Forum Tonight - You Are Expected

Tue., July 14, 1998

By Ken Sands kens@spokesman.com

It’s time to get out of the lawn chair and do something. We’d like to politely suggest that you attend the public forum on youth safety tonight from 6 to 9 in the Lair Auditorium at Spokane Community College. But if we did that you probably would ignore us. So, we’re going to bug you about it. Go to the forum tonight.

Gov. Gary Locke and Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson have arranged for public forums in every county in the state to discuss the problem of violence among young people and safety in our schools.

A commission of 50 or 60 people is collecting the best ideas from the forums with the intention of forming plans to confront the problem. Your views need to be represented there. Go to the forum tonight.

Every time there is an incident of violence by a young person, we are swamped with letters to the editor suggesting solutions to the problem of youth violence. Yet opportunities to get involved in schools draw little public participation. We have to do better. We owe that to our kids. So go to the forum tonight.

Forget about outcome-based education, political correctness and teachers’ unions. That is not what this is about. This is about raising our kids without the emotional scars of discrimination, unmanageable frustration and other factors that result in anger leading to violence. It is an issue that affects every social, economic and cultural group. It will take involvement from all of those groups to form effective strategies to address youth violence. Go to the forum tonight.

Leave partisan politics at home. And your frustration with government too. Regardless of where the statewide summit leads, tonight’s forum should be the beginning of a continuing dialogue on a local level about how we can keep our kids safe. But it takes involvement and that should start tonight. Please, go to the forum tonight.

Local journalism is essential.

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