Free Press –
Colodonato Twins,
Dear Friends,
Good morning. Last week as I stopped in at the Quakertown News Agency, I spotted the Colodonato twins. You’d never guess that they’ll be 80 in October. Julia is two minutes older than her identical twin, Jeanette (Colodonato) Hoffman.
I thought I heard Jeanette telling the proprietor that she’d been tubing in the New Hampshire mountains. For those of you who’ve not done tubing, it’s a thrilling experience. Patrons climb aboard truck sized inner tubes and ride down the slopes, bumping over moguls. The sport is not for the meek. I had this mental picture of Jeanette, holding on tight with a bunch of kids, hurtling down the mountainside.
Jeanette called me later and put me straight. She’d correctly concluded that I wasn’t paying close enough attention to her story. “I wasn’t tubing,” she laughed. “I was watching my grandson tubing.” Jeanette was visiting her son, who’s a superintendent of a New Hampshire school.
Her twin, Julia, is a member of the Pennridge-Quakertown Sports Hall of Fame. The 1949 QHS graduate was a field hockey, basketball, and softball star during the coaching days of Marion Afflerbach, one of Quakertown’s famous coaches.
The Colodonato sisters live together. Julia is a sports fan; Jeanette likes to cook and sew. “We’re always together,” Jeanette laughed, “that’s why we get into trouble.”
Item.
Some would have you readers believe that the Quakertown school board is full of villains who are doing their best to keep you in the dark. I don’t think so. I have no doubt that the board wants to do the best for its students. Yes, there are members who stumble. And yes, the board deliberations are not always as transparent as they should be.
But I don’t think that there’s a deliberate plot to deceive or mislead the citizens. My bet is that in the future, the school board will bend over backwards to avoid conflicts with the sunshine law. What the board needs to do is to insure that every graduate is proficient in the basic curriculum…and that’s not the case now.
In my column last week, I reported that 40 percent of last year’s graduating Quakertown seniors would not have received their diplomas if the proposed Pennsylvania standards for high school graduation had been in force. The failure rates of graduating seniors in the 13 Bucks County school districts ranged from a low of 14 percent (Central Bucks) to a high of 76 percent (Morrisville).
If enacted and passed by the state legislature, those standards will take affect in 2014. To graduate, seniors will have to pass exams in math, language arts, science and social studies.
I hope that the school board will implement those rules within a few years…long before the clock strikes 2014. How in the world can we expect today’s generation to compete with their Asian and European peers?
Item.
A story about recessions in the New York Times caught my attention last week. It pointed out that the U.S. congress is filled with inept people…and the 50 state legislatures are worse.
The report
listed recessions beginning with 1948 and when the congress responded to the
crisis. “The history of anti-recession efforts is that they are almost always
initiated too late to do any good,” the
The November 1948 recession ended October 1949 and the legislation was enacted October 1949; the August 1957 recession ended April 1958 and the legislation was enacted April and July 1958; The April 1960 recession ended in February 1961 and the legislation was enacted May 1961 and September 1962; the December 1969 recession ended November 1970 with legislation August 1971; the November 1973 recession ended March 1975 with legislation enacted in March 1975, July 1976, and May 1977;
The July 1981 recession ended November 1982 with legislation enacted January and March 1983; the July 1990 recession ended in March 1991 with legislation of December 1991; and the March 2001 recession ended November 2001 with legislation in June 2001.
As you can see, with the exception of the November 2001 recession, congress constantly reacted too late. Of course, the Presidents were equally to blame.
My point is this. There are few people in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government that understand economics and have come from private industry. The vast majority of these people have backgrounds in law or municipal government. Only a handful comes from private industry…that is, those who know how to create capital.
If history is a precursor, does this mean that there is no ’08 recession? Do President Bush and the congress just want to hand out cash during an election year?
Friends, it’s not just about Democrats and Republicans. Please tell me, in the last 50 years, what congress… what state legislature truly served the public. Couldn’t you could make a case for term limits…and if not term limits, how about throwing all legislators out in the cold and start afresh? Just kidding, of course.
Sincerely,
Charles Meredith