For more secondary schools

August 31, 2010

Dear Sir,

To Education Minister El James: In light of what you mentioned before, schools still look like they're reopening on September 8 instead of September 1. If you had wanted students to start off fresh, you would've started them off early the same way that Bermuda Institute started back on August 25. Really, do students need the extra six days (Labour Day doesn't count) for vacation if most don't get summer jobs (if your child walks around aimlessly in town for a whole summer, ask yourself if he or she could be doing something more constructive like getting a job to help out around the house?). Schools really should end on the last day of June with summer vacation starting on July 1.

The curriculum should even change so that it balances right (changing from secondary school to middle schools was already stupid and now to think eliminating primary schools will help won't solve the problem ... nah! It'll only make it worse). The best solution? Eliminate Clearwater and make that into a secondary school. Upgrade Whitney back into a high school and see if it's humanly possible to put a high school near Dalton E. Tucker primary school. The more secondary schools on the island the better.

EX-DEVONSHIRE ACADEMY AND –WARWICK SECONDARY STUDENT

Devonshire

How the USA does it

August 30, 2010

Dear Sir

As your readers may be aware, the US census is also underway and the UK census will be held in 2011 and it seems that things are pretty much on track. I did a couple of quick searches and came across the following information: (Of course, with Bermuda being substantially smaller than the US, the timeline would be much shorter.)

Address Verification (4/1/09 — 7/1/09)

Approximately 140,000 Census Bureau employees checked 145 million addresses from March through July 2009, walking virtually every street in the United States along the way to make sure we have every housing unit on our address list and that every housing unit ultimately gets counted. (This step for Bermuda would be skipped because the census forms could be delivered to each household — regardless of whether they have a mailbox or not)

Form Delivery and Mail Back Phase –(3/1/10 — 4/16/10)

The 2010 Census mail-out was the largest single delivery ever undertaken by the United States — over 120 million forms were mailed in March. Additional forms were sent to increase mail back participation in low responding areas. In other areas, we hand-delivered forms or visited each address to complete a form.

Door-to-Door Follow-Up Phase– (5/1/10 — 7/10/10)

Census takers visit roughly 47 million households that did not mail back their questionnaire (or who did not receive a form delivered to them). Census takers are your neighbours and are easily identifiable by their white census badge and black census bag.

Quality Assurance Operations –(4/11/10 — 9/3/10)

During the next several months, the Census Bureau will conduct three major quality assurance operations and other processes to ensure that the 2010 Census is an accurate and complete picture of everyone living across the nation. These efforts are an investment in the quality of the census that will pay off for the next 10 years.

QA 1: Coverage Follow-Up Operation –(4/11/10 — 8/13/10)

During this operation, the Census Bureau will call households who have responded to the 2010 Census if we need to clarify any answers about the number of people living at the address on April 1st. If we have some indication that someone may have been included or excluded in error, we will call to get a better understanding of the situation, and then use our census residence rules to resolve the uncertainties.

QA 2: Vacant Delete Check –(7/24/10 — 8/25/10)

We collect additional information to ensure housing units classified as vacant (or nonexistent) were in fact unoccupied on April 1st. In this operation, we follow-up with housing units that were classified as vacant or nonexistent during the non-response follow-up operation. A census taker — different from the one who made the original classification — will visit the housing unit to confirm the classification. If they determine that classification was wrong, they will collect the census information for the housing unit and any Census Day residents. During this operation, we also will visit and enumerate addresses that were added to our master list too late to include them in the Form Delivery and Mail back phase or in the Door-to-Door Follow-up phase.

QA 3: Field Verification (8/6/10 — 9/3/10)

In this operation, we send census workers to verify whether an address exists and to confirm its geographic location, if it does not match an address in our file. These addresses were submitted by households who provided their census information without an identification number linked back to our address file. For example, the households may have submitted a Be Counted form or provided their census information over the phone. We also use this operation to resolve suspected duplicate addresses contained within the same block.

Complete Questionnaire –Data Capture and Processing –(5/10/10 — 1?0/10)

Once we obtain completed questionnaires either directly from respondents or from the door-to-door follow up phase, the data must be captured in an electronic format, processed, and then tabulated in order to provide state population totals necessary for the apportionment.

2010 Population Counts Reported– (1?1/10)

For more information on each of these points, have a look at http://2010.census.gov/2010census/

The next census of England and Wales will take place in 2011 and includes a number of new approaches designed to improve census return rates in all areas and with all population groups. This includes:

Wide engagement in the community with the help of local authorities, representatives of target population and accessibility groups and a national publicity campaign post-out of all household questionnaires (around 25 million), based on a newly developed national address register.

Online completion: people will be able to complete and submit their answers online or fill in and return the paper questionnaire

Questionnaire tracking and targeted field follow-up: to identify and follow up households which have not returned a questionnaire

For further information on the UK census have a look at this link:

http://2010.census.gov/2010census/how/2010-census-progress. php

In my humble opinion, if the Bermuda Government had done a little research on how the census is done in random countries worldwide, I think things could have made things so much easier and less expensive for the Bermuda taxpayers and we would not be in the predicament that we find ourselves in now.

BERMUDIAN TAXPAYER

Warwick