Letters

Gratitude for options

It's National School Choice Week. I want to take a moment and thank those who have contributed to my education journey. I have attended traditional and charter public schools and will graduate high school from a private school.

A traditional public school gave me a great foundation. In second grade, my parents enrolled me in the then brand-new eStem Public Charter School due to the STEM emphasis, location, and promising possibility of a strong public middle school. That year I was diagnosed with a grade II brain tumor and hydrocephalus. My eStem teachers were amazing, and transitioning to middle school seamless. Because the school was so close to Arkansas Children's Hospital, I missed significantly less school than had I attended my zoned schools, and my parents missed much less work.

As high school approached, it became clear I needed support a public school wasn't able to provide and chose to transfer to Little Rock Christian Academy. Ten brain surgeries and many complications later, I will be a 2019 graduate with a high ACT and over 4.0 GPA.

I could not be more thankful for school choice options. But not every child has the opportunities I had, and I believe all children deserve to have access to excellent schools that meet their needs. Supporting quality school choice options is a moral, ethical, and constitutional issue Arkansans and our leaders must continue to address. My scholastic future is bright and I am able to dream big because of school choice. One can only imagine the deep appreciation I have for all who made this possible. To them I say, "Thank you!"

MARY-KAYLIN O'NEAL LINCH

Little Rock

Choice benefits us all

As National School Choice Week is upon us, and education issues are in the headlines across the country, it is sometimes easy to forget that many teachers are parents too. As a mother and as a teacher, choice in education has been very important to our entire family.

When my first son began preschool, I realized that following a traditional education path may not be what was best for him. We tried numerous options for educating him, including five-day private school, all-year public school, homeschooling with co-ops, and ultimately a university-model private school. Each of these options provided something different for my son. We finally found the best educational fit for him and he has done well.

As a teacher, I found that a traditional public school teaching position demanded more time than was beneficial for my family. I wanted to teach well and parent well. The traditional five-day class schedule did not accommodate doing both. Fortunately, the university-model school setting did allow me to do both. I have also found that area schools tend to raise the bar on quality and are more receptive to the community's education needs when options are available.

To me the evidence is clear: Choice in education benefits students, teachers, and families.

KIM FLOWERS

Bentonville

Judgment is coming

Watching Nova's "Day the Dinosaurs Died" confirmed my intuition that God's forthcoming judgment of this Earth may be to start all over again. The asteroid which hit Earth 60 billion years ago killed all life and totally realigned the planet. Energies, necessarily positive and negative, began new formations of all that is now. God loves to create and loves his creation but also said, "I am God and will do as I please." Eventually humans came along to love and care for this Earth: "The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew [breathed] into his nostrils the breath of life." Then God pointed out the "tree of the knowledge of good and bad [evil]," ordering that humans not eat of that one tree. They did, and it is the story of each of us.

Like God, humans like to create. Now we have nuclear weapons that could destroy the Earth. Nuclear energy and all else, seen and unseen, can be used for good or bad. That is for humans to decide. God allows humans to be, even while he is everywhere. On my own watch, I have seen evil spreading, not so subtly here and worldwide, since the 1950s. My conclusion is that the real division on this planet is about the love of money for power versus the love of God first, for the enjoyment of the immense and mysterious power that is only of God throughout all creation. It is not for sale.

JUDITH H. BAUM

North Little Rock

It's all a game to him

Rule-or-Ruin is a game that some players use and reuse in the game of life until they are masters of the tactics needed to "win." The basic position is simple: "Let me have my way or I will ruin the game for everyone." Not everyone can play this game; it requires a special temperament.

Donald Trump is much better at this game than we Democrats. This game is his go-to way of winning. He's used it for years in finance. Mr. Trump's numerous bankruptcies and bad habit of pressuring creditors to accept pennies on the dollar are but examples of a repeated pattern of bad behavior being rewarded. America is paying the price of this moral oversight.

To avoid being flanked and checkmated you have to block the threat of being sued to force payment of what was agreed upon with an absolute commitment to counter-sue, raise the stakes and raise the expenses to the point that the paper the other player holds is worthless. In this game the winner is the person who doesn't care about fair/right/wrong (these are just words); there is simply what the player wants and is willing to ignore verbal abuse to get.

Recently in a restaurant I saw a sign: "Arguing with the waitress is like arguing with a pig in the mud; after a while you will realize that the pig is having fun." That's Donald Trump and his shutdown. The more the pig squeals the happier it makes Mr. Trump. This is proof that he's about to win. There in no empathy and there is only one point of view, his own, the Emperor of America. The foolish news outlets can continue to play all the stories that pull on the heart strings of America. Trump does not share our national weakness--empathy. Their lives do not matter.

Listen to the echo coming from the back room of the White House where the infant sits tweeting in the early morning hours: "Make me."

DANNY HANCOCK

Lonoke

Thoughts on the wall

A few of my thoughts:

  1. The original "caravan" reached the U.S. border in Tijuana, where there is already a wall. Building a wall elsewhere will not have any effect on groups that do this, as I suspect most such groups will do.

  2. There is already a barrier (wall or fence, as appropriate) along about 650 miles of the border, put up between when the Secure Fence Act of 2006 went into effect and today at a cost, as of 2015, of about $2.3 billion.

  3. The true cost of a barrier needs to include maintenance. A breach in a fence is a lot cheaper to fix than a hole in a wall, and even what they planned to put up in the above-mentioned Secure Fence Act of 2006 was estimated, with maintenance, to cost $50 billion over 25 years. I suspect that the cost of maintaining a "wall" would be substantially more.

CLYDE BAILEY

Little Rock

Editorial on 01/21/2019

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