Teachers need affordable housing
There is a direct link between public education and housing.
Hawai‘i’s business and political leaders will never be able to solve the perennial problem of keeping our teachers here from k to 12 all the way up to college if they refuse to provide affordable housing for them.
Our educators are not a privileged class. They are a hard-working section of our society that is responsible for helping to maintain our economic growth and societal stability by educating Hawai‘i’s diverse youth population.
Hawai‘i’s working class is at the mercy of the large land owners, greedy Realtors and rent-gouging landlords. No more excuses. Those elected to public office have got to take them on.
Ray Catania, Puhi
Kaua‘i deserves free job training too
In the July 27 edition of TGI was an article about free job training through UH Community Colleges.
I looked into it. There are three categories — health care, technology and skilled trades.
The health care category has 14 classes on O‘ahu and Maui and are in-person.
The tech division has nine computer and one business class on O‘ahu and Maui, but they are online and available throughout the state.
The skilled trades category has five classes on O‘ahu, Maui and the Big Island, with four being in-person and one online.
What happened to Kaua‘i? The tech classes and one trade class are available to Kaua‘i, but not the others. If you go to the KCC site, there are a number of certificate and continuing education classes in the three categories, so why doesn’t Kaua‘i have some in-person classes for free job training?
Mark Perry, Lihu‘e
Hawai‘i representatives fight for native birds
Thanks to the leadership of Appropriations Committee member Sen. Brian Schatz and all of the Hawaiian congressional delegation, Hawai‘i will receive $14,092,200 to protect native, threatened and endangered birds from avian malaria.
Nonnative mosquitoes have decimated Hawai‘i’s bird populations. Mosquitos are thriving due to climate change, which makes high-elevation mountains, where honeycreeper species live, more hospitable.
With a single bite, a mosquito can transmit a parasite, which can cause a bird to develop anemia, weaken and die. This funding is part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and will fund mosquito control, captive care for wild birds and other technological and eradication efforts.
The American Bird Conservancy Action Fund applauds Sen. Brian Schatz, Sen. Mazie Hirono, Rep. Ed Case, and Rep. Kai Kahele for helping to fight extinction and protect birds, which are all-important to Hawaiian culture and ecology.
Steve Holmer, vice president of policy, American Bird Conservancy, Washington D.C.
Very concerned about releasing engineered sterile mosquitos to fight the current mosquitoes- bad things happen when you play with Mother Nature. Need to find other options to fight mosquitoes!!! No genetic modified mosquitoes please !!!
Ray; Your idea of providing affordable housing for teachers is a noble one. I have a few questions. Who do you propose is supposed to provide this housing? You don’t specify that detail in your letter; the school district, the County, or some other entity? Where are the funds going to come from for this housing? If the County provides such housing, wouldn’t other public employees want housing as well, like police, firefighters, court clerks, etc. They also perform necessary work for us, just like teachers perform. The better solution is to pay teachers more so they can find and pay for their own housing. School administrators are vastly overpaid while teachers are underpaid. Re-allocate the money from the top down towards the teachers.
I think Nevada is a place many have moved to. But the weather is even hotter than Hawai’i during the summer. Once move, it’s never return. Where are people moving to? Florida, New York, and California. Top 3 places. This is comparison to Kaua’i. Probably high taxes, but higher income earned too. Richer. It’s a choice. I think people get tired of two lanes highway so the move.
They lose out on coconuts and paradise for metropolitan style housing. More dangerous though on the mainland. Crime rate is higher. Trade off is income is higher and crime rate lower for Hawai’i. So you want fame and popularity with your peers at Kapa’a High School football games Friday nights or do you decide to move? Earn bigger income. That’s the trade off. The local would face.
Very strong are local ties to high school. We’ve all attended high school before, right? Hawai’i. There is such a thing as local influences in high school. We call this peer pressure or just teen life. Apparently at the high school gym on Friday nights basketball games is where we as student meet others we like and this door to the gym, becomes our confluence of influence for life. It is our food for life. Thereby getting the term fame and popularity. Locals rules only.
I think if you wanted to go to KCC, you’d probably make it into their computer/math two year technical degree. Of which encompasses everything from pc use, microprocessor chip use, electronics use, programming, and just getting started on BA degree. So you can voice your own articles if you’re smarter on TGI newspaper. And I don’t mean Journalism. I mean computers.
That’s the problem. If you graduated in the F troop section of your senior year in high school, 1970s, sports, you know like Bernard Carvalho, missed graduation. They think the honor roll students, those engineers now, like them now because they’re all grown up now and not into school. Same thing. Still getting made fun of if you were the F troops of your class.