Life in the jungle
Who did the jobs no one wants before the illegal aliens? We did.
In the meatpacking houses, those callouses were on our hands. We were making $10 per hour plus benefits, but this was the 1970s. It was how we took care of our families and paid our bills.
Then Bar S, the Monforts, etc., broke our unions, using the same demographic everyone, including the union, is so worried about now. There was no one crying outside the fence or who cared how we would survive.
In the packing house, life is tough. This is just the latest chapter. Welcome to the jungle.
Bill Robinson, Frederick
So Right, Bill
I keep wondering what job's they were talking about. Lets wait an see which party gives a rats ass about colorados real working class.
Bill:
What I can't abide is the Monfort's et al of the world who exploit illegals by hiring them with the ever present threat of deportation. That to me is a modern form of slavery.
Posted by Dave C. on February 3, 2007 10:39 AMI read, with interest, how the school board has decided not to renew the contract with the Life Skills charter school. For many of the students, this is their last chance, due to age, family problems, and the need for a smaller environment in which to learn. As a retired DPS teacher, I think one could go into any high school and find students "sleeping and/or listening to music on their headphones," which was given as one reason for doing away with the charter school. Another reason was the decline in the enrollment. Again, one can find the same statistic in any of the DPS high schools. When I retired in 2004, we celebrated that our graduation rate was over 50% of the 2000 freshman class--the best in several years. Although we kept over 50% of the students, we lost nearly 50% of the beginning freshmen. Why? Disinterest in completing school, truancy, and students who didn't have the skills to complete high school courses. Why? The district mandated policy of "social passes," to protect the students from low self-esteem that would be associated with "flunking" in the lower grades. I taught students in a self-contained alternative school, and, believe me, if one can't read and one is in the eighth grade, that contributes to real self esteem problems. They had been passed through the system like a rat through a snake, although they couldn not read, write, nor compute. As they passed through the system, they learned that they could do nothing, disrupt and miss classes, and they would advance to the next grade because they were a warm body of a certain age. Many became members of gangs because they could excel at something that didn't require reading a sentence in a book.
The problems are not new, and the solutions are not pretty! Only in the dictionary does success come before work, and many students haven't learned that they have to work to succeed in school, and, later in work. This should not be laid at the feet of "the teachers." This has been a district policy for decades, and is an established part of the culture of the DPS district. Reworking the pay structure, finding new methods, and using new buzzwords cannot fix the problem without, first, emphasizing that a child will not move on to the next grade unless they work hard to honestly pass all of the coursework, whether in first grade or ninth grade. High school is the first place where they can't pass unless they do the work--a little late to instill the idea of work before success--if one is used to doing nothing and moving forward with their peers.