Please be civil, slow down
I have loved living in and working in the Sequim School District community for many years now. Thank you to everyone for your kindness and hard work to make Sequim a wonderful place to live! I’m confident our town will remain a great place to live and send our children to school for years to come.
With the rather heated disagreement between hundreds of parents of young children and our new school superintendent, I’d like to thank superintendent Regan Nickels for her civility. I’m grateful for her example of remaining calm, and I hope we as parents and staff will likewise be civil in conversation and social media.
To our five elected school board directors, thank you for your service! We need your patience, thoughtful reflection, and leadership more than ever to help us find unity and move forward together.
I’d like to suggest that the best way to find unity is to slow down the implementation of the school reconfiguration. There’s no urgency to make the change right away; even superintendent Nickels has now indicated that.
The best option is to vote to change the implementation date to fall 2024, and spend time getting input from the frustrated staff and parents. People want to be heard.
School Board Policy 1005 states: “The board will work to advance the community’s vision for its schools …”
Please ask those of us who will be most impacted by this decision what we want for our schools and our children.
David Updike
Sequim
Social divide happening on social media
Sequim is more informed of events since social media, particularly, Facebook. However, it’s caused social divide. Mobs engage in unethical rhetoric in minutes with unsubstantiated statements and mock primary source facts. Attempting to stabilize hostility is crushed.
I’m a 41-year resident, SHS alumnus with a 12-year-old in the Sequim School District. Facebook community commentary accuses school administration and board of collusion, secret meetings, a board member called “human garbage” and told to resign. Bullying happens when we debate without facts.
Anti-restructuring is the new rant with demands one’s child be at “the safer school,” false claims about ACEs (adverse childhood experiences), trauma and rage over inconvenience moving schools 10 minutes from each other. Homeschool parents contributing to the financial shortfall ask more to homeschool in retaliation.
Accusing administrators of collusion and calling a volunteer “garbage” won’t change minds. Defamation is not free speech nor legal. Inciting “pressure” on officials, repeating daily letters and threatening “paper terrorism,” a tactic Southern Poverty Law documents as used by Sovereign Citizens groups is hostile.
Discussing primary source supported facts to change minds is one thing, but lies, unkindness, demands and retaliation causes pain.
Rebecca Lynn Horst
Sequim
Wrong party?
After reading “An existential danger” (April 19), I’m wondering if the author mistakenly called out the wrong political party.
He talked about a “radical organization that seems hell-bent on destroying a free America.” Was he referring to the Grand Old Party (GOP)?
We all can agree that the Constitution has guaranteed our freedoms for more than 200 years. Have Democrats called for terminating the Constitution after losing an election? GOP front-runner Donald Trump did just that, calling for “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” (Truth Social network, Dec. 3, 2022).
The author attempted to tie the Democrat Party to communists. How ironic. Have Democrats openly embraced communist leaders like Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin? GOP front-runner Donald Trump did just that, saying “they’re all top of the line” (Fox News interview, April 11, 2023).
The author quoted Victor Davis Hanson, a retired classics professor, who called the Democratic Party “… a woke, hardcore revolutionary movement.” Is that why Democratic voters chose the more moderate Joe Biden instead of the hardcore revolutionary socialist Bernie Sanders?
To wrap things up, the author mentioned “ignorant, uninformed voters who are still naive enough to believe the drivel dished out by our corrupt major media.”
By “corrupt major media,” was he referring to Fox News Corporation, who tacitly admitted to peddling lies in order to retain viewers as part of their $787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems?
Louis Kalmar
Sequim
