Speak Out 1/27/06

Parental interference

AS A Jackson High School teacher, I would like to weigh in on the kilt issue. Most of the teachers have kept their mouths shut about this, but I think maybe it's time for you to hear our perspective. In my opinion, this young boy wore a kilt strictly for attention and to create a scene. Prior to the dance, he was saying he thought he'd wear a kilt because it would be funny to watch the principal's reaction. That's fine. That's what kids do. But something that everybody has ignored is the parents. This is what we deal with in public schools all the time. Kids break the rules, and when we enforce them, parents are up in arms. A lot of kids are learning from their parents that any time you do something wrong at school, that's OK, because we'll call the school and straighten it out. I caught a kid cheating on a test and gave him a zero on the answers he had completed and put him in the hall to take the rest of the test. The parents thought that this was incorrect. I gave him credit for the rest of his work. They thought I should give him credit for everything. That's what we deal with all the time. That's the biggest problem in education today.

No politics in church

REGARDING churches preaching politics: Their tax-exempt should be taken away. If the preacher wants to preach politics, he should become a politician and not be preaching. He might as well lay his Bible down and let some good preacher come in and pick it up and preach the word of Jesus Christ and being born again instead of preaching politics in church. You have Democrats and Republicans both who are losing sons on the front lines. Religion is fine, but leave the politics out of church.

Autoworkers out of work

I WONDER how people who own foreign cars feel this morning and know how many people they put out of work. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Pricey bus

AT THE big car auction out in Glendale, Ariz., a bus sold for $20 million. I can't believe anyone would want to pay $20 million for a bus.

Henderson parking

I CAN'T understand why Henderson Avenue between Broadway and Normal Avenue, one of the widest two-lane streets in the city, has absolutely no on-street parking on either side. There is so little parking in the area you would think it would make sense to open the area up for curbside parking.

Movie nuisances

PEOPLE NEED to learn how to act in movie theaters. The past two times we've been, we have been miserable because of crying kids and a woman talking on her cell phone. If you use your cell phone during a movie, you obviously don't care about wasting your money and missing the movie, let alone annoying everyone around you. It seems people are looking for every excuse to take their kids out in public and annoy everyone around them. Neither of the movies we attended were appropriate for small children. Thanks, parents, for ruining the movie experience for us.

Passing on costs

EVERYTHING IS going up in price: gasoline, food, electricity, phone and cable TV. Why does the price increase of cable TV make such big news? Each cable channel charges the cable-TV provider, and when the cable channels raise their rates, they get passed on to all of us. Just like all the other utilities, expenses gets passed on to the consumer.

Misguided lobbying

MISSOURIANS sent John Ashcroft to Jefferson City as governor and to Washington as senator. How can he betray the people of Missouri by lobbying to have Israel's aircraft industries rather than Boeing obtain the contract for a new radar system designed to help the U.S. Air Force track enemy aircraft? And this at a time when St. Louis is about to lose thousands of jobs in the auto industry.