Plan will just empower the bureaucracy

The idea that we can make our school district better by reorganizing it or breaking it into smaller districts is pure hoopla. It is driven by people who haven’t a clue as to what it would take to make changes resulting in a better educational system.

After spending more than four decades in education, mostly in Clark County, I have learned that the public school bureaucracy never gets better, only bigger and worse. Money hardly ever reaches the only place it can do the most good, namely the classroom. Politicians, school administrators and parents are the absolute worst people to run the education system because they are biased toward their own special interests.

The local parents will eventually negate whatever good may come from breaking up our school district and administration will continue to draw away what is needed in our classrooms in pursuit of their personal needs and position. Politicians always gum up the system by providing inadequate funding and instituting crazy policy changes with little or no funding to back them.

So in my opinion, all breaking up the school district will accomplish is more layers of bureaucracy with rich and poor districts run by smaller groups that haven’t a clue.

To actually see positive change in public education, we must strip the political and administrative bureaucracies of their power over making the rules. We should direct our students toward what interests them instead of trying to create one-size-fits-all education policies. Then we must put the majority of public school funding where it should have gone in the first place — the classroom — and tell parents to just butt out.

Jim Hayes

Las Vegas

Drug problem

As I am watching the presidential race, I have not heard anything from the candidates about the drug problem we have here in the United States.

Drugs kill far more people than firearms, but the two major presidential candidates have not said what they intend to do about the drug problem.

Henry Hertel

Las Vegas

Taking our guns

The so-called gun control initiative, Question 1 on the November ballot, is a joke. It does nothing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals; it does nothing to keep illegal guns out of the hands of gang bangers. Those people will get their guns regardless of any regulation we might pass.

This is a big step for the anti-gun, Michael Bloomberg, crowd. And this initiative, like many others being presented by the anti-gun crowd, would put us just one step away from a national registry, which will lead to the national confiscation of our guns. And that, my dear citizens, is exactly their goal.

They point to the so-called Australia model regarding gun confiscation. What they don’t tell you about is the corresponding spike in crime, especially violent crime, in the wake of their total gun confiscation. Guess they didn’t get them all. Could it be that criminals thumbed their noses at the confiscation order and retained possession of their guns? Hmmm. Should be a lesson there.

The only people affected by this ill-conceived proposition will be law-abiding citizens, who already obey gun laws and are no threat at all to our population. But that’s not the threat Mr. Bloomberg and his ilk are worried about. They fear our guns because of the Constitution, which provides for a citizen’s right to arm himself and protect himself from a high-handed federal government. Looking around at our political landscape today, I think they got it right, don’t you?

Question 1 is just a smoke screen that will not make us safer.

Rick Ainsworth

Henderson

The writer is a member of the Nevada Firearms Coalition.