HOPE GRANTS
Protect Georgia, don’t
lower minimum GPA
Standards for the Hope Grant must be raised, not lowered. A 2.0 grade point average is not high enough for students to receive a Hope Grant. Students must be taught to excel and not just skate by. If this type of thinking continues, this state will need more than Hope Grants — it will need more hope.
Too many unready students are going to colleges that are unprepared to handle such students.
Georgia needs more well-educated adults to replace those with 2.0 grade point averages working in and running this state. Georgia is in trouble. Lowering the Hope Grant eligibility requirements will only increase these troubles.
BARBARA COPES, DOUGLASVILLE
IMMIGRATION
Amnesty plan must
come with safeguards
In 2007, I wrote the following suggestions to Senators Chambliss and Isakson.
The immigration problem is too complex to be solved by one enormous bill. It can be solved one step at a time with simple, one-purpose legislation. Stop illegal entry absolutely. Register all illegal residents, without penalties but with ironclad provisions that those not registered by a specified date forfeit all possibility of future citizenship or legal residency. Then, with realistic data, legislate lenient but rational amnesty, and revise immigration standards and quotas with the usual American charity, tempered by social and economic needs of the nation.
Amnesty without safeguards along the lines suggested here would trigger an unsustainable avalanche. This country, as we know it, is at risk because of unassimilated immigrants. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
JOHN STANFIELD, PEACHTREE CITY
GUN CONTROL
End proliferation
of domestic WMDs
We define “weapons of mass destruction” as weapons that are capable of inflicting tremendous harm — usually death — to those we fire on.
Unfortunately, there are weapons of mass destruction here in the U.S. These weapons have been extremely detrimental to thousands of people each year, both adults and children. When will we decide that we don’t live in the Wild West anymore, or that we have made too many weapons of mass destruction available to too many who are mentally ill?
DAVID CLARKE, BUFORD
ENVIRONMENT
Hold Jekyll Island
officials accountable
Thank you for printing the article on the Jekyll Island Authority’s clear-cutting a portion of the Jekyll causeway in violation of the Coastal Marshland Protection Act (“Order to quit clearing comes too late for Jekyll,” Metro, Feb. 9).
The authority’s claim of ignorance of proper natural resource management practice is unacceptable. Its job is to know.
As someone who cares about this state park, I ask that the Jekyll Island Authority be held accountable and suffer appropriate consequences for its illegal action.
JOE FULCHER, SEA ISLAND
