Inadvertent Omission
Editor: The Windsor Service Alliance was inadvertently omitted from the article on the Windsor Toy & Food Giveaway. For twenty plus years the Windsor Fire, the Windsor Service Alliance and the Kiwanis Club have teamed up with Santa Tim to provide Christmas toys and food for the children of Windsor. We apologize for this oversight as the Windsor Service Alliance is an integral part of this event for families of Windsor. Thank you to the Windsor Service Alliance for your continued partnership and we look forward to many more years of providing this service to our community.
Sherry Rubin, President
Kiwanis Club of Windsor
Special Needs Children’s Activity Program starts Saturday
This Saturday marks the start of the winter season of the Special Needs Activities Program (SNAP) presented by the City of Healdsburg Parks and Recreation department in conjunction with Rotary Cares, a combination of the Cloverdale, Windsor and both Healdsburg Rotary Clubs.
The program is open to all special needs children between the age of 5 and 20, and there is no cost to the parent or caregiver. The various activities are designed to improve spatial and motor skills, body control and coordination, peer interaction, plus other functions in a fun and welcoming environment.
All sessions will be held at the Healdsburg Community Services Department, 1557 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg. For more information, please contact Angelica Garcia at
ag*****@ci.us
or call 707-431-3186. We hope to see you there.
Robert Redner
Cloverdale Rotary Club
Cloverdale
He Could Have Been My Son
He sits across the table from me, this nice looking young man of 15 years, attired in his juvenile prison grays. I’ll call him Alonzo.
“Do you shave yet Alonzo,” I ask him. He self-consciously touches his face. “Yea, once.” He smiles and adds “But I really didn’t need too.”
I smile back. “Yea, believe it or not, I remember the first time I borrowed my dad’s razor and made my first attempt to shave. That was a heck of a long time ago.” We both share a laugh.
My mind drifts to some lyrics from the musical, Les Miserables. An aging Jean Valjean is standing over the wounded young man, Marius Pontmercy. He sings from the depth of his humanity, “God on high, hear my prayer….He’s like the son I might have known…bring him peace, bring him joy. He is young. He is only a boy.”
Alonzo is only a boy, too. Some would call him a “bad boy,” a rotten kid who, urged on by gang members, tried to rob a 7-Eleven store. I would not call him a “bad” kid. Life is never that simple. We have all made our share of mistakes.
But yes, he committed a crime and justice demands that he pay for it. However, I question whether taking a kid from his family, his neighborhood, his school and isolating him in prison is the best way to punish him. As parents didn’t we figure out other forms of discipline for our errant kids than taking a belt to his backside? Didn’t we find that a judicious combination of taking away privileges or giving our kids extra work or withholding allowances worked better?
I am convinced that we can find better ways of rehabilitating our kids than locking them up. Incarceration should be the last resort, not our punishment of choice. Teenage kids can, and do, change, if we give them a chance, if we work with them. It’s not a case of being soft on kids who screw up; it’s just being smart. It’s also being compassionate and willing to give a child a second chance.
Kids like Alonzo didn’t come here from Mars. He came from a family here in Sonoma County. He is a product of local schools, our own community. He is one of our kids. He could have been my son.
Hank Mattimore
Windsor
Homeless related?
After reading your police and Sheriff’s logs every week I finally made up my mind that I could no longer keep quiet. I am very curious to find out why your paper feels the need to identify certain Sheriff calls with the final sentence “homeless related.” Why aren’t the other calls labeled in kind, such as “has home related.” The homeless in this county are already shamed and stigmatized for being just that. It seems to me that being a homeless person is the last group in society that it acceptable to ridicule and even “hate” without any repercussions. There seems to me to be no reason for your paper to identify any call as “homeless related.” It just seems to add to the ignorance of a very serious and sad problem.
Carolyn Kennon
Guerneville
