Whoopee!

Motel Breath Falliero, late board member RIP

Dr. White: There are no specifics to your general comments on your candidate page. They are very high-sounding and abstruse. Are you sure you aren’t a school administrator with a degree in early childhood?

I would like a specific answer to this question. I was taught English at HCC for 28 years. The incoming freshman from local schools did not know grammar and punctuation basics. They did not know how to structure and develop the standard five-paragraph essay. It’s hard to teach Hamlet and Yeats to students of this caliber. There is nothing the college teacher can do but to take time out that should be devoted to higher-level writing and literature and teach the students what they did not learn in high school.

What specifically will you do if you win the run-off for the board to deal with this problem of the schools’ graduating marginally literate students? Would you be courageous enough to require an exit essay that demonstrated competence in grammar, punctuation, and construction of a standard five-paragraph essay?

Lee Drury De Cesare

Mr. Bartels: I assume that you and Dr. White are the run-off candidates.

Your platform is a mystery except for your promise to support the arts. I believe you specifically cite music. I am for that impulse. I do not get the impression that the current board is much interested in the arts. They are mostly interested in ripping off tax payers with flying around the country on larks for the ostensible purpose of boning up on how to be a superlative board member but really to lark about and investigate the ins and outs of room service in swank hotels; this they do while the poor children in the county can’t afford school supplies to participate in class. So you will be the leader in this arts quest if you can get it past the current traveling board harpies.

I see a picture of you on your site with flags draped around a stage that looks as if you are set to preside over a hoedown. That’s fine. I am fond of hoedowns. My Georgia family likes nothing better than a hoedown, and my daddy played the “fiddle,” i.e. the violin. He thought it pretentions to speak of a fiddle as a violin. All his witty relatives would have accused him of “getting’ above his raisin’.”

I myself like opera. Not the Grand Ol variety but the Wagner kind. If there is a Ring Cycle any place in the US or Canada, I am on a plane to get there for the 20 hours or so of the performance. I hope you will sponsor a Ring in the schools to testify to your love of music. That would represent real devotion to the arts.

If you win against the druggist, I will be interested to see how brave you are. The board members are entrenched in their ways, and I have seen Ms. Olson and Ms. Kurdell slap a board member silly for suggesting that it is not ethical to award no-bid contracts. To an average citizen, giving no-bid contracts to buddies and former administrators sounds like crime. But the board has its own protocols of crime. You will see if you survive in November and have the effrontery to think you have a right to your own opinion and represent citizens’ interests, not the administration’s and board’s, and won’t be slapped flat and shut up by the entrenched board commandos. I will be watching your performance, sir.

Lee Drury De Cesare