Happy St. Patty's Day!!

Interesting thing(s) that happened today:

Former (how I love that I can finally use that word) President Bush visited Calgary, Canada. I’m not sure why, it’s not like GWB has large support in the Northland nor does he have some sort of wisdom ready to bestow among the people. Get this, he was to speak on the challenges to be faced in the 21st century. My favorite part was that shoes got tossed at a huge poster with Bush’s face on it. Unfortunately, no media was allowed, nor was his speech allowed to be recorded in any form. Apparently even GWB knew his speech would never go down as a “Best Speeches of the Century” and thus didn’t need a record of it.

The White House fountain was dyed green for the first time…and I loved it…maybe it’s just because I spent some of my formative years living in a suburb outside Chicago, but I thought it was cool.

Tug-O-War: The Minnesota Budget

As many of you know, I have had an incredible opportunity to go on sabbatical this year. Instead of teaching I am pursuing a master’s degree in public health at the University of Minnesota. Through one of my classes I am lucky enough to shadow a public health lobbyist during the current legislative session. In addition to this experience I am also taking or have taken several public health policy classes. So as I attend committee meetings on the governor’s budget and listen to different groups make their case for a portion of the pie I have struggled to form my own opinions.

From where I stand Health and Human Services is fighting it out with education, as they are the two top areas that the budget is spent on. As a public school teacher for the last eleven years, I have very strong opinions surrounding education. Now both areas seem to be strategically trying to figure out how to get their due, even if it is at the other’s expense. As someone who is passionate about both education and health, I have been reflecting quite a bit about it and I have some questions.

· First, isn’t the purpose of both health care and education to create/produce healthy, productive citizens?
· Am I the only person who cares about education of our youth and their health? I’m pretty confident I can answer that and the answer is no.
· Do we not have any elected officials that care equally about both…or at the very least be able to see the connection between the two?
· With the budget deficit, if there has ever been a need for a partnership, it is now. It also seems like this could be an amazing partnership. However, we need political leadership to reach across the aisle, and I don’t mean to the other party…to their fellow democrats that are simply on a different committee and figure out how together they can protect our youth.
· Governor Pawlenty…and I say this as a teacher first, instead of your goal to “hold education harmless”, how about we hold kids harmless. Sending supported, healthy (mentally & physically) children to our schools will do more than lowering the classroom size by 1 pupil.

One more thing Governor…please keep in mind that as you balance your budget on that spreadsheet it may look great on paper when you think you’re done. However, shifting payments out of your budget and onto the residents of this state does not balance the budget, nor does it help any Minnesotan. For example, if you cut health insurance to 114,000 adults without children in this state it may save you x-amount of money on paper, but the taxpayers will be picking up the tab and that is not only a misleading budget but also a completely inconsequential budget, the sum of which means that you are not doing your job.

So those are some of my thoughts…can we start to work together to try to hold kids harmless. It is our job and our ethical obligation to take care of future generations as best we can. Simply put, we aren’t doing it, not like we should or could be. It’s time to start breaking out the kind of innovation this country has been respected for to get the job done. I’m sure I’ll come back to this at some point, but that’s where my thoughts are at currently.

If you’re interested, you may want to follow and dare I say call your legislator in support of a bill introduced last week, “The Healthy Communities Act” which actually tries to focus the medical community on keeping people healthy instead of treating people when they’re sick.
http://www.leg.state.mn.us/ Bills: SF 1294 & HF 1424.