Christine Richie, Kristen Montas, Rogene Boileau, Marc Abelard, Alex Vernetti (Celeste Little)
“More funding for public libraries. More funding for schools.”
(Christine Richie, under 30, of Kirkville, full-time clerk at Beauchamp Public Library
“The four public high schools in Syracuse, in the city, are in the lowest ten percent of the state and I think that’s just a disgrace. I like the Say Yes for Education program, but our graduation rate is 30-something percent. That is just completely unacceptable. I don’t know what exactly can be done, but I know something needs to be done to get kids to graduate.”
(Kristen Montas Graves, 44, of Westcott neighborhood, physician at the Syracuse Community Health Center)
“Better national security, better relief spending and improvements on the education system. Education-wise, I don’t think teachers are trained properly. The way they teach is so generic and narrow that they find a lot of difficulty with students who don’t learn the way everyone else learns. As far as security, for example, in airports a lot of the random checking is very biased. As far as national spending on relief, for example, in Katrina there are a lot of areas that still aren’t up to par. There should be a lot more done.”
(Marc Abelard, 19, of Syracuse, freshman at Syracuse University)
“Number one: Stop slaughtering our young men and bring them home with damaged brains. Number two: If we educated everyone in this country according to their intelligence, not their father’s pocketbook, we’d have a better country. Number three: Let’s take the fantasy of sex off the T.V. because there’s too many rapes in our country, both men and ladies.”
(Rogene Boileau, 81, of Northside, Syracuse, housewife)
“I would like the excise tax lowered and I would like the drinking age to be lowered to 18. I believe that pleasure should not be taxed because we live in a free country where pleasure should be something we should be able to pay for and not be charged by the government. The drinking age should be lowered to 18 because as long as we’re able to vote and determine who runs the country and/or go and die for our country across seas, we should be able to enjoy something that is also included in the excise tax.”
(Alex Vernetti, 19, of DeWitt, sophomore at Le Moyne College and server at Cam’s Pizzeria)
(Celeste Little is a graduate student in magazine, newspaper and online journalism.)
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