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It's easy to be an armchair quarterback and criticize Gov. Tim Walz for his response to COVID-19 when it was first declared a national health emergency ("We now see the damage wrought," Readers Write, July 23). Anyone can look back and say how it should have been handled differently. More could have been done if our president had not insisted the numbers were small and downplayed it. More could have been done if our president had not left it up to each individual state to deal with getting their own supplies, creating bidding wars and driving up costs, turning state against state!
In the early days of this pandemic, thousands of people were dying and no one knew for certain what the immediate and long-term threat could bring to our children. Gov. Walz was not willing to gamble with our children's lives! He did the best he could with the limited, conflicting and confusing information he had at the time, trying to protect all of us. Safety was his highest priority. Gov. Walz didn't care about polls, he cared about people. He cares about our children. He cares about our lives. He did his best to offer relief to small businesses and help people who were hurting at a time when no one had the advantage of 20:20 hindsight. He is my hero. Thank you, Gov. Walz, for having the courage, integrity and a calm hand on the tiller when we needed it most!
Martha Wade, Bloomington
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A recent letter writer brought up the damage done to our students during the COVID closure. Let's move forward and make this a watershed moment in education. Let's start the next school year with an assessment of each student's reading, writing and arithmetic capabilities, and then follow that up by placing them in classrooms where they feel just as proficient as the student sitting next to them (regardless of age).
In my opinion, the worst thing we can do is to put our kids in an environment where they feel "dumb," because I fear they just might stop trying.
