Hits and Misses
MISS: It’s a good time of year to drive and look at fall colors, but it’s also a time when drivers should justifiably feel a bit jittery due to the increased number of car-deer collisions that take place in late October and into November. A collision between a motorcycle and deer in Fayette County that killed two people this week is a tragic reminder of that fact. There were more than 5,000 deer-related crashes in the commonwealth last year, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that there were 1 million car accidents involving deer across the country in 2022, resulting in 200 deaths, 10,000 injuries and $1 billion in vehicle damage. According to Jonathon King, vice president of insurance sales at AAA East Central, “The costs can be staggering.” AAA has also released a number of recommendations for drivers at this time of year. They include paying attention to signs that denote a stretch of the road might have a heavy concentration of deer, being particularly careful at night and early in the morning, and using high beams when there is no oncoming traffic. Be careful out there.
HIT: Part of the reason attending a public college or university has become so onerous for students and their families is that states have reduced a good deal of the funding they once provided. Right now, it costs a little more than $22,000 for an in-state student living on campus to attend one of the campuses within the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE), and that includes PennWest University. Hoping to ease the pain of the high cost of higher education, the PASSHE board of governors has requested a 6.5% increase in funding for the 2024-25 academic year. They believe this will allow them to hold the line on tuition for the sixth straight year, and enhance programming on the campuses. Given the importance of education or training following high school, and the need to get more students on PASSHE campuses, we hope the Legislature will agree to make this crucial investment.
MISS: October is Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Month, and the Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts (AOPC) recently released data on protection from abuse (PFA) filings that were made in the commonwealth in 2021 and 2022. The results were a mixed bag. Across Pennsylvania, PFA filings inched up by 5% from one year to the next, but in Washington and Fayette counties they decreased slightly, while increasing in Greene County. Brian Gorman, executive director of Greensburg-based Summit Legal Aid, stated the unfortunate reality about domestic abuse: “PFA filings are always high. Frankly, domestic violence is always present, and PFA court is always busy. That’s been a constant for us over the years.” If domestic abuse is a problem that is not easy to solve, we can take comfort in the fact that there is much greater awareness of it, even if many victims remain unwilling to report it. As Gorman explained, “It is something that needs to be taken very seriously, and not something that is dealt with or viewed with some sort of simplicity or dismissiveness.”