Greeters thanked with music

An Ole Tyme Jamboree featuring Ken and Jane Brooks, Back Porch Bluegrass of New England and the Katahdin Valley Boys held a special Christmas show for the Maine Troop Greeters Saturday Dec. 7 in St. Albans. The musicians were wonderful, and folks in attendance were very patriotic. What a joy seeing so many Maine residents expressing thanks to our wonderful men and women who are in the service of our country.

Thank you to the entertainers for traveling so far and for giving up their Saturday night for us.

Charles Knowlen

Eddington

School daze

In regards to spending $327 million more on Maine’s public school system, I have this to say: For the first six years of my education I went to a one-room school with four or five grades in the room. We had outhouses for bathrooms and carried our water from the house across the road.

Grades six through eight, I went to a four-room school with two or three grades to a room.

My college board scores were in the top 10 percent, and I graduated third in my class. Four years later I had a degree from the University of Maine at Orono.

There was not any money thrown at my education. But myself, and most of the rest of the people I went to public school with, got the education we wanted to get. How?

Simply, we were expected and made to behave ourselves and take care of our school work. If we were disciplined for whatever reason, when we got home we were disciplined again.

No amount of money in the world will improve a system where the students have more rights

and freedoms of action and speech than the teachers assigned to them. If you want to improve the educational system, bring back classroom discipline and put the teachers and

administrators back in control.

The system we had up until the late 60’s worked fine for hundreds of years. It wasn’t broken, but it got fixed anyway. Sometimes things are better being left alone.

Ralph Grant

Waldoboro

Label kudos

As the owner of a small Maine grocery and convenience store, I want to commend Gordon Colby for his recent OpEd, “GMO label mandate onerous and unwarranted.” This legislation does nothing to ensure food safety, causes confusion and is designed to drive shoppers to organic and GMO-free labels that are already legal and in the marketplace. The enormous cost on our business community has been completely ignored by legislators who pay more attention to tweets than to fact and sound science.

Entities including the American Medical Association have determined that genetically engineered foods are no different nutritionally than non-genetically engineered foods. We have had them for 25 years without a single foods safety concern related to their use unlike all of the food recalls due to contamination caused by actual farming methods.

This legislation puts a burden on retail food merchants that could be crippling. Most products sold in grocery stores contain some GMO ingredients. Under this legislation, if it becomes effective, we would be fined $1,000 per day, per item, per location for any food that is not properly labeled.

Farmers will have to maintain meticulous records of seed source and provide documentation in order to wholesale any produce.

I respect anyone’s right to choose non-GMO foods and they can do that with voluntary GMO free labels as well as certified organic. We shouldn’t have to pay the price of increased food costs just to make organic more competitive in the marketplace. Colby was correct in his assessment of this “onerous” piece of legislation.

Lois Bowden

Hartland