Adele Ferguson - Parents, students don’t like merging school districts

ITEM–The Seattle Times has called for consolidation of smaller school districts with their neighbors to save money. Savings could be achieved by eliminating duplicate positions, i.e. bureaucratic overhead, and forming cooperatives for purchase of supplies, says The Times. They could still use the same buildings and bus systems.

COMMENT–As I have written many times, consolidation is rarely done because parents and students don’t like it, and we’re kidding ourselves if we think all those surplus bureaucrats will just melt away or move to Australia. Districts already can form cooperatives. Each district could reduce its own bureaucracy quicker and cheaper by returning most assistant superintendents and directors of this and that to the classroom.

ITEM–One in eight Americans –37 million–received emergency food help last year, up 46 percent from 2005, the nation’s largest hunger relief group reports. Children are hit particularly hard, according to the report by Feeding America, a network of 203 food banks nationwide, One in five children, 14 million, received food from soup kitchens, food pantries and other agencies. Feeding America president Vicki Escarra said America is in a crisis. President Obama proposed to add $1 billion annually in his budget to aid school-based food programs.

COMMENT–Sorry, I just don’t believe it. There is too much evidence in competition for government handouts that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Hence this squeak.

ITEM–U.S. House Republicans announced they won’t request any so-called earmarks in an election year attempt to outdo Democrats in clamping down on the practice of adding money for pet projects to legislation.

COMMENT–They’re a little late. If they had announced this after they became the majority in Congress they might still be there. Instead, they played “it’s our turn” and reached for all the goodies they’d been denied in the minority. When President Bush signed their wish lists instead of vetoing them to uphold their claim that they stood for less spending and smaller government, they and he blew it big time. On the other hand, the reason so many members grow old in office is because they delivered the pork.

ITEM–President Obama is considering putting a halt to all sport and commercial fishing on the shores and inland waters of the United States, including the Great Lakes, according to the Washington Times. He can do it by simply issuing an executive order which would not require the approval of Congress or any other body. The reasoning behind it is to make sure fish are an assured resource for coming generations.

COMMENT–Why aren’t we seeing more about this in the mainstream press or on television? Is the whole idea to do it before we find out about it and demand to be consulted? Where is the people’s voice on such decisions?

ITEM–A plan to send Honolulu garbage to central Washington through Longview and other lower Columbia River ports by truck instead of barge has run aground in the federal bureaucracy. Seattle-based Hawaiian Waste Systems has been told that the U.S. Department of Agriculture wants another environmental assessment of the plan. In the meantime, a Honolulu TV station reported that 300 tons of compacted, shrink-wrapped garbage is stacked up on the docks waiting for shipment to the Roosevelt Landfill.

COMMENT–Why us? Surely there is land elsewhere unusable for homes or businesses that can use the money involved in storing garbage. Why not store Hawaiian garbage on Hawaiian land? Or one of the many uninhabited islands out there in the wide blue yonder?

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville. Wa,, 98640.)