWEICH Fort Wayne

‘Food stamp president’ compliment

In his candidate speeches, Newt Gingrich has referred to Barack Obama as “the food stamp president.” Personally, I prefer people becoming president who care that all Americans have enough to eat.

ROBERT COLLIE Fort Wayne