One of the benefits of living in Cochrane over Calgary is we have a football championship team.
Congratulations to the Cochrane High School Cobras on winning the provincial title last weekend by defeating St. Albert.
Which of course makes it even better since the head office of our parent company, Great West Newspapers, is in St. Albert and all our long foreheads are there. They’re better at newspapers than football, thank goodness.
Speaking of students.
Once again, dumb bureaucratic thinking has reared its head in a government proposal.
I know you’ll find that hard to believe, but there’s new legislation being proposed under the Schools Act and one of the proposed clauses simply makes no sense.
It deals with bullying and the cause is admirable, but the solution is dumb.
Under the proposed legislation, if your kid sees a bullying action and does nothing about it your kid could be suspended from school.
So if your kid minds their own business and doesn’t get involved he’s guilty.
Simply because a teacher said so, and that’s not fair to teachers.
The vast majority of teachers want nothing but good for their students and the learning process so they should never be burdened with the duty of suspending some kid because he minded his own business in a school fight.
This proposal is out to lunch. It simply won’t work.
Rather than solving a problem, it causes new ones.
Bullying is awful and should never be tolerated, but to penalize students for having the common sense not to get involved is wrong.
Just like far too many things in life, we once again have a government proposal that does little to solve the problem.
If the government really wants to do something about the bullying problem there is a resource it should talk to.
It’s a resource that’s easy to locate, is willing to share and is a far more reliable than what’s been researched so far on this issue.
Talk to the kids. Talk to the students.
Government short changes Olympians
Speaking of young people, how about this injustice to young athletes. Olympic athletes to be precise.
The federal government spent more than $4 million on advertising during the last Olympics.
The federal government spent a measly $214,000 on medal bonuses to athletes.
Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
And now this bulletin: The federal government spent $1.1 million promoting a commemorative Olympic coin. So the feds spent five times more promoting a bauble that it did promoting our very own athletes.