Track needs acute at Soddy-Daisy High
Soddy-Daisy High School is the second largest high school in Hamilton County. We have begged for a running track for the past 25 years or more. The fact that Hamilton County commissioners want to approve $500,000 for a track at Central High is an insult to our students and community as a whole.
There is no usable track at any school north of Red Bank High, which is receiving $150,000 from the county to improve its track.
Let me list the schools that would benefit from a track at Soddy-Daisy: Allen, Daisy, North Hamilton, Sale Creek Middle/High, Sequoyah, Soddy Elementary, Soddy-Daisy Middle, McConnell, Loftis Middle, Ganns Middle Valley, Ivy Academy and Soddy High. These schools represent about 6,700 students and 16 percent of Hamilton County's total enrollment.
I urge my representatives, Randy Fairbanks and Rhonda Thurman, to work together to help our students.
I was recently elected chairman of a nonprofit organization, the SD Trojan Fund, to benefit extracurricular activities at Soddy-Daisy High. We welcome interested alumni, parents, and businesses to donate. My email address is soddydaisy1972@gmail.com if you would like more information.
Steve Slater, Soddy Daisy
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GOP trashed ACA instead of fixing it
After six years of vilifying the Affordable Care Act and 50-plus votes to "repeal and replace" it, the Republicans have no identified and agreed-upon plan to put forth? And President-elect Trump thinks he can send out a tweet and bibbity-bobbity-boo, we will magically have a replacement?
So we have six years of energy expended toward doing everything possible to undermine an effort to offer health insurance to more of our citizenry when they could very well have used that time to address improvements.
This is distressing because it represents a resentment so deep against President Obama that it overrode action that would benefit the people they were elected to serve and because it would seem to indicate a bias against people without health care - as though they are freeloaders who drain the system.
Amazing that legislators with Cadillac health care coverage and sufficient resources can be so dismissive. I wish they could meet some of the folks I worked with over the course of my career who, through no fault of their own, found themselves in disabling situations when all they wanted was to work and be responsible for themselves.
Kate Stulce, Ooltewah
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Wire services fail to report facts
We subscribe to the Times Free Press because of our interest in getting local news and evaluating local events. Most of the articles about the Chattanooga region appear to be fairly well written and worth perusing.
However, the newspaper is not a national paper and fails miserably to present national and international news objectively. On Jan.12, the front page had three pieces of literary trash from the AP, none of which reflected any level of objectivity or value.
The fact that the TFP uses narratives from the New York Times and Associated Press is antithetical to its slogan of "without fear or favor."
"Fake news" has become a new moniker for poor reporting. Those articles are not even an attempt at objective reporting but are simply bigoted narratives from a prejudiced press. Reprinting such trash is doing your readers an injustice, as is trying to present a commentary as fact when there is no factual basis.
I believe that you can do better about becoming a newspaper that presents news versus "narratives" and dump the AP and New York Times.
Chuck Charnawskas