Letters (Mar. 27, 2013)

Letter to the Editor

Written by Hillsboro Free Press Friday, 29 March 2013 15:19

Funding does not equate to ‘education’

 

I read with interest Bob Woelk’s column on government involvement in education (March 13). It seemed to me he was talking about both funding and regulation.

I taught school for several years and have been involved with schools for many years. I can assure you that the quality of the students’ education has very little correlation to the money spent per student.

For example, I’ve known chemistry classes that only used chemicals that could be bought in any grocery store or brought from home. Basic physics was taught with things like a bicycle, a stick and a fulcrum, a string and a weight. Talk to these students a few years later and most will tell you how much they are using of what...

Read more: Letters (Mar. 27, 2013)

Finish line in sight for 2013 legislative work

Opinion

Written by Don Schroeder Tuesday, 02 April 2013 11:52

It seems we actually are nearing the finish line of the 2013 legislative session. While being optimistic about nearing the end of a fast-paced session, we are not yet finished. Many bills need to go through the conference committee process to reconcile the House and Senate versions of those bills.

This week we spent long days on the House floor debating a list of bills that waited until now to be considered. Most of them are innocuous and are simply making slight changes to improve efficiency or correct some small inconsistency in the laws. A few bills are not so simple and take long hours of debate.

Monday the largest amount of time spent on a bill was for a program that would create a tax credit limited to $10 million for...

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Critical mass

Editorials

Written by Hillsboro Free Press Tuesday, 16 April 2013 12:49

Criticizing public leaders is a spectator sport in our culture. In some cases, the criticism is justified, for every profession has the self-promoting hucksters within. But every so often it’s good for us to remember the perspective of Teddy Roosevelt, himself a frequently maligned servant of the people in his day. Spoken in 1910, his words are worth pondering today:

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or...

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Tale of a bad trip to Illinois

Partly Nonsense

Written by Joel Klaassen Tuesday, 16 April 2013 12:51

I thought we should have chicken for Sunday dinner, so we went to the deli at Vogt’s. The chicken looked and tasted great, but the front of Vogt’s store looked equally good.

The new look is great and the red tile roofing mimics the red tile their store downtown had for many years.

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One of our part-timers walked in the other day and said the new awning on the Free Press building looked nice. I hated to say that we finished that project that last May.

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I don’t know how much room it will take in this column to describe the travel nightmares I experienced last week on the trip to Moline, Ill., for the spring Midwest Free Community Papers conference.

Since I am on the board of directors, which meets the Friday morning prior...

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