Letters to the Editor
Important Watershed Restoration Projects
Protect Geauga Parks congratulates the Geauga Park District on their work with the Chagrin River Watershed Partners to secure grants for two important watershed restoration projects.
One project will restore a section of the Griswold Creek watershed in Bessie Benner Metzenbaum Park and the other will restore a section of the Beaver Creek wetland in the Bass Lake Preserve. This is important work that will benefit all residents of Geauga County and ultimately help to keep the waters of Lake Erie clean, which is a benefit to millions of people.
These are the kind of projects that Protect Geauga Parks has been advocating for the past few years and hopes to see more often.
Partnership with groups such as the Chagrin Watershed Partners makes good sense for the health of our community, the beauty and sustainability of the parks and the economy of the entire region. We know that projects such as this are the product of years of work and study. We are grateful that the Geauga Park District has a dedicated and knowledgeable staff of natural resource experts such as park biologist Paul Pira to spearhead these efforts and provide continuity with groups such as the Chagrin River Watershed Partners.
We are thankful that grants such as these are available through important funding programs such as the Water Resource Restoration Sponsor Program (WRRSP) and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). Projects such as these have provided immense benefits with at least a 2-to-1 economic payback to the region in other places around the Great Lakes.
We hope that the Geauga Park District will continue this kind of impressive work.
Kathryn Hanratty, President
Protect Geauga Parks
Helping to Lead a Change
I am writing this letter in response to a letter to the editor titled “Learning Optional? Fix It,” written by Dan Galdun and published on Nov. 16.
Mr. Galdun expressed his shock at the explanation of the Berkshire graduate profile work. (See, “PRIME to Seek Input from Berkshire Residents,” Oct. 26 issue.) Mr. Galdun assumed I was referring to a system that was created by Berkshire, when, in fact, I was referring to the system of public education that was created in 1893 by the committee of 10, which is still the system that our public schools in the United States of America are operating within today.
That system was created to prepare our children for work on the assembly line, for the Industrial Era. The system was created to sort and select students, and the system was created for compulsory attendance, with learning optional. At no time, ever, did I insinuate the Berkshire faculty and staff were making anything short of a heroic effort to achieve results that this system was never designed to produce.
The system of public education we fight with today was never intended to teach a high level curriculum to ALL children. Where we see schools and districts doing well, it is a direct result of the herculean efforts of their teachers and staff.
My intention is to help lead a change of that very system here at Berkshire, where we stop trying to tinker with a system that was never intended to teach a high level curriculum to ALL children and begin to reinvent a system that will foster high levels of thought and achievement for ALL children.
That work starts with identifying a common goal for what we want our children to know and be able to do when they graduate from our schools, our graduate profile. This involves input and feedback from a wide variety of people. We have a committee that includes residents from Burton, Claridon, Montville, Thompson and Troy townships. We have business leaders, parents, teachers, school staff, trustees, administrators and college representatives on our committee.
This representative committee will work together to create a draft graduate profile. That work will start in January. Once we have a draft, we will conduct community meetings to share our work with a wider audience in the community, and we will gather their thoughts and input until we are satisfied that we have a complete graduate profile. The graduate profile will then be used to begin constructing the new system that will lead our district into the future.
We will use our graduate profile to make decisions about the types of learning experiences and instructional practices that will best serve our children. Our teachers will be leaders in this process because they are dedicated, hard working and want to help create a system that will benefit our children and our community. That work is starting now.
Mr. Galdun asked the question why we are waiting for a new building. We are not. We are starting to build that system now. The new building will be a way to design our learning spaces to get the maximum result for our children and to prepare them for the workforce demands they will face when they graduate, as well as create a cradle to career pipeline through our partnerships with Kent State University, Geauga Growth Partnership, University Hospitals and Auburn Career Center. It is quite the opposite of what Mr. Galdun believes, because the new system will drive the creation of the new facilities.
Mr. Galdun was also concerned about our not correcting the accounting errors that lead to the low score in K-3 Literacy on the state report card. The fact is, we have made those corrections and we would be very supportive of the Ohio Department of Education issuing a new report card; however, they will not do that. The Ohio Department of Education has correction
deadlines and, frankly, those deadlines occurred before I was hired to be the leader of the district. I am now working with our staff to ensure we are able to make those corrections before the deadlines in the future.
I welcome questions and conversation from anyone who would like to talk about the direction that Berkshire Local Schools is moving. I have reached out to Mr. Galdun and he has accepted my invitation for a meeting.
John Stoddard, Superintendent
Berkshire Schools
Editor’s Note: The link to the Oct. 26 story, “PRIME to Seek Input from Berkshire Residents,” is http://bit.ly/2AWTRM1.
Don’t Call It a Park
Yes, folks, I am one of those “incompetent park appointees” our Russell Township trustee chair so delicately referenced in one of the local paper’s articles about the second park board issue passing in the election.
In spite of my lack of competency, I wish to correct some the false narratives being spread about the workings of the existing park board during the Modroo acreage acquisition process, as I was involved in every step.
First, there is a completely false storyline that we commissioners were against the acquisition of the Modroo acreage from the beginning and that we fought to scuttle any deal. The fact is, I was asked to vote to go ahead with the very sketchy plan to proceed with purchasing the acreage at the second park board meeting I attended. This was with no clear definition of what we were buying, what the costs were, what the terms of the deal were, what the appraised value was and how much of our budget would be used.
As a steward of public funds, I wasn’t going to sign off on that “plan.” The previous board had a roadmap drawn up to pay whatever the seller of the acreage wanted, with no apparent thought to what the true market value of the land was.
I have been in sales and marketing nearly my whole working life and a very important skill one acquires is how to negotiate so a deal produces a good outcome for both parties. We didn’t have that. I likened it to a scenario where you walk into the car dealer and ask how much that nice red car is and they ask you how much do you have to spend. Surprise, that nice red car’s price is exactly how much you have to spend.
We had every intention to purchase the acreage, but based on what we were gifted from the previous commissioners, the seller had all the leverage and we were hamstrung in what we could do.
We had an appraisal done and I talked with a local developer in order to get an idea of what the land is worth. It appeared the land wasn’t worth what the seller was asking, as it had been on the market for over a year with no takers. But, because the seller knew the pressure would ratchet up on the park board to buy it, there wasn’t any downward movement in the price.
Based on this research, we came to a figure of what we as a park district would pay and, if our partners at the land conservancy could come up with some more, then we’d have a deal. Thus the outlay of $1.2 million from the park board for the acreage — not $1.55 million — and the rest came from several other donors.
How this qualifies as “fight the acquisition of the Modroo farmland” I don’t know.
Additionally, there have been comments and accusations to the effect that we as a board wanted to open up the park owned land to active recreation and use, as if that’s a crime. I have been very outspoken before, during and after my term on the park board that I don’t agree with using the park-owned properties as drive by parks.
The park goals and bylaws set up in 1984 are very specific: that the land acquired by the board be available for “year-round recreation activities and facilities” and “to promote adequate and equitable access to its facilities for all residents of Russell Township.” Somewhere along the way the previous park commissioners lost sight of these goals so carefully laid out by the founders.
Pretty clear to me the goals of this group that pushed this new park board have nothing to do with forming what most people know as parks; they are much more interested in land preservation with no access or recreation. That’s fine, just be honest and don’t call any land they want to acquire “parks.”
Charlie Butters
Russell Township
Swindled
American taxpayers are about to get swindled big time. We’ve all know that the new tax bill sharply reduces income taxes on those making more than a million dollars a year while the vast majority of Americans will end up paying higher income taxes, but that’s not the worst of it.
More troubling are the giveaways in the bill to the super rich. The Senate is about to eliminate the estate tax or reduce the amounts now subject to the estate tax. Either way, America’s debt load will increase since our country will lose the revenue now generated by the estate tax and we’ll have to borrow billions more from China and others to finance the additional debt.
Levying income taxes on appreciated assets in these huge estates is just a matter of tax fairness. A recent study found most of the money generated in huge estates has never been taxed. How can that be?
Gains on business real estate and appreciated stocks in these huge estates have never been taxed because these assets have never been sold prior to death, so no income tax has been triggered. If the tax bill passes, the super rich will simply pass their gains down from generation to generation without paying any income taxes on gains in value.
Appreciated real estate, appreciated stocks and other appreciated assets will simply be transferred upon death to other family members and heirs on a stepped up tax basis so even their heirs won’t pay taxes on these gains.
Currently, estates under $5.5 million, or $11 million for a married couple, are not subject to the estate tax and, for that reason, this giveaway unjustly enriches the top two-tenths of 1 percent of the taxpayers in the country, or about 32 families.
If you don’t think concentrated wealth is an issue, consider that just three individuals in the United States now own more assets than 50 percent of the entire US population.
Call Sen. Sherrod Brown at 202-224-2315 and Rob Portman at 202-224-3353, and ask them to vote no on the tax bill being rushed through Congress. There will be plenty of time to carefully evaluate these measures in the next session of Congress.
Terry Carson
Bainbridge Township
