Letter writers see alternative to closing schools, lobby for vaccines and criticize rent rules
Not enough students, too many students...
The Olympia School District doesn’t have enough students and may need to shutter buildings. The Tumwater School District has more students than it would like in its buildings.
Maybe these districts could work together.
The school district boundary is not an impregnable wall. It’s a line we draw to help ourselves administer schools. It doesn’t mean we can’t cross it when it would help.
Would it better serve Olympia and Tumwater students to have some Tumwater students attend Olympia schools with Olympia teachers? Or have whole classes of Tumwater students with Tumwater teachers use rooms in Olympia buildings?
I know that working out the logistics of redistributing money, transporting students, and negotiating with four teacher and staff unions would be the easy part. The hard part would be convincing some parents to send their children to schools that aren’t the closest to their homes. And if a student lives in Tumwater but attends an Olympia school, are they a T-Bird or a Bear? I won’t pretend to know.
But I know these are questions worth pondering, and I know our school boards and district staff are smart enough to figure it out. I would rather have students learning in comfortable settings than crammed into one building while another is mothballed a few miles away.
James Geluso, Tumwater
Take advantage of 21st century medicine
“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
Aside from forgetting most of the teachings set forth 2,000 years ago, Christian Nationalists, with their anti-vaccine campaign, have forgotten the heartbreak of raising a family less than a century ago.
Unlike today, when school-age children are more likely to die from a school shooting or an motor vehicle accident, children in the mid-1900s were more likely to die from childhood diseases such as measles. With a respiratory illness, dying in bed was common, so children had their own prayer! Couples often gave birth to several children in a short period of time because the likelihood was that not all their children would survive. Pregnancy carried its own risks and fertility was not guaranteed beyond age 30.
Today, thanks to science and the development of vaccines, couples can start their families at their own pace and most often avoid the heartbreak of losing a child or watching a child struggle with disabilities brought on by infection. While protecting embryos above the health of the mothers who carry them, Christian Nationalists put actual living children at risk of suffering and death, with their pernicious anti-vaccination stance.
Remember, love thy neighbor! That includes vaccinating your children so they will live instead of spreading disease and death to the children of others.
Dave Little, Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, Olympia
How to improve access to housing
The Olympia City Council and staff have turned providing rental housing into a political game. The city has joined with state lawmakers to pass rental housing rules and possibly rent control regulations. The political actions have become headline grabbing.
While the targets of the actions are property owners, the actual help for renters is counterproductive. In Olympia, a Mom and Pop rental operation is confronted with regulations that add costs to the units they provide. This will mean an increase in monthly rental rates to cover the fees and inspections and the time to deal with the added bureaucracy.
If tenants cannot be screened for former evictions, there will be a statistical increase in damages that must be considered. This has happened with car insurance rates going up 20% overall.
The point is that none of these regulations will provide more affordable housing. The result will be higher rents and no increase in affordable housing.
For a better approach, the city council and staff should look at other cities such as the Missoula Housing Authority in Montana. Here is a county with 117,000 people that is organized to provide housing. Funding opportunities are different in another state, but rental advocates in Olympia and the state legislature should focus on providing more affordable housing, not increasing counterproductive rental regulations that will do nothing but increase rent.
John Newman, Olympia
