Posted: Monday, March 2, 2009 10:00 pm
Senior center needs help
In the past the Albany Senior Center has served the community well. The seniors who use the facility enjoy its programs and its services. It provides shut-in seniors with meals - 7,105 in the last two months - and 707 meals were served at the center by senior drivers and kitchen volunteers. Call-a-ride volunteer drivers had over 2,400 riders in the last two months.
This year the center has a $8,000 shortfall in its budget that needs to be filled if the center is to continue serving the citizens of Albany at its present rate.
The center provides several classes, a small store, meeting rooms, a pool room, bridge and other card games and a hostess table with volunteers serving over 800 pots of coffee the last two months. Now it's tax time and senior volunteers are doing taxes free to the public at large.
This is my opinion: I feel the users of the center and their families and the citizens of Albany could help the center by donating to help keep its volunteers and staff working to serve the public in its present condition. I feel it could be helped by the people who use the tax service with a small donation. Because it's a federal thing they can't charge for it, but it's senior volunteers that do the job.
If I have ruffled the feathers of anyone by writing this letter I feel inclined to tell you as president of the Senior Board for a few years I'm devoted to the seniors and staff, and feel obligated to tell citizens of Albany that the Senior Center could use your help.
Bill Holton, Senior Board President, Albany
Healthful? Not quite
I don't have much of an issue with what foods a food stamp recipient buys. I did want to respond to the snack foods that were mentioned in a recent letter.
The snacks were suggested to be healthy. They are a slightly healthier version of an unhealthy food, but in no way healthy.
The 100-calorie snack packs are very expensive for what you get. Try baking cookies instead and limiting the portions. They taste better and are better for you than a preservative-filled snack.
Diet pop, no matter how you look at it, is never healthy. There are many beverage choices that are healthy and at an equal or lesser price than pop.
Whole wheat or corn chips aren't any healthier. Buying a baked version is healthier but still not what one can consider a healthy snack. Try buying corn tortillas, cutting them up and baking them. I do this and they are really good. It's a matter of getting used to it if you haven't eaten this way before. The snacks you choose to buy are up to you, just don't consider them healthy. Your food stamp dollars would also go further this way. I'm just listing a few helpful, healthful options. I opt for healthy foods mostly but when I drink a diet soda, regular soda or munch on a corn chip, while it may taste good, I know it's not healthy.
Becky Castle, Albany
Needed: How to cook meals
In reply to Ms. Krueger's letter, which I am sure will generate a ton of replies: I for one am shocked that she feels what she buys is not my business, and what she considers healthy is appalling.
I am 71 and still work because retirement income is not enough, so my taxes go to buy 100-calorie junk food. I am healthy because I was taught what healthy food is. Let's educate food stamp people that cooking from scratch is healthy. A bag of dried peas or beans, a ham hock would make enough good soup for a couple of days.
Nachos for lunch! How healthy is that? Wasted calories! Whole wheat chips are still junk food.
I volunteered at SHEM in Sweet Home and we had a ton of apples. I offered a bag to a young mother and she asked what to do with them. I told her to make applesauce. Peel apples, boil them and add a little sugar and spice if needed. She thanked me and had no clue it was so easy! It sounds like education is needed.
The kids probably need Sprite for tummy aches from too much junk food. When you ask a taxpayer to help raise your children with our money, you have given us the right to say how you use that money.
Sharon Toth, Foster
Cuts and then raises?
The front page news on Feb. 11 said administrators and teachers are getting raises. I am a very concerned taxpayer of Sweet Home.
Something is really very wrong when our Sweet Home School Board votes for administrators and teachers to have raises, and then the school board and administrators turn around and cut positions and cut other employees' hours.
How sad. Most people around here are just trying to survive and keep what jobs they have. Somehow our Sweet Home School Board approves raises for our administrators and teachers. They somehow forget to mention that our newer teachers, though, will lose their jobs and our classified employees will also lose their jobs or have their hours cut way down to help finance all these raises.
Sweet Home School Board members, you should be ashamed of yourselves to give administrators and teachers raises in these financial hard times. That you had to take a lot of other very valuable employees' jobs away from them to help pay for raises for some doesn't seem right or fair.
Robert Johnson, Sweet Home
Slow down on 18th S.W.
I am a teacher at Faith Lutheran Preschool. I have been very concerned about the speeding traffic down 18th Avenue S.W. because that is where our playground sits. One of my worst fears happened on Tuesday, Feb. 24, when a high school student took the corner too quickly and lost control of his truck and plowed through our fence and into our playground. We were lucky and blessed none of our students were outside during this accident.
Although no one was hurt, I was very angry with the situation. I have been asking for cops to patrol that street for a while now, especially from 11 a.m. to noon because the high school students have lunch during that time and that's when the speeding is the worst. Yet it never happened. There has been nothing to make people slow down.
I now wonder if the boy crashing through our fence is enough to make something happen, or is it going to take a child being hurt for an outcome?
This kid who was driving is a great example of most of the students who take the road to get to McDonald's or Taco Bell for lunch. I hope and pray that other people who use that street will read this and realize what is at stake here. If you speed it's not just other drivers but also innocent children that can be harmed by what you do. So watch out and be smart.
Tara A. Earp, Albany