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In Our Opinion

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 ...

Preservation Ordinance Will Only Preserve Historic Blight

Passage of a Local Preservation Ordinance has popped up on the City Council’s agenda tonight - and in our opinion council members should tread lightly on this ground. For starters, the ordinance includes reference to a Jamestown Preservation Board, a board that to our knowledge doesn’t yet exist and, frankly, doesn’t need to if we have a city Planning Commission. We don’t need another board or commission when groups that already exist in the City Charter - like the Strategic Planning and Partnerships Commission - are defunct. Creation of new historic districts or amendments ...

Save Social Media Platform TikTok — Then Let It Go

ByteDance, a Chinese firm that the federal government says is essentially a front for the Chinese government, owns the popular social media platform TikTok, which is used by an estimated 170 million Americans. That’s a national security threat, says Congress, which last year passed a law giving ByteDance until Sunday to sell the platform or shut it down. ByteDance sued to stop the ban, but the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday upheld the ban. President Donald Trump, who took his oath of office on Monday, vowed to use executive authority to save the app. The government was wrong to ...