Commentary: Join HEF for Healdsburg Education Week
Healdsburg Education Foundation (HEF) has worked for more than 30 years to raise funds to ensure that the students of Healdsburg Unified School District (HUSD) receive the education they deserve. Now we invite you to join us as we take this opportunity to imagine what our schools can be and how HEF can continue to help to meet the changing needs of our schools. Distance learning has created challenges, some anticipated and some that we could have never imagined. The gaps we have all worked so hard to close have become wider and our students, teachers and schools need us now more than ever to provide critical resources to navigate these uncharted waters.
A Jeopardy quiz about America
We are inviting our readers to partake in a short quiz about America as we continue to distill the many outcomes and significances of last week’s elections. To honor the recently deceased TV game show host Alex Trebek, we are patterning the quiz after the Jeopardy format by listing a series of answers that need to be matched with the correct question. (Example: Donald Trump. Who was the 45th president of the United States?)
Main Street: Keeping our balance
My neighbor is learning to ride her bike with no hands. She’s 9, and we live at opposite ends of a 300-foot lane off a busy residential street. Her family lives at the busy entrance and our family lives at the quiet end, but we see her often, riding her bike or scooter up and down, patient and determined, while her younger brother zooms around in circles, crashing here and there and always getting up.
Journalists and the vote
It is now post-Nov. 3 and we are witnessing what it will take to complete a free, fair and secure election. Most headlines and attention will be focused on the acrimonious presidential contest and we will under-appreciate how much of the rest of the voting is happening without rancor, dispute or distrust.
A fork in the road
Somewhere in the week after Nov. 3, in our country and our community, we will reach a deciding moment in our collective lives when a series of major choices will be required. The choice could be, and should be, more than turn left or right, or even just stay the course. It should be a conscious effort to build a new future or to try and claw our way back to a place we felt better regardless of the impact, or more likely find some middle ground.
Flashbacks
The following snippets of history are drawn from the pages of the Healdsburg Tribune, the Healdsburg Enterprise and the Sotoyome Scimitar, and are prepared by the volunteers at the Healdsburg Museum & Historical Society.
History Matters: Supreme Court no stranger to controversy
With newly confirmed Amy Coney Barrett now the sixth conservative on the bench, the next several months should be fascinating if not terrifying for those concerned about health care, the environment and the concentration of wealth. As expected, little was revealed during her confirmation hearing with all votes determined long before it started (although Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski took a few days to say so). Now we wait to see if Biden can win the presidency and the Democrats can take the Senate. If both of those things happen, we’ll see how long it takes them to add justices to the court to reduce the conservative super majority to a minority. Adding, say, four liberal justices to the court would send Republicans howling, and probably increasing the number yet again if they ever retake the White House and the Senate.
A ‘Wizard of Oz’ election
People would be very surprised to hear that “The Wizard of Oz” was written as a political allegory and was based on real people including presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Williams Jennings Bryan, a former North Dakota senator and even the spirit of Sitting Bull. Published in 1900 by L. Frank Baum, the illustrated children’s novel, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” was published when there was a strong populist movement, similar to the recent Tea Party Movement and the rise of Trumpism.
