A (thankfully) quiet graduation

After last year’s national media frenzy surrounding the five diplomas withheld at Galesburg High School’s graduation, this year’s graduation was quite a bit less controversial.
Five students were denied their diplomas following the May 27, 2007, graduation ceremony because administrators said there was too much noise from the crowd when their names were called. The students and their parents had signed a behavior contract saying they wouldn’t hoot and holler.
The students and their families, though, claimed it was racist to withhold their diplomas, as they were all black (Well, four of them. One was of mixed race), and there was a lot of noise also made for white students. They threatened to sue, getting a lawyer from Jay Janssen’s firm in Peoria.
It touched off a firestorm rained down upon the heads of District 205 administrators, with the ACLU jumping on board. Death threats were launched, blogs lit up and calls were received from CNN, the New York Times and several other national news outlets.
There’s a whole lot of other back story here (Just Google “Galesburg graduation” and it’ll pop up) that I don’t want to get into. As a result, though, the district created a committee to evaluate commencement policies. This committee was comprised of teachers, parents, administrators, students and community members, and they worked for several months, looking at all aspects and surveying the community.
In April, they came back with their decision. People would be allowed to “respectfully applaud” after each graduate’s name, but excessive noise was punishable by removal from the auditorium. Students would only be held accountable for their own actions, and their diplomas would be mailed at a later date.
The message seemed to reach the ears of people attending Sunday’s ceremony, as the packed house simply applauded (with a few minor exceptions) for the graduates. Once all names were read, the place erupted.
Of course, the fact that the audience was read the list of rules inserted in the programs couldn’t have hurt.
One of the neatest moments, though, was when a disabled student was wheeled across the stage. When his name was called, every single person in the auditorium — at least, it sounded like every person — applauded.
All I have to say is, I’m glad I don’t have to share my sources with the major news outlets.

Illinois to release payments to schools

The long weekend has made news slow (if that can happen in this business), but I found out that Gov. Blagojevich has decided to release the nearly $400 million owed to Illinois public schools in June instead of July.
Schools were worried that the 23rd and 24th state aid payments wouldn’t come through until July, after the end of the fiscal year. This practice, which took place last year — according to my sources, regardless of what the governor’s office says — causes many schools which would otherwise be in good financial shape to take a spot on the financial watch list.
This can screw up lots of things for the schools, including applications for grants and the permanent financial record of the school.
But, since the state is going to (in theory) release the payments on time, schools should be OK this year. Problem is, as anyone living in Illinois knows, promises are all well and good in theory, but it’s the practice that can kill you. I’m cautiously optimistic that things will turn out alright, but until the payments are received, we won’t know.
I’m currently working on comments from Rep. Don Moffitt and school districts in my circulation area, but I’ll try to update this.
And, I don’t have a link for you to one of the stories on the decision because, for some reason, I can’t embed links here. Weird. If you really want to check it out, visit the Springfield State Journal-Register’s website. They broke the story.

Education vs. sports

Around here, we’ve had a lot of sports controversy lately.

One school district fired a boys basketball coach, then hired another about a month later. Another school district fired both the boys and girls basketball coaches, and will be hiring new ones this week.

School board meetings for both these firings lasted far longer than normal. Executive sessions averaged 2 hours, topping out at 3.5 for one district.

Our paper had major stories on all of these firings/hirings which drew dozens (sometimes hundreds) of comments and hundreds (or thousands) of hits.

But when a teacher is fired/disciplined/hired, I don’t know about it until I get a pages-long personnel agenda. They approve them all in one lump consent item, rarely pulling specific pieces out to be discussed in executive sessions. While I would support giving press to all of the hirings and firings and retirements, I simply don’t have time or space to do so. People don’t cry out to hear about these, and the stories I do publish – normally about superintendent and principal changes – warrant few hits and even fewer comments.

This is a subject of much discussion in our newsroom. The sports guys, obviously, like covering these things because they rarely get controversy. Many of us on the news side wish the public didn’t want these stories so often and paid more attention to the people actually educating their children.

But, alas, sports are more high-profile than academics on a more regular basis. People discuss sports with much more passion than they discuss their children’s education, until something goes wrong. Then, they rail against educators, administrators and school board members for things they could have known all along if they had been paying proper attention.

What do you think? Why is there so much attention given to sports in schools and so little to educational matters?

Books banned in Washington

Leave it to the Midwest to do something like this. However, knowing the area where this news comes from, I’m slightly surprised about it.

Basically, a parent freaked out that her daughter was reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex.” Now, I’ve not yet read the novel, but Amazon says:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the “roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time.” The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides’s command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie’s shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:

Emotions, in my experience aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” … I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” … I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.

When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you’ll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it–putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight–just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. –Brad Thomas Parsons

While I have read that this book has some pretty graphic passages, I would imagine they’re not extraneous passages. They likely serve a purpose in the story.

This is just another in a series of parents being scared of the all-powerful gift of knowledge. Sure, things written in books and shown on TV and the like can be graphic and many serve no purpose (Have you watched prime time TV lately?), but if a parent has raised a child right and that child knows to think for, in this case, herself, the book should not influence her life in any major way.

Books are not so insidious that teenagers, after reading them, will go right out and start raping and pillaging because a character in a book did so. If a kid does that, he or she has some serious social disorder which must be treated by professionals and is not going to be cured by mommy dearest protecting the little one from the big, bad books. It’s a similar argument used with the “influence” of music, TV, movies and video games.

Censorship requests have gone by the wayside in recent years after reaching some pretty frightening peaks in the 1950s-1970s. Bonfires where copies of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Catcher in the Rye” no longer take place, but people are still terrified of the potential effect literature can have on kids.

In my mind, that is the power of literature. It has the ability to change the way people think and view the world, but it’s not going to cause a kid to take any immediate action.

Parents should be embracing the fact that their children are reading, even if it is just for school, and use the “smutty” books as an excuse to have a conversation. But, of course, it’s easier just to complain to the school board and the newspaper than to talk to your own children.

And, on another note, I’m kind of disappointed in the school board for putting this new “policy” into effect. If the district doesn’t trust its teachers enough to choose their own material, sounds as if they have a personnel problem, not a policy problem.

They should have the courage to stand up to this woman and tell her that the teacher knows the literary value of the book and that’s that.

Random comments of the day

Sometimes, my job just makes me smile. Especially when I get to talk to sources who will tell me random things.

For example, in working with the Moffitt story today, I had one superintendent tell me he was “tired of getting jerked around by the legislature.” This is not surprising to me, coming from his mouth and some of the humorous things he’s told me before, but it’s something which makes me giggle.

I also had a college president today tell me his institution focuses more on finding commencement speakers who will inspire the graduates and not serve as, basically, a publicity opportunity for the college. If you know anything about my coverage area, you know that we have two private colleges of comparable size within 15 miles of one another, and there is a longtime rival between the two.

The college officials try to play all nice, but when something ripping on the other college in a veiled manner (College A is having a state senator as a commencement speaker; College B is having a very powerful woman in national and international politics and had a former president last year) comes from the highest person at the institution, I smile.

For all the frustrations I put up with thanks to my job, it’s the little things which count.

Moffitt calls for release of funding

Rep. Don Moffitt, R-Galesburg, sent out a press release this morning calling for the release of the 23rd and 24th payments of general state aid to school districts across the state.

He says:

“Schools are feeling the affects [sic] of the slowing economy too,” said Moffitt. “Increases in utility bills and gas prices are creating more costs, so issuing the last two state aid payments in June will help schools to deal with these additional expenditures.”

According to Moffitt, the last two payments can be made after the state’s new fiscal year begins on July 1, but by issuing them before that date, schools will receive the state assistance they need to balance their budgets which is required by state law. Moffitt said so far, Governor Blagojevich has not called for the release of the last two payments of state aid for schools for the current fiscal year, but there is still time.

“When the state delays payments to school districts, it creates a cash-flow problem for our schools,” said Moffitt. “Schools still have bills coming in, yet there is not enough revenue to cover them without the GSA from the state. I strongly encourage the advanced release of these last two payments so our schools can close their books at the end of the year in the black.”

So, if it’s the law that schools have their budgets balanced for a given fiscal year (July 1-June 30), how is it allowable for the state legislature to hang onto the money it owes the schools until the following fiscal year? This sounds as if it’s something which needs to be changed fully in the legislature to avoid the overuse of power by any given government agent.

If recent events and budget crises in this state are any indication of what we can expect through the remainder of Blagojevich’s tenure, I would think constituents should be crying out for their representatives and senators to push something through to the governor’s desk saying state aid payments must be made to school districts before the end of the fiscal year, not on the whim of the lawmakers.

On a side note, I just talked to one of the superintendents in my coverage are who said he’s “tired of being jerked around by the legislature.”

Update: I just spoke with Moffitt, and he said he would support the state borrowing on a short-term basis in order to give the money to school districts. We’re talking approximately $400 million statewide, a pretty hefty chunk of change and that money can do a whole lot of good for schoolkids.

Some closure in a sad tale

An indictment has been returned in the case of 13-year-old Megan Meier, a Missouri girl who hanged herself in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages from “Josh Evans” via MySpace.

Problem was, Megan wasn’t talking to anyone named Josh Evans. He wasn’t 16 years old. And he wasn’t male.

He was the mother (and her employee) of one of Megan’s schoolmates, who had created the profile to gather information about Megan. Unfortunately, as happens in far too many cases where people try to conceal their identities for information-gathering purposes, the information-gathering took a horrible turn. Lori Drew wrote posts calling Megan all sorts of names, saying he never wanted to speak to her again. It’s these posts which Megan’s parents credit with their daughter’s suicide.

The story says the suit brought into court by Meier’s parents alleges

MySpace members agree to abide by terms of service that include, among other things, not promoting information they know to be false or misleading; soliciting personal information from anyone under age 18 and not using information gathered from the Web site to “harass, abuse or harm other people.”

Drew and others who were not named conspired to violate the service terms from about September 2006 to mid-October that year, according to the indictment. It alleges they registered as a MySpace member under a phony name and used the account to obtain information on the girl.

This case will, undoubtedly, be seen as a landmark in online litigation. It will be cited in any future cases of this nature.

While what happened in this situation is deplorable and Drew deserves to be punished for what she did, what some in the blogosphere fail to mention is that Megan’s parents weren’t necessarily as vigilant with monitoring her online activities as they should have been.

She was 13 years old. While three years’ difference may not seem like much in your later teens or beyond, the age and maturity difference between 13 and 16 are gigantic. No 13-year-old girl should be talking to a 16-year-old boy online.

And, that’s another matter. Parents need to be monitoring their children’s online activities, and they need to verify that the people their children are speaking with have real, flesh-and-bone counterparts. They should not be allowed to talk with people, especially to the point of developing a serious-sounding relationship with them, online unless they know them in person prior to conversing online.

Another issue in this case, compounding the tragedy, is that Megan was being treated for depression before her death. Her parents, then, should have been extra careful in watching what she was doing and who she was talking with. They should have had some more serious discussions with her about the potential dangers of getting too attached, and should have more closely monitored their daughter’s actions.

This situation, while incredibly tragic, could have been prevented by a little more vigilance on the Meiers’ part. Drew could have still created the false MySpace profile, but if Megan’s parents were following what she was doing online and having regular discussions with her, Drew’s actions may not have had the impact that they did.

What do you think?