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Artvoice Weekly Edition » Issue v10n45 (11/10/2011) » Section: Letters to Artvoice


Revising Collins's Golf Score

It was fair to a fault of you to score a birdie for Collins’s performance in the wake of the crash of Flight #3407 (“The Real Score,” Artvoice v10n44), but let’s follow that wake past the aftermath and into the next budget year. In the 2011 budget, Collins cut several jobs in the medical examiner’s office, some of same people who had pulled remains out of the wreckage of both plane and home, transported them, identified and autopsied them, dealt directly with their grieving families, etc. They showed up last November 10 at the same Legislative hearing we in the arts community were present at to testify on behalf of cultural funding. Speaking on their behalf was one of the flight #3407 widows, Robin Tolsma, who spoke out against eliminating the jobs of the people she called “last responders,” who had dealt so professionally and sensitively with the remains of her husband and all the other victims when that flight crashed into a house in Collin’s own town of Clarence.

Republican Chair Should Resign

Erie County GOP Chair Nick Langworthy has been a disaster. Last night, his candidates lost the marquee races for County Executive and Legislature and almost lost two races that should have been landslides: Assembly and Clerk. Earlier this year, he engineered Jane Corwin’s defeat in a solid Republican district.

Go Ahead, Close Lafayette High School - Why Should We Care?

he front-page story in the Buffalo News on Friday, October 28, 2011 regarding the problems at Lafayette High School was no surprise to anyone who pays any attention to annual reports of test scores and graduation rates. What is surprising and disappointing is to hear State Education Commissioner John King’s renewed threat to close the school at the end of this school year, seemingly without recognition of what has changed since the state designated Lafayette as “persistently lowest achieving” nearly two years ago.



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