Where are priorities concerning TEAM?
I am strongly concerned about TEAM Center's closing by a state department that decided to stop giving a grant to TEAM Centers, which has 2,700 patients here in Chattanooga. Instead, the money will be going to fund a facility in Knoxville which has 290 patients.
As Chattanooga will no longer have a facility to treat patients with high functioning autism or other intellectual disorders, parents of children with autism spectrum disorders, and all adults who live with an ASD, may need to go as far as two hours away to receive treatment.
Chattanooga will be overtaking Knoxville as the third largest city in Tennessee, population-wise. Where are Gov. Haslam's and Commissioner Henry's true priorities? Is there any coincidence that Gov. Haslam was the previous mayor of Knoxville, and now the $700,000 plus grant is going there instead to Chattanooga, when TEAM Centers has been a long established organization, doing great things to make the lives of greater Chattanooga's youth and adults better?
I can only imagine what Haslam and Henry have in mind for the future of Tennessee with regard to intellectual disabilities.
SCOTT KRAMER
Founder/Executive Director,
Greater Chattanooga
Aspies
Guatemala gets too much ink
Will someone please explain to me why the Times Free Press editors are so preoccupied with Guatemala and that county's "immigrants."
On Sunday, July 24, the Times Free Press readers where subjected to five full pages, (including the front page), of "bleeding heart," liberal journalism about a subject which is only important to legal U.S. citizens because of the taxes they are having to pay to subsidize a welfare system that supports illegal immigrants.
Why didn't your writers explain how much the yearly cost is to hospitals for their services to illegal immigrant Guatemalans who use hospital emergency rooms for their general heath care?
Again on Wednesday, July 27, Times Free Press blasted its readers with an additional three full pages regarding Guatemalans.
There are more important problems and issues currently facing the city of Chattanooga, i.e., intercity gangs and shootings, political corruption, cutbacks in services, etc., which deserve as much or more print in the Times Free Press as stories on Guatemala.
Why don't the editors of the Times Free Press assign their reporters to do as much research and reporting on intercity gangs and shootings as they have done on Guatemala?
WILLIS M. MARTIN