BART: Better After Reading This

You know those useless BART tickets that you have lying around with a few cents on them? Well, BART, in addition to being a less environmentally destructive mode of transportation, is also beneficial to our community and its inhabitants. In the article titled "Tiny Tickets: BART’s Best-Kept Secret?" in the Mission Local and also in the San Francisco Chronicle, J.J. Barrow explains that:

While most BART riders don’t know that their 10- or 30-cent tickets, forgotten in purses and drawers, can be turned into charity donations, a few nonprofits do.

If you're itching to help your community, but you can't find the time or the money to help, then turning in these old, unwanted BART tickets is the perfect option. BART began this project of donating the money on these leftover BART tickets to charities, in 2001. This program is called "Tiny Tickets," and it has lost some popularity as of late as charities have dropped out due to tough economic times, yet there are still around fifty charities that participate in this program now. In the seven years in between 2002 and 2009, charities have made around $260,000. Imagine how much more that sum would be if all people who rode BART knew about Tiny Tickets. Unfortunately, due to issues with money, charities and BART are no longer able to advertise this program so it is up to us to spread the word about Tiny Tickets in order to improve our community with this simple program.

The Call for Education Reform

The founder of Microsoft and possibly the world's most famous billionaire, plans to push for an overhaul of America's current education system, on November 19, 2010. Bill Gates is actively contributes to various non-profit organizations with support and donations, and encourages the youth of America to live better lives. According to the article entitled "Gates Urges School Budget Overhauls" by Sam Dillon of the New York Times, tomorrow, Gates is planning on making a speech directed to all the superintendents of the fifty states of the U.S. to transform the current educational budgets for public schools into a new system that would be spent better and would better benefit the youth of America. Gates wants to:

end teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master’s degrees, which he says are unrelated to teachers’ ability to raise student achievement. He also urges an end to efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead, he suggests rewarding the most effective teachers with higher pay for taking on larger classes or teaching in needy schools. 

While I believe that the better a teacher is and the more qualified he/she is for his/her job, the more he/she should get paid, I do agree with Gates that we do, in fact, need an overhaul of the current public education budget because, in the tremendous majority of public school districts in America, kids are not being educated the best they can be educated and many schools are not using their money in order to best suit the education of their students. Even though education falls mostly under the jurisdiction of state governments, President Obama should back Gates up and should also push superintendents to reform their budgets. I also agree with Gates in the respect that class sizes should be cut down because the lower the student to teacher ratio is, the better, because teachers are not as swamped with dealing with more students than they can handle, and the students will also feel more comfortable to approach the teachers, who will have more time to deal with the fewer students that they have.

Mental Health Break