SPEAK OUT

Parental responsibility

PRESIDENT BUSH wants to hold schools and teachers responsible for students making poor grades, or they will withhold federal help. What about the parents' responsibilities? All classes I've been in have some students making high grades, some medium and some low grades. Some children just can't get it. We all weren't born with a high IQ. So many parents don't work with their children at home to see that they do their homework or extra reading. There are so many children who come to school ill-dressed for the weather and are hungry and get their breakfast at school. Teachers don't just teach the regular subjects anymore. Now they teach drug education, sex education, moral education. You can't put all the blame on the school and teachers for a child's low grades.

Need county P&Z

WE NEED planning and zoning in the county for the same reasons we need laws and police officers. Some people can't be trusted to do the right thing. I recently bought some property. After I made the purchase, nearby land was sold, and someone is building a concrete batch plant next door. This can happen to anyone in the county, because decency seldom wins over greed. That's why we have laws. Let's not let this happen to someone else. Support planning and zoning in the county.

Notice to motorists

TO THE people in Cape Girardeau and East Cape: I'd like to inform you that when heading west on Morgan Oak and Sprigg, there's a line there that you're supposed to stop at so the trucks can turn. Also, I'd like to know if there is a Missouri law that states when Illinois license plates are on a car, that car doesn't have to use a blinker.

Bad scheduling

I JUST read in the paper where the Jackson School Board has changed the graduation date. We should have gone to school on Jan. 12 and Jan. 15. Now parents who have families out of town are going to suffer. They scheduled it on a holiday weekend. This makes it more difficult to get off. It also makes travel time more dangerous. You can't tell me the board took anybody into consideration for anything. It's their incompetence that caused the date to have to be changed. If they would have taken a stand and held classes Jan. 12 and Jan. 15 like schools in the area did, they wouldn't be in this mess.

Not this taxpayer

STAFF MEMBERS of the Cape school system said something must give to accommodate the district's increased expenses, and they hope it will be taxpayers. They want to increase teachers' salaries. Such gall. They make twice as much as I did ten years ago. With the new gas prices, taxpayers are overburdened now.

Try 3.5 percent

I'M READING in the paper where a Missouri Senate committee has rejected a pay raise, and it's made some of them quite angry. I suggest that they give themselves a pay raise. They should think of what Social Security people got, which was 3.5 percent. They should give themselves that much of a raise, then expect their supplementary insurance to go up and their car and homeowners insurance to go up.

Falling on deaf ears

CONCERNING THE last two fugitives from Texas that were captured and given air time: I can't understand why the media would give them the time of day. They can cry, and it'll all be on my deaf ears. Honey, when they do the crime, they'll just have to do the time.

Too many monopolies

WHAT WILL be the final outcome of all these mergers and consolidations of communications, railroads, trucking, airlines, energy producers, and many other commercial enterprises and industries? When these monopolies are finally completed, defeating competition in all these areas, will a possible future communistic-led government confiscate these industries and nationalize all of them, as Russia did years ago? Our government had better take preventive actions and exercise the antitrust laws to prevent this lack of competition in our country. We are supposed to have an open, free-market system. No competition causes monopoly exploitation.

Plenty of police

IN RESPONSE to the "Stop the speeders" in Jackson item in Speak Out: The caller must not get out and drive very much, because you see police out all the time.

Parents, take charge

IN RESPONSE to the item "Young readers." You should probably tell the parents of kindergarten-age children to sit down with their kids and see what they know. Monitoring a 6-year-old's progress in school should be a parental duty as well. Unfortunately, there are some parents out there who do not pay enough attention to the beginning of their child's academic career, which is sad. It's more painful in the end for the child than the parents. Shame on you. Don't blame the teachers. Blame yourselves.

Measuring Clinton

CLINTON IS not the worst president the republic has had, but he is the worst person ever to have been president. So wrote columnist George Will. If the measure to be used in this regard is the overall damage done to the system of self-government embodied in the Constitution, that distinction must be reserved for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who laid the foundations of the modern welfare state and began the process of seducing Americans out of their historic spirit of self-sufficient individualism and into the mire of government dependency, from which we are still struggling to escape. No, Clinton was not the worst president of the 20th century. He was, rather, the most corrupt.