SCHOOL DISTRICT ELECTION reminders are a spring ritual for this newspaper and others. After a while you get the sense that one paper’s stories on budgets or candidates could easily be swapped with those of a different paper, with no one being the wiser.

Editorial writers I’ve known wouldn’t do something like that for fear readers might prefer the other paper’s writer. And this year it wouldn’t work because everything is so different. Or is it?

Let’s start with voting. You’re planning to go to the polls for your school district election, right? Wrong! By executive order of the governor, everyone who votes in the June 9 school budget referendum in all of the 732 public school districts around the state has to vote by absentee ballot. If you live in Columbia County you should already have received an absentee ballot and a postage-paid return envelope from the school district where you live. Read more…

A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO we had only enough money to keep our columbiapaper.com website going a few more weeks and the print edition was on ice with little hope of revival. Then we asked for help and you gave it to us. And now there’s a twist.

In our appeal, which annoyingly covers much of the first page of our website, I wrote that “our efforts to obtain government loans and private grants have so far been unsuccessful.”

That was true until Monday evening when I received an email that, at first glance, made me suspect it was a scam. But our tech advisor said it passed the spoofing test, which is tech talk for it’s okay to open. The email said Google has selected The Columbia Paper to participate in a program called the Google News Initiative Journalism Emergency Relief Fund: https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/journalism-emergency-relief-fund Read more…

If you want to understand why social distancing and quarantines matter now, read accounts of the flu pandemic of a century ago. U.S. cities that ignored the warnings that crowds were dangerous suffered the greatest loss of life in 1918-19 outbreak. That virus disproportionately killed otherwise healthy young adults.

My grandparents survived that pandemic and died half century later. It wasn’t until they were gone that a relative recounted a story about my maternal grandfather I hadn’t heard. He was a young doctor, just a few years out of medical school and a “general practitioner,” when he joined the Army in 1918. He was transferred from Kansas to Georgia and was boarding a troop ship bound for the “Great War” in France. But just before the gangplank was pulled up, someone shouted his name and handed him new orders to disembark.

I never heard my grandfather speak about that incident or anything else related to the pandemic, so it’s only guesswork to imagine why he was needed thousands of miles from the front lines. But one fact of that time can’t be ignored: more U.S. soldiers died from the flu than were killed in combat. Read more…