Intervene early to build math skills

To the editor:

Based on experience, I agree with the Review-Journal's editorial position that high school is too late in the K-12 cycle to begin to correct student problems with basic math (Friday editorial). While it flies in the face of social engineering, we need a comprehensive math and English exam near the midpoint of the fifth grade and before the transition to middle school.

Forget all-day kindergarten and all that nice stuff and put the resources into a full year of tutoring for those kids who don't make the cut. Sure, we will be attempting to teach third-grade material at the sixth-grade point, but that's what intensive instruction in small classes is all about.

While we're about it, let's have a good, hard look at the instruction methodology. I have yet to recover from being a school board member in California when we had a sizable contingent of Vietnamese students enroll as a result of the Boat People exodus. Here were kids who'd had as much as two years of instruction in fetid refugee camps with minimum resources, but they put our kids to shame in math. Many of our Vietnamese eighth-graders had mastered basic algebra.

Kenneth Record

LAS VEGAS

Silly survey

To the editor:

The Olive Garden restaurant is very good for what it is, but voted the best Italian restaurant in Las Vegas again ("Best of Las Vegas" poll)? Choosing it -- and Red Lobster as best seafood restaurant -- completely invalidates the rest of the "best of" categories.

Next year, ask for the best Italian restaurant first in your survey. If Olive Garden is listed on the ballot, don't even bother counting anything else; just throw it away.

Jay McCarty

LAS VEGAS

Where's the need?

To the editor:

Why is there a need for a "new" City Hall (Saturday Review-Journal)? Don't tell me it's old and falling apart. By many cities' standards, our 40-year-old City Hall is fairly new.

Or is it that our city officials just like spending money that we don't have, or money that could be put to better use if we did have it? We are already on a short budget now, and I understand our present City Hall is still not being used to full capacity.

By the way, have we paid off that outrageous bill for the new Regional Justice Center? I know that was a "county" project, but both our city and county officials seem to have a knack for showing poor judgment when it comes to spending money on "needed" new facilities.

Henry Rees

LAS VEGAS

Put Tark in the hall

To the editor:

With this being the season of March Madness, it is with much sadness that I see that former UNLV coach Jerry Tarkanian is again not a nominee for the Basketball Hall of Fame.

His resume is among the best of all time, and he did it at all levels. How can the likes of Adolf Rupp, whose teams had gambling issues, be in but not Mr. Tarkanian? Even the great John Wooden had dubious help from the booster Sam Gilbert.

Mr. Tarkanian had a few interesting individuals on his teams, but look at some of today's players, who dot the police blotters. The only thing I can deduct is that he coached in Sin City, which somehow makes what he did invalid to the basketball elite. The UNLV athletic department and administration owe Mr. Tarkanian and UNLV fans an effort to lobby on his behalf or root out the genesis of this blatant snub.

Richard Zinman

ARCADIA, CALIF.

It's the spending

To the editor:

I have to take exception to your editorial, "Entitlement meltdown," in Saturday's Review-Journal. Your editorial would imply that the problem is entitlements, when it is not.

The so-called Social Security trust fund has collected about $1.7 trillion more than it has paid out, including about $500 billion in the past three years alone. That money should have gone a long way to strengthening Social Security, right? Wrong! That money was borrowed and replaced with IOUs. The money was used to artificially keep income taxes low, essentially subsidizing low income tax rates that benefit mostly the richest taxpayers. If the Review-Journal raised an alarm about this in its editorial, I missed it.

The net effect is that Joe and Mary Blow and their employer's payroll tax payments were transferred to the richest taxpayers and replaced with IOUs with nary a whimper from the Review-Journal. Now the Review-Journal comes forward decrying, not that the IOUs were issued, but that they have to be paid back.

The entitlements are not the problem. They've been paid for. The problem is either a federal budget that is too high or a taxation rate that is too low or, most probably, a combination of both. "Federal budget meltdown" would be a better headline for an editorial.

Jim Weber

MESQUITE