Reader Andrea Cox emails:

I don’t understand why it’s so important to keep the elementary strings program. Some things have to go because of the budget constraints imposed upon the schools. Strings strikes me as much less important than, say, class size, mathematics, or reading. We can’t have everything without major changes in how the school funding is set at the state level.
(I would have posted a “comment” to this topic, but I couldn’t figure out how to do this on the site.)