Letters for March 26, 2024
Old school buildings are not the issue
There have been excellent letters to the editor explaining why voters turned down the $200 million bond. The school board need not have a meeting to discuss why the bond measure failed or spend taxpayer money on a survey. The reasons are obvious.
My question is, why build schools that only last for a short time? In 2018, I visited Cambridge, England, with my wife and daughter. As we passed King’s College, students were streaming out of class. King’s College, built by King Henry VIII in 1441, continues to educate students. The oldest of Cambridge colleges is Peterhouse founded in 1284; its charter granted by King Edward I, Cambridge is one of the most distinguished schools in the world. My daughters and grandsons attended a parochial school which was first built in 1914 as a combined church and school. The building is now a dedicated school, and it provides an excellent education. The elementary school that I attended in Detroit was built in 1927 and today it still educates elementary students as a charter school.
Someone once said, “Students learn from teachers, not bricks and mortar.”
It’s time we built schools that last.
Bernard Korth
Spokane
Sex education is not for the state to decide
If you wonder why parental rights bills are being put forward both locally and nationally, and school board meetings are near riots, just read Dr. Robin Pickering’s recent Spokesman guest opinion (“New parental rights legislation poses threat to youth health” March 5) on Initiative 2081, recently passed by the Legislature.
Parents evidently can be in charge of everything except sex education. That evidently needs to be done by experts like Dr. Pickering and government approved sex education curriculum.
When my wife and I were raising our children, we tried as much as possible to be open with them about almost everything. When each of our children reached 11, we took them on a pre-adolescent weekend where each of us spent a special time at a fun place talking to our same -sex child about the changes coming soon to them both physically and emotionally.
If there is anything we were not interested in, it was our public school molding our children’s ideas about sex. Sexuality is something personal and basic to a family’s setting their child’s moral compass. The “plumbing” information public education offers has little value to a family attempting to raise strong, responsible and value-oriented adults.
What is most troubling about any attempt to limit parental authority over children is the idea that somehow the “state,” and its authority, love our children more than we do. What a truly foolish and destructive idea. Any concern about children’s mental health lies in their parents love and care, not in children being taught the “right” views on sexuality.
James Becker
Spokane