Well, your dad is wrong! He should have visited the library more.

School librarians, specifically, are teachers of a kind (in PA and many other states the job requires a teaching license as well and a Library Science Degree.) During school library time students don't just get books and read. They have their reading skills evaluated by a dedicated professional, they get specific instruction in reading skills that greatly supplements what and overworked teacher can provide and is more focused on reading for pleasure than textual required reading, and most importantly for me, they teach research and information resource evaluation; the skills we need to, say, "do our own research on the vaccine," and not come away with some Q Anon garbage.

It's no accident that insufficient school funding policies over the last 40-50 years leading to a lack of school librarians, happening at the same time as a boom in technology changing how we get information faster than we can keep up, has lead to the exact situation we are in, where kids on Tik Tok think birds are a psyop and a not insignificant part of our nation's population believes the big election lie.

When I was a kid in public school our librarian taught us boolean operators. Now, I work with kids and even having grown up with google their whole lives they can often barely figure out the best way to get the information they are looking for because no one is teaching them.

School librarians, specifically, are teachers of a kind (in PA and many other states the job requires a teaching license as well and a Library Science Degree.) During school library time students don't just get books and read. They have their reading skills evaluated by a dedicated professional, they get specific instruction in reading skills that greatly supplements what and overworked teacher can provide and is more focused on reading for pleasure than textual required reading, and most importantly for me, they teach research and information resource evaluation; the skills we need to, say, "do our own research on the vaccine," and not come away with some Q Anon garbage.

It's no accident that insufficient school funding policies over the last 40-50 years leading to a lack of school librarians, happening at the same time as a boom in technology changing how we get information faster than we can keep up, has lead to the exact situation we are in, where kids on Tik Tok think birds are a psyop and a not insignificant part of our nation's population believes the big election lie.

I can't vouch for your catholic education, but when I was a kid in public school our librarian taught us boolean operators. Now, I work with kids and even having grown up with google their whole lives they can often barely figure out the best way to get the information they are looking for because no one is teaching them.

Anyone who's been to RTM regularly in the middle of the day knows that place stays packed with trade shows. Honestly, if the only things it's doing is keeping those food stalls profitable, I have no qualms with it.

They even have Labatt and Bills glassware!

It was originally put into effect as an ethics measure but what it really does is keep the political field full of rich people IMO.

Allan Domb has no problem dropping his council salary to run, of course, but city workers in the field, who are the ones implementing these policies, rules and budgets and seeing how they play out, are firefighters, sanitation workers, clerks, library employees, tech workers, etc who need the paycheck their job provides and couldn't afford to quit and run for any kind of office (even ward offices), despite having the most first hand knowledge of what's working and what's broken.

It requires a ballot measure to make any change to the home rule charter, and council must vote to approve any ballot measure put forward, so somehow anytime it's come up it hasn't passed council....