Vote yes for schools
Our public school facilities are chronically underfunded. I would like to share the experience of my students and I at our West Hawaii school and why the constitutional amendment must be passed in November.
My first-graders and I must try to learn in a classroom that is often hotter than 85 degrees. Every transition (and sometimes in the middle of lessons) I have to encourage my students to take a drink of water to avoid dehydration. I even used my own money to buy an adapter to make our classroom sink into a water fountain.
We can drink water all day long, but when we have pounding headaches and are dripping sweat, it’s very difficult to focus. We have two doors and eight windows open all day long, which doesn’t help much to cool our room, and when other students are at recess outside our doors and we have to close the doors to learn, we get even hotter. I’ve seen my classroom reach 90 degrees. I’ve sent students home with symptoms of dehydration and heat stroke, and I’ve stayed at work and suffered through the same symptoms. We’re told we’re still years away from having air conditioners installed due to lack of money in our budget.
There are still many classrooms (several buildings worth) at our school without air conditioners. In fact, we have a beautiful new building for our middle school that just broke ground, but there wasn’t enough money to include air conditioning units and installation in the final plans. We’ll have an amazing 21st century building where kids will continue to swelter.
Please vote yes on the constitutional amendment in November. There is no better or faster way to increase the funding coming to our public schools.
Jennie Hancock
Waimea
Officer thief should have been charged
It is appalling that the Hawaii County Prosecutor’s Office is gonna just let the cop or cops who stole cocaine, dabs and hashish (and who knows what else because Mitch Roth is obviously not going to audit the Hilo police evidence room like he said he would) get away with whatever they want to do or take. It probably took two cops to pull the thefts off, an evidence room person and the lieutenant who was let go to retire.
The Oahu prosecutor’s office decided to not charge the thief because of some obscure statute, profiteering off proceeds of a crime or some other improvable crime?
Just charge him/them like you charge the rest of us peons, with theft, plain and simple, you don’t need to prove he/they made money off it. The dude was probably stealing drugs for years, every weekend he walked through the evidence room and grabbed some dabs or coke or hash for his own personal party time.
Or did the Oahu Attorney General tell the prosecutor to step aside and drop it? Just look at the damning audit of the AG’s office this June, and you tell me the cops don’t have total impunity in this state to rip off and keep the proceeds of anyone or anything they want. That is why the police and prosecutor’s office still do not recognize cannabis as medicine, so they can rip medical patients off!
The AG’s office and the police and the prosecutor’s office need to be charged with profiting off all the goods and cash they administratively take from people who are not even convicted of a crime.
Sara Steiner
Pahoa