Thank you to Noozhawk for publishing Cori Hayman’s Feb. 23 commentary, “Santa Barbara County Schools Must End Forced Masking of Children.” I could not agree more.
Now that even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is relaxing its mask mandates for adults, there is no excuse for schools to continue to require them of our littlest citizens — a demographic, by the way, that is the least susceptible to COVID-19.
My elementary school children have been adversely affected by the mask requirement, and my youngest, who must wear glasses to correct a lifelong condition, struggles every day to manage both. That may seem inconsequential to an adult, but I assure you it is not to a 6-year-old.
Thank you again to Hayman for standing up for a reasonable, common sense response. If parents want to keep their kids in masks, I respect their choice. Just the same, they should respect my choice for my kids.
Marisol Rodriguez
Santa Barbara
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After years of watching Noozhawk take turns for the worse, ie. removal of comments so no one can refute the misinformation spread by this page, I finally have to put my foot down and send you a message regarding the garbage, so-called commentary by Cori Hayman with a bullshit afterthought stating her thoughts aren’t shared with Noozhawk.
Label this as OPINION … like it is. Open the comments. Let people discuss the crap you serve.
Noozhawk has become another conservative sounding board for The SB Newspress. Take a hint from EdHat and get your shit together.
Nick Savage
Santa Barbara
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California state Senate Bill 9, recently passed by the Democratic-controlled Legislature and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, is not a housing fix, it is a disaster.
Its purported purpose is to create more housing and it will do this by any means possible, including cramming more units into already built-out neighborhoods. It removes local controls, overrides zoning laws in single-family neighborhoods, disregards the impact of more cars parked on narrow roads in high-fire areas, closes its eyes to limited resources like water in our drought-prone state, and supposes more densified neighborhoods will cause housing prices to drop.
If that latter point is true, why isn’t New York City more affordable?
A fumbling Legislature wants to camouflage its failure to rein in the disastrous effects of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), a 1970 law that has morphed into a catastrophe for sensible housing development — and politicians know it.
Sacramento legislators, including Newsom, seem to have forgotten that zoning laws protect property owners’ rights, which are ignored by a stroke of a pen in SB9 but were assumed during the purchase agreement. Think about having your next-door neighbor suddenly erecting a fourplex where a single-family home once existed.
Sign the circulating initiative proposal to overturn SB9 and stop Sacramento’s land grab.
J.W. Burk
Santa Barbara
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Santa Barbara County Third District Supervisor Joan Hartmann’s Feb. 18 letter to the editor endorsing Laura Capps for Second District supervisor should be a red flag for moderate and conservative Democrats.
Holding up Capps’ accomplishments as a Santa Barbara Unified School District trustee of supporting solar energy installations as a huge achievement is minor while schools remain with many temporary buildings’ poor insulation and conditions.
The most important thing to parents when they send their children to school is that they learn the basic foundational skills. English and math are particularly important in elementary education.
The Santa Barbara school district’s lack of improvement and the learning gap of English and math scores of minorities and the underprivileged demonstrate a complete failure to accomplish this. This population that Capps claims to support has greatly suffered under her leadership and has fallen further behind.
The recent exposure by Santa Barbara school teacher Christy Lozano with her whistleblowing YouTube video exposed what is being taught with no transparency to parents, and clearly shows the lacking focus on English and math. It’s no wonder students are struggling.
Further, the school board collectively voted on increasing food distributions, knowing that many families who relied on the lunch program would be affected with the shutdown of in-person learning that Capps and her fellow trustees chose to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Does this community really want to play musical chairs with politician Capps, who was a lobbyist using her mother’s connections in Washington? Waiting on another candidate.
Rosanne Crawford
Santa Barbara
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I am writing to express my dismay and alarm that the Cold Spring School District in Montecito is considering taking on more debt (in addition to two bond measures that won’t be paid off until 2039) to help pay for a proposed building project.
Respectfully, I urge the school board to say “No” when this matter comes up for a vote at the Feb. 28 special board meeting.
With the failure of Measure L2020, the constituents that the school district purports to represent sent a very clear message: no new construction, no new debt.
Yet the district has forged ahead anyway with a proposed Phase 1 project, committing district taxpayers to at least $1.7 million of taxpayer-funded debt that they do not want and have, in fact, already said “No” to.
Katherine Davidson
Montecito
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