Christian Romano is an undergraduate at the University of Utah and a Karen Shepherd Intern for Ethics and Good Government. What can a 22-year-old intern without much experience tell you about the world around us? Perhaps more than you think. Though I’m inclined to think I can’t offer any insight that you can’t conjure up
Last week saw the release of a long-awaited report on the feasibility of Utah managing federal lands. According to the report, Utah could conceivably take over the management of federal lands within our borders, and with the money derived from extractive industries, pay for its upkeep. First, the most obvious hitch in this whole plan
Senator Lee just picked up an endorsement from the super conservative, Super PAC Club for Growth. You know, the same group that wants to impose vouchers on public education and thinks corporations shouldn’t pay any taxes at all.
The Better UTAH Beat airs Tuesday afternoons on KVNU’s For the People. Podcasts of previous episodes are available here. —– When it comes to Utah politics and policies, Utahns can’t always say why they don’t like something, but they certainly know what they don’t like. Several recent polls have shown the same interesting, although not surprising, data
Homework hassles (and a teacher’s reply), AG Reyes’s mean-spiritedness and legalizing drugs in this week’s letters to the editor across the well managed state of Utah. Enough with the homework already I go to public high school, and I have had enough with all of the homework the teachers are giving out. They forget that
Paul Rolly’s recent column about a teacher who was placed on administrative leave for openly questioning standardized testing points to an authoritarian administrative approach that has no place in public education. Ann Florence, an honors English teacher, was placed on administrative leave after vocally criticizing the Granite School District’s computer-adapted standardized tests, calling them a
Maryann Martindale, Better UTAH executive director, made the case in a weekend op-ed that despite a rather lackluster legislative session, there were still some clear winners and losers. Politics will probably always lend itself to a model in which some win and others lose. The winners and losers don’t line up quite how we expect.
I don’t like breakfast cereal. Not because it’s not good, it just never satisfies me. I could eat a whole box and still be hungry for more. This is how I feel about the 2014 legislative session. Going into the session there were a number of important issues on the table and sadly, a lot
Public education is one of the perennial focal points for the legislative session. This year’s session is no exception. Gov. Gary Herbert has allocated $261 million in his 2014-2015 budget proposal to increase education spending. That increase will go to pay for the additional 10,300 new students expected to enter Utah’s schools this year, as
In a lot of ways, I suspect that I am the sort of student that the majority of the Utah Legislature dislikes. I’m not majoring in a STEM field. Quite the opposite, I am majoring in political science and Spanish. And I am certainly not heading into a field with great economic projections or potential
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