Editor, Gazette-Journal:

Let me tell you about my father. He grew up in the anthracite mining district of eastern Pennsylvania and his formal education ended at eighth grade. Then he began work as a “breaker boy,” earning 50 cents a day by hand-sorting shale from coal. He never saw the 50 cents: it went straight to the company store to buy groceries for his large family.

His reflection based on his own bitter experience throughout the Depression was: “When hard times come, the man with an education will always find something. It’s the one without an education who is out of luck.” He put three sons through college and they all did well and their children all did well.

This leads to my central point: What jobs there will be in the future will be for people with brainpower; the uneducated will be competing with robots. And so: Support our schools, which have been slowly starving over the last few years and are seriously hurting. Pass the meals tax! The cou...