Eldred Pres: Do your job!

Apparently after one year in the Eldred Central School District, Dr. John Morgano still does not get it. He does not need to educate the public, he needs to educate the students and manage the teachers to make sure that gets done. That is not happening, and more students and parents are choosing not to come to ECS. Do your job! You were not hired to greet students at the door.

Without a doubt, more taxes will get ECS on a more sustainable financial footing, but will they fix Eldred? While everyone readily admits that salaries and healthcare are the biggest budget busters, have you re-negotiated the teachers’ contract? Do your job!

Not one ineffective teacher has been let go. Why are students not coming to Eldred? Do your job!

We will talk later about breaking the tax cap and what that means for the community!

Paul A. Clark Jr.

Barryville, NY

A hunter for gun safety laws

Two recent shooting incidents have prompted me to write this out of concern about arming teachers in schools.

A black security guard in Illinois, legally armed, was shot by police while he was trying to do his job subduing a man threatening clients where he worked. This was a case of a snap judgment by the police officer who shot him.

A 21-year-old black man was also legally armed when he was shot by police in a mall in Alabama. He was carrying a gun and running away, along with others, from a shooting rampage by someone who, at the time of this writing, is still at large. This was another case of an officer acting very quickly when he saw a man with a gun.

Now, picture an active shooter in a school where some teachers are armed, maybe some of them teachers of color. The police arrive and see several armed people. Is an officer going to make a snap decision that turns out to be horribly wrong? Think of the trauma students would experience if one of their teachers were shot by police.

I am a hunter calling for sane gun safety laws.

Katharine Dodge

Lake Ariel, PA

Inhumane treatment for asylum seekers

As if separating children from their parents and putting them in cages was not enough, our bully president has now ordered the use of tear gas against families with children seeking asylum, to prevent them from entering the United States. The bully in the White House’s demonization of immigrants is nothing new. His fear-

mongering lies include stories that families fleeing violence, starvation and who have walked thousands of miles to reach the country of their hopes of salvation are criminals, gang members and members of ISIS. Even our intelligence community does not support this. These lies are told by the leader of the free world, and his supporters may actually believe him. 

Our country has a long established orderly process to determine who is granted asylum, yet the Trump administration has heightened a crisis by working to dismantle the legal methods for migrants seeking that status. According to U.S. law, migrants are required to report to ports of entry and ask for asylum. Currently, they are refused entry when they arrive and therefore cannot even petition for asylum. They are told to sit and wait, often for weeks or months, after walking thousands of miles. How much more can these people endure?

The images of children and parents being tear gassed should wake up ALL Americans. Not since 1939, when the United States refused the entry of over 900 largely German Jews fleeing the Nazis, has our country turned away asylum seekers en masse. In 1939, those people were forced to return to Europe and certain death. Our current laws were written so that such a cruel crime would not happen again. Today, the ignorance and hatred of Trump may lead to more innocent deaths, if these current asylum seekers, too, are similarly forced back to the hell that waits in their countries of origin.

Jane Creteau

Lakeville, PA