By JC BOWMAN

Educators are leaders who should be valued and respected. In an era of transformational change across Tennessee, there is a well-timed debate over how we define achievement and success both in and out of school, as well as the proper role of federal, state and local policy.

Nobody disputes that the path forward is the presence of quality teachers in Tennessee classrooms. However, quietly unnoticed is a startling fact: there are 3.2 million teachers in the United States according to the U.S. Department of Education. By 2020, it is estimated that 1.6 million will either retire or leave the profession. This pending impact will be felt across many Tennessee classrooms.

Of even more concern is that the data reveals 46 percent of public school educators leave the profession within their first five years. The attrition rate is highest among science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers, who can command higher salaries in the private sector. The book (and now movie) “Teachers Have It Easy,” by Dave Eggers, Nínive Clements Calegari and Daniel Moulthrop, has produced a compelling discourse that accumulates data to give readers a blunt and unforgiving portrait of American education which raises questions about the sustainability and desirability of the teaching profession in the 21^st Century.

By ANNE DONNELL

I know you’ve written about thank-you notes, probably more than once, but do you mind “cruising” through it again? I hope that graduates and brides and grooms will read this and start writing their thanks. -A Rather Generous Person

Too often one has to be generous, even when the notes have arrived in one’s mailbox.  These graduates and brides and grooms, as our QP of T (Question Person of Today) phrases it, seem to feel that what worked in the third grade (contents, form, and general appearance as in smudges and numerous erasures, misspelled words, and worse) works all life long.

And, yes, I agree that grooms should be on the list of those who write thank-you notes.  Often the gifts come from those with close ties to the groom and perhaps no ties to the bride. So the groom can take pen in hand as I hope he would have done for graduation gifts (and birthday).

By BOBBY M. GOODE
USDA Rural Development,
State Director for Tennessee

Nearly every rural Tennessean benefits from USDA Rural Development investments in businesses, cooperatives, communities and non-profits. We help them create jobs and improve access to things like reliable water, sewer, broadband, electricity, rental housing, home repairs and other essentials like public safety, education, job training and healthcare. Our urban neighbors benefit, too. A competitive rural America is vital to the economic health and independence of our nation in terms of food, exports and as a vital source of renewable energy and innovation for the future.

We also help literally thousands of families achieve the dream of homeownership every year. Just since 2009, we have helped more than 12,500 rural Tennesseans reach this important milestone.

June is National Homeownership Month and as we celebrate with families across Tennessee, we are reminded that ownership matters because homes are the center of family life and communities. Owning a home generates pride that encourages greater participation in civic life and stable households contribute to greater success in school for children who then grow up to have greater success in work and life.

By ANNE DONNELL

How are new words added to our vocabularies? I know this is happening a lot, but I’m curious about what the process is or even if there is a process.
-Using Words I Didn’t Know Existed When I Was A Child

That signature above needs to be left alone; those of us with mostly no TV childhoods were able to grow up without knowing about the existence of a lot of words, mostly X-rated ones. (X-rated itself is meaningless before the movie standards were adopted; the original ones went in use in late 1968.)

There is not a process for adding new words; there are many, many, many. Sometimes a famous creative person hammers away at words (think Shakespeare), chipping and shaping until new ones appear. Sometimes an anonymous creative person pops out a new word (think advertising copy writers of this century and last), and this word sticks. Sometimes high school students open their mouths and out comes something never heard before, maybe jitterbug, maybe Tweeeterbug.

This guest column is in response to an article published in the Friday, June 1 edition of The Wilson Post, in which local dentist, Dr. Chad Williams said he will be contacting other dentists to begin a campaign to add fluoride to the local water supply. You may read that article by clicking here.

I read with great concern the article about a Lebanon dentist who wants to put fluoride back into the water. The first thing I would like to point out is that fluoride is NOT a nutrient. The fluoride that is typically used for water fluoridation is hydrofluorosilicic acid, not the pharmaceutical grade sodium fluoride that is used in toothpaste, but rather the toxic waste straight from the scrubbers of phosphate plants with all of its other toxins such as arsenic, lead, and mercury. It's too toxic to release into the air or rivers, yet okay to put in our drinking water. It doesn't pass the common sense test. 

Supporters of fluoridation always refer to "research" that shows fluoride to be safe and effective, yet in the 10 years that I have been studying fluoride I have yet to see this research. They always refer to the "York Review," however, Dr.Trevor Sheldon, the founding director of the center that actually did the study, said that the review did not show water fluoridation to be safe. In 2006 the National Research Council released a report that also found the levels of fluoride used at that time not only to be unsafe, but potentially harmful to diabetics and kidney patients as well as other groups of people.