A letter that the Hamilton County Board of Education should write, but won't:
Dear Homeschooling Parents:
Thank you -- and we're sorry.
By paying taxes to support public schools while also making the sacrifice to teach your children at home, you've saved local taxpayers countless education dollars over the years. So we owe you some serious fiscal gratitude.
But while you're graciously accepting our thanks, allow us to extend our apologies, too.
At a recent board meeting, we had a chance to offer a token of appreciation for all you do to help public schools financially. We could have voted to let your children take part in sports at their local schools -- schools which, again, you pay for like everybody else.
But we dropped the ball. We offered excuses to continue discriminating against the very students whose parents' decision to homeschool is helping the county make ends meet.
Only two board members -- Rhonda Thurman and Jeffrey Wilson -- voted to let your children play sports in public schools, in accordance with a policy that the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association approved this year.
The other seven of us said no.
Honest to rhubarb, there's no reason why we should punish families who do us a kindness by funding our schools and helping reduce crowding in the classroom, especially since homeschooled athletes still would have to try out and could be charged fees to defray costs of their participation.
As a member of the Blount County Home Education Association said in the Knoxville News Sentinel, a ban on homeschoolers taking part in public school sports "makes no more sense than saying everybody who chooses to drive their own car should be forbidden to use public buses ever again because you're choosing to do part of the work yourself."
Talk about no good deed going unpunished.
Anyway, thanks again for the tax dollars. We trust this sports ban unpleasantness won't spoil our ideal relationship.
Sincerely,
The Hamilton County Board of Education, which reminds you to thank a teacher if you can read this -- and to blame somebody else if you can't.
Gun control in action
A prediction: Norway will make its strict gun laws stricter, making it even easier for people who don't care about obeying gun laws to subject defenseless fellow citizens to future carnage.
Anders Behring Breivik had a leisurely hour and a half to pick off scores of victims at a summer camp on an island in the land of the Nobel Peace Prize. That's how long it took police to arrive, and throughout the blood-drenched wait, none of the victims could fire back at their tormentor.
Of course they couldn't. They were law-abiding citizens, and with few exceptions, law-abiding citizens in Norway can't have guns. Even the police aren't routinely permitted to carry firearms, and one of the earliest people sent to a premature grave was an unarmed officer providing "security" at the camp. Breivik might as well have been shooting newborns in a maternity ward, for all the resistance he met.
Now suppose he had instead tried to mow down families at crowded Coolidge Park on a summer Saturday, and by some bizarre turn of events, police couldn't get to the scene.
I'm betting significantly less than 90 minutes would have elapsed before a civic-minded NRA member or 12 from Red Bank paid a visit to the park and turned that Norwegian goose into Swedish meatballs.
But Breivik struck in ever-so-civilized Scandinavia, not in frightfully provincial Chattanooga. So not only did he survive his rampage, but he may get to trade in his prison duds for a civilian parka and snow boots in no more than 21 years.
Now that's enlightenment.