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It's as much a part of the holidays as turkey and cranberry sauce: shoppers gathered outside stores long before dawn on the day after Thanksgiving in pursuit of bargains.
In Bend, people were lined up outside the doors of the Fred Meyer store as much as an hour and a half before the scheduled 5 a.m. opening. According to news reports, the hot deals that induced these people to crawl out of bed and stand around in the cold and dark at 3:30 a.m. were discounts on TV sets and -- socks.
Socks.
Let's do the math. A pair of ordinary socks costs what? Four bucks? So a half-price pair of socks would be two bucks. If you stood outside Fred Meyer for 90 minutes and bought six pairs of half-price socks, you would save a grand total of -- $12.
After doing that quick calculation, the first question I asked myself was: "Are these people insane?" I had to answer in the negative; after all, they're allowed to run around loose. The next question that occurred to me was: "Are these people idiots?" Again, I had to conclude they -- or at least most of them -- are not. They apparently drive cars, and most of them probably hold down some sort of job.
No, the explanation is not insanity or idiocy, but a quirk of human nature: Many people just don't think very clearly when it comes to money.
That's true about more things than socks. Take the referendum to repeal the state's $800 million revenue package. The petition to get the repeal measure on the ballot has gathered more than twice the signatures it needed, and the consensus is the repeal will pass by a thumping majority when votes are tallied on Feb. 3.
Know how much this will save the median-income Oregon family? Go on, take a wild guess.
Give up? It's $36. A year.
Will this $36 represent an actual savings? Well, not if the Oregon pre-kindergarten program is scrapped and you have to put your kids in day care. That $36 will evaporate in about an hour.
How about if Granny's prescriptions are no longer covered by the Oregon Health Plan and you have to help her out? At the pharmacy, $36 vanishes faster than the last slice of pumpkin pie on the table.
Then there are the various state and local fees, licenses, property taxes, levies, bond issues and what-not that probably will be raised if the state revenue measure gets axed.
A few minutes' thought makes it abundantly clear that for the average, ordinary, working Oregonian, the repeal measure will not be a bargain.
So enjoy that $36, fellow Oregonians. Knock yourselves out. You can buy a lot of terrific stuff with it. A couple of large pizzas. Six movie tickets. Nine video rentals. A rather small Christmas tree. Oh, yeah -- and 18 pairs of socks. Half price.
H. Bruce Miller is a Bend writer; e-mail: hbm@bendcable.com
Submitted by Dot Russell
Kulongoski's unshared sacrifices
01/14/03
Last Friday, two West Coast governors released their proposed state budgets. One governor asked sacrifices from everybody -- cuts in schools, health care and public safety programs and a 1 percent to 2 percent income tax increase on the richest people in the state (individuals who make more than $130,000 and couples who make more than $260,000 a year).
The second governor said the same thing -- that everyone will have to make sacrifices. But the budget he released was not consistent with that rhetoric. The second governor asked for sacrifices from low-income senior citizens with disabilities, 15,000 of whom will lose state-sponsored care. He asked for sacrifices from people with mental illness; 110,000 Oregonians will lose mental health coverage. He asked for sacrifices from more than 100,000 public employees, who were told to expect a two-year freeze on pay and health insurance payments that will reduce their take-home pay by almost $1,000 per year.
But the second governor, unlike the first, did not ask the wealthy to sacrifice a thing. Nor did he follow the lead of New Jersey Gov. James McGreevy and ask corporations to sacrifice by closing corporate tax loopholes. Instead, he pledged that he would not propose or support any tax increases.
The first governor was California's Gray Davis. The second, unfortunately, was Oregon's new governor, Ted Kulongoski. The disconnect between rhetoric and reality in Kulongoski's budget goes beyond the "sacrifice" line. Kulongoski claims to boost spending on education. In fact, the education budget is at least $400 million below what would be necessary to hold education harmless; he's counting on school districts to cut teachers' and other employees' compensation to make up the difference. The word is "freeze," but again, in real terms, that means "cut."
Kulongoski won't close any prisons, which suggests he's protecting public safety -- but he's closing four juvenile correctional facilities, cutting assistance to local law enforcement and cutting mental health and drug and alcohol treatment, which will certainly lead to more criminal behavior. Public employees know we will have to make sacrifices to balance this budget. Our unions have proposed ways to reduce the costs of PERS and wrestle down the rising costs of health insurance, which threaten even larger payroll cost increases than PERS.
Public employees are willing to do our part and share the sacrifices needed to balance the state budget. But we are not willing to accept sound bites about shared sacrifice when the only people sacrificing are the poor, the weak, the old, children and public employees.
Public employees do some of the toughest jobs in the state. We take care of the old, sick and disabled. We keep the streets safe and the roads free of potholes. We teach your kids.
And two months ago, our members overwhelmingly supported the candidacy of Ted Kulongoski, who pledged to be a governor for all Oregonians. Sadly, his budget belies that pledge.
Leslie Frane is the executive director and Kathie Best is president of the Service Employees International Union Local 503, the Oregon Public Employees Union. Both live in Salem.
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Voters should be asking some questions before deciding how to vote on Measure 95, which ties teacher pay to student performance. The details of how this would actually work are to be set after the measure passes. So if it passes, someone will have quite a job to do. Who should get that job? School districts? Teachers? State government? And whoever shoulders the load of coming up with a fair system should have deep pockets, because there is no mention of funding this project. If school districts evaluate their own staff members, will they have to hire professional evaluators? Or will they reassign current administrative staff and cut back on other work? If the state government takes on the job, where would it gather funding? Should the Legislature do it, or the Department of Education? Parental support has been shown to be a major factor in student success. Will there be any allowance for teachers who don't see much support from parents? In business, there is an opportunity to choose the raw materials that go into a finished product. Would teachers have any choices about their incoming students?
STEVIE VIAENE |
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Regarding "Jury awards dying former smoker $20 million" (March 28), I'm glad for the parties involved. Twenty million dollars for damages, even though the warnings were clear. I'm a middle-school health/science teacher in a small district near Portland. I began adding up the time, in-service days and classes I've (devoted to) addressing the issue of tobacco use over the years. What about all the time and money invested in anti-smoking education by all health teachers and their districts? Not to mention the disciplinary time and paperwork that is created when an underage student brings tobacco products to school. So, what if I and my district filed suit for the cost of these expenses? More important, for me personally, would be to file for the general insult and damage done to our professional credibility by tobacco companies that have all but called us liars by their continual denial of the truth taught in our classrooms.
CHERYL McGINNIS |
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Don Zehrung writes that the relationship between teachers' low pay and the difficulty attracting the best and the brightest to teaching "should be obvious" (Letters, March 11). He has omitted an important point in his comparisons between teaching (average salary of $39,347) and engineering ($64,489), and that is that teaching is still only a part-time job. In my school district, teachers work 185 days a year, 172 of them in the classroom. They are off two weeks in December and another week in March, in addition to the full complement of holidays and personal days afforded to any state employee. Also, not many teachers arrive earlier than 8 a.m. or stay past 4 p.m. Engineers, on the other hand, generally work 45 or more hours per week, 49 weeks a year. The less-significant holidays (President's Day, Veterans Day and so on) are ordinary working days for engineers. Thus compared, these average salaries line up a little more closely.
LISA BURROS |
It's also the time to discover that if they bug their teacher, he or she will not hand them a cookie and send them outside to "get the ants out of their pants."
Our kindergartners are, for the first time, in separate classes. It's been a new experience for each to have a different set of friends. Some friends are in both sets, but by and large, our twins are not twins while they are at school.
Which sometimes can present problems. Twin No. 2's class recently had a cool "marble party" to celebrate collective good behavior. That class also took a trip to a pizza place to emphasize the letter "P." Twin No. 1's class does fun stuff, too. They just haven't done those things -- which has led to numerous arguments and not a little whining. The grass is always greener on the other side of the playground.
One class also is participating in a reading program called "Book-It!" sponsored by our local Pizza Hut. What this translates into for a kindergartner is if he reads, or has read to him, 10 books a month, he gets a coupon for a free "personal pan pizza" from Pizza Hut.
Well, that sounds wonderful. It's not hard to see why Pizza Hut is happy to sponsor the whole thing. I'm pretty sure we're not the only family that walks out of there with a big pizza when we take twin No. 2 to redeem her Book-It coupon.
So why, I've wondered, have I been so reluctant to do my part in this? All I have to do is write down the books that I read and send the list into school via backpack. We read just about every night; certainly there's no problem accumulating 10 stories a month.
It's taken me awhile to analyze just what's been bugging me: I now realize that I'm tired of paying my kids to do the stuff they're supposed to do, like learn to read.
One of my older daughters also did the Book-It program early on. When she moved up to third grade and realized that pizza would not be forthcoming for books read, she decided reading wasn't a worthy goal in itself. We've been fighting that battle ever since.
I'm just waiting for someone to come home with The Breathing Award -- rewarded just for breathing.
When I was in school, we didn't have pizza coupons. We had book reports. That's correct. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Richardson, made up a list of 100 ways we could do book reports. Every time we finished a book, we got to choose some zany, creative way we could tell our peers what the book was about.
And we thought it was a treat! For all our work of getting through the book, we got to do more work! The weird thing is, we did it and loved it. Felt really proud of ourselves, too. No pizza; just book reports.
And we didn't get parties for behaving ourselves in class. We got Mr. Morello, the principal, when we didn't. No one, not even the toughest boys, wanted to go see Mr. Morello. It was great when he dropped by our room to tell us we were his favorite class. We just didn't want to see him behind his desk.
This concept of paying kids to fly right isn't just in the schools. I've contributed to it myself. I've been known to bribe my kids with candy if they'll just smile normally when we're getting a family portrait taken. I have sometimes sunk to promising a movie rental if we could just get through this shopping trip without any more trips to the bathroom. (While I'm buying clothes for the potty break queen, mind you.)
So I'm going to say no. Starting with my kindergartners, I'm going to teach them that we do things for reasons that can't be found at Pizza Hut. We read because reading is one of the most wonderful activities humans can do. We behave because people don't want to hang out with us when we don't. We go to the store because buying food is both fun and necessary. We breathe because we die if we don't.
I think the kindergarten year is an excellent time to begin learning all that.
Sheila Hagar, who lives in Milton-Freewater, can be reached by e-mail at dns@bmi.net.
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From The Oregonian March 7, 2000
Teacher education is only one part of the equation
Oregon's teachers aren't lab rats to be 'trained;'
instead, we should focus on the bigger picture
IN RESPONSE Mark Bailey - a professor in the School of Education
at Pacific University, 2043 College Way, Forest Grove, OR 97116.
More letters on this topic from The Oregonian: Factor in parents' part in
literacy Fatten pay to get better
teachers
Reading skills begin at
home
Saturday, March 11, 2000
RICHARD S. GREEN McMinnville
Saturday, March 11, 2000
EILEEN NICHOLAS North Portland
Saturday, March 11, 2000
DON ZEHRUNG Woodburn
from The Oregonian Letters to the Editor, Feb. 12, 2000:
| Top rating requires unpaid work ....I read with interest the report on Astor Elementary School receiving an "exceptional" grade from the state Department of Education (Feb. 6.) I totally agree that this is an outstanding school; however, let's keep in mind that music and art programs were sacrified to achieve this goal. ....Also, the average Astor school teacher works from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. (an 11-hour day, which is more than 3.5 hours over their contracted daily hours) almost every day. This is the amount of time necessary to implement this "exceptional" program. ....How many professionals in other careers would regularly put in this much unpaid time to ensure a job well done? Teachers and other educational staff members need to be paid for the excellent jobs they do. I doubt if any schools in Oregon would rate even satisfactory if all educators worked only their contracted hours. DEBBY GREENE |
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