Schools are for learning, not guns

I wanted to follow up Tom Bokowy’s eminently diplomatic letter of Oct. 3. The day school staff are armed, I will remove my two children from Lake Pend Oreille School District and any support for its funding.

Thin walls make for massive collateral damage, even among trained experts. No thanks. If others share the same risk-reward calculus, the ensuing exodus will gut the LPOSD budget and force LPOSD to sharply increase levies. Given recent voting, it would not be unreasonable to see future levies voted down. Is this the hidden agenda?

Meanwhile, LPOSD offers no course in computer programming. We offer only an abbreviated track in chemistry and physics. We offer mathematics only through calculus AB and then only to a tiny percent of students. The combination virtually hands scientific careers to foreigners. We offer no course in European history, removing the intellectual and political foundations of American history. Grades 4 through 10 are almost devoid of critical writing and argumentation.

Our trade and art courses that develop practical polytechnic skills and provide outlets for expression are underdesigned and underfunded. We offer no applied academic courses where programming and rudimentary statistics can open up the world of practical science. No courses integrate technology (models, simulations, etc.) to examine natural or social phenomena. The triumvirate that drives the world, law, economics and finance, are absent.

Let LPOSD focus on building and financing a 21st century curriculum within healthy and vibrant schools instead of moving schools toward paramilitary encampments? Schools for rigor, skills, and enlightenment, not guns.

PETER KRIZ

Sandpoint