For the May 9 issue
By:
Board should keep
Roesch at HHS
To the editor:
I am writing this letter to you because it seems this is the only place the East Windsor Board of Education responds to. If they are very concerned about their public image and the welfare of our children, they have a strange way of showing it.
At the last Board of Education meeting many high school teachers got up and endorsed their Principal William Roesch. When was the last time a teacher spoke up in this fashion unless it was for a pay raise or benefits? They know a good thing when they see it. This is a man who cares about students both inside our schools as well as his home community of Clark. He was just honored with a Junior Achievement Hall of Fame award for his 22 years of dedication.
The question that still remains is why Mr. Roesch’s contract isn’t being renewed? He has had a positive and lasting affect on our high school and the students. For years we have had no leadership, direction or dedication. Now when we finally have someone who wants his career to be at Hightstown, we don’t want him. He guided the high school through their Middle States evaluation with the dedication and perseverance of an administrator who cares. Too bad we don’t have more of these people running our schools.
If we had more people like William Roesch, perhaps our students would excel far more than they are now.
Thank you.
Hightstown
Hummels should not
get special treatment
To the editor:
I am responding to the article on the cover page of the Windsor-Hights Herald from April 25 entitled "Away from home."
Although I can sympathize with the plight of the Hummel family, my feeling is that rules are rules are rules, and so on. People from all over the world would like to live in the U.S. Many of them go about applying for permanent residency in an acceptable manner. They fill out very lengthy forms, wait on very long lines for many hours in order to submit those forms or pay an attorney to do it for them. The applications are also expensive. They work on a temporary visa and get the company they are working for to sponsor them, they wait some more. It can take several years. Then they are contacted and told to make an appointment with a doctor for a physical (a list of doctors is provided by INS). After the physical, they wait some more. Then there is an interview. Then they wait some more. Eventually they receive a Green Card and permanent residency papers.
How do I know so much? My daughter in law went through the whole process. And that process took close to five years. There were times when she could not go out of this country to travel to see her mother who is very ill. I went with her the day she had the "physical." These doctors are a joke. She went to a dirty little office in South Brunswick, waited her turn, went in and the doctor listened to her heart, took her blood pressure and said, "You’re fine…$150 please." Some racket. He was a plastic surgeon.
My point? I feel that the system has rules, whether they are convenient or not. To try to "get by" without adhering to them just serves to get you in trouble with the INS, as we can see from the story of Ms. Hummel. I feel that she should not necessarily be given a 10-year ban, but that she should be made to go through the application process like anyone else who wants to live here. I don’t think it sets a good example for some council people to try to do a "speedy fix" of this situation.
East Windsor
District performance
on tests is abysmal
To the editor:
After several years of sharp tax increases, which almost entirely are due to the expanding school budget, the East Windsor Regional School District continues to show virtually no improvement in its performance. In fact, one could easily argue that the district’s performance actually has deteriorated over that time.
The latest evidence comes from the 11th grade High School Proficiency Tests that were administered last spring. Within this district’s income group, "GH," its score placed it an abysmal 42nd out of 44 districts. Districts including those in Camden, Metuchen and West Orange all scored higher than East Windsor. The students taking these tests are only one year from graduating, and it is unbelievable that 25 percent of them failed the math portion and another 12 percent failed the language portion. By the way, those results exclude children who are in the English as a Second Language program.
Frankly, this is quite embarrassing and I, and the rest of you, should hold the school board, the administration, and the teachers directly responsible. This is even more disturbing when the school board’s president, Bruce Ettman, who was quoted in last week’s Herald, suggests that "We want to continue the positive momentum we have developed over the past several years." What in the world was he referring to?
For those of you who voted for the school budget this year, how many of you actually realize where the money is going? Did you bother to look at the line items? Clearly, not enough is going towards the curriculum and too much of it is going to fund administrative and teachers’ salaries and benefits. Not a single in employee in the administration or the teacher’s ranks deserves to be paid one additional cent in salary and benefits until performance is improved, and board members should stop sugarcoating what is happening in this district. If the administration and the teachers do not want to be judged based on performance, then let’s get employees that do and are willing to work for it.
East Windsor
Bush’s tax cuts
only helping rich
To the editor:
President Bush is pressuring congress to pass his latest fiscally unsound tax cuts totaling about $700 billion. He argues that the average tax cut would be around $1,080 and that all Americans would benefit. Unfortunately, most Americans would receive far less than that amount. It is estimated that about 58 percent of Americans (middle class) would only receive on average of approximately $500 and the lower-income Americans would have their taxes reduced by approximately $200. The other 14 percent would have their taxes reduced by about at least $5,000. Of course, Bill Gates’ tax benefit would be considerably higher.
We have a federal budget deficit approaching $400 billion and an accumulated deficit well over $6 trillion dollars and increasing out of control. These tax cuts, which benefit mainly the wealthiest Americans, would do little to increase economic growth and would only add to the enormous federal deficit.
East Windsor

