Funding needed to test painted tiles

As you may or may not know, the painted ceiling tiles at Chapel Hill High School are controversial. To review a bit, we will have to go back 14 years.

I was a relative newcomer to CHHS when my students first started painting ceiling tiles. As part of the end-of-year AP projects, a student wanted to paint a ceiling tile. I saw no harm in painting a nonflammable paint on a nonflammable tile, so I agreed. Each subsequent year, more and more students wanted to paint tiles. Other teachers joined in this celebration of education.

Last year, the fire department found us in violation of the flammable finish section of the fire code. We were told to take down and replace the ceiling tiles. A battle ensued.

There was a compromise: The fire department would be gracious enough to allow the ceiling tiles to be tested by an independent lab (Commercial Testing Company). There would be three different tiles tested: two blank tiles, two tiles painted with latex paint and two painted tiles with a flame-retardant finish. The fire department states that if the tiles pass muster, we can keep the tiles.

Here's the problem: The tests cost money -- big money. It will cost $550 per tile. That can be anywhere from $2,200 to $3,300, depending on if the company needs to test the final two tiles. The school district says that it has $1,500 to spend on the test, leaving us with a range of $700 to $1,800 to raise. We would accept direct contributions to save the tiles and will be looking at other ways to raise money.

If you are a painted tile "alum" or if you would like to help us with our plight, you can send a contribution to "Smile for Tiles" at CHHS (High School Road, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27516). -- Bert Wartski, Chapel Hill

Clintons have not helped Hispanics

Hillary Clinton's substantial support in the Hispanic community is surprising in light of Bill Clinton's hard-line on immigration. On Sept. 30, 1996, Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, one of the most regressive immigration laws since the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Thanks to the act, U.S. citizens and permanent residents were denied the opportunity to file green card petitions for their "illegal" spouses, parents, children and siblings.

Thanks to the act, U.S. employers were denied the opportunity to file green card petitions for their "illegal" employees.

Thanks to the act, millions of "illegals" who had petitioners willing to sponsor them for green cards were forced instead to live in a netherworld of continued illegality and fear, compounding enormously our country's illegal immigration problems.

Hillary Clinton seeks to latch onto Bill Clinton's legacy. Our nation's Hispanics should ask themselves, where was Hillary's voice on Sept. 30, 1996? -- Adrian R. Halpern, Chapel Hill

Cut spending before raising county taxes

The editorial of Feb. 10, "Weighing the options on new taxes," asked Orange County residents to name their poison or medicine.

I have already participated in this phone survey, and there are two more options that were not mentioned in the editorial. The first, most obvious and most desirable solution is for the Orange County commissioners to cut spending. Keep the taxes at the current level and adjust spending accordingly. A novel idea but it is possible.

The second idea is to broaden the tax base by encouraging businesses to locate in Orange County so that Orange County residents spend less in Durham, Wake and Chatham counties. Wow, could that ever happen? -- Larry Hodges, Chapel Hill

Newspaper should investigate racist flier

I recently learned of a flier advertising a Chinese New Year celebration at The Goat in Raleigh with a tagline that reads "Come get slant eyed @The Goat." (To see the flier, go to www.angryasianman.com/2008/02/come-get-slant-eyed-at-goat.html.)

I am a faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill who teaches and researches in the field of Asian-American studies. I recently told a candidate we were interviewing for a job, a young Asian-American professor from California, that I was comfortable here -- that the kind of racism I had expected in "the South" had not happened.

I suppose I will have to tell him I'm wrong.

What is especially disappointing is the lack of media coverage or outrage around this flier.

I hope that if a similarly racist flier targeting blacks were distributed that there would be such an outcry that people would be boycotting The Goat and that The Chapel Hill News would be providing key coverage.

If you could please investigate this incident, it would help to make me feel that the Triangle is, potentially, a place I can call home. -- Jennifer Ho, Chapel Hill

Leaders refuse to see what's happening

Scientific evidence is springing up everywhere that indicates the massive and pernicious impact of the human species on the limited resources of Earth, its frangible ecosystems and life as we know it.

Guided by mountains of carefully and skillfully developed research regarding climate change, top rank scientists issued a Code Red emergency declaration this month to leaders of governments and to the family of humanity proclaiming the necessity for open discussion and action by politicians and economic powerbrokers.

From my humble perspective, many leaders of the global political economy are turning a blind eye to human over-consumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities that can be seen recklessly dissipating the natural resources and dangerously degrading the environs of our planetary home. The Earth is being ravaged; but it appears many leaders are willfully refusing to acknowledge what is happening.

Because the emerging global challenges that could soon be presented to humanity appear to so many fine scientists as human-induced, leaders have responsibilities to assume and duties to perform, ready or not, like them or not.

Perhaps leadership in our time has too often chosen to ignore whatsoever is somehow real in order to believe whatever is politically convenient, economically expedient, socially agreeable, religiously tolerated and culturally prescribed. When something real directly conflicts with what leaders wish to believe, that reality is denied. It appears that too many leaders are content to hold tightly to widely shared and consensually validated specious thinking when it serves their personal interests.

Is humanity once again finding life as we know it dominated by a modern Tower of Babel called economic globalization? That is, has human thinking, judging and willing become so grievously impaired by our idolatry of the artificially designed, manmade, global political economy that we cannot see or speak intelligibly about anything else except economic growth and profits without sounding like blithering idiots? -- Steven Earl Salmony, Chapel Hill