Guarding Secrets
February 8, 2013
January was a bad month for some sports heroes, but it was an instructional time for those who paused to connect some dots.
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Two of Major League Baseball’s most prolific performers became eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame, but we learned in January that neither came close to earning enough votes for election to that prestigious shrine. Each has seen his star-power descend in a cloud of legal problems surrounding his suspected use of performance enhancing drugs.
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After seven Tour de France titles and seven times seven denials of using performance enhancing drugs and various blood doping techniques, Lance Armstrong “came clean.” Sort of.
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A Heisman Trophy candidate went from a broken-hearted soul mate to the victim of a cruel hoax to a contributor to the weirdest story college sports has witnessed. From duped to duplicitous.
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And all this with Penn State’s scandal still fresh in our minds.
How fatiguing it must be and, ultimately, how futile it is to try to keep secrets. That’s always been true; it’s just more obvious in a world where everyone’s access to social media renders investigative journalism too little and too late in uncovering the secrets that heroes harbor.
How any of these people ever thought they could guard their secrets beyond the grave would be beyond belief if it just didn’t keep happening so often. There must be something we’re doing wrong in the upbringing of prominent athletes (like too many politicians) that makes them think they can get away with sordid secrets . . . that they’re too big to fail.
The truth is, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. No secret is beyond discovery.
School Overload
January 29, 2016
I don’t know how school administrators and local boards of education do it. Every year, pressure increases on them to improve student performance in core subjects, while every year, lawmakers and government agencies try to make schools the place to solve, or at least respond to, more of society’s problems.
Expanding definitions of disabilities have required expanding public school responses. School employees now must be trained to respond to a myriad of student allergies. Schools have been made the place to address drug abuse, bullying, sexting, drunk driving, sudden cardiac arrest, seat belt use and much more.
This would be okay – in fact, it would be really good because it would solidify that the local school is the center of each and every community. But if schools are not given the resources to both improve student academic performance and address every threat to student health and safety, then no more should be asked of schools.
Right now our Michigan Legislature has dozens of bills that would make new demands on local schools. Most of these bills, on their own and in a vacuum, would be good – like the requirement that schools provide curriculum and professional development in warning signs for suicide and depression, and the requirement that students be certified in CPR before they graduate high school.
But until schools are given more time and money to perform current mandates, it’s time for legislators to put new bills in their back pockets and for government agencies to back off.