It's Monday morning, a fresh new week has begun, so it's still possible to feel optimistic about things. At first blush, the governor's idea about matching state and federal dollars in a $10 million employment incentive sounds like a plan.

Bonus: She doesn't need to jump through legislative hoops to get this started.

Lingle's notion is that if she can offer small-ish businesses a subsidy for health-coverage costs on new hires, there might be more new hires. And anyone who's off the unemployment rolls is paying taxes, and is not drawing unemployment.

Rep. Isaac Choy, the House's resident accountant, is leery of it, I read in Derrick DePledge's A-1 piece, but otherwise I'm not seeing a down side. I haven't made a single phone call yet  to check this out, it's true. Must find out where the $5 million in state seed money is coming from, for starters.

And reportedly she raised this idea with the president while the governors were visiting D.C. last month. Wonder what he said?

-- Vicki Viotti

When my husband and I sold our condo to buy a single-family home, one of the incentives was avoiding the always rising maintenance fees. After reading Rob Perez' piece today about condo boards, I'm thinking we avoided a kind of civil war (though I was unaware of any drama with our association board at the time).

The Bluestone episode, in which binding arbitration found for a condo owner who sued over retaliatory treatment by condo leadership, is a stunning example of how bad things can get. The arbitration ruling itself is being appealed -- so much for it being binding.

Is the civil court and arbitration the only way to rein in such problems? We'd like to hear from people with ideas on how this seemingly underregulated behavior might be curbed.

-- Vicki Viotti

Over the weekend, the Obama administration raised the curtain on its plan to overhaul the No Child Left Behind law. We've just begun to study the president's new initiatives, and some of the broad brush strokes seem encouraging.

Reportedly, there will be less of a pass-fail approach than one that measures progress. There will be a push to link teacher pay enhancements to student performance;.

Logical as that sounds, reforming teacher pay will be complicated. The state Department of Education is still working on its system for tracking individual student performance, and it boggles the mind to think about how -- or when -- the DOE will get that linkage established.

And that's not even considering the political issue: bringing the teachers union on board.

We will be continuing to develop our editorial position over the coming days, studying the releases from the feds as well as reportage across the media spectrum. As always, we're interested in the thoughts of parents, teachers and students. In fact, all taxpayers support this system, so, whether or not you have a direct affiliation with the public school system, you have a voice.

Thanks for any thoughts.

-- Vicki Viotti

There's been a bit of media buzz this week about a visit from a nonprofit now known as Project Prevention, which seeks out drug addicts and offers them money in exchange for their decision to be sterilized or use long-term birth control methods.

Obviously, this is very controversial. Many of the critics say this outreach wrongly targets vulnerable women and presses them toward a decision that they aren't of a mind to make clearly and that they may later regret.

Some of this criticism is legitimate. The way the program plays out, founder Barbara Harris and her crew may not reach addicts in all sectors of society. And some of the vitriolic verbage -- accusing addicted mothers of child abuse, for example -- seems over the top. And yes, it ignores the drug-abusing men who go around fathering children at will.  (Since when have men borne their proper share of the birth-control burden, anyway?)

But setting aside the shortcomings of its execution, Project Prevention is built around a kernel of truth: Preventing the birth of a child in circumstances of drug addiction is a good thing. And Harris' group has been focusing more on encouraging women to get reversible birth control devices such as Norplant and hormone patches (they get a little cash upon insertion/application, a little more at maintenance intervals for as long as they use it).

That is certainly a more defensible approach than dangling  financial incentives for sterilization, an irreversible medical decision, which would hover uncomfortably close to forced sterilization (given the desperation of these women for money). Too Nazi-esque a concept, to be sure.

-- Vicki Viotti

I've been out of the office for about a week now, but I can't help but weigh in on a story that that jumped out at me as I opened up yesterday's Advertiser. "House cuts $70M off school budget," by Loren Moreno, explained how the House version of the state budget made "line-by-line" reductions in specific Department of Education services and programs, including hiring teachers, maintenance contracts and special education. Also included is a $14 million cut in transportation services, to provoke improvements in the managing of school bus contracts.

"These are areas that we looked into where we thought we could find some savings without negatively impacting school choices," said Finance Committee Chair Marcus Oshiro.

It's confusing enough trying to figure out who runs our public school system. Is it the Board of Education, the DOE, the Legislature, the governor, the public? Perhaps that's too broad a question. Here's a simpler one: Who gets to decide if the school system's bus service can be run more efficiently? Here are your choices:

a. Randy Moore, assistant superintendent of school facilities and support services;
b. James Brese, chief financial officer for the DOE;
c. Kathryn Matayoshi, interim superintendent;
d. The entire BOE;
e. Marcus Oshiro, state representative;
f. The entire state Legislature;
g. Everyone who uses public school buses;
h. The voters;
i. All of the above

If you're having trouble choosing, you're not alone. It's one reason why there have been calls to make the school system more accountable to the governor and therefore less accountable to....well, choose from the list above.

And speaking of accountability, a national panel yesterday proposed a common academic standard for all public school children. It's the kind of broad reform that makes fixing a school bus contract seem like child's play.