Limited pension tax just foot in the door

House Speaker Joe Souki’s idea to tax the pensions of seniors is unfair and a slap in the face of seniors — a group of people who have already paid their fair share.

Souki can’t just dictate a tax on seniors, and he should remember the public made it clear to Gov. Neil Abercrombie that hitting up seniors in retirement with a pension tax is just wrong.

While he mentioned that he wants to tax the pensions of so-called "wealthy" seniors, Souki’s tax idea opens the door for future taxation on the pensions of middle-income folks just as soon as the government wants more money.

Pensioners are on a fixed income, often without extra money, and facing ever-increasing expenses for necessary goods and services like medicines, utilities and rent. It’s wrong to tax them again.

Claire P. Santos
Punchbowl

Legal pot threatens health of youngsters

The Legislature is already blowing smoke about legalizing marijuana. I don’t want my grandkids smoking that. Medical experts already say smoking marijuana is unhealthy.

Drugs create drug addicts. Then what. Rehab?

Let’s get rid of the circus of Democrats and go back to being a government by, for and of the people. They keep shoving legislation down our throats without caring what we want. Fix it at the voting booth or suffer.

Henry P. Kahula Jr.
Paia, Maui

Sex ed helps youth protect themselves

Everyone wants their children to grow up safe, healthy and ready to succeed. I think we can agree that pregnancy in the teen years makes that goal more difficult to achieve.

All sexual health education programs teach young people that abstinence is the best and safest way to prevent unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. They teach decision-making and negotiation skills that help youth to make healthy decisions about their sexuality.

Much as we would prefer that young people refrain from sexual activity until marriage, the reality is that 98 percent of Americans do become sexually active before then, and should know what to do to protect themselves.

Judith F. Clark
Executive director, Hawaii YouthServices Network

Teacher evaluations discourage teachers

I am sure that hundreds of Hawaii teachers experienced the same dismay that I did upon reading the Star-Advertiser’s editorial endorsement for the controversial new teacher-evaluation system ("Don’t water down teacher evaluations," Star-Advertiser, Our View, Jan. 16).

The article warns that "it would be a waste to now step away from that commitment to high-quality teacher job evaluations."

As of yet, however, there is very little evidence pointing to the "high quality" of the evaluation tools.

There is quite a bit of evidence to suggest that, rather than allowing administrators to "show the persistently ineffective [teachers] the door," the evaluations may have the contrary effect of causing the best and most experienced teachers to flee their professions and thus leave an educational climate in which teachers increasingly lack the freedom and autonomy to do what they know — far better, indeed, than the new evaluation tools — is best for their students.

Andy Jones
Language Arts teacher, Radford High School

Empower teachers to improve quality

Your editorial, "Don’t water down teacher evaluations" (Star-Advertiser, Jan. 16) makes the spurious assumption that the recently implemented teacher-evaluation system is a valid mechan- ism for assessing teacher quality and effectiveness in the classroom.

In reality it is anything but that. The current system is so unduly time-consuming (for teachers and administrators alike), abstruse and overly complex, and on such unsure footing with regard to fairness and equity, that it can’t fail to have the opposite of its intended effect.

Let’s face it, this onerously Byzantine evaluation process exists for one reason and one reason only to secure those federal Race to the Top dollars.

That’s all well and good and it help may feed the bureaucratic beast and trickle down to the schools eventually, but it will have little long-term impact on teacher quality or efficacy.

Real reform starts with empowered administrators and teachers, from the bottom up.

Michael Clark
Makiki

Homeless solutions just a matter of will

Regarding the homeless, imagine, just for argument’s sake, that our parks and beaches are crowded with thousands of people not just without houses, but without clothes.

Stark-naked families and individuals completely exposed due to various reasons — terrible personal misfortune, mental illness, substance abuse, or simply a desire to exist on the fringe.

I can 100-percent guarantee that if this were so, government and citizens would help. Immediately. Today. It simply wouldn’t be allowed to continue.

No one would balk at clothing the naked, and businesses would vie with each other to assist, since widespread nudity would have patrons leaving in droves.

We would be so shocked, dismayed and offended that we would do whatever it takes to fix the situation.

The naked would be clothed, and those who truly didn’t want to wear clothes would have to work hard, covertly, to sustain their choice.

It seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?

Dale Moana Gilmartin
Manoa