THE 'FALLING SHORT' LABEL
So step up now and volunteer to help
I loved Gail Rosenblum's Aug. 30 column on test scores. She is so right. Test scores do not tell the whole story at Cityview or any other school.
During the final 10 years of a long teaching career, I felt fortunate to have wonderful volunteers working with me. Many of them were senior citizens. They visited my third-grade classroom week after week and helped my students feel special and loved.
The beginning of the school year is a great time to offer help as a volunteer at your area school. I promise that you will be very much appreciated.
CHERRIE MATHIESON,
FERGUS FALLS, MINN.
THE DREAM ACT
A way to better educate Minnesota's workforce
Regarding Lori Sturdevant's Aug. 30 column about the need to educate more Minnesotans to college and beyond:
Many students would love to go to college but cannot because of the high cost. Others cannot go because of a decision their parents made: When the students were very young their parents came here from another country, and these students have no documents to receive financial aid.
If politicians would pass the Dream Act, more students could attend the universities and provide Minnesota with some of those much-needed workers.
SEAN FLEMING, ST. PAUL
NO REALLY MEANS NO
Surely Kersten doesn't oppose that message
Oh, dear. Couldn't one of your editors have saved Katherine Kersten some embarrassment and told her that "skits on 'date rape'" tend to be about how to prevent or report it rather than how to commission one?
The rest of the wild overgeneralizations of her Aug. 30 column might be chalked up to a difference in values systems, but opposing anti-date-rape education looks remarkably like valorizing ignorance -- at the expense of young women's safety.
MARISSA GRITTER, EAGAN
LOCAVORE BASICS
Beyond taste, a movement to diversify
Both authors of the Aug. 30 opinion piece "Eating from the Inner Circle / Does the local food movement make a difference?" seem to emphasize the cutesy aspects of the locavore movement, as when we shuttle off a busload of first-graders to an apple orchard and say, "Look, this is where apples are made!" rather than "These are the people who keep us alive, and healthy."
The authors fail to point out that as long as we all must eat, food will remain a matter of national and regional security. A food production system based in the industrialized monocultures of California's Central Valley, Mexico or Brazil is incredibly vulnerable to fluctuations in oil prices, as well as regional weather and disease patterns.
The locavore movement is about a lot more than nostalgia and "fresh and tasty": it's the food equivalent of asset diversification. Be they organic, free-range or caged, it's never a good idea to put all of your eggs in one basket.
We should do our darndest to feed ourselves.
CRAIG BOWRON, M.D., ST. PAUL
THE GREENER GOVERNOR
Pawlenty's support is just more discerning
Nick Coleman's Aug. 30 column criticizes Gov. Tim Pawlenty for changing his position on the "climate change/clean energy fight."
Perhaps in trying to balance the state budget, Pawlenty noticed the huge state subsidies going out to ethanol plants and wind farms at a time when grain-based ethanol is no longer considered a solution to global warming. Maybe he recognized that carbon dioxide is as clean a gas as we can get and there is no reason to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Maybe he noticed that Minnesota has good access to low-cost coal and natural gas while environmentalists have no alternative to offer.
I have not heard Pawlenty advocate drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or in the Rockies, nor have I heard him advocate offshore drilling, which Brazil and Cuba are doing. I have not heard Pawlenty repudiate the "man-made global warming" theory as the hoax that it is. When he does that I might believe he has actually changed his position.
JOHN ZIMMERSCHIED, MINNEAPOLIS
