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State needs cyber charter reforms

A $400 per month fuel stipend for every employee who comes into the office to work. Concessions, parking, and tickets to a major league baseball game for the whole family. Gift cards for groceries, Amazon, Target, Domino’s, and Dunkin’. Lavish budgets for commercial shoots, TV advertising, and expensive swag. Perks for a fancy tech company? Line items for a Fortune 500 company? No. These are just a few examples of what Pennsylvania’s cyber charter schools are spending money on--money they receive from school districts. These are tax dollars that home and business owners pay to ...

The efforts to shrink the government

The purpose of government is to “maintain order and stability, ensuring citizens can live safely and productively, while also protecting individual rights and freedoms within a framework of law and justice.” (AI Overview) Our agencies were created to serve us. The personnel staffing them are experts in their fields. There are entities doing everything from predicting the weather to warning us about devastating diseases and finding cures and/or vaccines. They take care of the elderly and children, help the disabled and veterans, protect us from attacks from foreign governments and ...

Homer City project a ‘game-changer’

Eleven days after the massive smokestacks and cooling towers of Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant came down in a dramatic fashion in this Indiana County village, causing both emotional and economic distress and a sense of hopelessness, Homer City Redevelopment announced that an even bigger natural gas power center would be built in its place. The Homer City Energy Campus will be a series of natural gas plants that will power a massive data center campus. The emotion coming from hometown boy Shawn Steffee was palpable -- not just because the build will resurrect Homer ...

Reflecting on violence — and how different cultures understand it

Every spring, I share a couple of stories from Heinrich Hoffmann’s children’s book “Der Struwwelpeter” (“Slovenly Peter”) with my students to practice the German past tense, and every time, students express their surprise at the level of violence displayed in these stories. The same happens every Halloween when I bring Wilhelm Busch’s children’s book “Max and Moritz” to class. Both books are classics, and like so many other German-speaking children, I grew up with them. “Der Struwwelpeter” was published in 1845. Hoffmann, a physician who loved writing, wan-ted ...

Governor keeps betraying poor children

Immanuel Christian School is in dire straits, but not for lack of students who want to go there. Demand is high for the K-12 school’s limited number of seats, reflecting the sorry state of nearby public schools. Yet in this predominantly low-income and nonwhite eastern Pennsylvania community, many families struggle to afford tuition, and the school nearly shut down permanently in December. Not long ago, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro promised to pass a scholarship program to help students in struggling communities afford schools like Immanuel. Now the governor seems willing to abandon ...

Should we worry if the cure will kill the patient?

When experimental treatments are given to patients, there is a requirement for a special kind of informed consent indicating that the cure may kill the patient. When my father went in for his hip replacement surgery, he was high risk because of a cardiac condition. He was told that he had a 25% chance of dying. He decided to have the hip done anyway, and he survived another 20 years. Every time a lawyer goes into court, the attorney knows that there is a chance of winning or getting nothing for his client. Every business school in the world teaches about the importance of allocating ...