Simran Adnani, 6Troy, MI Snow White Has COVID-19 Simran Adnani, 6 The Queen sat by her window. Pricking her finger on a needle, she wished for a child. She had a beautiful daughter called Snow White. When Snow White was 6 years old, the Queen died, and the King married a cruel stepmother. Stepmother made a magic mirror and asked it,” Who is the fairest of all?” Mirror said, “Snow White is the fairest of all. Queen you look very fair normally but today you look rather pale, what is the matter?” The Queen got a nasal swab and her COVID test came back positive. She made a COVID poisoned apple by biting it that she thought she would use later for hurting Snow White. Then she took Remdesavir (the drug that treats COVID) which completely cured the Queen. But the Queen did not believe in social distancing and called the Huntsman. She ordered him to take Snow White to the jungle and kill her. But the Huntsman was kind and let Snow White go. Snow White was tired walking in the forest. She decided to rest in the house of the seven dwarfs. They were called Cheeky, Squeezy, Fishy, Curious, Puffy, Lazy and Knowledgy . Snow White ate from Cheeky’s cereal bowl and slept off. When the dwarfs returned, they all had masks on their faces. Snow White was alarmed to see them and she started to run away. Knowledgy stopped her and informed her that masks were only to protect them from COVID. She didn’t understand the need for masks. Next day the dwarfs left for work and warned Snow White of the wicked stepmother. Snow White didn’t listen and opened the door to the evil step mother. The queen who was a COVID survivor and was wearing a mask, offered Snow White an apple that she had previously poisoned. Snow White took a bite and fell unconscious. The dwarfs returned and were very sad. Knowledgy checked her heart and noticed that it wasn’t beating. “The evil stepmother gave her COVID,” said Curious. Then they buried her in the cemetery as it would be dangerous to put her in a glass coffin. The Prince heard about Snow White’s death and was very sad. However, he did not kiss her for fear of getting sick.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Friendship, a cartoon by Natya Chandrasekar, 12
Natya Chandrasekar, 12Palo Alto, CA Friendship Natya Chandrasekar, 12 I created the friendship cartoon after I came from a walk where 2 friends were walking 6 feet apart and I realized this is going to be the way of life after the coronavirus. Natya is selling prints of all of her cartoons to raise funds for a nonprofit organization in her local area called REF (Ravenswood Education Foundation), which has established an emergency fund to provide financial relief related to the school closures due to COVID-19. Ninety percent of students in the school area qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, and the majority of their parents work hourly service jobs. REF is working closely with the school district to plan and address specific needs, including in technology and distance learning, food and food distribution, emergency childcare, and financial support. We at Stone Soup are very happy to support Natya in spreading the word, and congratulate her on her work and her fundraising efforts for her community–well done, Natya! You can look at the complete collection of cartoons and choose your favourites either in this Dropbox Folder or Google Drive folder, and write to Natya if you would like to obtain a copy of your own. You may pay for the prints either by making a direct donation to REF here, or discussing directly with Natya and her family.
Funding Our National Parks: How America’s Best Idea is Being Left in the Dark by Daniel, 10
$11.9 billion is the cost of the NPS deferred maintenance. This is because funds keep getting cut, and not a lot of measures have been taken by the government to continue to preserve “America’s Best Idea” – a name given by many to our national parks. Our leaders simply don’t seem to understand how severe the consequences are of underfunding national parks. Because national parks aren’t getting enough funds from the government, NPS staff’s wages have to be lowered and maintenance continually gets pushed back, which will ultimately cause entire parks to go out of order. A lot of the money that is supposed to be allocated to national parks is not being given to them. A SmartAsset article written by Amelia Josephson states that the NPS needed $11.5B for proper park maintenance in 2014, but the government only appropriated $3B: a little over just 25% of what the parks needed. In addition, a bill passed in 1965, called the Land and Water Conservation Fund, is supposed to provide national parks with at least $900M each year, but a lot of that money is used for other things before it even reaches the NPS. Because of this, Josephson says, “from year to year, funding is unpredictable.” As the modern economy grows and humans begin to revolve around technology, many forget about nature and its wonders. Money is used for other things, and national parks are often put at the bottom of the priority list in many different categories, especially funding. A lot of the money that is supposed to be appropriated for national parks is not being provided at all, and the health and condition of national parks is rapidly deteriorating. This significance of this underfunding is that it forces NPS staff wages to be lowered, in addition to causing urgent maintenance to be continually pushed back. Park staff are underpaid because the NPS simply can’t provide for them, and this lowering of wages will cause significant safety breaches. On Glassdoor, the stats the website has compiled shows that the average annual pay of a park ranger is only $46K, and that the average annual base pay is just $43,412. Assuming that park rangers work 365 days a year and 40 hours a week (the latter assumption is based on information from iresearchnet.com), their hourly base pay would only amount to around $20.81, and their average hourly pay would only total to $22.05. Of course, this assumption is flawed because park rangers most likely don’t work 365 days a year, but they often have to work extra hours, so these assumptions balance each other out. Obviously, the NPS doesn’t only consist of park rangers. There are also maintenance workers, laborers, forestry technicians, heavy equipment operators, etc. However, retaining the assumptions above, the highest salary listed for the NPS on Glassdoor is just a little over $30. These salaries can be compared to the salary of an average American citizen: $27/hr. It is quite shocking to think that, in terms of income, rangers are actually below average, even though they work tirelessly to preserve some of nature’s best. Wages this low will definitely not attract new rangers, and it might even cause current rangers to leave their position. Since rangers are the main enforcers of law at national parks, without them, many safety rules may not be enforced. Because of this, the safety of tourists is being compromised. During one accident in Joshua Tree National Park, because rangers were not present, volunteer workers, who undoubtedly did not know as much as an experienced rangers, were told to handle the situation. This inexperience greatly increased the chances of death; luckily, during this particular incident, that did not happen. However, it did show how important rangers are to the health, safety and continuation of a park. In addition, with no one to enforce the rules, vandalism is becoming more and more common, from teens toppling natural monuments to people doing their business on park grounds. However, a lack of rangers is only one factor of safety breaches of national parks – insufficient preservation of key park sites and places that have the potential to be dangerous is also playing a role in slowly dismantling our national parks. The National Park Service has a lot of maintenance to perform, but due to underfunding, they are unable to do so. At national parks, the expense of backlog maintenance overwhelms the amount of money that the government actually provides. According to the Joshua Tree National Park’s superintendent, David Smith, “Here at Joshua Tree, we have about $60 million in backlog maintenance. And to put that in perspective, our annual operating budget at this park is a little over $6 million.” The supposed maintenance would be performed on historic sites in the park, most notably Key Ranch and roads surrounding and passing through the park; because Joshua Tree is located on a fault, road damage is inevitable. The bottom line, says Smith, is that “[the park] doesn’t have enough money to provide the level of service the public expects.” While many parks aren’t quite as underfunded as Joshua Tree, nearly every national park needs more than what they actually get. However, Joshua Tree is not the only national park that’s underfunded. According to NPR author Nathan Rott, Yosemite needs $500 million for repairs ($100 million for critical ones), and Grand Canyon needs at least $330 million for water system upgrades. Combined with the need of other parks, this cost totals to around $11.9 billion. Given these statistics, it seems like the government is investing in everything but national parks. According to the author, most parks need at least two times the money the government provides for proper maintenance. In the case of Joshua Tree, this scale is exaggerated; the park needs 10 times of what they actually receive for backlog maintenance. While the NPS director Jon Jarvis is hopeful that the government will eventually provide, neither Trump or Biden have shown that they might do so,
