STAND UP ... AND WALK OUT >>>

South Puget Spound Community College student Kendall Brookhart and other students will walk out of class Monday, Nov. 28 in protest of the special session and proposed budgets aimed at education. The "Student Walkout" will have several "rally points" that Monday: 10 a.m. at South Puget Sound Community College's Student Union Building and The Evergreen State College's Red Square, and 11 a.m. at Heritage Park in Olympia.

Below is Brookhart's plea for others to join the student walkout.

Myself and several other students are planning a student walkout for Monday, November the 28th.

This is a planned action. This is a conscious decision. This is not a day to stay home and sit on the couch. This is a response to the opening of the Special Session on Capitol Hill, which has proposed severe budgets aimed specifically at our Education.

The proposed cuts would result in larger classes. This is a problem because as the number of students in a class grows, the ability for teachers to cater to and communicate with each individual student lessens. Larger classes also means fewer overall classes; so registration just became that much more difficult.

Fewer programs would be offered under the new budget cuts. Running Start would no longer be free, or even terminated all together. Services for exchange and international students, including those for students just learning English, are vulnerable.

Tuition will rise. These fewer, more crowded classes of lesser quality will cost you more money. Financial aid will suffer. Qualifications for receiving financial aid are going to become stricter, and the amount of people able to receive assistance will diminish.

Teachers' jobs are threatened. They are liable to be laid off en masse around the entire state. These budget cuts will take jobs away from our teachers, creating a circular effect again increasing classes sizes and work loads for those lucky enough to remain employed.

Education for everyone is essential to any democratic society, and lately that belief has been kept at an arms length for most of us. Education has become a privilege for the few, no longer the right of all. This unfortunate, yet designed consequence of our current system is no longer tolerable.  We plan to walk out, in solidarity with the Occupiers all over the world, in a physical demonstration of the strength of the people and our ability, as students, to stand up for our education and ourselves. On the 28th of November we will walk out of our classrooms in order to better defend our classrooms, and our fellow students and teachers whom also depend upon them. JOIN US AS WE WALK OUT to restore the precedent of participation in our own lives.

FOOR FOR THOUGHT >>>

To get to know her students better, an Olympia-area elementary school teacher recently asked them what they had had for supper the night before.

When his turn came, one little boy said he didn't have anything to eat; that it was his turn to miss a meal because his parents couldn't afford to feed his family.

My thought processes stopped for a moment when Robert Coit, the executive director of the Thurston County Food Bank, related the story to me.

Then I tasted anger.

Don't get me wrong; I am not some bleeding heart liberal in search of a cause.  On the contrary, I have a heart as hard as a blacksmith's hammer when it comes to earning what I want for me and mine.

This doesn't make me a Wall Street lackey - it just characterizes me as ambitious and gives me the ability to provide for others and myself.

But I draw a line at hunger.  No one in this country - the richest in the world - should go to bed hungry.  This is about a human need and right.

It doesn't matter that some adults have made decisions that have put themselves and any children they may have produced at the mercy of hunger.

Stupidity and hunger sometimes share the same ride to work, if you know what I mean.

Unemployment is more than happy to drive the car.

"The unemployed fuel the rising numbers of the hungry we see today," Coit added. 

According to the federal government's numbers, one in six Americans suffers from what is euphemistically referred to as "food insecurity."

What? Insecurity? Please. Spare me the verbal pabulum.

Hunger is hunger, damnit, and calling it anything else is as intellectually dishonest as it is cowardly.

Nationwide, 19.5 percent of Americans live in hunger.  Almost 14 million children go to bed hungry, and over three million of them are under the age of 5.

Hunger is a capricious and growing bastard that cripples lives.

"What we do in society today to address the issue of hunger is a band aid only," Elisabeth Schafer, a retired nutrition professor and volunteer at the Thurston County Food Bank, told me as she helped a young couple with a small child.

"Hunger hurts children; they need nutrition to grow and learn; we all have an investment in this; children are the future."

Cliché aside, Schafer's verbal arrow found its mark.

Helen McGovern, executive director of the Emergency Food Network in Pierce County, drove the point in deeper.

"18.2 percent of the clients we serve are children."  Then to add insult to the tragedy that anyone in this country is hungry, she added, "Another 24 percent of those we help are senior citizens."

Young, old and, yes, for those in-between, hunger doesn't give a damn.

In August, the network served 833,000 individuals.  During the first nine months of this year, more than 12 million pounds of food has been distributed.

That amount - like a person struggling to stay afloat - barely keeps families fed.

In both Pierce and Thurston counties, the number of people needing food continues to rise.

Coit and McGovern both pointed to bad life choices and the train wreck of an economy derailed at 9.2 percent unemployment as the reasons for more Americans needing help to feed themselves and their children.

"This is the front-line of fighting hunger," Marcus Stoll told me as we stood in a small, crowded room at the FISH Food bank at the United Methodist Church in Lakewood.  "Look around you, these people need food."

They did and they do.

I wondered about the little boy who routinely skips supper and goes to bed hungry to help his family.

My anger has a nasty aftertaste.

Want to help? Visit www.efoodnet.org or www.thurstoncountyfoodbank.org.

Can't see the slideshow associated with this story? Click here.

POPULAR PARK FOR YOUTH TEMPORARILY CLOSES >>>

Tuesday afternoons I get off work at 3 p.m. If it's not raining, I buy a cup coffee, grab my skateboard and head over to the Yauger Skateboard Park on the Westside of Olympia for a little requisite shredding. Rolling into the snake run, olleing the top of the pyramid. Perfecting flat ground tricks until the sun goes down. No better way to spend a clear, winter afternoon. 

This Tuesday was no different. Well, that is until I got to the park. Instead of my normal smooth cruise across Cooper Point Road and onto the ramps, a metal fence stopped me. The park was closed. A sign on the fence read something like, "The skate park is closed due to excessive litter."

Excessive litter? Park closed? My reaction was simple: screw you, City of Olympia. You've ruined my afternoon.

Ready to write an angry editorial, I called the Olympia Parks Department this afternoon. I spoke to Lisa Hall, a parks department representative. She informed me that the park was scheduled to remain closed until Thursday. Hall argued that the amount of litter present at the park was too much for a skeleton winter parks crew to handle.  She said overflowing trashcans (backward logic perhaps) and trash in the bowl justified a park shutdown. She said closing the park every so often was a way for the city to say, "shape up" to the park's users. She hoped closing the park would cause the, "good kids to lean harder on the rowdy kids," in an effort to curb littering. She said though the park was technically closed, skaters could call the parks department and have it opened for a short period. She also said she was sorry to inconvenience skaters who pick up their trash.

"It's an imperfect solution to a problem," Hall said.

The city has never closed another area park due to excessive litter. 

Yauger Skate Park is popular. On any sunny afternoon, the park can see as many as 50 visitors: kids in helmets and pads shooting down the ramps; men with tattoos jumping down the stairs; high school teens grinding the boxes; skaters, bikers, and rollerbladers zipping in every direction. And since most of the park's users are youths, the occasional forgotten Burger King wrapper or empty Gatorade bottle is inevitable. Simply inevitable.

I never litter at the skateboard park. Ninety percent of the people that use the skateboard park don't litter. But some do.  This is true of any high-traffic, tightly contained area.

So the city closed the park. They didn't grin and bear it. They didn't reason that a sanctioned location for activities most likely to be performed by easily alienated youth is critical for the Olympia. Instead, they shut the park down.  But because the ever-dreaded "trick-style skateboarding" is illegal on almost all-private and public property, where else can the youths who use the park go? Who knows? Maybe home. Maybe to go grind some benches out in front of the capitol building. Maybe to find some trouble.

Yeah, I'm pissed. The city should take a look and see how popular the skateboard park is, how a few scraps of trash floating in the wind at a small concrete plaza are insignificant. The city's park's department should think about all the "good kids" they are negatively affecting. They should think that closing - even temporarily - a safe haven for area youth wouldn't increase respect for city property, just increase animosity. Letting any public park sit unused is a bummer, especially a park that was funded by city and community money.  The city should keep the park open, increase the amount of trashcans and say, "Roll on. Try to pick up your trash but roll on." That's what the city of Olympia should do.

After my conversation with Hall I dropped by the park to take some pictures of the fence and the closed sign. To my surprise, the park was open. One day ahead of schedule. Perhaps the park's department decided to open the park because the litter was cleaned earlier than expected. Or maybe they opened the park because they got a call from a writer asking some questions. Impossible to say.

The park was open. But it hardly mattered because there was snow on the ground and I couldn't skate.