DATE: Friday, July 18, 1997                 TAG: 9707170231

SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON   PAGE: 09   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Letter 

                                            LENGTH:   72 lines

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR - VIRGINIA BEACH

Whoa! Virginia Beach, I think I just saw a ``dragon'' sucking up dirt from the gutters on the streets of our wonderful city.

It seems that a member of our lavish City Council has seen fit to have our city engineers dress up our street vacuums to look like dragons. Cute idea? Maybe - but with taxpayers' money?

So far, I have seen two, but there is no telling how many more the city will let loose.

Members of the City Council need to get a grip on reality and waste this money on more trivial projects that we can all appreciate. How about more parking meters to hinder merchants' business at the beach front and run more of our visitors away? This is just another example of our tax dollars at work.

L.G. Cohen

June 19 Move sounds like retaliation

The involuntary transfer of eight teachers at Pembroke Elementary after they voiced concern about the effectiveness of their principal sounds very similar to retaliation to me.

Many of the teachers being transferred from Pembroke have spent years providing top-notch instruction to all the students with whom they came in contact. They have nurtured these students and watched them grow and blossom. When a new administration came to Pembroke in 1996 and the staff felt that some of the decisions being made would adversely affect the children, they had to make a very difficult choice.

Do they stand by and allow all the hard work put into bringing Pembroke out of the at-risk category go by the wayside or do they speak up? When they chose to speak up, it was not an easy task.

However, someone, somewhere must have agreed that something was wrong. A change in administration was made. Now, several of the teachers who spoke up are being told to leave Pembroke and find somewhere else to go.

To say it is restructuring in the city doesn't make sense. What about the other 51 elementary schools? Are they being restructured? Staff cuts don't make sense, either. They will need to replace the two fourth-grade teachers, two fifth-grade teachers, the reading resource teacher, guidance counselor and librarian at Pembroke.

If the school is overstaffed, then shouldn't staff members with less seniority be moved first?

The teachers at Pembroke are there because they want to be there. Why punish the students and parents by taking away the teachers who have worked so hard to achieve perfection?

Theresa Johnson

July 9 Public needs more information from media

You no doubt remember the old Sherlock Holmes mystery that Holmes solved when he realized that the dog did not bark at the person who eventually committed the crime.

The dog, perceiving the evildoer to be a friend, approached with wagging tail and slobbered all over the apparent friend.

Our local news media, for the most part, reminds me of that watchdog.

Our Beacon, I'm sorry to say, is a watchdog that doesn't bark. Important decisions that affect our city are being made with very little public notice or discussion and just about zero critical analysis from our supposed watchdog.

We need, and many of us want, information both for and against any project. And we need a watchdog, without wagging tail, to provide a critique of the information presented.

Robert D. O'Connor

July 10

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