To the Editor:

The story headline was “St. Lawrence County schools struggle, state commission calls for longer school days and years, more accountability” (published online Jan. 3) and it’ll take until the Fall of 2013 to put it together!?

In the first place, I don’t see how longer school days and years are going to save any money for anyone! And full days for Kindergarteners? Come on, there were some very good reasons for not starting out with full days. None of anything in that article will save or decrease costs to the schools in any way. It all goes to show, Gov Cuomo doesn’t know his plans from a hole in the ground, in my opinion. Longer days and years is really expensive when you consider the added electric bills, heating bills, insurance modifications and a gazillion other things that go along with them.

I thank God nearly every day now to have a paid-for home with basically only taxes and utilities to pay for. But what of people still making mortgage payments, car payments and the like. I hope the hell they leave my veteran’s exemptions for battle zone duty and my STAR exemptions to help with my taxes. It’s no wonder no one wants to stay here to make a living after they finish schooling.

In the end, they will simply pass on to the local school districts another huge load of payments for them to make when there are so many ways to cut school spending other than forcing them all into austerity budgets and using their emergency funds if they have any left.

There are many ways they could cut costs right now in the schools, real estate taxes, sales taxes, heating oil and fuel oil cost savings.

That’s what they have to be looking at. There’s nothing better that I’d love to do than tell our government critters how to do that, including taking away their pork barrels and all the rest of the waste. Everything costs more now and the public has realized it for nearly a decade now while our critters just go right on spending on the darndest things. All they want these days is PR, credit for saving here & there but not mentioning where they shifted the costs to and many other shell games they like to play.

They might be robbing the Social Security System to pay for some things, a stupid move right from the get-go but they’ve become so used to lies by omissions they don’t even think about it anymore, especially if it was a plank in their platforms. I have to wonder if a government critter is still considered worse than a used car lot salesman or if it’s gotten even worst.

Let’s be noisy and let the critters know our ideas, too, in vast numbers of entries. Let’s never see another article as stupid as this one was; I hope you took a moment to read that article.

Tom Rivet, Heuvelton