That’s the Sound of a Dying Empire, Not Freedom
I would like to respond to Charles Walker’s letter (“That’s Not Airplane Noise; It’s the Sound of Freedom!” Aug. 4).
I guess Mr. Walker missed the debt/deficit “crisis” and the economic collapse caused by dozens of unfunded wars and the posting of American legions of occupation all over the world.
He also seems to have missed the facts of peak oil and global climate destabilization caused by overuse of fossil fuels. The Pentagon is the No. 1 consumer of U.S. petroleum.
It also seems to have escaped his notice that the F-35s he’s defending are overpriced boondoggles designed to fight the F-16s the United States has supplied to others while lining the pockets of Lockheed, etc. Or that the military-industrial complex will be selling these planes below cost to other countries.
When I hear military jets overhead, I hear the dying blasts of the end of the age of cheap fossil fuels coupled with the financial and moral bankrupting of our society by the Permanent War Economy.
Chet Gardiner
People Experiencing a Mental-Health Crisis Have Long Had a Place to Go
I am writing in response to “Help Is on the Way” (Currents, July 14). I work at Southern Arizona Mental Heath Corporation crisis center (SAMHC), which has been serving members of the Tucson community in mental-health crises for 50 years (2502 N. Dodge Blvd., No. 190; www.samhc.com). I was disappointed that our agency was not mentioned, and am even more concerned that members of our community may not be aware of the important service we have been providing.
We are a 24 hour walk-in crisis center and provide the community with mobile acute crisis teams, assistance with the Title 36 petition process, and important services for all of Pima County, regardless of a client’s ability to pay.
While the Crisis Response Center may be a new facility, the services it will provide are not new to Tucson, as we have been providing them (with some differences) for a very long time.
Betsy Gershman
This article appears in Aug 25-31, 2011.
Well said Chet!
Tuesday night Pima had another community forum on the elimination of the neediest students by not offering certain remedial courses .
But in the beginning……
Pima college claimed they needed to turn away the neediest students (determined by low scores on their assessment test) by eliminating remedial courses because state funding to Pima College had been cut drastically. So the college had to cut and they chose to cut the remedial courses which serve the neediest students because Pima has statistics that say these students are failures.
That is where the myriad of confusion begins – the statistics on Pima College demonstrate that the college has a 10% graduation rate, 79% of the students coming to Pima test into at least one remedial class, and as Pima explained at their most recent community forum 19 out of 20 students leave the college and don’t finish their study program, which actually verifies the rest of higher education’s supposition that community colleges are a waste of taxpayer dollars because they divert students from a worthwhile education?
Yet when Pima college did a recent survey of students they didn’t survey the students who have left; the fault is not because of students’ lack of effort to tell the college, the college just doesn’t listen, that is why students leave.
Students are clear about why they leave Pima including teachers and staff who don’t care and/or have little to no contact with their students evidenced in classes that start out with 30 students and end up with 3 with all of this and funding issues complicated by the college’s payment of six figure salaries to over 45 administrators.
Doubtless, it is not coincidental that this elimination of the neediest from Pima College coincides with the college’s removal of all daycares (which are funded in the same way that all other daycares are funded and which continue to operate), outreach coordinators who would visit high schools, and retention specialists whose major duties included working with the neediest.
The confusion continues: while Pima College initially claimed it was the neediest students’ failures on the assessment tests that prompted this action to eliminate these remedial courses, the college then claimed these students are failures because Pima has provided a wide variety of programs to help them over the past five years and it has not worked. This sounds more like the K-12 schools’ legacy of the past 50 years in which once again public schools have failed our students.
And still more confusion because Pima College said that they were eliminating remedial courses for the neediest because of funding cuts, but now they claim they will set up a new program called Pathways to Pima with techniques to help the neediest students which will cost more mone, although the costs weren’t discussed.
Confusion then leaves one stunned for the techniques in this new program, Pathways to Pima, that were proposed by Pima College, are old solutions. The plan would include the use of literacy and adult education programs that have already existed and which are overloaded already with students. The college also proposed that the neediest students could be sent to other college programs like Center for Training and Development for literacy classes but these programs do not provide those types of services and do require that students take an assessment, so these students cannot access these programs.
Bewilderment then ensues as Pima College proposes that there will be some courses that the neediest students can take at a cost of $33 which in five to six weeks will teach them everything they did not learn in 12 years of high school or in any other previous Pima College program that served the neediest and didn’t work.
Then there is the kicker for these neediest students because they will need to pay for these courses as they will not be eligible for any federal grants or other college assistance.
However, the confusion with Pima College’s plan becomes completely overwhelming because the college will still allow these students to take up to 15 credits of courses, just not any of the major general education courses that are part of a degree steering these neediest students away from the dream of a college degree.
While confusion reigned in much of Pima’s plan to eliminate educational opportunities for the neediest students, one thing was clear at the meeting – this is a done deal because the board and chancellor have already decided this is what will be. So why the community forums if they do not even wish to listen to the community who are the sole reason for their existence as a college.
In not listening to the community, it is an abandonment on the part of the board and Pima College to serve their community well. The outcome is simple – the neediest students will not be able to go to Pima College nor continue onto other accredited universities and college; instead these students will turn to more costly, unaffordable and unaccredited colleges that cannot provide the educational and career opportunities that Pima College was designed to provide.
And it was also made clear at the community forum that the blame lies on students and businesses…..how terribly disingenuous , at its worst hypocritical……
As an epilogue, statistics actually do support that there are programs and schools that do work with the neediest of students; Until educators, which certainly includes Pima college administrators, accept their responsibility for the poor state of our public educational system instead of blaming others, then education is never going to improve……and these types of programs that determine who can and cannot go to college are pure elitism and racism (there is abundant research that clearly demonstrates that blacks and hispanics compose the greatest portion of the neediest students.)