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As a parent, I want to be involved in creating a thriving learning community at my children's school. To me, this means a lot of things, including supporting teachers' expertise. The idea that as parents and taxpayers we somehow get to weigh in on every aspect of teachers' worklife really rubs me the wrong way. As taxpayers and community members we all pay for and use all sorts of public systems, but you never hear conversation picking apart parole officers' pay scales, or how to identify ineffective firefighters. We routinely have this conversation about teachers, and I don't see how this possibly advances the quality or quality of life of people working in education.

posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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My family checks out dozens of books a month at the library. When the recession hit, we greatly scaled back the number of books we buy. I use interlibrary loan to access technical and scholarly books for my work that I could never afford to buy on my own.

I'm so grateful for Multnomah County Library's early literacy programs. They've made a reader out of my three year old, and he can't even read letters yet. I can't imagine that can happen on a computer; you need physical books for that.

Another place libraries and librarians are important is in helping to navigate the huge wealth of information available to us all today. It's not all good quality or relevant information, and librarians can help us to learn how to search and evaluate the results, as well as guiding us to resources that are known to be useful.

Lastly is community. For some reason, the families we met at book babies are the ones we've formed lasting ties with. This is not true of people we met at parks and rec classes. I'm still trying to figure out why that is. I love the Everybody Reads and Summer Reading programs, which makes the entire city into a community of readers.

posted 2 years, 10 months ago
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I'd like to hear more from Rep. Mauer about what it means to dismantle the current employer-paid system. Right now I pay about $7200 a year in pre-tax dollars to insure my family through my employer's plan. As expensive as that is, replacing it with a $5000 tax credit doesn't sound appealing.

My teenage foster daughter qualifies for Oregon Health Plan, and requires intensive mental health services. I'd like to hear how the two candidates' plans will cover mental health services, and how John McCain's plan would affect Oregon Health Plan.

posted 4 years, 8 months ago
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