Immigrant series a service to community

To the editor:

I want to congratulate the special projects staff of the Review-Journal for the series you are doing on the issue of illegal immigrants. This is the kind of reporting a community needs -- factual, deep, broad.

Whatever eventually comes out of the whole issue, and whether or not I personally like the results, I can say I am extremely proud of my hometown newspaper. I've often questioned some of your editorial comments and journalistic leanings. Now, however, with the work you've put into this series, I feel your newspaper is definitely doing the job it should be doing.

Sunday's installment has prompted me to again contact my elected representatives to make myself clear as to what I want them to do in regard to illegal alien immigrants in my nation and in my neighborhood.

Ralph j. pestka

LAS VEGAS

Fat chance

To the editor:

I write in response to your recent articles concerning obese children and the failure of government programs to change their eating habits.

When I went through secondary school in the 1940s and '50s, many things were different than now. Almost no one was delivered to school by their parents. Most kids walked (especially in grade school, and even in the winter in Michigan), rode their bikes (at least through middle school years) or rode the bus. Today, I frequently drive by Leavitt Middle School in the morning and occasionally see someone riding a bike -- these kids are never obese. Most of the kids, though, are delivered by their moms in big SUVs.

When I was in school, we had one hour a day of physical education, either in the gym or on the playground. We played dodgeball (now banned as too dangerous) and other sports, ran on the track, weather permitting, and had no other option -- that was part of school. After school we played "kick the can," tag or ball games -- we did not sit for hours watching TV or playing computer games. Even if such things had been available, most parents would not have allowed their kids to use them for hours.

In those days, parents were truly concerned about their children and were able to say, "No." That is not the case today. So kids eat junk food, sit for hours in front of a video screen and get no physical exercise, do not work outside the home and probably not in the home, either.

Bottom line: More food, more fattening food, no physical exercise and guess what? Obesity -- big time (pun intended).

Walter F. Wegst

LAS VEGAS

Teacher pay

To the editor:

Here's a shocking thought from a teacher: Raising our salaries won't improve anything.

Yes, we deserve more money, but the claim that higher pay will solve our country's educational woes just doesn't hold water.

As much as everybody says teachers need more money, the fact is that, if teachers really meant it, we'd all have quit by now.

What of all the teachers who do quit? Ask them why. Most of them, especially the most competent and experienced, get burned out due to poor working conditions, not low pay.

What poor working conditions? Spoiled students with no respect or desire, unsupportive parents who excuse student failure, a poisonous popular culture that encourages ignorance, and a bureaucracy that responds to this constant abuse by spinelessly running from one trend to another, issuing idiotic uniform testing and loading teachers with pointless politically correct paperwork, just to name a few.

Imagine if results in your business didn't depend on the skill and effort of your work, but mostly on the lazy whims of forced customers who hate you and who spend their time outside your business undoing your progress, and on powerless corporate headquarters which punish you until the results that you can't control improve. Kafka couldn't come up with anything this surreal.

Teachers won't get the pay they deserve until market forces are allowed to influence it.

Until then, try this to improve education: pay teachers $2 an hour, but let them really enforce high standards of work and behavior, without fear of pressure from administrators or backlash from a community entrenched in entitlement. I guarantee we'll have an army of perfect teachers in every classroom tomorrow.

Jamie Huston

NORTH LAS VEGAS