'Schools must address students’ social and emotional needs first': Letters, July 17, 2022

Vote against extending the Martin County School Board tax

I urge Martin County taxpayers, for the sake of reason, not to extend the property tax that is due to expire this year. As indicated by a recent article in the Stuart News, the teachers have received 80% of the tax money the past four years to fatten their wallets via “stipends.” Stipend is defined as a fixed regular sum paid as a salary or allowance. Of course, the teachers say “We will reallocate the new tax money.” Why now?

This act is egregious and needs to stop.

The school board uses ballot diversion by employing such terms as school safety, mental-health programs, professional development and academic initiatives. This ballot language is designed to fool the hard-working taxpayers of Martin County.

The school board already receives nearly 50% of my property tax. How unfair, if not outrageous. Why don’t they contact the Lottery Commission and obtain money allocated to Martin County schools from lottery ticket sales?

Again, please vote no against this preposterous tax.

Chris Fountain, Stuart

There's more to the story on statues honoring Mary McLeod Bethune

Eileen Zaffiro-Keane’s Thursday article from the Daytona Beach News-Tribune was a well-written and a well-deserved piece on Mary McLeod Bethune.

Although she noted that there was a “Bethune birthday party at Lincoln Park in the city’s metro area” in Washington, D.C., she failed to mention that the party was held near another memorial statute of Ms. Bethune (with a cane, representing a gift from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and two small children) that has been there since 1974.

In addition, Lincoln Park is located in D.C.’s “historic Capitol Hill” area; to those of us who have lived there (40 years for me), a small, but important distinction.

Hugh Stevenson, Vero Beach

Schools must address students’ social and emotional needs first

Upon Florida’s final year in participating in the Florida Standards Assessment, discussion among the results and their meanings are at the forefront of the news. A July 3 article detailed a 52% passing rate on the Treasure Coast for reading in grades 3-10. While some educators pronounce this as a success after a challenging two years with the pandemic, others state that there is still work to be done.

Florida’s new progress monitoring system is still up for debate. Some say this will allow for a better measurement of individual needs while others state that this will only increase the frequency of testing and therefore, stress levels of both students and educators. I, for one, agree with the latter. Our education system has become a ploy for attention and rewards. The focus is taken away from individual student needs and placed instead on image and reputation.

It is my recommendation that we take a step back. Academics and education have lost their way. The system has failed. Rather than inundating our students with high stress levels through standardized testing, it’s time to get back to basics. Let’s teach our students to listen. Let’s teach them how to express themselves. How can we expect our students to perform academically when they can’t regulate themselves? We are in a mental health crisis and will continue to see the negative impacts in our students unless we make a change.

I may not have all the answers, but I know that our current system is failing our students. I am calling for action to be taken in our school districts. Introduce social-emotional learning. Watch how this impacts the overall well-being of students and teachers. Once this is addressed, academic scores can then be a topic for discussion.

Nicole Scrivani, Port St. Lucie

All children should have a mother who wanted and loves them

Over half a century later, vivid in my mind’s eye, is the intersection of Cabrillo Highway and Pine Avenue. Straight or left will take us home. Right takes us to Montgomery Ward’s Catalogue store. There is a red brick building on the south-east corner. My mother’s words are ringing in my ears, “You’re only here because the Catholics outlawed birth control in Wisconsin.” Growing up is difficult when both parents regret your existence.

In my dreams I see two wonderfully in love people marrying in San Diego. But the man who stepped foot onto the shore of Okinawa Island was not the same man who reunited with his pregnant wife in Milwaukee. The atrocities he survived forever changed him. He became physically and emotionally abusive. As my sisters entered their teenage years, I’m sure my mother saw an escape route opening. Then I happened, brick wall.

I was never so happy as when, a few years later, our governor, Ronald Reagan, legalized abortion. Every child could now have a mother who wanted and loved them. Being loved is the most basic of human rights.

Now there were wonderful moments in my childhood. There were happy times. I regret that my father could never free himself of his demons. I regret my mother had few options. But more, I regret that our society expects its military heroes to remain unscathed, that abuse is so pervasive, and we keep alive a myth that things are wonderful when it just ain’t so.

The future lies before us. Going straight or left will take us forward. Turning right will revisit a past some are nostalgic for, a past many have no memory of, but a past that was also tragic and wrenching.

Take the wheel, our path is in your hands.

Ric Stange, Fort Pierce

Students need to know they can play a role in making the nation better

To some the term “critical race theory” is un-American and akin to worshiping the devil.

So let’s set the term aside for the moment. Let’s talk about a road such as State Road 60. Do we just assume that it has always been there and there is no need for further discussion?

Same too with the end of slavery, the right of women to vote and the end to legal racial segregation. All those rights weren’t around when the Declaration of Independence was written. It states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …”

It wasn’t until 1920 — after decades of protests and lobbying — that women were finally allowed to vote. It took a Civil War to make Blacks more than property to be bought and sold. Even then the legalized second-class status of Blacks didn’t get erased until the 1960s.

What we assume today wasn’t always around — like four-lane State Road 60. A lot of motorists died of drowning after veering off what was once a narrow two-lane roadway. Their cars plunged into the deep ditches just off the edge of the pavement.

All that is important for our school students to know: That what we assume today came about after a lot of trials and tribulations, even deaths.

The America that we assume today didn’t just magically appear. Knowing that is important for empowering people of today, of all ages, to know they can play a role in building an even better version of this nation or themselves. None of that is easy. Or do we just use a red-hot iron to brand all that critical race theory and shove it in a closet.?

Maybe we should have just left State Road 60 two lanes.

Elliott Jones, Vero Beach

Take a broader look at the history of this hemisphere

Recent letter writer Tom Miller stated that we have virtually no control over who enters our country across our southern border. The Constitution does “provide for the common defense.” But only of the 430,000 square miles of the original 13 states? It was the slave rebellion in Haiti that resulted in the French selling us 827,000 square miles more of territory. Now we chase their descendants with horses?

Spain also gave up territory here. Miller complains about the cost of taking care of immigrants, but not the cost of three Seminole wars, countless cavalry, forts, to “remove” indigenous tribes from, first, the eastern United States, the Northern Territories, and the western Plains. The labor of slaves created capital, with the sale of their children also providing cash.

Surely a nation that claims to be “under God,” mostly “Christian” even, can have some mercy. Remember also how much capital was drained from Mexico, Mesoamerica, and South America, by the Spanish conquistadors.

Just the one fleet going aground here in 1715 was carrying $14 million worth of gold from the Aztecs, silver from the Incas, and gems from the Mayans. But two such fleets had been leaving for Spain every year carrying treasure that was used to buy tools, hire people, start up businesses, banks, and the Industrial Revolution. Pirates of all nations, officially and unofficially, preyed on those heavily laden treasure ships: easy targets, often going aground in storms. Spain has records, and people are still hunting for what is called “Spanish” treasure.

So many Americans are proud of our successful capitalistic economy. But for the corn, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, etc., that the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas developed over the centuries they were first on this “most favored land” (69 crop plants, wrote Ernest Lyons), they surely also deserve our respect and gratitude.

Helen Frigo, Jensen Beach

The question about increasing CO2 is ‘What do we need to do about it?’

The July 8 commentary “Skeptics on climate change refuse to accept our reality” by Michael Manias puts forth the narrative predicting gloom and doom due to global warming caused by increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

It is a fact that CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, which created the question whether something should be done about it. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created to explore this question.

“Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last hundred years or more. Many politicians and the public are convinced that mankind is responsible for global warming. Research done by multiple climate scientists have produced findings that put the question in its proper perspective. An example is recent research done by Roy W. Spencer, a Ph.D. in meteorology and a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. In his words, his group's recent government-funded research suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Spencer reported that the global-average lower tropospheric temperature trend is +0.114 C per decade. This trend extrapolated to year 2100 produces a result of an increase of less than 1 degree C by the end of the century, hardly a crisis.

How climate change has been conflated into a crisis is that the politicians, i.e., the Intergovernmental Panel, are at the helm of the ship rather than the scientists. Two books analyzing climate change, “Hot Talk, Cold Science” by S. Fred Singer and “False Alarm” by Bjorn Lomborg, provide some enlightening insight on climate change.

Daniel Steenberge, Port St. Lucie

This article originally appeared on Treasure Coast Newspapers: School taxes; students' needs; future of U.S.: Letters, July 17, 2022