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...

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Regular session ends with a rush of voting

Opinion

Written by Don Schroeder Tuesday, 09 April 2013 12:47

The last week of regular session started slowly but ended with many conference committee reports to vote on before first adjournment.

We had two days off last week while conference committees were supposed to meet. Few conference committees took place so that simply put more work into this week.

The only regular committees that continue to meet are the exempt committees, which are Appropriations, Fed and State and Taxation. Primarily, only the Appropriations Committee meets occasionally as they continue to iron out the budget. Fed & State and Taxation will meet only as needed to help get the budget and revenues to come out so the budget is balanced.

The conference committee process has been in full swing this week. The Senate Ways...

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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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Train is an option for traveling

Partly Nonsense

Written by Joel Klaassen Tuesday, 23 April 2013 12:43

After writing about my travel misadventures last week, I received an e-mail from an Amtrak person suggesting I should take the train to Chicago next time. The note stated the train has never been canceled in more than a dozen years and probably a lot longer than that.

So I checked online for the departure and arrival times and the rate. Based on what I saw, I wouldn’t have been able to make my connection for the trip to Dubuque to catch a ride to Moline. Total travel time is about 12 hours if you don’t mind leaving in the middle of the night. Time is always of the essence.

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I have always been intrigued by trains. When I was a kid in the early 1950s, my mom put us kids on the train in Mountain Lake, Minn., then picked us up 10...

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