Outstanding graduates from Coatesville

I made a New Year’s resolution to write this letter. I can only hope that it will be published

I retired as an American History teacher after 42 years at Coatesville High School in 1998.

This past summer, I received a visit from one of my former students who graduated in 1998, my last year of teaching.

The following are excerpts from that conversation without the quotation marks.

What are you doing now, Pat? Well, I’m Doctor Pat Houlihan and I am teaching History at Oxford University in England.

That’s wonderful; how about some others who graduated in 1998 such as Matt Fesak? He’s now an attorney. What about Thera Crane? She’s Doctor Thera Crane.

What’s Justin Kuresko doing? Justin is an executive with Aramark Corporation in Philadelphia.

How about Matt Banghart? He’s Doctor Matt Banghart and teaches neurobiology at the University of California San Diego.

There are five outstanding graduates of Coatesville High School from one class!

The tradition of this situation is that the only way these people could get their names in the newspaper is if they shot someone.

Several years ago, I received a phone call from one of my colleagues who teaches with me at Immaculata University.

He asked, “My granddaughter will be entering 11th grade at Coatesville High School; will she get a good education?”

My answer was immediate, “Absolutely, if she wants one.”

The Coatesville School District offers a quality education to any student who wants one.

No school district offers one to those who don’t.

Ross Kershey Immaculata University

This is a test

We’re being tested. Those of us in the majority, whose strongest weapon is our vote, should expect that every trick in the book will be tried this year.

A majority of us, 54%, didn’t vote for Trump. Millions more of us voted for Hillary Clinton than Trump.

And clearly after a year of his brand of so-called leadership, many more millions would not vote for him today.

Thank God that our free media will continue to provide a steady flow of those stubborn facts – facts of his incompetence, destructive actions, and often lies.

But make no mistake that the constancy, loudness, and strength of the distractions from this administration, this majority party, and especially their captive media outlet, will continue.

The latest distraction is a classified, totally partisan memo, one declassified by an authority whose judgment (in exercising that awesome responsibility) was illustrated not long ago when he personally declassified national security secrets to Russian officials in the Oval Office.

I’m confident in the average majority voter’s ability to recognize this memo as both a distraction and a truly weak strawman – constructed of a few carefully selected straws with no true strength without the whole bale of truth.

Hopefully, this growing majority will not be long distracted from our primary 2018 mission, not by the chief distractor nor by the increasingly spineless Republican Party leadership.

This partisanship has legs. This latest marathon of GOP inflexibility began with none other than Mitch McConnell’s cynical promise of non-cooperation going back to the days around the election of our first black President.

Since then, regular order hasn’t been replaced merely by the singlemindedness of principle or even strict ideology, but actually by mindlessness rather than debate, reason, and compromise

But those of us in the majority of voters, not just Democrat and Independent, but many Republicans as well, are really worn out, finally looking forward to when we will need to be patient no more – in November.

Then you’ll see the return of a certain kind of non-partisanship, when left, center, and many from the right act together to right the ship of state.

So this memo is a test, not the last before November, but stand strong and the wait will be over then.

John Conrad West Chester