Jeer

The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education faces enough challenges — historically low financial support; declining student enrollment — without adding a crippling faculty strike to the mix.

But that’s what we’re steaming toward. Union members and state negotiators are locked in a seemingly fruitless and increasingly acrimonious series of contract negotiations, and Oct. 19 — the date union leaders say their members will walk off the job unless they have a contract — is just weeks away.

It’s hard to see how this failed relationship between faculty and management succeeds without neutral arbitration, but negotiators for the state have refused multiple times to avail themselves of that option.

Neither side looks particularly willing to compromise and bring an end to this impasse, and it’s students who stand to lose the most because of their intransigence. This is exactly the kind of situation binding arbitration was designed to remedy. Negotiators have failed for 15 months. It’s time to hand the matter off to someone with a better chance of sussing out a middle ground.

Cheer

Twenty thousand dollars isn’t small potatoes, and that’s what the Friends of Bantam Jeep Association just pumped into to coffers of 19 nonprofit organizations in Butler County. Those gifts, which ranged from $500 to $3,000, followed $15,000 the group had already given to organizations that helped it put on the Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival in June.

Some of the money will go to the Butler County Historical Society, and help mount four of the remaining Walldogs murals that were painted this summer. It’s a worthy cause to support — as are the causes of all the organizations the Association donated to — and the effort deserves to be commended.

The festival, which brings thousands of people into Butler each year, enriches our community every summer. Now the Association is doing even more, and using proceeds to help these organizations enrich Butler County throughout the entire year.

Bravo, and thank you.

Jeer

In a stunningly irresponsible move this week, members of the Plum Borough School Board voted to reinstate superintendent Timothy Glasspool. Glasspool — one of two district administrators sharply criticized in a grand jury report on a teacher-student sex scandal in the district — deserves to be shown the door, not brought back into the fold.

Board members say they’re following the advice of a law firm hired to examine Glasspool’s culpability. If that advice was to reinstate someone who, through either obliviousness or tacit endorsement, allowed predators to roam the hallways of Plum and abuse their authority to prey on young women, then the district deserves its money back.

If a school administrator is presiding over a school culture that permits multiple teachers to have sex with female students, then they are completely ineffective in their position. If performance failings of this nature aren’t enough to justify an administrator’s firing, what does?

Months ago board members pledged to rehabilitate Plum’s culture. When they voted to reinstate Glasspool they did the opposite, and became a part of the problem.