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About Baker City herald. (Baker City, Or.) 1990-current | View Entire Issue (July 21, 2020)
TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2020 Baker City, Oregon 4A Write a letter news@bakercityherald.com OUR VIEW Employment Department computer issues are continuing State auditors were in the middle of an audit of the Employment Department’s computer upgrade when the pandemic hit. Auditors put it on hold. They didn’t want to put more strain on the department as it struggled to handle thousands of unemployment claims. But a letter to the department from auditors last week had two themes. The department has done a good job recently in planning the upgrade and adher- ing to state procedures. Encouraging. It also said: “However, the program faces signifi - cant risks.” Worrying. A legislative report had already highlighted the history of the failure to upgrade the system after the last recession. The auditor letter reinforces those concerns. The phrase “signifi cant risks” in the auditor letter is common in reviews of complicated projects. What matters is how the employment department re- sponds. Does it take the risks seriously? Is that needless worry on our part? We don’t think so. We’ll tell you why. There are two reasons. Sometimes Oregon government does not take such warnings seriously. In 2013, we read the monthly, in- dependent consultant reports about a project known as Cover Oregon. They were fi lled with warnings colored red and labeled risky about pulling off the state’s health insurance website exchange by its fall deadline. We spoke on the phone with the project’s director about the reports at that time. He reassured us that that was just the kind of thing such reports do. Then-state Sen. Dennis Richardson (he later became secretary of state) raised similar concerns. Cover Oregon fl opped and cost the state about $300 million. The second reason is that the state has known about the computer problems at the employment department for a long time. Previous state audits highlighted them years ago. “Those audits predicted the problems OED is now experiencing with unem- ployment claims if the modernization project was not carried out promptly,” State Sen. Kim Thatcher wrote this week. She is a Republican who is running for secretary of state. We should note the bulk of the auditor’s letter addressed issues that the department has seemed to get right. It then mentions at least two risk areas. One is personnel. Staff turnover has been a recur- ring problem for the computer upgrade. And there has been more turnover recently. “From January to April 2020, staff fi lling six positions on the Modern- ization Program team have left, though two of these positions have since been fi lled. In addition, on July 1, 2020, the OED Modernization Director left the pro- gram,” the letter points out. How can the department pull off this project if it can’t keep key staff? The other key risk area identifi ed in the letter is the timeline. It’s diffi cult to estimate the timeline on complicated, technological upgrades. That’s no surprise. But it can lead to unanticipated additional costs, particularly as the department struggles to cope with the workload from the pandemic. Unemployed Oregonians are not getting their unemployment checks in part because the depart- ment did not successfully carry out the upgrade of its computer system after the last recession. Oregon legislators and Gov. Kate Brown need to do a bet- ter job of tracking the upgrade’s progress. Take the signifi cant risks seriously. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the Baker City Herald. Columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the Baker City Herald. Don’t take police from schools George Floyd’s tragic death prompt- ed national protests against police brutality and then a chorus of calls to defund police departments. The move- ment swept up school district offi cials, some of whom are removing armed offi cers from public schools. Yet it wasn’t a gun that killed George Floyd. The video of his death lasted an excruciating 8 minutes and 46 seconds and is seared in the national conscious- ness. But parents and educators would do well to recognize that the Floyd video was 6 minutes longer than it took Deputy Jimmy Long to stop a 19-year- old with a gun at a Marion County, Florida, school on April 20, 2018. Earlier that year, on Feb. 14, a student gunman took the lives of 17 students and adults in Parkland, Florida. A “National School Walkout” to protest gun violence was organized to take place April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre in which two students killed 13 people and wounded nearly two dozen others. Just four hours north of Parkland, students at Forest High School were preparing to leave the building as part of the walkout when a gunshot rang out. A former student had entered the premises and shot a 17-year-old. Deputy Long, a school resource of- fi cer, “ran towards where he thought the noise came from,” said Sgt. Paul Bloom, director of public information for the Marion County Sheriff’s Offi ce. “That’s what you train for and you hope you never have to deal with, but they (school resource offi cers) are there to protect the children.” Had Long not been on campus, April 20 might have marked another somber anniversary. JONATHAN BUTCHER The Minneapolis school board has, for years, considered removing school resource offi cers from district schools. While unrelated to schools, Floyd’s death prompted the board to offi cially sever ties with law enforcement last month. Portland, Oregon, schools followed. According to reports, school offi cials in California, Colorado, Illinois, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin are consid- ering similar moves. Floyd’s death was brutal, but de- mands to remove school resource offi - cers after this event suggest that police are the problem — a perspective that is easy to take until a troubled individual with a weapon walks into your child’s classroom. Over the last 25 years, the number of school resource offi cers in schools has nearly doubled, often with approval of school communities, according to surveys. A 2013 Congressional Re- search Offi ce report found that, based on the research available, “the expan- sion of SRO programs coincided with a decrease in reported serious violent vic- timizations of students while at school and generally lower numbers of violent deaths and homicides at schools.” Cameras and smartphones are virtu- ally everywhere, so videos of aggressive offi cers go viral quickly. Yet federal data shows that some 1.4 million incidents involving criminal activity happen in schools every year, which means thou- sands of incidents that offi cers handled properly go without a headline for every problem with a school resource offi cer. Your views Oregon’s mail-in elections should be national model In 106 days from today there will be the Nov. 3 presidential election. No matter where you stand on who you want to see in this country’s highest offi ce, likely you deem it important that the ballots — in all 50 states — are handled properly. Oregon’s mail-in ballot elections have been around for Parents and policymakers must still address the troubling examples of offi cers abusing their position, however, and after the Parkland shooting in 2018, state offi cials emphasized the training programs available to offi cers assigned to schools. The Federal Com- mission on School Safety, formed that year, heard copious testimony on the importance of such training. The Commission’s fi nal report listed programs in Texas, South Dakota, Ar- kansas, Indiana, Virginia and Ohio, to name a few. Surveys of school resource offi cers — including a 2014 survey of Minnesota police — demonstrate that offi cers want this training, especially in the areas of counseling and mentoring students. Lawmakers should be wary of federal proposals to standardize school resource offi cer responsibilities or evaluations, and families should object to across-the-board elimination of the offi cers from schools. Law enforcement agencies certainly have best practices to share, but the 2018 Federal Com- mission was correct to say “the problem of school violence is long-standing and complex” and there “can be no ‘one-size- fi ts-all’ approach.” Specifi c training can help, along with removing the comparatively few offi cers that harm students. In Florida, Deputy Long reacted immediately and relied on what he had been taught. Sgt. Bloom says Long “did what he was there for and sworn to do. The parents of those kids are glad that he did.” And they would have been devas- tated had he not. Jonathan Butcher is a senior policy analyst in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy. Letters to the editor 20 years. Results are usually within 24 hours. I believe it would be of great value that we each contact our Sena- tors Merkley and Wyden, and Oregon’s Secretary of State Bev Clarno asking that they bring up Oregon’s successful election process to the attention of the nation. We are all in this together. Linda Bergeron Halfway We welcome letters on any issue of public interest. Letters are limited to 350 words. Writers are limited to one letter every 15 days. Writers must sign their letter and include an address and phone number (for verifi cation only). Email letters to news@ bakercityherald.com. OTHER VIEWS Everyone should heed precautions Editorial from The New York Daily News: Even as Walmart gets with the public-health program and requires masks in all its stores nationwide, even as Alabama’s Republican governor belatedly issues a mask mandate, even as an anti-mask Oklahoma governor tests positive for COVID-19, cleverer- than-thou twentysomethings here in America’s fi rst and deadliest corona- virus epicenter are back to having devil-may-care parties without social distancing. We say to them what we said to the ultra-Orthodox Jews who defi ed restrictions during the worst of April’s agony: Cut it out. You’re going to get people killed. Already, New York City offi cials report that infection rates among 20-29-year-olds rose 43% between mid- June and the end of the month. Now, Gothamist reveals that “Multiple ... underground parties have been taking place every weekend in the city, spread via WhatsApp chat groups and text chains with promoters asking people not to publicize the illicit events.” The jig is up. No, COVID-19 isn’t especially deadly for young people. But these revelers have parents and grand- parents and friends, some of whom work in hospitals and nursing homes. Fingers crossed and knock on wood, over months of pain and sacrifi ce, New York has managed to contain the virus; it is now fi nally reporting single-digit daily fatalities and citywide positive test rates that bounce between 1% and 2%. No one has the right to squander that hard-won progress: not Floridians, not Texans, not fellow New Yorkers who consider themselves invincible. Mayor Bill de Blasio has a Health Department. He should send them to the scene of these crimes in progress and start handing out the fi nes.
