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In Our Opinion

Sharing Sports Should Be A Starting Point, Not An End Point

Residents of the Frewsburg and Southwestern school districts learned this week about talks between the districts to share sports teams. Shared teams aren’t new. They’re been a growing part of the interscholastic sports landscape both in Chautauqua County and the rest of the state for years. But what’s being considered at Frewsburg and Southwestern is different. Rather than sharing a team or two, the districts are talking about a large-scale sharing of sports that would formally include several teams in all three high school sports seasons. Southwestern has lost 7.7% of its ...

Executive Orders Sidestep Necessity Of Compromise

Our concerns about the second Trump Administration’s executive actions on immigration are twofold: First, the White House should employ a greater focus on illegal immigration specifically and, second, executive orders violate the principles of our republic. As we noted in our editorials during the Biden Administration, executive orders circumvent the process in ways that poorly serve the public. Sweeping proposals such as Biden’s student loan forgiveness plans or Trump’s plans on immigration, as we wrote about the former in August of 2022, “should go through proper, ...

Unsatisfied With New York School System

It’s a fair question, because the person leading the state’s school system is getting a $155,000 a year raise to oversee a state educational system that spends the most in the nation — with raises like hers it’s easy to see why, by the way — while attaining middling educational results for children. This commissioner is overseeing a revamp of graduation standards that are just as likely to water down the value of a diploma as they are to actually prepare more students for college or the workforce. This is an education commissioner whose department needed state legislative ...

School District’s Immigration Letter Shouldn’t Have Been Needed

Parents in the Jamestown Public Schools District last week received a letter from the district detailing what someone who is the subject of an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement action should do. Such a letter shouldn’t have been necessary in the first place given the limitations Dr. Kevin Whitaker discussed with The Post-Journal and WRFA-LP following last week’s school board meeting. Despite Trump’s change of sensitive location guidelines, Whitaker said there are still limits that govern what law enforcement can do in schools, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement ...

5&2 Ministries Trying To Fill An Ever-Widening Gap

There are a lot of wonderful groups in our community dedicated to feeding the hungry. We’re written about a lot of them over the past several months - Conduit Ministries, the St. Susan Center, Chautauqua County Rural Ministries, countless church food pantries and, most recently, the 5&2 Ministries. The 5 Loaves and 2 Fish Ministry began in Clymer in 2016, and was started by a women’s Bible study that identified the need to help hungry children in the community. Jen Heiser, ministry president, said members realized that children would get their breakfast and lunch at school but ...

Persistence Pays Off For Falconer

Persistence is finally paying off for the village of Falconer. Since 2017, village officials have been either demolishing, cleaning up or preparing for new development the sites of two fires that, all told, destroyed four mixed-used commercial properties, displaced six businesses and 16 families. The announcement this week that a new mixed-use development of apartments and business space for downtown Falconer proposed by Buffalo Business First Inc. was allocated $500,000 by the state Regional Economic Development Council is welcome news for the village, which has seen previous ...