The goals set for the 2025-26 school year by Altoona Area School District administrators are laudable, indeed. However, now that the goals are in place and have been made available to district residents and others interested in the school system’s goings-on, the challenge, going forward, ...

No matter when and/or how Pennsylvania’s budget impasse ends, members of the General Assembly need to exercise an examination of conscience into why they allowed the current fiscal embarrassment to persist for so long — now having passed the three-month mark for a basic budget-preparation ...

One day last month, newspaper stories shined a light on the troubles, triumphs and transformations happening in communities across Pennsylvania. In Erie, readers followed fundraising efforts to save an injured dog named Dopey. In Harrisburg, people gathered at a vigil for a teenager whose ...

A great opportunity awaits industries and other business entities and interests in the six-county Southern Alleghenies region. If most embrace the opportunity, hopefully expanded Amtrak passenger train service will be the result. If they don’t, it is possible that such expanded service ...

Anyone who did not read the entire Sept. 24 Mirror article “Altoona officials meet with Cricket Knoll residents” might have missed what possibly were the two most important paragraphs of that article. Parts of those paragraphs are as follows: — “When the plan is finished, there will ...

A recent editorial was accompanied by a photo of a formerly enslaved man in Louisiana displaying whipping scars on his back during the Civil War. Made in May 1863 and widely published two months later, it presented gruesome evidence of slavery’s inhumanity for countless Americans who ...