July 4th – You Must Decide
by Glenn Mollette
My wife and I were walking around the streets of Annapolis, Maryland most of Wednesday. We had been visiting my Navy son who lives up the road, speaking to a church group and taking an afternoon to enjoy Annapolis.
I never dreamed we were just one day and a few streets away from what would become the next horrific shooting in America. A newspaper office staff was gunned down by a crazed gunman. Our hearts go out to all the loved ones of those gunned down at the Capital Gazette building in Annapolis, Maryland.
Five Americans will not have the opportunity to celebrate Independence day this week. Because someone was free to walk into a building with a gun and kill people, five working Americans lost their lives.
I realize no one is free to murder but murder occurs in different ways every day in the United States from guns, to cars to knives all sorts of weapons are used to take the lives of others. As we know its difficult to prevent many heinous acts from occurring. Crazy people are often successful at carrying out missions of hate and pure insanity.
Every American must step up to the plate and become a leader in a new pattern of civility in this nation. What we are doing is not working.
Refusing to serve people in restaurants because of politics or race or sexual preference is further dividing this nation. Slamming people every day in the media is not helping us. Every cable news show does not have to be a program that instills rage in the minds of its viewers. I realize most media outlets feel they have a point to get across. We will never live in Mayberry again in this nation.Further, none of us want to return to a time when our heads are buried in the sand and people are hurt or violated in any way. However, the time has come when media from television personalities, news anchors, editors, rock stars, sports figures and all others with a michophone must start leading this nation back to civility, congeniality, grace, helping others, prefering others and treating others the way we would all like to be treated.
America will get worse or we will become better and it’s up to each one of us to decide.
Dr. Glenn Mollette is the author of 12 books. His syndicated column is read in all 50 states.
AMAC: Trend Toward a
Four-day School Week
Gaining Momentum Across the Country
Schools across the country are opting to give teachers and students a day off on Fridays. It’s a way to save money, they say. According to the National Conference of State Legislators “approximately 560 districts in 25 states have one or more schools on a four-day schedule.”
Teachers and stay at home moms seem to like the trend but households where both parents need to work to make ends meet, it poses difficulties. “Families with children too young to stay at home alone will have the added expense of daycare,” points out Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC].
Weber says that in addition many low-income parents rely on subsidized school breakfasts and lunches and that having to feed their kids an extra day a week can pose a problem. The Department of Agriculture says more than half of the nation’s high-poverty schools offer breakfasts and lunches to students at no cost.
Meanwhile, there’s evidence to suggest that the savings for school districts that adopt shorter school schedules are minimal at best.
Paul Hill, a Research Professor at the University of Washington Bothell, is an expert in the field of public education. In an interview published in The Atlantic he was asked why school superintendents, if they know the savings may not be significant, elect to shut down on Fridays.
His response: “They hope to save money even if the odds are low. But there are two other reasons people go to it: at least initially, I think superintendents were enthusiastically thinking they could find a way to get more time for teachers to collaborate and maybe actually improve instruction. But the other was that teachers and families with stay-at-home moms and so on were all pretty glad to have that one day extra on the weekend where they could do things like take their kids to the doctor. So it was a combination of hope for academic benefits and real family and quality-of-life benefits.”
Weber says it would appear that the benefits of the four-day school week accrue principally to stay-at-home parents and teachers. “They would not outweigh the disadvantages for students and households where both parents work. Consider also the fact that the remaining school days would be longer under such a revised schedule and could prove to be difficult, especially for younger students.”
The Association of Mature American Citizens [AMAC] [https://www.amac.us] is a vibrant, vital senior advocacy organization that takes its marching orders from its members.
