Inhospitable

August 2, 2014

Our county hospital chief executive officer (CEO) is upset that he had to fire 56 employees the other day.

He should be

This is a mess that he created.  Our CEO actively promoted the plan for the El Paso Children’s Hospital to the voters.

Turning attention to the 56 jobs and away from the carnage that terminating the employees will cause for them and their families, we should ask about the necessity of those jobs.

Were they unnecessary, fluff, pork?  If so then shame on management for wasting the money.  How much more of this is going on at the hospital?

If they were necessary, what will happen to patient care?  Will this just be an inconvenience that patients will have to endure for the sake of the massive egos of management?  Or will patient care be jeopardized?  What will that do to the quality of life of the patients?  Hopefully no one will die as a result of this cut back.  I wonder how much that would cost us?

We deserve better

Brutus

“Even though the children’s hospital is under our umbrella, it will be governed separately   September 2, 2011

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Posted by Brutus

Writing

July 19, 2014

The Common Core State Standards Initiative is sponsored by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

It is an attempt to develop K-12 education standards that apply across states.

Keyboarding is a requirement,  cursive handwriting is not.  As a result children in many states are no longer being taught handwriting and penmanship.

Texas does not subscribe to the Common Core standards.

Teaching to specific tests to the exclusion of teaching life skills will ruin education.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

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Community College sports

June 29, 2014

Reading the June 24, 2014 agenda for the public meeting of the El Paso County Community College Board of Trustees I see that they want to rent apartments for some student athletes.

Evidently they have at least three athletic programs:  baseball, softball, and cross-country.  The agenda item proposes spending just short of $49 thousand dollars for apartments for some of the athletes.

The backup material indicates that the budget for the three programs is $746,966 each year.

Admittedly I don’t know anything about the desirability of having athletic programs at our community college.

Hopefully some of our astute readers will weigh in and inform us about the issue.

We deserve better

Brutus

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2014 middle school rankings

June 21, 2014

The 2014 Children at Risk school rankings for Texas are out.

Their methodology is open to criticism, but at least it is consistent throughout the state.  You can read it here.

They ranked 2063 middle schools  with 2063 being the lowest performer and 1 being the highest according to their system.  A rank below 1032 (1-1031) places a middle school in the top half of the state.

Their results for our El Paso county schools are:

2014-ElPasoTexas-Middle-School-Rankings (1)

Congratulations to those involved with the schools that ranked well.

As for the others,

We deserve better

Brutus

 

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If wishes were horses …

June 4, 2014

I got a chuckle the other day when speaking with someone about the prospects for our Lincoln Center.

In general he was commenting about the number of people who think that something should be saved, but with someone else’s money.

Paraphrasing what he said:

I think we should have saved the Asarco stack, built a pool for the alligators at the base, put the star at the top, and run the street cars up and down the side of the stack.  Then we could move the Lincoln Center to the location and use it as a gift shop.

We deserve better

Brutus

 

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