It was a morning on the treadmill (it didn’t rain but it seemed like it would), three miles in 26:59 all the while choking and grunting and feeling it deep in the calves. Plus, the iPod Nano had no charge and doesn’t appear to be holding on anymore. But I did get the run in.
Author: hankkalet
Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.
Morning quote: David Sirota on the Obama administration
David Sirota, writing on the In These Times Web site on the Obama administration’s reform plans, compares the actual details of his vision to some of the major American visionaries of the past (the Founding Fathers, Edison, FDR):
All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.
Hurdles to participation
This move by the Mt. Olive school district, if approved tonight, presages a dangerous trend in public education.
Mount Olive High School students who play sports and some who join clubs will be forced to pay a participation fee next year to make up for budget shortfalls.
The Board of Education must come up with $91,000 in revenue from the fees, and preliminarily announced the fees will be $125 for a student to play an unlimited number of sports and $25 to join nonacademic, nonservice clubs, school board President Mark Werner said at a recent board meeting.
Thus, a student who plays multiple sports and is in multiple clubs would pay $150, the same as a student who plays one sport and is in one club.
“That’s what we’re looking at right now,” Werner said. “However we slice it, we have to come up with $91,000. That’s our mission — $91,000.”
On first blush, this might seem an innovative way to plug a hole in the school district’s budget. And it is difficult to criticize the district for exploring this avenue.
But seeking fees from students raises questions about access to programs, about the openness of participation in public school activities and whether such fees might pose, if not an impediment, then a disincentive to joining clubs or playing sports.
Granted, these activities are extras, but they have become a central part of the high school experience — and they are an important part of the college applicaton process. Colleges not only seek students with solid grades and high test scores, but those who participate in the school culture — in clubs and sports — because they want kids who are well rounded and interested in more than just books.
The fees, therefore, become not only a financial hurdle to high school participation but potentially create a drag on the ability of low- or moderate-income students to get into college.
Health care naysayers
Republicans were out in force, trying to kill the kind of healthcare reform that Americans — if opinion polling is any indication — desire and expect. All are claiming to support reform, but none seem to be listening to the majority, which repeatedly says it wants a public plan as an alternative to the current system — and that it trusts the government to manage health care coverage better than the insurance companies.
Amnesty and fiscal prudence
The state’s tax amnesty program appears to have worked beyond anyone’s expectations, with more than a half billion dollars in past-due taxes making their way back into state coffers.
The money, according top top Democrats, will allow the state to restore property tax rebates that had been slashed as part of the various budget revisions offered by Gov. Jon Corzine to deal with flagging revenues caused by the failing economy and to deal with a structural deficit in the budget built up over the last two years.
Bringing back the rebates makes sense as a short-term measure, even if Republican candidate Chris Christie accuses Corzine of using the money for political gain. The rebates are desperately needed in this property-tax heavy state, especially with so many New Jerseyans facing economic uncertainty.
Is the amnesty program a one-shot gimmick? Maybe, but so was the rebate cut. And the program gives the state some time to find replacement revenue for next year’s budget.
Ultimately, as I’ve written, the rebates — like so many other attempts to rein in property taxes without changing the system’s fundamental structure — are just a patch. Eventually, the entire system will blow like an aging tire and a new one will be installed. That’s the only real hope.
In the meantime, the rebates will have to do.
