Your Letters for March 21, 2025

Choices about schools

About the upcoming SJSB election. I am 78 years old, graduated from Central and my wife from Lafayette. We just signed up to freeze our real estate taxes so we are just going to sit this election out and let the parents and kids make the choice about their schools.

Michael Stephens

St. Joseph

Reading in America

It seems that Americans are losing the ability, and maybe the desire to read. It doesn’t bode well for our future.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress recently reported that 33% of eighth grade students cannot read at basic level. Even more discouraging, 40% of fourth graders read below basic level. It is popular to blame the education system for this failure. However, there is evidence that much of the problem may start at home.

An American Enterprise Institute reported that adult reading levels have also declined over the last few decades.

It is a fact that many people today spend time interacting with their cell phones, computer games, other screens, that was once spent reading. Children brought up in homes where reading is not a priority are poor candidates to excel in elementary school and beyond where reading is tied directly to learning.

The rather frightening question is, what will reading skills be like when children of the 40% of fourth graders who can’t read at grade level today go to school 15 or 20 years from now?

Keith Evans

St. Joseph

School bond boondoggle

There has been a lot of projections on how the school bonds will affect the taxpayer. Remember the old saying about statistics? If you beat the numbers hard enough, you can make them say whatever you want.

Well, I think this may be a good example. I will attempt to give you some idea of how this spending other taxpayers’ monies works using the numbers offered in the Weekender News-Press by our educators. A $150,000 house will increase your tax by $171. A $325,000 house will increase your tax by $370 and some change, but who’s counting. This is the first bond. If bond one passes, we will be asked to pass the second bond of somewhere around 190, plus or minus a few million, which will double your taxes from bond one. You need not worry how quick bond two will hit because the land to build school one is unknown at this time.

Remember the old saying, “You build it, and they will come?” If all this bond stuff fails, we will be asked to pass a bond for $80 million to improve two high schools. Yes, these are schools not good enough for our high school students but good enough for our middle schools kids, and one thing to remember is, if the bond issues do pass, we will steed need to improve our high schools/middle schools so the $80 million will still be on the table.

Confused yet?

I will not mention the cost of AstroTurf presently being spent at our high schools because it gets too murky. I’m sure the middle school kids will get good use out of the fields.

Remember the shell game where a person shifts three shells around and you guess which shell the pebble is under? Well, substitute which shell the taxpayer is under. For all you non-voters who think these bond issues will not affect you, think again. Remember how corporations pass increased taxes to the customers? Well, your landlord will do the same to you. For folks like myself, who recently requested their property value be frozen, you will not escape the bond tax increases per the people at the Assessors Office, when I asked.

Here is my suggestion to our educators and School Board members, if classes are too small at one school, why not send the teacher to a central location and students can attend that location. I assure the educators the cost will not be close to the proposals you are asking us to bear.

When I attended school and is the case now, students do this now at Hillyard Vocational?

That $80 million to improve schools, if these bonds fail, is looking pretty good right now compared to this endless pot of money.

Last but not least is this comparison of St. Joseph taxpayers to St. Louis or Kansas City. We are not either, so stop justifying. I think we need to get back to educating our kids and educate our educators and school board members. Vote! This issue will affect you.

Richard Sharp

St. Joseph