Cheer

It’s not often that a municipality in Butler County gets to welcome more than a thousand new residents to the community. But it’s a process that Slippery Rock gets to reprise year after year, by virtue of it being the home of Slippery Rock University.

This year the university welcomes more than 1,500 new students in its Class of 2020 — young men and women who will visit local businesses, volunteer at local civic organizations, interact with borough and township residents, and begin the process of carving out their lives after high school.

It’s a time of celebration and hope. The students have the good fortune of attending school in a vibrant, welcoming community where their myriad talents can make a lasting impact. The community, in turn, benefits economically, intellectually and socially from an annual injection of active young adults who are hungry to make their mark on the world.

Welcome, Class of 2020, you have our best wishes for a successful career at SRU and a positive residency in northern Butler County.

Jeer

Sexual assaults and sexual violence on college campuses is far, far too common: one in five women and one in 16 men report having been the victim of such an assault during their college years.

That’s not going to change if we don’t confront the problem head-on, and there’s no better time to remind students of the danger — and their responsibility to do all they can to stem this shameful pattern of conduct — than at the start of the academic year.

In many ways our institutional system for investigating and adjudicating allegations of sexual assaults on campus is broken. But that’s the fault of administrators, not students.

Where we’ve come a long way is a willingness to speak publicly about this issue, and students can and do have a large role to play in that conversation — making sure that it continues and that it is a subject of seriousness and support rather than crude humor and derision.

Shrugging off that role as minor or easy ignores the immense pressures and vulnerabilities felt by students — male and female — regarding this issue.

Cheer

On Thursday Pennsylvania’s prescription drug monitoring system finally went live, after much delay amid funding problems. It’s not a perfect system, and seems likely to drive some opioid users and addicts to even more dangerous substances, like heroin, which have killed thousands of Pennsylvanians over the last 12 months.

Despite that fact, it is a major step forward in the commonwealth’s effort to reduce the number of opioid-related overdose deaths. It’s also a major win for the cause of physician accountability regarding the prescription of these dangerous substances.

As Gov. Tom Wolf said Thursday, “We have a big problem here in Pennsylvania. it’s an opioid problem.”

That problem did not manifest itself overnight. It grew with the help of doctors’ irresponsible overreliance on powerful and addictive painkillers, and under the nose of state officials, who for years failed to provide adequate legal mechanisms and funding to help track the drugs’ use and hold doctors accountable.

No one is blameless, and Pennsylvania’s system — which doesn’t communicate with the databases of neighboring states, or prompt doctors to refer addicted patients to treatment services — is not a panacea. But it is the keystone of an important tool for fighting the opioid crisis.