“These are the times that try men's souls.” | Quite a few years ago I started pushing a idea to incorporate a senior center with our local elementary school (5-12 kids). We had never had a senior center in this area for over 40 miles in any direction. We got the ball rolling and brought Utah & Idaho seniors into our school two days a week. It was a win for everybody, it helped spread costs of operating the school to justify keeping it open. The best thing was it got a lot of housebound seniors out of their homes, back to visiting with their old friends. However the best thing was it got more one on one time with kids and the seniors, I felt it those kids where the real winners in this deal. I really made my day to see kids eating school lunch with the seniors, in fact the seniors enjoyed it as well. The first few years we really had problems with the stateline issues of running senior programs, as both states helped fund it, biggest problems was insurance issues for public transportation van we used.
In fact when I was trying to get a little support on this issue when I was on the school board, telling people of my vision of this program working I had coffee with a local doctor. He had been wanting to do a small clinic on our side of the mountain to better serve the seniors as he knew they wasn't receiving the proper care they needed. So he helped by coming those two days to the school and we set up a room for him to see patients. We were even able to send prescriptions out to people on the school bus run in the afternoon so elderly didn't have to try and made it to town that day. It was working great until the local hospital and the doctor had a run in, and he was forced to move to another hospital and had to leave the area. It was sad to lose a great doctor that truly cared about patients. So the clinic portion of it ended.
I guess my whole point is, there is a way to provide these services to people and reduce costs to taxpayers if a lot of boneheaded people would come together and work a plan, not just look at their program being cut for another one.
It's sad that we as taxpayers spend all this money for school buildings that go unused for great portions of the day that could have a lot more programs running out of them to help spread some of these fixed costs. Lets start getting a bigger bang for our buck.
I guess we can even let the cell phone stores and tattoo & piercing parlors have a room in the back as well. It would save the kids a trip to town. (just kidding folks) LOL Instead of being bought off by Coke and Pepsi for school athletics money we could let Verizon have a sign in the school as well. Heaven knows they have a lot of customers in the building! |
this sucks
