This talk about how starting a week earlier will better prepare the students for the state tests is little more than horse puckey.
From what I've seen during my daughter's 12 years of attending Burbank schools, especially high school, the first two weeks were just about always wasted with changing classes and mass confusion — very little was ever learned during those first nine days.
I especially remember her first weeks in Burroughs.
Her class was part of a baby boom and the administration was totally unprepared for the number of students entering that year (1998), so last-minute calls were made to hire more teachers and set up new classes while the kids sat around doodling for a week and a half.
Of course, a third-grader with a calculator and a list of students recently promoted from the local middle schools could have figured out the situation two months beforehand, yet, it was completely beyond the ability of our illustrious school board to grasp the situation.
It's sort of funny that to be an educator in the city of Burbank you must have a college degree, yet to be on the board that tells the educators what to do you are only required to have a pulse. And that's about all most of them have.
RICHARD J. TAFILAW
Burbank
Aviation history takes a nose dive
They are tearing down the Pacific AirMotive engine test facility and the factory building behind it.
Both are located on Hollywood Way across from the Bob Hope Airport. This is the last production building in Burbank from the days of aviation manufacturing in this area. The destruction of the massive structure that was the engine test facility, exposing its guts during its demise, demonstrates what great efforts the people who made and maintained aircraft here went through to get the job done.
I recall as a kid hearing the mighty roar of radial and jet engines being run up for testing and thinking that sound was normal to any city.
