Let’s get our priorities straight

Matt Pearl

It is perhaps pointless to reason with radicals, their perspective becomes their entire reality, and logic, therefore, works against the grain of their thinking.

I find myself often feeling like a logical loner when I survey politics: everything from local wastewater plant talks to the president unilaterally nullifying the significance of “his” and “her” signs on public restroom doors.

So that’s what 2016 has become: we don’t know which restroom to use, but our government has informed us that we all need new sewer plants to handle the wastewater after we flush.

Each of these two issues deserves our attention, perhaps, although my feeling is that the less socially charged matter — wastewater treatment — will have the largest impact on the residents of our coverage communities.

But perhaps applying 26 column inches to talking about sewer plants is an unworthy endeavor. Suffice it to say this only: we have a lot of work to do, and the Department of Natural Resources is going to make sure we get it done on their schedule.

Nor do I have the heart to write an entire column about how my grandchildren won’t know what a boys bathroom or girls bathroom is. To avoid lawsuits and possible danger to children, I predict that the president’s restroom mandate will land — as always — on the backs of others, who will have to pay to remodel their bathroom facilities to be single-occupant, unisex closets. It costs a lot of money to keep everyone happy all the time. But then again, spending your money is something in which your government specializes.

No, I’ve been thinking more about the school year in our small towns, and the importance of maintaining the current bookends for the nine-month season.

Our schools basically begin session in mid-August and dismiss in mid-May, depending upon snow-day makeups and other non-scheduled absences that the district must account for at year’s end.

And I used to advocate for the more traditional year: begin after Labor Day; let summer break begin on Memorial Day. But there are some problems with that system to rural communities.

Primarily, farmers need help and need their kids home when the work load most demands it. They’re already planting (weather permitting) before the end of school, and the work is far from done when it begins in August.

To keep kids in school until June would present even more of a problem for the farmers around the community.

My former advocacy for the September start was rooted in weather considerations.

August can offer some of the season’s hottest weather. But the number of air-conditioned classroom areas in our schools has allowed for relief from such heat. If we can successfully control in the indoor climate, then I suppose it really doesn’t matter when school begins and ends from a heating and cooling perspective.

I’ll close on an unrelated but exciting note.

The Gentry County Library has received notification that it has received a grant to digitize back issues of county newspapers.

For you and me, that means in the near future, doing keyword searches and finding items from back issues of The Tri-County News, The Albany Ledger, The Stanberry Headlight, The King City Chronicle and more than half a dozen other newspapers is coming. It took a lot of work from Judy Garrett and the library staff, but the project is coming.Now that is pretty exciting.