Letters to the Editor | Jan. 11, 2024

It’s great that Pennsylvania legislators have passed a law for the 2026-27 school year requiring high schools to provide a course in personal financial literacy in order to graduate. Back in the ‘70s, when I was in high school, I thought a class like that should be required. However, as is usual with mandates from the legislature, there is no plan that accompanies it to say where the money will come from. The wealthier districts will figure out how to fund this without cutting back in some other area, and the poorer districts will likely scramble to make it work by not fixing broken toilets and leaking roofs, or by overtaxing a teacher who will have to squeeze it into an already full curriculum. As we wait for the Basic Education Funding Commission report on how to fix Pennsylvania’s unconstitutional school funding system, I hope Gov. Josh Shapiro and all our legislators will do the right thing and come up with a plan to adequately and equitably fund our schools starting with the 2024-25 school year.

Beth Logue, POWER Interfaith Education Justice Team, Philadelphia, elizabeth.logue44@gmail.com

The Inquirer’s Jan. 6 editorial attempts to tar former President Donald Trump as guilty of inciting an insurrection, but that is wrong. Trump was never indicted or charged with that crime; in fact, it is conspicuously absent from the charges special counsel Jack Smith unsealed last August, which claim that Trump “exploited the disruption,” but didn’t actually encourage or incite the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. And in 2021, Trump was acquitted by the Senate of inciting insurrection in his second impeachment trial. Furthermore, not one of the over 1,200 people arrested for taking part in the riot has been charged with insurrection. As former Attorney General Bill Barr said on the third anniversary of the Capitol incident, the U.S. Justice Department under President Joe Biden went too far in its prosecutions, even targeting people who merely walked into open doors and hung around, and Barr opined, “I didn’t view it as an insurrection.”

Nick O’Dell, Phoenixville, nickodell16@yahoo.com

The Welcome Park debacle points to significant problems in the National Park Service’s planning process. Apparently, without broad engagement, plans were made that missed the point of William Penn’s greatest contribution, one shared by all of Philadelphia’s residents while defacing an important work of art by Philadelphia’s most important architects of the last half-century, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

As Philadelphia’s principal historian for the last 40 years, I have grown to see Philadelphia as the center of a series of revolutions that created the modern world — with 1776 as one, but also the first computer, and more recently, mRNA vaccines. But the first revolution was that initiated by Penn in his Charter of Privileges of 1701 that began, “Because no People can be truly happy, though under the greatest Enjoyment of Civil Liberties, if abridged of the Freedom of their Consciences, as to their Religious Profession and Worship.” That is why Penn should be commemorated in the city that he founded, and why the park service should start over with its plans.

George E. Thomas, Philadelphia

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