By Lisa Schencker and Rosemary Winters

The Salt Lake Tribune

Published: November 13, 2010 02:00PM

A state school board member is questioning whether family members should be allowed to contract with one another to run charter schools, calling the relationship between a charter-school academy and its management company “not right.”

But the practice of family members running charter schools together is not unique to one school. Charter schools are independently run public schools often started by groups of parents.

Another important story by The Salt Lake Tribune, a newspaper this community cannot do without. The Tribune is always willing to dig into these troubling issues and bring them to the attention of the public.

Charter schools can be very good, and they can be very bad, and they can improve education and they can detract from it, and they need careful public scrutiny.

We all need to get up to speed on the issues and become involved in these school issues.

Outgoing state school board member Denis Morrill raised the issue at a board meeting this month as the board considered American Preparatory Academy’s request to expand beyond its current plans. The academy pays a charter school management company $986 a year per student to run its two schools, according to the management agreement. The company is owned by sisters of the chairman of the academy’s board.

“I’m not willing to approve and watch expand something that puts another $920 a year per student in the pocket of the sister (more…)

Community leaders urge moderate approach to immigration reform

Published: Thursday, Nov. 11, 2010 11:53 p.m. MST

The Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY — Frustrated with a discussion some say has turned hateful, a broad swath of business, political and religious leaders joined forces Thursday to speak out against tough, enforcement-only immigration policy and urge legislators to take a gentler, more “humane” approach to reform.

State legislators who have been lobbying for an aggressive charge against illegal immigration, in the meantime, remained undeterred.

Similar arguments are taking place in states across the country as local governments struggle to figure out how to pick up the pieces of a broken federal immigration system. While states lack the constitutional power to grant citizenship or rework the visa system, “states can either welcome illegal immigration in their jurisdiction or they can discourage illegal immigration,” said Jon Feere, legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies. Twenty-two states have followed in Arizona’s footsteps, filing bills to crack down on undocumented immigrants and push for more deportations, but many states are gearing up to make their states more immigrant friendly.

“Before the Legislature begins discussing policy, there needs to be a broad public debate about our culture,” said Paul Mero, president of the Sutherland Institute, a conservative, Utah-based think tank. “We have to ask ourselves, ‘What kind of society do we want in Utah?’ ”

The Sutherland Institute, along with the Utah Attorney General’s Office, the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Office, the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce and United Way, kicked off that conversation Thursday with the introduction of the Utah Compact, a document outlining five principles “to guide Utah’s immigration discussion.”

Why the outrageously divisive Sutherland Institute and its leader Paul Mero are part of the Utah Compact has only one purpose—to try and bring respect and credibility to the disrespectful, cantankerous voice of Paul Mero and the Sutherland Institute.

The front and center involvement of Mero taints the whole otherwise worthwhile effort to bring civility into community discussions.

Almost all of the extreme anti-immigration voices come from the right-wing portion of the community which forms Sutherland Institute’s very basis of existence.

It is a huge turnoff to have Sutherland Institute front and center on this issue and to have our community leaders giving that organization credibility when it should be shunned and marginalized.

The answer, of course, is with its relationship with the LDS Church, which (more…)

By Paul Koepp

Deseret News

Published: Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2010 1:20 a.m. MDT

SALT LAKE CITY — In April 2004, officials from Utah-based Stevens-Henager College flew a delegation to the South Pacific island nation of Tonga.

A week later, after meetings with the royal family, they returned with commitments from at least 100 Tongans to come to Utah to study at the for-profit school. The bottom line for Stevens-Henager: $30,000 per student, or $3 million in revenue.

This “Polynesian Program,” which also included a plan to create a campus specifically for Pacific Islanders at the Porter Rockwell Center in Bluffdale, fell apart without ever being fully implemented and has been part of a legal dispute between Stevens-Henager and one of its rivals ever since. But it’s an indication of how creative for-profit colleges have been as they seek an edge in an increasingly competitive and cluttered market.

Utah has dozens of for-profit colleges that offer alternatives to traditional higher education and work with employers to meet the local labor market’s demand. Ranging from beauty school to business school, it’s impossible to paint all for-profits with one brush.

And they lay claim to successes: The locally-based Eagle Gate College Group reports that 92 percent of its graduates are placed in jobs, and the colleges say they are ahead of traditional schools in measuring what their students actually learn.

This is an important story and The Deseret News is to be credited with a good effort here. News stories like this take time, effort, and commitment. Hopefully the down-sized staff will be able to continue to perform solid public service news stories like this one, but don’t hold your breath. The Deseret News has laid off (more…)

Gary Herbert October 2, 2010 12:07AM

When Gary Herbert assumed the governorship from Jon Huntsman Jr. in August 2009, we said that he was known to be a thoughtful, careful man who likes to listen to all sides and drill down into policy issues. We urged him to steer a moderate political course. In his year in the job, he has done that, for the most part, and he’s earned our endorsement to continue in office for another two years.

By any objective measure, Herbert is a bona fide conservative on both financial and social issues. But in Utah, where the Republican-dominated Legislature is pulling further to the right every day, dancing happily with tea party enthusiasts, Herbert has emerged as a moderating force, a voice of reason. We hope he will play that role more strongly if he is re-elected, backed by an electoral mandate of his own in the top job.

Nevertheless, a governor must work with the Legislature, and Herbert has done that, too. He formulated his first budget proposal, the one for the current fiscal year that began July 1, just as the economy was showing signs of weak recovery from the Great Recession. In the face of further erosion of revenues, he promised to dip into the Rainy Day Fund, protect education as far as possible and make judicious cuts elsewhere in state government while avoiding any recovery-killing tax hikes. In the end, he accomplished most of that, though he allowed the Legislature’s tobacco tax increase to pass into law without his signature.

In the political storm over immigration, he called for a summit to provide a civil forum, and he has urged the Legislature to retain in-state college tuition for children of undocumented immigrants who graduate from Utah high schools. He backed an immediate investigation that quickly exposed rogue state workers who anonymously published a list of 1,300 aliens allegedly in the country illegally. He wisely decided not to call a special session to make voluntary a state law that requires employers to verify the eligibility of employees to work in this country because he worried the session could take hasty, extremist decisions. He has warned about the risks of racial profiling and arrests without probable cause inherent in Arizona-style immigration enforcement legislation.

After lengthy deliberation, he correctly decided that Utah would administer the new high-risk insurance pool under the federal health reform law. He dismissed calls for the state to turn down federal stimulus money (more…)

By Brian Maffly

The Salt Lake Tribune

September 27, 2010 11:33PM

After securing a costly associate degree, Chelsi Miller learned she did not have much use for it.

Chelsi Miller says she amassed $45,000 in debt to earn a surgical technologist degree from the for-profit Everest College in 2008 in the hopes of transferring to the University of Utah, only to find few schools accept Everest credits.

“That was my entire goal, to transfer. I felt hopeless and lost. I knew I had to start over,” said Miller, 26, a single mother from Midvale who works in a surgical setting in a Salt Lake City hospital. “It was a complete waste of time and I lost all that time with my baby.”

This is just the beginning, the opening of an examination into for-profit schools. Hats off to Brian Maffly and the Tribune for this story. We will follow the developments in the case.

It raises many questions that the public needs to be aware of, such as who regulates these schools, who accredits them, who are the teachers and what are their qualifications, and of course, where does the money come from and where does it go? How much are teachers paid? What are employee benefits?

Miller and two other Everest graduates, saddled with tens of thousands of debt and questionable credits, filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging Everest admissions representatives deployed “a policy of deceiving and misleading students” about the value of a degree from the West Valley City campus and the true costs of attending. The school’s corporate parent Corinthian Colleges disputes the charges.

The suit, filed Friday in Salt Lake City’s 3rd District Court, alleges Everest’s recruiters subjected prospective students to high-pressure sales tactics that omitted or distorted crucial information about the transferability of credits, as well as the debt loads associated with enrolling.

“Sadly, based on these misrepresentations, they completed (more…)

By CARLA K. JOHNSON and GEOFF MULVIHILL

The Associated Press

September 24, 2010 10:27AM

CHICAGO • Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Friday announced a $100 million donation to Newark, N.J., public schools in a move that could enhance his reputation just before the opening on an unflattering movie about him, “The Social Network.”

Why Newark?

“Well, Newark, is really just because I believe in these guys, right?” Zuckerberg told Oprah Winfrey on her TV show.

“These guys” are Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat. The three appeared together Friday on Winfrey’s show.

Zuckerberg’s donation is the Internet tycoon’s first major (more…)

In his op-ed, “Utah can learn from Florida’s progress in education” (Opinion, Sept 19), Speaker of the Utah House of Representatives David Clark speaks volumes about how poor Utah education really can be. “With our large families and extensive federal lands, Utah will never be able to match the spending of other states on public education” is apparently considered by Clark to be a probative comment.

But let’s look closer. After subtracting the 70 percent of the Utah land held in common with our fellow American citizens, Utah still has more 26,000 square miles of land for our 3 million residents to own and occupy.

Florida, on the other hand, has 18 million people sharing 64,000 square miles — it is twice as crowded as we are (or, in the terms Clark offers, it has only half as much opportunity for its citizens). And little New Jersey has only 7,000 square miles to support its 8 million citizens, while creating a far higher standard of living than Utah does.

So the primary question is: Is Clark educationally deficient or only intellectually challenged? And, secondarily: Will Utah Republicans ever stop whining about not getting a big enough piece of the federal pie?

Darrell Prows

Murray

By Robert Gehrke and Lisa Schencker

The Salt Lake Tribune

August 18, 2010 06:07AM

An offer of $140 million in federal money for education and health care is not being met with gratitude by Utah legislative leaders.

Far from it.

Instead, Utah’s Republican leaders are apoplectic that Congress provided the money — aimed at keeping teachers in the classroom and helping with the health care burden of low-income residents — and frustrated that any attempt to reject it may be fruitless.

“I’m truly astonished,” House Speaker David Clark, R-Santa Clara, said Tuesday. “Congress has unequivocally carried out the constitutional responsibilities of this state and this Legislature. … [Congress said] ‘The Utah Constitution doesn’t matter. We’re doing an end-run around this, and we’re going to decide how the money is going to be spent.’ ”

Astonishment! The Republicans are wailing at Obama for not fixing quickly enough the economy they ruined. When he takes action, they cry ‘No.” They block the very solutions necessary because they would rather have the country fail than Obama succeed. We are in a mess, a diabolical mess.

No decision has been made on whether Utah will seek the funds. Legislative leaders are meeting (more…)

By TONY SEMERAD

The Salt Lake Tribune

August 14, 2010 10:26PM

The amount of federal stimulus cash pumped into Utah by the controversial American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has now surpassed the $3 billion mark in spending and as much as another $1.5 billion in tax cuts.

Spending alone — on education, business and student loans, road and infrastructure construction, energy projects, and expansion of existing social welfare programs like jobless assistance and food stamps — has pushed Utah’s benefit from the stimulus to $1,110 per resident, according to data newly compiled by the nonprofit investigative journalism website ProPublica.org.

That puts Utah slightly below the national per capita average of $1,170.

But the Utah stimulus figure is much higher than $3 billion. Almost $1.5 billion more in tax cuts — not part of spending data — has been reaching Utah pocketbooks since 2009, through the stimulus bill’s changes in payroll withholding brackets and relief from the alternative minimum tax for middle-class taxpayers.

So, with a financial boost that large — one likely to be more even than the $3.7 billion the bill originally targeted for Utah — what do taxpayers have to show for the money?

A lot, it turns out.

This is great news—but Republicans will twist it into bad news.Through the eyes of a Republican Obama can do nothing right. Whatever he is doing is wrong. If the stimulus is helping the economy then we are ruining the economy with deficit spending. If the stimulus isn’t working then blame Obama. Whatever the situation — the Party of No can turn it upside down.

“Whenever you get that amount of money infused into the state, it has to have a certain amount of benefit,’’ said John Nixon, budget director for Gov. Gary Herbert, who has helped shape (more…)

Utah to receive $101 million for education, save more than 1,400 teacher jobs

By Joseph M. Dougherty and Elizabeth Stuart

Deseret News

Published: Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2010 12:12 a.m. MDT

WASHINGTON — With President Barack Obama’s signature on the $26 billion stimulus bill for education and Medicaid on Tuesday, Utah stands to nab about $101 million for education for fiscal 2011.

Though that number is just 1 percent of the $10 billion allocated for education funding nationwide, it could save the jobs of 1,400 to 1,500 teachers in Utah, according to state estimates, and up to 1,800 teachers, according to federal estimates.

Republicans are opposed to this good news. It boggles the mind! They would rather give a tax cut to the rich than keep our kids in teachers. Such distorted values!

Both the U.S. House and Senate passed the bill this month, with the House’s vote taking place Tuesday afternoon before a copy of the bill was taken up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.

The votes in both houses happened nearly along party lines, with the Democrats supporting the bill (more…)

The Pull of Magnets

Susan Eaton | May 27, 2010

Just beyond the bodegas painted in tropical hues, past the bleak jail for juveniles and the vacancy signs along Broad Street in Hartford, Connecticut, a startlingly sleek, sterile collection of buildings materializes. Weekday mornings, a chain of yellow buses encircles the compound. Under the eyes of security guards and cameras, kids hop down, saunter into buildings and settle into classrooms where the mix of complexions and family incomes does not match Census data culled from these streets.

Many of the children scattered among the elementary, middle and two high schools have indeed been “bused” in, to engineer the creation of racially and economically diverse schools in this otherwise extremely poor, sharply segregated Latino neighborhood. Some of the children who attend the schools in this “learning corridor” live nearby. Others come from the African-American neighborhoods to the north, and a large share travel up to an hour from the lily-white suburbs that surround the city of Hartford, where 46 percent of children are poor. Several other “magnet” schools in and around the city open their doors each morning to a student body that reflects the diversity of the region, as opposed to the homogeneity found in schools that enroll kids from just one town or neighborhood.

“It has been nothing short of a beautiful experience,” says Mara Whitman, a white mother of four who opted for a magnet in Hartford over the far more affluent and far less diverse schools in her town, West Hartford. “To be honest, it was not the diversity that attracted us. It was the educational program. The theories that drove instruction were well thought, based in evidence…. But it wasn’t long before we realized that the diversity made the experience rich.”

After a state court ruled in 1996 that the region’s public schools were segregated, in violation (more…)

by Rosemay Winters,

Salt Lake Tribune

Murray » Geniah Stuber, a third-grader at Parkside Elementary, knows why it’s important to learn to read.

“So then you can be, like, smarter,” she said Tuesday during reading time in Mrs. Buehler’s class.

Learning to read by the end of third grade also is a key predictor of children’s future success, according to a new report released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. But nationally and in Utah, two-thirds of students are not proficient readers when they start fourth grade, according to the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Process or NAEP.

“Up to third grade, children are learning to read,” said Abel Ortiz, the foundation’s director of evidence-based practices. “Starting in fourth grade, they are reading to learn. So if they don’t learn to read by third grade, that greatly impacts their ability to learn in later years.”

It also affects students’ long-term earning potential, Ortiz said, and for low-income kids, their ability to leave poverty behind.

As a teacher back in the mid-60s I taught health to all the seventh graders at Logan Junior High School. After two weeks I would make a list of those students who would be juvenile delinquents by the ninth grade and took it into the principal.

The list was composed entirely of non-readers, and it proved to be a very (more…)

In the era of Will & Grace, Portia & Ellen and Neil & John, it’s hard to believe that there’s a public school in America that would insist on holding a “straights-only” prom or else none at all. But sure enough, Itawamba Agricultural High School in Fulton, Mississippi is trying to do just that.

Constance McMillen, an 18 year-old senior at IAHS, approached her school’s administration because she wanted to attend prom with her girlfriend, also an IAHS student, and knew that same-sex dates had been banned in the past. After meeting with school officials, she was told that she and her girlfriend would not be allowed to attend together. Constance was also warned that they would be thrown out even if they came separately but tried to slow dance with each other or even if their presence made other students “uncomfortable.”

Schools in Utah have not prohibited same-sex dating at the school dances. Gay Pride Clubs are prominent in many Utah high schools and gays have not been restricted at school dances.

That’s when Constance contacted the ACLU, and we sent the school a letter demanding that they respect her constitutional right to bring a female student as her prom date and to wear a tux. The school board met over the issue and, apparently, saw that there was no way they could hold a prom and not allow Constance and her girlfriend to attend.

So they canceled it.

What is up with that? As Constance has said “prom is one of those high school moments everyone should get to experience and enjoy.” How did this school board (more…)

Tribune Editorial

Updated: 03/10/2010 05:04:01 PM MST

Republican legislative leaders like to say that they’ve “held public education harmless” in the state budget for the upcoming fiscal year. That means, we assume, that they feel they have done no harm to the public schools, that, for the time being, all is well and quality education has been preserved.

That view, it seems to us, is like looking at a glass that’s three-quarters empty and being steadily depleted and calling it half-full.

It’s true that the Legislature has managed to keep its education cuts relatively small compared with reductions made to other state agencies. The deal made between legislative leaders and Gov. Gary Herbert this week first trimmed 1 percent, or about $21.1 million. But $6.3 million siphoned out of school transportation was added back in. And $5 million was backfilled to help pay for classroom supplies — about half the money allocated in past years.

Watts Cookin’ has a great deal of confidence in The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board. It works hard in getting at the facts and is a voice of reason in Utah politics. The Tribune ran two editorials regarding the 2010 budget that will be passed by the legislature tonight.The other editorial is also posted on this blog entitled “Tribune Praises Herbert’s Budget in Tough Times.”

Generally speaking the Tribune was supportive of Governor Herbert and the legislature in arriving at a conservative budget in difficult economic times. The Tribune would have preferred that severance and fuel taxes be raised to reduce the harm to Utah’s education system, and yet the Tribune recognized the difficulty of the economic climate and was only mildly critical of the results.

However, despite legislators’ advice to education officials to be grateful for the harm that wasn’t done to education, we feel obliged to point out a few facts. Everybody’s heard it 100 times, but it bears repeating: Among all the states and the District of Columbia, Utah is dead last in education spending per student. Not only that, the gap between Utah and No. 50 is growing, as is the difference between Utah’s per-pupil spending and the national average.

The Legislature, for the first time, appropriated no money to cover the cost of school enrollment (more…)

by Dylan Lovan

Associated Press

Louisville, Ky. » Home-school mom Susan Mule wishes she hadn’t taken a friend’s advice and tried a textbook from a popular Christian publisher for her 10-year-old’s biology lessons.

Mule’s precocious daughter Elizabeth excels at science and has been studying tarantulas since she was 5. But she watched Elizabeth’s excitement turn to confusion when they reached the evolution section of the book from Apologia Educational Ministries, which disputed Charles Darwin’s theory.

“I thought she was going to have a coronary,” Mule said of her daughter, who is now 16 and taking college courses in Houston. “She’s like, ‘This is not true!’ ”

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.”

“The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians,” said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program.”

Those who don’t, however, often feel isolated and frustrated from trying to find a textbook that fits their beliefs.

Two of the best-selling biology textbooks stack the deck against evolution, said some science educators who reviewed sections of the books at the request of The Associated Press.

“I feel fairly strongly about this. These books are promulgating lies to kids,” said Jerry Coyne, an ecology and evolution professor at the University of Chicago.

The textbook publishers defend their books as well-rounded lessons on evolution and its shortcomings. One of the books doesn’t attempt to mask disdain for Darwin and evolutionary science.

Parents who shield their children from a modern education so as to protect their religious beliefs are not much different than parents who won’t let modern medicine treat their sick children. When taken to an extreme it is sad and serious and borders on child abuse. Parental rights have limits.

What can be done about it? Probably very little, except that we should do everything we can to inform the public about the lack of academic merit these schools have—a warning label so to speak.

“Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant word of God will find many points in this book puzzling,” says the introduction to Biology: Third Edition from Bob Jones University Press. “This book was not written for them.”

The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its “History of Life” chapter that a “Christian worldview … is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it (more…)

From the webpage, UnknownNews.org. Democracy depends on an informed public discourse, and it’s imperiled when lies and misinformation are multiplied by mass media, or by bloggers or panicked emailers. Please — our nation and our world face very serious, very real problems, and you can help, by being a little skeptical about all the phony, non-existent problems that are only distractions. —H&HH

This seemingly unending list of lies vomited up by pathological liars is so long you won’t have the patience to read it all. Sadly, this is what the Republican Party has come to. A ridiculousness that should result in an almost complete abandonment by anyone with a brain. Oh, the awful embarrassment of being associated with this stuff.

Latest update: Feb. 14, 2010

No, it’s not true that global warming stopped in 1998 and the world has been cooling ever since. This video does a good job tracking down the single wingnut who made that bogus claim, which has been repeated ceaselessly by climate change deniers ever since.  #

No, Republicans are just lying when they claim that prosecuting terrorists in ordinary American courtrooms is something unusual or dangerous. There’s nothing outrageous or even out of the ordinry about how the Obama administration is prosecuting the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.  #

No, contrary to conservatives’ claims, big snowstorms don’t disprove global climate change. A snowstorm doesn’t mean science is a fraud. As explained briefly, we’re going to see more snow, not less, because more precipitation — including heavy snowstorms — is a sign of global warming, as atmospheric moisture levels have increased with warmer temperatures, meaning more storms with heavy snow or rain.  #

No, it’s not true that Sen Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) has proposed legislation the would establish universal voter registration, including votes for ex-felons and welfare recipients and oh my!
It sounds like a great idea to me. I believe people should be encouraged to vote and voting should be as easy as is practically possible — but for their own reasons, other people like to have a few hurdles in the way so that only people who bother to jump those hurdles get to vote. You could make reasonable arguments for the latter notion, and maybe that’s a conversation we should have.
But instead of making those reasonable arguments, right-wingers like John Fund, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck are simply lying, because Senator Frank has made no such proposal. There’s no universal voter registration legislation to oppose. When you hear or read about this proposal from Senator Frank, you’re hearing or reading a lie.  #

No, the widespread right-wing meme that the underwear bomber quit talking as soon as he was read his Miranda rights is bull.  #

No, it’s not true, despite columnist George Will’s claim, that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would “abolish workers’ rights to secret ballots”. It’s a right-wing talking point, but it’s no more true today than the last time it was debunked on this page. It’s untrue every time you hear it, which sure is often.  #

No, it’s not true that President Obama used a teleprompter to address a class of sixth-graders at an elementary school in Falls Church, Virginia.  #

No, despite Investor’s Business Daily‘s hokum, the Community Reinvestment Act didn’t cause (more…)

The results of a Salt Lake Tribune poll support the idea of offering two sex education tracks in Utah secondary schools.

Surprisingly, the percentage of those polled who said Utah public school teachers should be required to teach about contraception using state-approved instructional materials is exactly the same as the percentage — 43 percent — who said teachers should not teach about contraception.

What better way to meet the preferences of Utahns in both camps than to let parents decide whether their children should receive comprehensive sex education at school, or lessons that steer clear of explicit instruction regarding birth control and intercourse and focus primarily on abstinence?

The Tribune is right on here. We should be offering more sex education, not hiding it. Unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are tragedies that should not happen. Ignorance is the source of those troubles. If the glory of God is intelligence then let’s not be afraid of it.

If we have to continue to live in the dark ages in the public school system then as parents we need to become informed and learn how to educate our own children and grand children about the role sex plays in their lives. Most of us won’t get it done and the next generation will make the same mistakes as our generation and the school system and poor parenting will continue to fail our children in that regard.

Legislation that would require schools to offer both options has been abandoned in favor of modifying current law just a bit to let teachers talk about the limitations and benefits of (more…)

Lt. Governor Bell; President Waddoups; Speaker Clark; Members of the Utah Legislature and of my Cabinet; Utah’s Supreme Court justices; the State’s First Lady, my wife Jeanette; my children, my mother and my fellow Utahns; I am humbled and honored to stand before you tonight as Utah’s 17th Governor to offer this annual report to our great State.

Tonight, I first pay tribute to the many Utahns who have answered the nation’s call to serve. Whether it’s as a soldier in Afghanistan, a Utah National Guardsman in Iraq, a humanitarian volunteer in Haiti or Ambassador Jon and Mary Kaye Huntsman in the People’s Republic of China, we give them all our heartfelt thanks.

I also recognize those who put their lives on the line every day to protect ours. We suffered a great loss when Millard County Sheriff’s Deputy Josie Greathouse Fox of Delta lost her life in the line of duty. Her family is here with us tonight. Please join with me as we remember a life of service and pay tribute to our entire law enforcement community, whose sacrifice helps to keep us free and to keep us safe. In my inaugural address, I spoke about the importance of, and the need for, unprecedented partnerships. This will be a continuing theme for my administration. Our success will be measured by the way we unite stakeholders from across the state, and from across the aisle. We must join together to combat the challenges we face and to seize the opportunities ahead.

Over the past four months, we have formed several such partnerships. Let me highlight two of them.

First, we created the Advisory (more…)

The 2010 general session of the Utah Legislature opens Monday, and Utahns are holding their collective breath, waiting to see how deep the budget ax will cut. As effects of the Great Recession drag revenues down, to the tune of about $700 million dollars, give or take a few million (we won’t have final projections for another month), legislators are digging in their heels, resisting any tax increases.

That’s shortsighted and dangerous, especially when it comes to public and higher education.

Utah public schools, already the most crowded in the nation, will welcome approximately 11,000 new students next fall, and many of them will be from immigrant families, where English is not the first language. Latinos make up about a fourth of new student enrollment. We already spend the least per pupil in the nation, by a growing margin. We’ve dropped from near the top to 34th in the nation in public “effort” to fund K-12 education; that’s the amount spent per $1,000 of personal income. Cutting fat is not an option.

This Tribune editorial does exactly what a good newspaper should do. It gives serious thought to serious matters and comes up with serious suggestions. This is substantial journalism.

All Utahns should read this carefully. This editorial isn’t something that was typed quickly in a moment of angst, or to fill a daily hole in the newspaper. The editorial evaluates where we are, where we need to be, and how to get there. It was hard work and required research, collaboration, and leadership.

If the readers will carefully read and evaluate this editorial they will be hard pressed to find areas of disagreement. The facts are there and the solutions are reasonable and doable.

People are naturally reluctant to raise taxes, but the arguments in this case are compelling. The governor and legislature won’t go for this, but they will not come up with a better overall result.

We could go for this result 100%, but even more, we would like to commend the Tribune on offering such a great community service. It once again has displayed the importance of a good newspaper. If you find anything as constructive and thoughtful, that requires thinking and hard work, from the other newspaper in town please let us know. We will be happy to celebrate if that ever becomes the case.

Gov. Gary Herbert proposes no further direct cut to public education after the current year’s 5 percent cut, but he would not fund the enrollment increase, the equivalent of a cut. Legislators (more…)

by Michael Lewis

Salt Lake Tribune

Just over a year ago, the Utah Utes celebrated one of the finest moments in their sports history: a Sugar Bowl victory over legendary Alabama that capped a perfect football season and triggered much rejoicing.

Not just on the field, either.

The triumph allowed the Utes to balance their athletic budget — something that would not have come close to happening without the estimated $2.3 million profit they made from their second trip into the lucrative Bowl Championship Series in five seasons.

This is an outstanding story. Congratulations to Michael Lewis. There is much more that needs to be uncovered and written about the mess of college athletics. The Sugar Bowl was the absolute zenith of success for the University of Utah.

It resulted in a ‘pot of gold’ of $19.2 million, but when costs and shares are distributed Utah ends up with a paltry $2.3 million, and even that is an illusion because that money will vanish quickly into increased salaries for the head football coach and his entire staff that will continue even in non-Sugar Bowl years.

The college presidents and the general public have been hood-winked.

You know we have our values upside down when the teacher-pupil ratio in college football is about one coach per five players, and our first grade reading classes have one teacher for 30 children, and the salary of one head football coach could pay the salaries of 30 elementary school teachers.

You know something is upside down when a coach is fired at one university for egregious rule violations and is quickly hired at another college at an increase in salary—-because he can win.

Utah put up with one of the crudest college basketball coaches in the nation for how many years?—all in search of the ‘pot of gold!’

Go Michael go! Don’t quit here.

(Also, congratulations to The Tribune for making this a front page story.)

But while that surely counts as a victory, on the eve of the annual BCS title game, it also illustrates a growing problem for many universities: Spending in pursuit of sporting success can result in serious financial jeopardy if they cannot reach a brass ring, such as a BCS game, to deliver multi-million-dollar salvation.

“The real crisis facing college athletics” is not the need for a major football playoff system, two co-chairmen of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics wrote in The Washington Post recently, but rather “the sustainability of its business model, which is on a path toward meltdown” because of soaring costs amid a troubled economic environment.

President R. Gerald Turner, of Southern Methodist University, and chancellor William E. Kirwan, of the University of Maryland, noted that NCAA statistics showed that nearly 80 percent of the 120 athletic programs that sponsor major-college football reported operating deficits (more…)