Letters: Across-the-board policies fail to address underlying issues, problems

Dear Editor, The Morgan Hill Unified School District Board’s
exclusionary policy if a student receives an
”
F
”
grade does not make sense. It punishes instead of helping.
Across-the-board policies fail to address underlying issues, problems

Dear Editor,

The Morgan Hill Unified School District Board’s exclusionary policy if a student receives an “F” grade does not make sense. It punishes instead of helping. If you think excluding the student from extra-curricular activities will result in better grades, think again. It doesn’t address the root of the problem which could be any number of issues. What is needed is intervention, evaluation, parent-teacher involvement, an achievable action plan, specialized tutoring and supervision with check points.

That would directly address the problem and would have guaranteed and measurable outcomes better than simple exclusion. There may also be a learning challenge which exclusion would never address. 

To label extracurricular actives as simply fun is an incredible misunderstanding. There is learning, social interaction, cultural exchanges and more. Exclusion would also limit these growth opportunities. Exclusion would also label the student. The board might as well make him/her wear a Scarlet Letter “E” on their shirts. It would likely ostracize and alienate the student which would have undesirable impacts and outcomes.

I have been teaching and administering school policies at both the high school and colleges for more than 30 years. I never understood the across-the-board policies which fail at addressing individual issues and problems. For me, it’s the lazy way out and fails every time in achieving desired outcomes.

Mark Grzan, Morgan Hill

Small businesses pay the price for excessive government spending

Dear Editor,

While the causes of small business failures are many and varied, the common thread I’ve noticed in more than 30 years of debtor-creditor and bankruptcy trustee practice is confiscatory taxes-fees-fines-assessments and crucifying, strangling, suffocating rules, regulations, ordinances by government at all levels.

We’re unable to bear the burden government imposes now, so how on Earth are we going to bear the multi-billion dollar burdens of tax subsidies for the Bullet Train?

Small business owners have already been thrown under the bus (Valley Transportation Authority) by our elected leaders, so why are they now going to throw us under the HSR Train?

Joe Thompson, Past-President, Gilroy-Morgan Hill Bar Assn., Gilroy