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I was amused reading the article in the Taste section "It's kind of a big dill" (Aug. 24). Seems like pickles are taking off like never before at the State Fair, and I'm all for it! There's just one problem: Minnesotans are getting cheated, since pickles in the food competitions aren't made by the fermentation process.

Back in 2000 and 2001, I had a run-in with the judges at the Creative Activities building who refused to allow my fermented "kosher" dill pickles in the competition. The Star Tribune has run numerous articles about this affair and its aftermath. Nevertheless, despite the fact that fermented foods have become mainstream now — the Star Tribune published a story about the Gyst Fermentation Bar, for example, in May 2015 — the State Fair still does not allow fermented foods in food competitions. That means, after more than 20 years, the State Fair Creative Activities judges still have not come into the 21st century. It also means being denied the opportunity to try some of the most delicious pickles in the Western Hemisphere.

I welcome the article writer to come to my home and try my pickles. I promise she'll come out of the experience alive, well and licking her lips!

Doris Rubenstein, Richfield

Railing about government inefficiency is as much of a national pastime as baseball. But Sunday's story "Firearm tracing hampered by law" may have highlighted the most ridiculous example ever. The federal government has so many pounds of records stored in an office in West Virginia that it was damaging the structural integrity of the building. So, they installed 40 shipping containers to store 80,000 boxes of paper records.

Rochelle Eastman, Savage

Many people assume that having a "school resource officer" is a good thing. Research shows, however, that this is a practice with mixed results. The very first mass shooting in a school in Minnesota, Red Lake, involved a security guard being shot first, and it is widely thought that a resource officer is just as likely to be a convenient target of violence rather than a deterrent. So let's start without the assumption that an SRO is presumed to be a good thing.

Now we have state statute that bars SROs from using certain kinds of holds to restrain a student ("Police rethink school contracts," Aug. 28). These are holds known to sometime lead to death or serious injury. The law now says that police cannot endanger the lives of children in our school in this particular manner. Some in the law enforcement community have responded that if they can't use these dangerous holds, they would rather not be in schools.

I am concerned that this reveals yet another reason to keep police officers at a distance from our children. If a legitimate effort to reduce the chance that a child can be killed or injured by a police officer scares away some police agencies, those agencies may be exactly the entities we want nowhere near our schools, except in a dire emergency.

I grew up in a world where you dial 911 in response to a potentially dangerous situation. We now live in a world where one might best think twice about involving our over-militarized warrior police forces. We need to change that.

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While arguments may continue as to what use of force is allowable under the new law, we need to consider safety without force. When Minneapolis Public Schools severed its ties with the Minneapolis Police Department in 2020, it opened the door for a more holistic approach to school safety — one that does not use force or threat of force. District leadership partnered with Nonviolent Peaceforce (NP), a civilian protection organization, to train safety specialists in unarmed and nonviolent approaches to resolving conflict and preventing violence. The safety specialists receive training in de-escalation tactics, situational awareness, relationship building and identifying tensions before they erupt into violence. In an interview with Youth Today (Aug. 2, 2022), the former MPS director of safety and security, Jason Matlock, indicated that the feedback the district had received was overwhelmingly positive. MPS has been able to hire candidates that better reflect the student populations, and fewer students are having interactions with law enforcement related to in-school behavior. With an additional grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, MPS and NP are piloting a project in two MPS high schools with student safety teams who learn emotional regulation, model nonviolent conflict resolution and present on these topics to incoming ninth-graders.

Violence interrupters are in three other MPS schools, also having a positive impact. These models create school environments where everyone has a role to keep one another safe and work together to address conflict before it becomes violent.

Marna Anderson, St. Paul

The writer is director of Nonviolent Peaceforce USA.

We had two English professors, Leo Hertzel and John Schifsky. They used "Reader's Response" as their method of teaching. No answer was wrong, but you had to defend whatever opinion you gave to the class. Hertzel and Schifsky also stood in front of us disagreeing with each other on their response to the readings. They were our models. They encouraged critical thinking and forming sound opinions with backup defenses.

It was the best mind-expanding seminar I ever took.

Luann Rice, Baxter, Minn.

After reading Betty Folliard's commentary regarding the status of ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment ("Still no Equal Rights Amendment, huh?" Opinion Exchange, Aug. 26), I rushed to my trusty copy of the U.S. Constitution. The ERA, as Folliard wrote, had an arbitrary time limit with an end date of 1983. I chuckled as I read the 27th Amendment (our last amendment) regarding congressional salary increases. This amendment was proposed Sept. 25, 1789, and ratified May 5, 1992. Surely, the ERA should be given the same consideration as well as no time limit for ratification.