Readers share views on child abuse, Missouri roads and ride-hailing services
Prevent child abuse
April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. The theme this year is “Be their voice — speak up to prevent child abuse.”
Prevention is the key to reducing child abuse and neglect and improving the lives of children and families.
Strengthening families and preventing child abuse takes a combined commitment from individuals and organizations in a community.
Ways to strengthen families includes providing accessible, quality early childhood programs, opportunities to increase adult knowledge of parenting and child development, and social connections such as friends, family and neighbors who help out and provide emotional support.
Other factors include safe places for children to play and availability of food, shelter and medical care for all families.
Head Start programs provide a comprehensive approach to programs and services that help strengthen families, leading to improved life outcomes for the child, family and community.
Whether you are employed at a local social-service agency serving children and families or are an individual, do your part to prevent child abuse and neglect.
Lend a helping hand, and speak up if you know a child is living in an abusive environment.
Everyone can take steps to make the community and families stronger.
Terrie VanZandt-Travis
Executive Director
Growing Futures Early
Education Center
(Formerly Head Start
of Shawnee Mission)
Overland Park
Failing in Missouri
The Star’s front-page March 30 article, “Missouri roads crumble, and funds too,” and its editorial the same day on misplaced legislative priorities, “Upside-down priorities in Jefferson City,” speaks volumes about our state.
Clearly, our legislature lacks the vision and the courage to do what is best for all citizens.
One has to ask, what are the most important problems facing Missouri if we are to truly prosper? Transportation of all kinds is in short supply. Health care also needs to be addressed to curtail rising costs and improve the health of our citizens.
Improved education and economic development are other areas that need to be addressed so that reliance on state aid is ultimately decreased.
The response to these issues, it appears, is only the will to do harm to the most needy and defenseless, to enrich the wealthy and to pass our problems on to our children and grandchildren.
The lack of ethics reform also speaks volumes about our legislators’ seeming desire to hide and mislead us about their true allegiance to special interests of all kinds. One can only conclude that what legislative vision there is is for personal or political gain.
Courage to address the true problems Missouri faces is nonexistent. Surely we can do much better.
Cliff Schuette
Kansas City
Ride hailing for KC
Kansas City needs Uber and Lyft. After all, we do not have a great mass transit system here.
Our daughters turned us on to these enterprises in Chicago, where they live, and we have used them whenever we’ve needed a ride in cities in which they operate, including here.
We’ve had wonderful experiences and never felt unsafe or insecure, unlike many taxi adventures we’ve had to endure.
A friend pointed out to me that we are going to want or need more of these options as we grow older and maybe are no longer able to drive.
Already we have too much constraint on thinking-outside-the-box enterprises.
Ditch the old way of thinking before we tarnish our city’s ambitions as forward-thinking for the young people.
Our safety will be enhanced with fewer drunken drivers and the fact that cash does not have to change hands, as will our economy as folks share rides to earn extra income.
You are always going to have an occasional bad apple — even with taxi drivers.
Taxis have credit-machine problems when there is inclement weather, and they want cash.
Lower the cost, and the regulations, and let Uber and Lyft operate here.
Michele Souder
Prairie Village
Veto abortion bill
The Star in a March 26 article, “Kansas is first to ban abortion procedure,” reported that the Kansas Legislature sent Senate Bill 95 to Gov. Sam Brownback’s desk.
The proposed law would be an unprecedented intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship. It would ban a procedure that represents a medically accepted standard of care.
We are local ob-gyn physicians with more than 55 years of combined experience serving Kansas women. We are appalled that the Kansas Legislature would play politics with a woman’s health care — often involving a pregnancy with serious anomalies.
This law would criminalize women’s health-care decisions.
It substitutes the personal agendas of legislators for the expertise of highly trained physicians.
It is ironic that the politicians advocating this cynical attack on safe, legal abortion in the second trimester are the same ones repeatedly advancing measures designed to block access to care earlier in pregnancy, when the majority of decisions are made.
Rather than enacting more abortion restrictions, our elected officials need to respect the dignity, health and lives of the one in three women who will decide to end a pregnancy in their lifetime.
We strongly urge Gov. Brownback to veto this dangerous legislation.
Herbert Hodes, M.D.
Traci L. Nauser, M.D.
Overland Park
Capital punishment
There is no question that the taking of a life is contrary to most religious principles, be they Christian or not (3-31, A1, “Pharmacy association faults death penalty role”).
As has been pointed out, the use of lethal injection somehow sanitizes the process.
Now that that has become untenable, are we to resort to more violent forms of execution?
Maybe we could set up a hanging scaffold on the steps of City Hall. That might satisfy the eye-for-an-eye contingent.
As my dear departed partner in medicine used to say, “One need not use much effort to reveal our true nature, for the veneer of civilization is very thin.”
David Zoller
Kansas City
Obama benefits
I am wondering why no one has given President Barack Obama credit for the low gasoline prices and the high stock market.
I have been in the stock market for a long time, and this is the highest I have ever seen it. I am 87 years old.
If the gas prices were high, Obama would get the blame. If the stock market were low, Obama would also get the blame.
If this happened when the other party was in the White House, that’s all we would hear.
Betty Greenwood
Shawnee
Rebuild partnership
Like many others, I watched with dismay as Académie Lafayette’s and the Kansas City Public Schools’ partnership plans devolved into a racially charged skirmish, letting down Kansas City children once again.
If the critics of the high school proposal knew more about Académie Lafayette’s history and the school’s true intentions, I’m sure they’d support the plan.
Instead, families will suffer.
As an Académie Lafayette parent involved in communications and fundraising for the school, I found the accusations of exclusivity and privileged access to be painful.
They run contrary to everything I’ve witnessed at Académie Lafayette, where the board of directors believes diversity is extremely healthy for the school and students.
They don’t just believe in diversity. They pursue it, aggressively.
Académie Lafayette’s proposed high school would provide free, quality seats in a district that needs hope and progress.
No doubt, frustration and fear run deep with Kansas Citians after decades in a subpar school district.
But the beauty of children is that they force us to look ahead, instead of back.
We must join hearts and hands and walk forward if we sincerely want change on behalf of children, families and our community.
Angela Michka
Kansas City
This story was originally published April 1, 2015 at 10:00 AM with the headline "Readers share views on child abuse, Missouri roads and ride-hailing services."