Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 23, 1994 TAG: 9411230100
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: L. GERALD CARTER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Student labor is very important to many segments of our economy. Since 73 percent of our people have service jobs today, and five years from now 93 percent will have service jobs, training for high-school students in service-related industries seems to be a good idea.
I suppose your newspaper would have been very critical when America was an agrarian society and schools didn't even start until all crops were harvested and stored. It's amazing the country survived! Having worked all through high school myself, I know how important the money I made in summer jobs was to my well-being. I never once started school before Labor Day, and I received a superior education in Virginia.
August has become a major travel month in Virginia. Many families wish to travel with their children for the last big weekend of the summer. We've seen a marked increase in travel since the post-Labor Day school-opening law has been on the books. Parents who wanted to travel with their children during this time prior to the law's enactment simply took their children out of school. Perhaps we need to call on school systems throughout the commonwealth to give us their absentee rates during that week when school was opening prior to Labor Day.
Your contention that this law is a ``state mandate on schools that has absolutely nothing to do with ensuring that Virginia schoolchildren receive the best possible education'' is naive to say the least. Localities through the commonwealth have imposed rooms taxes and food taxes in order to support educational efforts. The more people travel and the more business that travel-related industries generate mean more taxes in the coffers of the localities. These millions of dollars in rooms and food taxes, along with the 1 percent of the state sales tax that comes back to the locality, have a great deal to do with the quality of education within a locality.
No one supports education more than I do. As an educator prior to working in the travel industry, I personally witnessed absenteeism in my classes when schools opened before Labor Day. I also know that everything in education depends on funding. Taxes generated by the travel industry do a great service to the educational process in Virginia. I'd like for your newspaper to be more responsible in writing editorial comment. I feel that a little bit of research would have been very helpful before firing off this unresearched piece.
L. Gerald Carter is general manager of the Holiday Inn Hotel Tanglewood.
by CNB