Republican weekly radio address
For weekend of January 10-11, 2009

Greetings, this is Representative Phil Curtis, assistant leader of Republicans in the Maine House.

The new Legislature is now officially under way, and the major action this session will center on producing a state budget for the next two years. Coming up with a new budget is always a challenge, but it will be especially difficult this time. With the economy in recession, the state is facing a projected revenue shortfall of more than $800 million dollars.

Maine will probably receive a substantial amount of money from the federal stimulus package, but legislators can’t depend on those funds until they actually arrive. Balancing the budget and returning the state to financial stability will require tough choices and as the governor puts it, “shared sacrifice.” The budget drama will play out over the next couple of months.

Meanwhile, legislators are busy with the traditional ritual that comes with the start of a new session. They are submitting bills – lots of them. In the last session there were more than 2,000 bills. There may be fewer this time around, but we will still have plenty of them to deal with. As usual, they will range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I’d like to talk about one bill in particular, because it ties in with our hard economic times. It involves teaching critical life skills to young Mainers – primarily high school students. A similar bill was introduced in the last Legislature by Representative Joan Nass, of Acton. It didn’t pass, but she is trying again to convince legislators that Maine’s young folks need formal, hands-on education in fundamental areas that have become major problems for our state. Under her new bill, schools would add instruction in life skills and consumer science in Maine’s system of Learning Results.

Learning Results was established in the 1990s to help educators identify the knowledge and skills that are essential to prepare Maine students for work, higher education, citizenship and personal fulfillment. But Representative Nass believes that we fail in education if we neglect to teach students how to live well and successfully navigate in our complex society. And she’s speaking from experience. She spent 30 years teaching Family and Consumer Science, starting on Indian reservations in Arizona and continuing for 17 years at Sanford High School.

You might think learning how to live successfully is a personal responsibility and we all learn by trial and error. But the evidence is all around us that many people – especially young people – need training in core skills. They’re not learning these things at home and they’re not picking them up on their own. What is this evidence? A partial list would include obesity, bankruptcy, poor parenting, and out of control credit card debt. The skills that Rep. Nass would add to Maine’s curriculum would include such topics as financial management, food preparation, nutrition and child development.

Why should you care about this? To start with, Maine is experiencing an obesity epidemic, even among young children. That will cost all of us huge amounts of money for medical treatment for diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, joint problems and depression, which is a big problem among obese teenagers. By teaching proper food preparation and the value of eating fruit, vegetables and balanced diets, we would alleviate the adverse effects of an overweight population and demonstrate ways to save money by avoiding processed food, especially the fattening junk food that takes up whole aisles in supermarkets. Too many of today’s teenagers think the four basic food groups are pizza, French fries, soda pop and potato chips.

There’s also a need to educate high schools students about personal finance. How many of them could balance a checkbook? How many understand how credit card debt can eat you alive? How many understand the importance of setting a budget and living within your means? Obviously, not enough young people know these things. For the past 15 years, Representative Nass has volunteered at a homeless shelter in York County. She discovered that many of the residents ended up there because ignorance of basic household economics brought them to financial ruin.

The care and development of children is another area where young people need practical training. In 2007, more than 13,000 Maine children were assigned to caseworkers in the state’s Child Protective Services agency. They were being abused and mistreated for a variety of reasons. This problem creates serious hardship for the kids involved and a major expense for taxpayers.

In the last Legislature, the life skills bill submitted by Representative Nass enjoyed bipartisan support. Cosponsors ranged from the most liberal members to the most conservative. In constituent surveys, 75 percent of Maine residents agreed that fundamental training in things like nutrition and budgeting should be taught in school, perhaps integrated into science and math courses.

It’s no secret that many of our young people are not getting the practical training they need to lead happy, productive and fulfilling lives. Representative Nass has presented a bill to address the problem, and it is one that deserves serious consideration by the Legislature.

This is Phil Curtis. Thanks very much for listening.

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