Teachers and firefighters | The Salt Lake Tribune

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

As a teacher, I ask our state and local governments to think of education as an emergency service. Our educational system is in a crisis mode and becoming less able to meet the needs of educating our future work force.

To put this into perspective, consider our firefighters and how their situation might be compromised if the Legislature treated that emergency service as it currently does teachers. What would happen if we asked our fire departments over time to serve an ever-widening area with three-fourths of the fuel, water and other resources they had recently used to address emergencies in a much smaller area?

Certainly a task force would convene and the best minds would be asked to find a solution to this problem. A comparable response is needed to address the lack of funding in education and the ever-growing population of students who need to be served.

Brent Larsen

Salt Lake City