My Word

Dr. Benjamin Rush was the chief medical counsel to Thomas Jefferson and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Dr. Rush is also famous for advocating a medical treatment that proved to be incredibly disastrous. He advocated bleeding the patient as a cure for a wide range of illnesses.

February is “I Love To Read Month” – unless you are “Henry.”

Henry can’t read.

He’s in the fourth grade and can’t read. Actually he can read, but he reads on the first-grade/sixth-month level. Henry desperately needs catch-up growth in reading.

A catch-up kindergarten curriculum did not adequately focus on letter recognition, phonemic awareness, phonics and vocabulary development. That robbed him of valuable literacy learning time every year since kindergarten. Neither Henry nor his parents know that.

The aging athlete is a pitiful thing in America, especially when their glory days are more a matter of our own conjecture than any pen-and-ink record of accomplishment. Yes, I am guilty, and so what? I was a better-than-average high school baseball player and a terribly reluctant and, therefore, less-than-average high school football player. But since I have qualified for the Senior Discount at Burger King, I have tried to maintain some semblance of athleticism.

On Jan. 29, the state announced an $86 million cut in child-care assistance for low-income working parents. Also included in the cuts are subsidies to relatives raising abused or neglected children. 

That’s quite a statement for a governor who hung his hat on a platform of the importance of early childhood education, created a statewide Early Childhood Advisory Council and a Governor’s Office of Early Childhood, none of which have made any comment on the impending collapse of the system that houses most of our children under the age of 5 on any given day.