Take the tour; you'll be impressed

Do you want to see what your tax dollars have built?

Take a tour on Saturday of Glacier High School - the Flathead's (and Montana's) newest school.

The public has been getting its first peek inside the 243,000-square-foot school that looms impressively at the corner of Stillwater Road and West Reserve Drive.

People are invited to take tours of Glacier High from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturday. This is the second session of school tours - last week more than 800 people visited the nearly finished facility that opens for classes the first time this fall.

On the initial tours, people got to see everything from the biomass boiler to the classroom pods, and many were favorably impressed by the results of our $34.8 million investment in education.

Go see the sparkling new facility for yourself this Saturday.

If you need to take flight from the Flathead Valley this summer, there are expanded opportunities to do so.

Thanks to some major additions by air carriers, there will be almost twice as many seats on planes available at Glacier Park International Airport.

That means there will be 1,400 seats available daily, compared to the current 790.

The new airline connections include nonstop service to Denver, Kalispell and Atlanta, as well as extra flights to Salt Lake City.

These are welcome air links to the outside world that should improve travel to and from the valley.

At the risk of engaging in a little self-promotion, we thought we should relay the results of a recent survey about how well-informed Americans are about their world.

The survey by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that Americans' knowledge of national affairs has slipped somewhat from 1989 - despite the explosion of the Internet and cable television as news sources.

The most knowledgeable (as gauged by how well people answered survey questions) were those who were regular newspaper readers or watchers of "The Daily Show" and the "Colbert Report."

Plenty of pundits have raised alarms over the changes in how people get their news - and whether relying on blogs and text messages is any way for citizens to be informed enough to participate in a democracy.

The Pew report is just one more piece of evidence that newspapers still matter to an informed populace.