A sincere thank you to the voters of Weathersfield for visiting the polls and mailing ballots in support of the fiscal year 2022 school budget. We are grateful for your commitment to invest in the future of our students.
We would also like to thank the Budget Advisory Committee, which thoroughly reviewed the budget and made reduction suggestions in areas that would have the least negative impact on the education of our students. We appreciate their time and the thoughtful consideration that went into this process.
ANNEMARIE REDMOND
Weathersfield
The writer is chairperson of the Weathersfield School Board and Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union representative. This letter was also signed by School Board Vice Chair and WSESU representative Mark Yuengling, Clerk Kristen Bruso, WSESU Bargaining Council member Jacqui Antonivich, WSESU representative Jaimie Turner, WSESU Superintendent David Baker and Principal JeanMarie K. Oakman.
The Feb. 24 op-ed column demanding that Leon Black’s name be removed from Dartmouth College’s visual arts center raises two questions: What do the visual arts faculty who teach there and the students who study there think? And, while we’re at it, should the name of Ernest Hopkins be removed from Hopkins Center for the Arts as well?
As was pointed out as recently as this January in The Dartmouth, Hopkins, Dartmouth’s president, “rejected a 1933 suggestion to increase Jewish enrollment because ‘life is so much pleasanter in Hanover, the physical appearance of the place is so greatly benefited and friends of the college visiting us are so much happier with the decreased quota of the Hebraic element.’ ” In a 1934 letter, The Dartmouth reported, Hopkins acknowledged that Jewish applicants “were rejected at a higher rate than non-Jewish applicants so that the college would not be ‘overrun racially.’ ”
JON APPLETON
White River Junction
It is time for the entire U.S. government, federal and state, to experience what many Americans experience. Every job, from governor to senator to president, needs to receive the federal minimum wage. No benefits. The worst health insurance available. Pensions to drop to Social Security only. As their financial lives unravel and their stress escalates, we will watch.
We, the people, will be able to pick up their losses — their homes, their planes, their multiple automobiles, their luxuries — for pennies on the dollar, just as the wealthy lie in wait to pick us apart during financial downturns.
They will find the air is very different. Their imaginations will become stunted. Perhaps they will be “transformed” and become able to act like human beings. Perhaps Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs will become of interest to them.
We, the people, will decide when this ends by voting — in a year, at the earliest.
Federal minimum wage for all!
VICKI WARD
Barnard
It sure is grand to have rid ourselves of that two-timed impeached interloper (I’ve sworn to never speak his name). Now we can dedicate ourselves to more important things — like the climate mess. Please excuse my indignance: I simply can’t abide complacency with our increasingly dilapidating ecosystems. Wake-up fellow travelers, the third rock from the sun represents a closed system, and negligence in its upkeep is a peril to us all.
It would be one thing if crew and passengers of spaceship Earth were exclusively those who plot the matricide of mother nature, while the innocent (children, fauna, flora) and the ecologically woke could inhabit another safe haven. But that’s science fiction, not reality. Nevertheless, the deniers’ titanic misadventure is equipped with no lifeboats. So let me be frank: We must insist that the people wishing to take a “Ted Cruise” from the oncoming catastrophes must find their own planet, or the rest of us must enact legislation such that climate sabotage be ruled a capital offense. Think about the number of living souls vs. the number of deniers: the former dominates overwhelmingly. Society shall side with the innocents, else there is no justice.
We’ve recently witnessed a thermal upheaval of the jet stream, the firestorms of California, aggravated typhoons and cyclones, melting ice caps, the misbehavior of El Niño y La Niña, etc. The pendulum swings ever faster, more violently and chaotically.
The story “UN: Carbon cuts not nearly enough” (Feb. 27) reported that the United Nation’s climate chief told member nations to go back and try harder, given that their pledges would only reduce global CO2 emissions to less than 1% below 2010 levels by 2030. I don’t know about you, but I am livid! We’re so near the precipice, yet we pussyfoot around the issue. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “Humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal. Nature always strikes back — and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.” It’s time to shut down polluters. The innocents have suffered enough.
KEVIN McEVOY LEVERET
White River Junction