Larson compared admission to the GATE program to tryouts for first-chair violin in the school orchestra, or for starting quarterback for the varsity football team. His argument is premised on the notion that 1) there is a prize to be won, and 2) the best students should win that prize based on IQ tests. I think these premises are flawed.

As to the first assumption, self-contained GATE has never been promoted as a prize. It is justified by the idea that GATE-qualified students “learn differently” from other students and need to be segregated to obtain specialized instruction. I haven’t seen evidence that this truly is necessary, but that is the justification. To consider self-contained GATE classes to be a prize for those third-graders who score highest on an IQ test seems to miss the point.

But even if the program is intended to address the “special needs” of a few bright kids, it is important to note that nearly 30 percent of the district’s third-graders are GATE-qualified each year. It is difficult to imagine that so many students need specialized, segregated instruction, or that such segregation is healthy for the schools as a whole.

The second assumption, that IQ testing clearly identifies deserving students, is also questionable. The majority of this year’s GATE third-graders, 112 out of 190, are identified as being in the 99th percentile. Only 15 are found at the 97th percentile and 23 at the 96th percentile. Even fewer are found at the 95th and 94th percentiles. These numbers do not resemble a bell curve.

But most striking is the fact that only 22 of those 112 in the 99th percentile were identified in the initial round of universal testing using the OLSAT. The balance of the kids were identified in a second round of one-on-one tests administered by the school district GATE administrator or from private testing. Third-graders in Davis may be smart, but it seems doubtful that 17 percent of them are in the 99th percentile of learners, especially when the first round of OLSAT testing only showed only 3 percent scoring at this high level.

Admission to the GATE program is problematic.  But the problem is in the testing, not the lottery.

Craig Lundgren
Davis

I choose to avoid tempting having cancer by not having it. What other organs would it harm? We don’t know. Do I want to be a test subject for such a trial? No.

You can get your fluoride in a bottle on an individual basis at a low cost. Just don’t subject the rest of us who don’t want it.

Come on — where is common sense in this? Vote it down. Vote no!

Janet Zwahlen
Davis

We would like to thank two of those groups who recently held large drives — the Boy Scouts of America, led by Karen Ruan, and the Davis postal carriers, led by Mike McCoy. The food from these two drives will help us through the long summer months.

The STEAC food closet would not exist without the help of a group of amazing volunteers. Special thanks to Mike Finnegan, Will Benware, Jana Tuton, Lynne Rumery, Warren Micke, Pam and John Baird and Liz Merry, who spent hours going through the thousands of pounds of donated food, getting it ready for the shelves in the food closet.

Susan Simon
STEAC executive director, Davis

It does little good, however, for the cause of press freedom to engage in blatant disregard of the undisputed facts. First, the Plame affair during the Bush term involved high administration officials deliberately revealing the identity of a covert CIA agent as political punishment and engaging in perjury to conceal such perfidy; it was not an effort to plug a leak threatening national security.

Regarding the recent AP revelations, your editorial inexplicably glided from the Justice Department’s subpoena of past phone records to concern about the “monitoring” and “wiretapping” of journalists’ conversations, which has not been alleged by anybody here.

Finally, you are surely aware that Attorney General Eric Holder had to recuse himself from the leak case because he was himself a subject questioned in the very same investigation.

You are entitled to express your own opinions, but you cannot invent your own facts. This editorial was simple hackery, or “farce,” in your own words.

Thomas Riordan
Davis

Minutes later, in another parking lot, he blocked another car’s attempted exit from a space and, with help from an accomplice, kidnapped one of the two women in it. He then drove both his victims to a remote canyon, where he and the accomplice and one other man repeatedly raped the women before stealing their purses and leaving them behind.

The gunman, Michael Vicks, was convicted of these and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison, thanks to laws that provide enhanced sentencing in cases involving guns.

Imagine, now, that you are one of those rape victims and encounter Vicks — who you believed was behind bars for good — in a random encounter in a store.

That sort of thing happened to another woman, Marcella Leach, whose daughter Marsalee “Marsy” Nicholas, was stalked and murdered by an ex-boyfriend, coincidentally also in 1983. Only a week after that killing, Leach entered a grocery store after visiting her daughter’s fresh grave and was stunned to be confronted by the accused killer, freed on bail without any notice to the victim’s family.

A desire to minimize those sorts of encounters was behind the 2008 Proposition 9, also called Marsy’s Law and the Victims’ Bill of Rights Act, sponsored primarily by Marsalee’s brother Henry, now an electronics multimillionaire.

It requires that victims and their relatives be notified of every bail or parole hearing involving people accused of harming them.

Also prior to this law, inmates found unsuitable for parole by the state Board of Parole Hearings had the right to a new hearing within five years if convicted of murder, or within two years in lesser crimes. That’s one reason the likes of Charles Manson and his followers have come up for parole consideration repeatedly in recent years.

Michael Vicks (no relation to the similarly named Philadelphia Eagles quarterback) was convicted long before Marsy’s Law passed, so it was somewhat reasonable to expect that after he was denied parole in 2009 because of the “horrific” nature of his crimes, he would get another hearing two years later. He did not, because of Marsy’s Law, and he sued.

Vicks claimed that to subject him to the provisions of Marsy’s Law violates the Constitution’s prohibition on ex post facto laws, those that apply to events that occurred before the law passed.

Now the state Supreme Court has ruled his claim utterly without merit. Marsy’s Law, wrote Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, is not ex post facto because it does not increase the punishment for his crime.

“In light of the circumstances of his kidnapping offenses,” said Cantil-Sakauye, “such as the movement of the victims, the sexual assaults and the use of a firearm, it appears … that he would be required to remain incarcerated even if he were found suitable for parole.”

So Marsy’s Law now applies not just for crime victims from late 2008 and beyond, but also for those whose lives were blighted many years earlier.

What’s more, the law ensures that Vicks’ victims will always know about it long in advance when he gets a parole hearing or there is any other legal proceeding in his case. They are also guaranteed the right to be heard at any parole hearing in his case.

As for more recent victims, they will always be informed of bail hearings, trials or sentencing hearings in their cases. Any parole and probation decisions also must take into account victims’ safety and preferences.

Which means there should be no more encounters like the one Marcella Leach endured. This is one law that appears to be working exactly as the voters intended when they passed it. And maybe even a little better than expected, now that the Vicks decision is in.

— Reach syndicated columnist Tom Elias at tdelias@aol.com