Posted 9:02 AM by Susan Darst Williams

POWERFUL SUGGESTION ON STATE FINANCE TO SENATORS
FROM LONGTIME OMAHA TAX ACTIVIST BOB ZABAWA:
TWO YEARS OF 5% PAY CUTS FOR STATE EMPLOYEES

Senator Wehrbein,

You and your committee associates have nibbled around the edges on your proposed cuts/decreases in increases, moving money from specified funds like the gasoline tax, and maybe things I am not aware of. All this while the revenues, especially from income tax, are declining markedly as the result of the economy going into the tank. And, no sign of any rebound in the next two years with the typical delay in filing returns.

The usual screaming by all state, university and local entities about possible cuts from you, the state, is perfected to a science. Don't cut us, just give us more money, even though have not produced any better results, especially in the field of education.

Over 300 studies on K-12 education and all the elements -- teacher salaries, quality of facilities, pupil-teacher ratios, curriculum, discipline, high expectations and enforced, analyzed by Erik Hanushek, professor at Rochester University, NY, absolutely show that more money is not the answer. Strong curriculum and high expectations do the job.

Now to my point. From the state to the UNL System, the K-12 system, cities and counties, et al, their operating budgets are salaries and healthy fringes (30%) usually representing anywhere from 50% to 85% of the total.

The public sector in this nation, over 19,000,000 employees strong, makes anywhere from 20% to 60% more than the private sector, according to a study done by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) in the mid-1990s. If the trend continues, as it has since then, with the powerful unions getting by with strong-arm negotiation instead of productivity, collectively they will break this country. Just ponder what the steel, meat packing, airline industries and others have done.

In our case in Nebraska, I know we have the CIR in statute, and apparently in statute, that any disputes on salaries cannot take into consideration a falling economy and declining revenues. If true, that needs to be changed by the Legislature.

Now, a suggestion for a solution. Instead of all these agencies nibbling around the edges and cutting the weakest employees and terminating the few non-tenured teachers, why not recommend that all agencies including administrators take consecutive 5% cuts over the next two years and nobody would have to laid off? That would be the compassionate thing to do. If they don't do it voluntarily, force them all into Chapter 11 to renegotiate.

After all, they all have had it pretty good over the last 30-40 years with their steady increases. Maybe a 2-year break in the trend would solve our dilemma.

Posted 11:29 PM by Susan Darst Williams

MOURNING THE LOSS OF A WARRIOR FOR EDUCATION:
LIZ KARNES DIES OF CANCER AFTER A LONG BATTLE

Omahan Liz Karnes, longtime school board member for the Westside Community Schools, has died of ovarian cancer after dealing heroically with the disease and its consequences for more than a dozen years. She held an Ed.D. degree in educational administration and worked in a variety of educational jobs and public service posts.

Throughout her life, she did as much as any Nebraskan in history to inspire people, improve education and encourage children. Wife of attorney David Karnes, the former U.S. senator, and mother of four grown daughters, Mrs. Karnes' one wish upon diagnosis of cancer in 1991 was that she live long enough to see her girls grow up. Observers said it was remarkable that she survived so long and did so much, sharing her charismatic personality and keen intelligence whole-heartedly and with distinction.

Rest in peace, friend of children, inspiration to many, and most of all, child of God.

Posted 11:00 PM by Susan Darst Williams

TWO HEAD-SCRATCHIN' SPENDING ITEMS
FROM FREMONT PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The Fremont Public Schools are going to spend $5,000 for a motivational speaker for faculty and staff next school year, to start the school year off right, according to the Fremont Tribune.

The money will come from a grant from the Lester A. Walker Fund of the Fremont Area Community Foundation.

The key here is not that the donor wanted to do something nice for the schools. That's awesome. What's key is what else school officials could have steered that $5,000 toward . . . just think what $5,000 extra could have provided for students.

You'd think an awfully inspiring and peppy talk could be had for free from some of these public-spirited people always in the news aping about education . . . and the five grand could go for the kids.

The other item, also reported by the Tribune, is that the public schools there are going to subsidize kids who want to go to Camp Invention this summer. Taxpayers will be picking up $140 of each camper's $190 registration fee for the weeklong summer camp, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. June 23-27.

There were reportedly 110 camperships available, so that represents a taxpayer subsidy of $15,400 for the summer school program.

The camp will employ Fremont Middle School geography teacher Jason Chicoine and several other district employees, among others and is open to second through sixth graders.

The question is: haven't we been reading that the Fremont Public Schools is just as worried as the other school districts in Nebraska about state aid and how on earth will they manage to make ends meet?

Do you suppose school officials might subsidize a few taxpayers to attend another kind of Camp Invention -- a camp where taxpayers invent louder loudspeakers through which to state loud and clear that the district should cancel this boondoggle immediately, if not sooner?

Posted 10:50 PM by Susan Darst Williams

RURAL NEBRASKA SUPERINTENDENT
SAYS MAXWELL PLAN WOULD MAKE THINGS WORSE

Here's a letter sent this week to State Sen. Chip Maxwell of Omaha from Superintendent Curtis Cogswell of McCool Junction, a K-12 school district with 150 pupils about 50 miles from Lincoln. Cogswell said in an interview that Maxwell's proposal would takeaway the voice of the people at the local level and ruin schools. He said that all 18 graduates this year are going on to post-secondary institutions, without a single dropout, and that the key reason for that success is what little local control the schools have left. He wrote:

Senator Maxwell:

I just read your educational budget proposal for the 2004-2005 fiscal year. Your proposal did not go far enough. You need to get the State of Nebraska and especially the Legislature out of school funding all together. If our school system operated as inefficiently as the Unicameral we would have been shut down long ago. Give all control back to each local district in regards to funding through property taxes. Continue to set a tax levy limit that must be overridden by the voters if they want to exceed it. If they do not want to exceed the levy then they would decide the future of their district, not the State. Who might be the big loser if we go back to funding schools purely through local property taxes? Could it be Omaha!

WHAT DO WE LOSE IF WE GO TO YOUR PLAN? WE LOSE . . .

a. Further local control of our school districts and give control to senators who know nothing about educating children, some of whom haven't even set foot in a PUBLIC SCHOOL.

b. Small schools where superintendents and principals substitute when teachers are out of the building and help with the maintenance to save money. These people would be forced to go to bigger systems where this is unheard of. Thus cutting out the bureaucracy?

c. Schools which don't need to worry about alternative education because we can serve all of our students. Case in point -- we currently have taken in a student who was going to be expelled from the districts in which he attended. This student is doing quite well in our small school where we can give him the individual attention he needs

d. The school personnel knowing each parent and grandparent of the children in their school, creating a school where the family is valued as one of its greatest assets.

e. The list is endless.

There is a lot more at stake when you start closing schools and more importantly when the Legislature takes the approach that they know what is better for local communities than the people who live in them. The runaway spending by schools which you so commonly refer to (we operate our K-12 district on $110,000 per month) can be attributed to a number of things, from health Insurance going up at a rate of 10-19% a year to the services we use, like advice from lawyers who increase their fees each year. Senator Maxwell, why are you not calling for a freeze on these types of expenses? Or are some runaway expenses all right while others are not?

Senator Maxwell, I invite you to visit the McCool Junction schools where I have the privilege of serving as superintendent. It is only 50 minutes from Lincoln and would be well worth your visit to see what small schools have to offer. By the way, according to most legislative proposals, our district looks to get zero dollars in state aid.

I served as an administrator in a district with 30,000 students and chose to come to a district with 150 students. Please don't take that choice away from parents, especially when the state isn't funding any part of our budget.

Please come see this small school so you have another perspective of the future that YOU choose to represent. The children of Nebraska deserve your best in every decision you make. I would be more than happy to come to Lincoln to pick you up and bring you out to our school to visit. I am very serious about my proposal to have you come see this school. Sometimes it is easy to make a decision 50 miles away when you don't see the faces of the people impacted by those decisions. I can be reached at work: (402) 724-2231 or home: (402) 724-3150.

Curtis Cogwell, Superintendent
McCool Junction Public Schools

Posted 12:08 PM by Susan Darst Williams

TAX WATCHDOG LIKES MAXWELL PLAN
WITH A FEW 'TWEAKS'

Here's a letter from Wally Fritsch, an Omaha tax watchdog, who suggests a few changes to the plan proposed by Sen. Chip Maxwell of Omaha to shift state aid to education to one per-pupil sum instead of all different ones. Overall, though, Fritsch urges support for the Maxwell plan in the Legislature's education, appropriations and revenue committees, and with other senators.

---------------------------

I have received the proposal from Senator Chip Maxwell concerning his approach to the budget problem and education funding and have read it for concept.

I have found some items on the downside which, in my opinion, needing clarification or revision:

-- On his proposal to fund schools on a per-student sum only: first, the count should be on the average daily attendance only. A head count is more accurate than enrollment padding.

-- Objections to the unit funding must be made after a performance audit by the State Auditor to verify any claim of under funding.

-- Special education and alternative education will be a separate funding by the state. There must be guide lines established for qualification of these students.

-- The tax base of one half of real property value + income to fund education may be questionable from some aspects.

On the upbeat side there are some good points of great value to both education and taxpayers:

-- The plan would encourage consolidation of small districts to eliminate administration costs or merge districts.

-- Efficiency of schools would improve because of the uniform funding of all students.

-- Equity of funding will be positive and eliminate possible claims of court actions to get more.

-- The "Social Engineering" factor incorporated in the present special education programs would be removed from the schools and managed by state programs.

-- The total education taxation would be based on actual need if the program of performance audits is demanded by the legislature.

-- Lobbying efforts by educators, which we pay for, would be curtailed or eliminated.

-- The time delay incorporated by the 2004-05 year funding lapse would give the Legislature time to place a long term working program in effect.

Please contact your State Senator and ask for support of Senator Maxwell's proposal.

TAXWATCHERS INC

Wally Fritsch

Posted 12:30 AM by Susan Darst Williams

OH, THE SUN DOESN'T SHINE SO BRIGHT
ON OUR OLD KENTUCKY EDUCATION SYSTEM --
HERE'S HOPING NEBRASKA TAKES NOTE

KENTUCKY TESTING DEBACLE SHOWS FOLLY OF REMOVING LOCAL CONTROL

Kentucky was the first state to Goals 2000-ize itself, and institutionalize Outcome-Based Education in its public schools, replacing local control with state control.

Now it has major, major egg on its face. Are other states paying attention?

After a lengthy court fight led by radical leftists in that state, a June 8, 1989, ruling by the Kentucky Supreme Court held that it was unfair for some districts to spend more per pupil than others just because they happened to have more wealth in their districts. In response, the 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) became law and basically ruined the schools by "governmentalizing" them.

With a tax increase of $1.4 billion, a whole new system was put in place. It includes standards, assessments, graduation proficiency exams, penalties for schools that don't meet their goals and millions of dollars of rewards for those that do. Plus Kentucky now has a whole new big bureaucracy to administer all this. It's the same kinds of incredibly expensive and intrusive system that most states now are putting in, and which will be made even worse as the federal program, No Child Left Behind, sinks its teeth even deeper into public schools and pushes local school boards aside.

But here's what's sad:

After all of that spending and hardball politics and fuss, Kentucky's ACT scores last year averaged 20 out of 36, one of the worst averages in the nation. That average ticked up just .10 of 1 point since 1990. All that money, and all that damage to schools, for absolutely nothing.

Now that they realize that financially, educationally and from a public-policy standpoint, this has been a disaster, the state is considering getting rid of its statewide high-stakes assessments, the CATS exams (Commonwealth Accountability Testing System), but they have all that bureaucracy in place, they want to save face, and it's a big, fat mess.

You can read all about what's going on in the article, "Critics Push to Revamp CATS Exams," in the April 22 Louisville Courier-Journal, www.courier-journal.com

And you can talk to your state senators and educators and warn them that Kentucky puts on a heck of a horse race, but their education system is a broken-down nag.

Posted 12:28 AM by Susan Darst Williams

TAX WATCHDOGS APPROVE OF MAXWELL'S PLAN

Doug Kagan of Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom reports that he is conversant with Sen. Maxwell's plan to equalize state aid to education in the same lump sum per pupil statewide, and is willing to work with him on the idea.


ARTICLE ON HAWAII'S STATE-RUN SCHOOLS NOT SO ROSY

On the other hand, balance and equity in spending per pupil across a state has gotten a big, fat thumbs down in Hawaii.

Fans of Maxwell's plans ought to take note.

According to an article, "The Death of Public School" in the May 2001 issue of the magazine "Honolulu," Hawaii is the only state with a centralized school district offering universal free public education and the same amount spent per pupil, using state employees in a system that allows very little local say-so in any aspect of operations.

How is it working? Well, 71 percent of public school parents graded Hawaii's schools a "C" or worse; fewer than 2 percent gave them an "A."

The national publication, "Education Week," ranks Hawaii seventh from last in terms of a number of performance measures.

Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are below the national averages, as is the average SAT score of 995 (in 1999), vs. the national average of 1016 that year.

Even though school spending increased by 34 percent after inflation between 1986 and 1996 and stands as one of the highest spending levels in the nation, the longer students are in the Hawaii public school system, the worse they do on standardized tests compared to their age peers nationwide.

"Equity of funding is a farce," one state representative is quoted as saying.

Consider the subheads in the article:

Government, Not Public, Schools

Equity? Ha!

Inefficient, Ineffective

What Money?

Not a Happy Place

No One Is in Charge

Guild Protection

They've Got the Power

The Alternatives

Homeschooling

Vouchers

Charter Schools

The article's conclusion: "The state can't do the job. We've given it more than 40 years to try. Now it's time to kick government out of the public schools."

Those who think Maxwell's plan might take politics out of education might want to study this article.

Posted 10:20 AM by Susan Darst Williams

SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER, NORTHEAST NEBRASKA:
RESPONSE TO SEN. MAXWELL'S PLAN

Say we have 1,000 students in the state. Say we have $100,000 to spend in state aid.

What say, we send each of them $1,000.

But someone else says, "It only costs $600 in Plattsmouth and the burden is $1,400 in Taylor, because they only have enough students to average 15 per class."

It is an impossible task to equalize educational resources and opportunities with mindsets like that. What we need is a willingness to be fair and impartial, and then use that good, old-fashioned American ingenuity to make it work in every district.

And I say, knock down a wall between the third- and fourth-grade classes, and then do the same in all classes in odd and even years. How do I know that will work? The smartest, best-educated, best-adjusted people I have ever known were my parents, who both attended one-room schools. It isn't the dollars spent per pupil. It's the ability to do the best you can for kids with whatever resources you have, and those are too small for the way you've been doing things, you have to change.

The problem is that every senator feels a need to appease and try and represent his district and the other 48 at the same time. The Unicameral is not King Arthur's Round Table; it is a legislative body that has forgotten to focus on the needs of its constituency.

Posted 10:14 AM by Susan Darst Williams

DICK BUNTGEN, NEBRASKA TAXPAYERS ASSOCIATION:
RESPONSE TO SEN. MAXWELL'S PLAN

We fell for the "create a new tax for schools and reduce the property
taxes" before. The property taxes went back up and the sales and income taxes have been increased to
pay for education. I believe the teachers union would jump at this, in order to get a new taxing
plan introduced into the system. The teachers union would only need 25 votes to increase any new
tax.

Sen. Brashear pushed his plan of taxing services to lower the tax rates and now look, rates are going
up even with the tax expansion.

Sen. Maxwell brings up some good ideas but there are a lot of problems in taxing and spending and
I'm afraid that Sen. Maxwell's plan is not that well thought out.

Posted 7:14 PM by Susan Darst Williams

Happy Easter, one and all. :>)

--------------------------------

SEN. MAXWELL MIGHT HAVE A PLAN

There are a lot of things to like in the new plan to abolish state aid to education announced this week by State Sen. Chip Maxwell of Omaha.

He would replace it with a new, 1.5 percent variable state tax on income and property. About two-thirds of this tax would come from property and one-third from income. That would keep the funding level relatively stable regardless of what happens with the economy and people's incomes. And it would be kinder and gentler to property-rich, income-poor citizens such as farmers and seniors, both of which groups grace Nebraska from the Iowa coast to the Wyoming shore.

On the down side, the plan would force wealthier citizens to subsidize poorer ones across the state. But that is already happening. And as a matter of public policy, that might be better than the alternative, which appears to be allowing the collapse of most of the state's rural schools, and unconscionable disparities in funding power between rich and poor urban neighborhoods, which appear to be widening the achievement gap between rich and poor students.

Another down side is that the Maxwell Plan would require a constitutional amendment to add the new state tax, and the special-interest groups, chiefly the teachers' unions, will fight it tooth and nail. But Maxwell is convinced that the plan makes enough sense economically and educationally that the silent majority will outshout the educrats at the ballot box.

State aid is a mess, everyone agrees, and so this plan comes at an opportune time.

Right now, sales and income taxes pour in to the state and are tweaked to kingdom come in a strange compendium of formulas and figurings before being regurgitated back to school districts in a goofy patchwork of amounts of state aid that make little sense.

Under Maxwell's plan, every child enrolled would bring in the same amount -- $5,500 per pupil per year in the first year of the plan, 2004-05. That state subsidy would go up or down based on the Consumer Price Index, but not much. Since enrollment doesn't change that much from year to year, districts would have a pretty solid idea of how much is coming, and that's a good thing.

Maxwell also would shift to 100 percent state funding of special education, which might help get a handle on that runaway train and start ''paying down'' the disgraceful overidentification of ''learning disabled'' kids that districts are doing just to get extra money.

He also would add a new institution – state-run alternative schools – for kids with serious behavior problems, drug addictions, difficult personal problems and so forth. Maxwell figures that something like 5 percent of the Nebraska K-12 student body would shift into these schools, or 14,200 kids statewide. As long as these schools are kept the Sam Hill away from becoming School-to-Work slave-labor training camps, and the focus is constantly on returning these children to academic soundness and their regular schools, then that would be a good thing, too. It might even be enough of a carrot to earn support of the state's educators, who are constantly complaining about the distractions and difficulties of educating kids who are besieged with ''issues'' too tangled for public schools to mend . . . and yet, who love the extra dough that comes with the ''at-risk'' designation and thus have disincentives to help these kids get strong.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the Maxwell plan is its very uniformity of school funding. It may drive the silk-stocking set crazy to think that their children get no more dough for fancy-pants activities that, by the way, do nothing to build their vocabularies and grasp of reality, but which sound really, really good when the parents brag about it on the cocktail party circuit. This plan would take away the ''edge'' the rich schools think they have over the hoi polloi.

That might drive people with means out of the public schools and into the private schools, where they can donate money to ensure that their child has access to a digital camera or a CAD/CAM lab, for example. There, they would see how much money the public schools are wasting on nonacademics far away from the classroom, and in contrast how efficiently and well the private schools are managing money and preparing young minds and hearts for life.

Now, think about it. A decline in enrollment in the public schools and a corresponding groundswell of public opinion that the private schools are doing a better job might be the only way to force the public schools to get better. Right now, they have no reason to: they ''get paid'' regardless.

But under Maxwell's plan, if there were an exodus of ''the beautiful people,'' the public schools would have a reason to get them back in order to rebuild their enrollment figures. And that might be enough to refocus them on academics, cut out the deadwood, stop the waste, get rid of the social engineering – all of which parents want. It would force them to treat parents as customers. That would be a good thing. It would force them to get rid of a lot of the costly, nonacademic nonsense that is not competitive with the private schools, which stick to business.

Competition would be good for public schools in Nebraska. They would get better. And that would be a very good thing.

Remember, Maxwell's a politician, so gentlepersons, start your grains of salt, but he had the Legislative Fiscal Office run numbers for him, and he's claiming there would be a 25 percent property tax reduction under his plan. That would be a very, very good thing.

He's calling for people to contact their state senators and talk up his plan among their friends and colleagues.

Get in touch with him and get a copy of his plan, entitled ''Budget Proposal,'' via email at cmaxwell@unicam.state.ne.us

Let Go Big Ed know what you think of this, too. That would be the "goodest" thing of all.

Posted 12:44 AM by Susan Darst Williams

YOGA IN YORK, ACTION IN ALLIANCE, AND AN END IN ELKHORN

Here’s a look at three education issues around Nebraska:

Children’s Yoga Program in York Points Up Problems

An alert reader in York, Neb., sent in a notice about a children’s yoga program scheduled for Saturday as part of the Week of the Young Child celebration in that town.

Children from ages 4 to 10 are invited to the free event.

The reader said that yoga has been taught along with meditation and relaxation techniques across the state as part of physical education or regular classroom relaxation exercises. An Internet search showed that at least one yoga instructor says that she has taught yoga in the Omaha Public Schools and in District 66, for example.

But the reader wasn’t aware of yoga for children as young as 4, and wondered if yoga was spreading as part of the school curriculum.

Well, if it is, parents shouldn’t be happy about it. Experts on New Age religions such as Marcia Montenegro, a guest on Omaha radio station KCRO’s Paul & Marty talk show recently, warn parents that yoga is not good for kids. See her yoga article on

http://cana.userworld.com/cana_yoga.html

She says yoga postures combined with breathing and relaxation techniques can and do produce a light trance state -- an altered state of consciousness -- especially in vulnerable young children who lack the reasoning powers and ego defenses that could prevent such a change in consciousness.

This is dangerous for several reasons. Not the least of them is that yoga conditions children to seek to lose their self-awareness, define their own reality, and empty their minds –- all of which are anti-intellectual and may contribute to later use of drugs and alcohol to induce that lesser state of consciousness. That would seem to be the opposite of what a solid education is supposed to be about.

According to Ms. Montenegro and other yoga critics, yoga comes from the Sanskrit term to “yoke” or “unite” with the divine, impersonal, unknowable, inexplicable force that the Hindus describe as “God” or “Brahman.” That’s in direct contradiction to the Judeo-Christian concept of “God,” described in the Bible as personal, relational and knowable.

Further, yoga postures honor Hindu deities such as the sun, tiger, tree and snake. So the idea of instructing young children to arrange their bodies to resemble those Hindu deities is problematic.

Hindu documents show that the purpose of yoga is for the imaginary union of the coiled serpent they believe is lying at the base of one’s spine – “the goddess Shakti” –to unite with “Shiva,” her “consort,” who resides at the center of the forehead between the eyebrows. Yoga arouses the serpent power of Shakti so that this can happen, and supposedly provides the yoga practitioner with special psychic abilities and sinless perfection.

Even if yoga instructors don’t know a thing about the background of yoga and aren’t teaching all of that to the kids, that doesn’t excuse or justify what they are doing.

Also problematic is the fact that all physical yoga exercises are acknowledged precursors to the spiritual exercises of Hinduism. The whole idea is to deny your individual identity and “lose yourself” – and presumably your “stress” – by melting in to the “God” that the Hindus say is in everything and everybody.

That’s also in direct contradiction to the religious beliefs of the vast majority of the children who would be involved in the yoga activities.

Last, but not least, if yoga is taught in school, it constitutes the use of the public’s tax money to teach and promote the religious practices of one particular faith – obviously a violation of the First Amendment.

Whether it’s in a preschool setting or a public school classroom, a community program or a private class, wise parents and educators will investigate yoga thoroughly before they ever expose young children to the activity.


Alliance Parents Jam School Board Meeting Over K-4 Split

So many parents crowded into the recent school board meeting of the Alliance (Neb.) Public Schools to protest a planned split of the grade schools that the school board tabled the change and scheduled another public meeting for later – a classic defense maneuver by a school board that realizes it has made a boo-boo.

According to the Alliance-based online newspaper, www.Xpressnews.com, the school board sought to divide the two grade schools in Alliance, Grandview and Emerson, into one school that would hold grades K-2, and another that would hold grades 2-4.

Past news stories have indicated that there is more poverty among the children in one of those schools than the other, and low-income children have more intense learning needs than others. So it was proposed to mix the low-income learners with the middle- and upper-income kids to try to offset those problems.

The trouble is, that is perceived as improper social engineering by many parents. They packed the school board meeting to share concerns about safety, busing, supervision, splitting families, halting cross-grade interaction, academic setbacks caused by frequent school changes, and so on.

Of 24 parents who testified, 20 favored keeping the grade schools as they are, one was for the school board’s proposal and the others were neutral.

It is believed to be one of the largest turnouts of parents at a school board meeting anywhere in Nebraska this year.


Elkhorn High School Solves First Amendment Conflict

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter at Elkhorn (Neb.) High School is one of the most popular student activities available. As many as 100 teens gather on Wednesday evenings at school to shoot hoops, do good deeds and talk about how their faith shapes everything they do. There are adult chaperones present, but it’s the kids’ gig and they set the agenda and plan the activities. They play together . . . and they pray together.

But complaints were lodged by a local woman with a daughter at the school who has been on record against any mention of religious activities or opportunities in the schools because her family does not have a religious faith and she feels the girl is being isolated and diminished by school offerings in which she will not or cannot participate.

The woman said it could be misconstrued that the school was sponsoring the FCA because the FCA’s activities, although held in the evening, still took place in the school building, and were promoted at school, including posters and published articles about upcoming FCA events in the student newspaper.

Reportedly, the school was about to censor all mention of FCA in that newspaper until another parent stepped in with journalistic and legal evidence that showed that censorship would be wrong.

Ironically, the clincher was a nationally famous First Amendment case stemming from a conflict at nearby Omaha Westside High School. A dozen years ago, a student there wanted to have an after-school Bible Club with the same access to the school paper and other support and promotional services as other student clubs that are for kids but are not curriculum-related, such as the chess club and the pep club. School officials wouldn’t allow it and fought her all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Court eventually ruled against Westside officials, saying that student-initiated and student-run clubs must be allowed at public schools as long as they don’t disrupt the educational process, and neither treated with favor nor hostility in comparison with other noncurriculum clubs (Board of Education v. Mergens, 1990). Anything less than that is a violation of the students’ free speech rights and freedom of assembly.

In response to the FCA matter, Elkhorn officials decided against censorship, and for allowing FCA articles in the student paper under the heading of “Student Sponsored Groups” instead of “Club Hubbub,” the heading for official school-sponsored clubs.

Journalism advisor Judy Obert called it “a very workable solution.”

For more on religious freedoms in public schools, see the U.S. Department of Education’s manual.

Posted 2:46 PM by Susan Darst Williams

BOTTOM LINE ON HEAD START AND OTHER FORMAL 'PUBLIC PRESCHOOLS'

If your school district or attached foundation wants to use tax dollars or contributions that provide tax writeoffs to start or expand a pre-kindergarten program, listen up: there's a big, fat hole of the bottom of that preschool sandbox that, financially speaking, is a lot like a rathole that will waste that money and potentially harm children.

Many Nebraska school districts have started pre-kindergarten preschools and child-care programs on school property, and most Nebraska taxpayers think that's dandy. Most taxpayers think Head Start programs, using tax dollars to presumably give disadvantaged preschoolers a boost to get them ready for school, make a lot of sense, too.

But research is showing that these programs waste money and don't help kids in particular or society in general.

Research is showing that even the highest quality, most expensive formal preschool programs have little or no effect on children's intellectual development or school performance . . . and indeed, may have negative behavioral consequences on down the road.

Prudent public school districts would cancel their preschool and child-care operations immediately, if they were really serious about doing what is best for children . . . and not just interested in bringing more money into their own coffers.

There have been several large-scale, randomized trials over the last 40 years in which high-quality preschool's impact was measured on the intellectual, academic and behavioral development of children. All have shown that children who spent a lot of time in child-care centers had significantly more behavior problems in primary school than children of similar demographics who spent most of the their preschool time in their own homes.

As for claims of intellectual or academic benefits from programs such as Head Start for low-income children, empirical research is showing that those claims are untrue. Results have been distorted by major problems with the study design models, and many of those used by the pro-child-care industry to justify additional expenditures actually lacked the quality controls of peer review. In other words, they were "spin" that public education bought as fact.

In truth, there is no difference in intellectual functioning or school performance that could be attributed to participation in out-of-home child care in the preschool years.

The disputed studies were the Abecedarian Project (Ramey & Cambell, 1984), the Houston Preschool Project (Johnson & Walker, 1987) and the Perry Preschool Project (Berrueta-Clement, Schweinhart et al., 1984).

Duhhhh! What have good mothers and fathers been TELLING the politicians and the schools about what a waste of money free child-care is? The fact is, paying strangers and outsiders to do the job of moms and dads has never worked, and is never GOING to work. What WILL work is to cut taxes so that more moms and dads can afford to work fewer hours and have more time with their kids, where they should be, providing the only real advantage that is indisputable. And what will do THAT -- cut taxes -- is to get rid of bogus school-spending programs such as pre-K, which never should have been funded in the first place.

You can read the research yourself on the Eagle Forum's Education Reporter newspaperin the article, "Do Pre-K Center Care Programs Work?" by Verne R. Bacharach, Ph. D., Alfred A. Baumeister, Ph.D., and Jaimily A. Stoecker, M.A., C.A.S.

Their conclusion: "(I)t is obviously foolish, at best, for states to develop expensive pre-K programs in anticipation of some type of payoff 15 to 20 years down the road when there is no consistent scientific evidence for the efficacy of these programs."

That means any educator who still thinks it pays to offer free "sandbox school" at taxpayer expense in direct competition with the private sector, causing apparent harm to young children who would be better off in their own homes, doesn't have the brains to . . . pound sand.

Posted 2:21 PM by Susan Darst Williams

IS SCHOOL CHOICE GETTING THE BIG MO?

Colorado lawmakers last week enacted a way for disadvantaged kids to afford private school and avoid lousy inner-city public schools with a voucher program heavily supported by Republican politicians and pro-minority Democrats. It will offer tuition reimbursement to an estimated 17,500 students in 11 large school districts, mostly in Denver, by the year 2007.

According to Monday's Wall Street Journal (p. A15), the program joins existing school-choice options in Milwaukee, Cleveland and Florida, while similar moves are under consideration in Texas, Louisiana and Washington, D.C. The Lone Star State proposal alone could involve as many as 600,000 students, evidence of momentum that may be building nationwide as the benefits of school choice are exposed, discussed and promulgated.

Will Nebraska be far behind? Probably. But let's keep this in mind:

School choice programs are only as good as the lack of governmental interference that is allowed to be tied to them. Those who are skeptical that government will be able to keep mitts off private schools even if public funding is going in to them should remain skeptical of school-choice programs. They do look an awful lot like a governmental foot in the door of private education.

That's how I stand, and will probably continue to stand. I think it makes a lot more sense to stay away from putting tax dollars into school choice programs. Instead, we should encourage private donations to private children's scholarship funds to keep the entanglement of state and federal regulations out of the private schools as much as possible while still offering equal educational opportunity to poor kids.

If Nebraska enacts a vouchers proposal, it will wind up doing more harm than good if the education establishment -- the unions and the edu-bureaucries -- are allowed to interfere, and changes are they will. It will take shape as the state education department attacking the autonomy of the private schools that receive the vouchers income with harmful accreditation and assessment requirements. They'll do it in the name of assuring the public some accountability -- but the net effect will be to morph the private schools into carbon copies of the public schools. See? A vouchers proram, in other words, has real downside potential to destroy the very alternatives -- private schools -- that make them so attractive.

The only vouchers proram that should be permitted and espoused is one modeled after the GI Bill of the post-World War II era.

When we hear politicians promise that style, then maybe we should listen.

That is, the vouchers should be given to the parents to be spent where they think best -- with no governmental strings attached on the schools that enroll those students, other than assuring that they meet the basic health, safety and statutory requirements that already are, presumably, monitored and regulated, and properly so.

Let's bring school choice to Nebraska. Let's bring free enterprise to education. But for heaven's sake, let's not allow the unions and the bureaucrats to shape it. Let's keep that role where it belongs -- in the private sector.

Posted 12:45 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HOW TO BEAT BACK YEAR-ROUND SCHOOL IN RALSTON

Here we go again: the Ralston Public Schools are attempting to jam year-round education into that cash-strapped district. They're pitching it as a way to help students avoid "backsliding" during the long summer breaks. This is even though there is no evidence that Ralston students "backslide," and even though there is no evidence that the nine weeks on, three weeks off calendar as proposed for Ralston makes a particle of difference to educational quality anywhere it is being tried in the world.

Indeed, an assistant superintendent of the Los Angeles public schools recently admitted that the nontraditional school schedule employed there because of massive overcrowding in LA has "hurt students badly." Year-rounding has been tried, and dumped, everywhere from LA to Denver to Miami, and Ralston voters deserve to know why.

If Ralston educators and school-board members don't acknowledge the "con" side of this issue, that's a red flag to Ralston voters that they'd better stay away from this change with a 10-foot pole. If the Ralston educrats did supply the "con" evidence, though, there might be a move to fire them for even suggesting this boneheaded change that has been so discredited nationwide.

Parents in Ralston need to be alerted to an excellent website with tons of documentation for why year-round education is a bad idea. It's from education activist Wes Walker, who advises parent groups coast to coast on this issue and would be well worth contacting on behalf of the Ralston community:

Wes Walker's Year-Round Education Website

Ralston officials also should be asked:

1. What hard evidence (quality, reality-based research, not people's opinions) is there that the nontraditional calendar is better for the specific Ralston academic community than the traditional school calendar?

2. Since there isn't any evidence that nontraditional calendars are better, why shouldn't Ralston go back to the Labor Day to Memorial Day calendar with a nice Christmas break and a nice Easter break, instead of the goofy half-day on, half-day off, start in mid-August calendar that people hate and that has demonstrably damaged and distracted learning efforts over the past few years?

3. How come Ralston voters are being told that year-round education implementation would cost from $12,895 to $23,659 per school, when national authorities such as Governing Magazine estimate the average implementation cost as $100,000 per school, and that doesn't count ongoing higher costs for such items as air conditioning, other utilities, transportation, and additional teacher pay and benefits?

---------------------------

Here's my educational advice column on the topic from my upcoming series, "Show 'n' Tell for Parents":

Year-Round Education

Q. What are the pro’s and con’s of year-round school?

The pro’s are available from the National Association for Year-Round Education, www.nayre.org

The con’s are documented on the website of education activist Wes Walker, www.geocities.com/weswalker99/

Year-round schooling is generally composed of nine-week quarters with two or three weeks off, and an abbreviated four- or five-week summer break. It is associated with the school management fad, “Total Quality Management,” with its mantra “continuous progress.” It’s also linked to the job-training systems and student apprenticeships of School-to-Work programs that require year-round student workforces.

Bottom line: there’s a glaring absence of evidence that changes to school calendars produce academic gains for the vast majority of students. YRE is hard on family life. And while a shorter summer does reduce backsliding among at-risk, impoverished children, their needs can be met with far less disruption and cost than radically changing the school calendar.

Year-round education has been dumped in so many locations that it is perplexing why educators still attempt to put it in place. Parents usually have to research YRE’s track record for themselves in order to learn the truth about it. It appears to be an attempt by educators to gain more income stream for the public schools and to justify higher salaries for educators in 12-month jobs that the public intends to be 9-month jobs.

Homework: “Academics, the Year-Round Calendar, and the Color of the School Buses,” Christopher Newland, Ph.D.
www.auburn.edu/~enebasa/html/Newland_article.pp.html

Posted 12:30 AM by Susan Darst Williams

ODE TO YEAR-ROUND SCHOOL

(to the tune of "The Caissons Go Marching Along")

School all summer!
School all winter!
So much seat time, get a splinter
As the endless school year rolls along.

From my birth
To 18
'N' every moment in between,
I am tied to my school my life long.

I'm no longer free;
No individuality.
'Cause they have to make sure
That I conform!

Parents ask:
"What's next?"
School's building an annex
So we kids can live year-round in dorms.

Posted 11:07 AM by Susan Darst Williams

HOPE FOR KIDS WHO CAN'T READ, AND SEND THE BILL TO YOUR SCHOOL

If your child has been enrolled in the $7,000-plus-a-year public schools and still can't read at grade level, quit spinning your wheels expecting people who have shown that they can't teach your child how to read to somehow be able to do the job even though they insist on using the same old, failed methods.

Instead, enroll your child in the excellent summer reading program at Creighton University . . . and send the bill to your public school.

Creighton annually invites the Institute of Reading Development to teach the summer weekend classes as a community service, with tuition at $289 for five or six sessions, a fraction of the expense of reading remediation in the public schools.

For children ages 4 through entering fifth-graders, there is a reading class with phonics, comprehension and fluency.

For 6th to 8th graders, and 9th to 11th graders, there is an advanced program said to more than double reading speed and to improve reading comprehrehension one to two grade levels, adding study skills.

For adults, entering high-school seniors, and college students, there is speed reading, which is claimed to improve reading speed by three to four times for light reading and two to three times for professional material, with comprehension, concentration and retention techniques.

For more information, call (800) 979-9151, 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday.

Posted 12:09 PM by Susan Darst Williams

MOO! MILLARD MONTESSORI IS A SACRED COW

It's wacky enough to know that one of Nebraska's largest school districts has a Montessori program in it. That's a non-mainstream alternative from the private sector: making Millard taxpayers foot the bill for it is even more radical than (gasp!) the outlandish (?) notion of making Millard taxpayers foot the bill for any other non-mainstream education alternative, including Christian schooling and homeschooling.

What's even more amazing is the fact that Montessori in Millard is costing taxpayers $1,200 per pupil more than the average price per pupil for the regular education program. This is odd, in light of the fact that school-choice voucher programs are always for amounts of money that are less than the regular education per-pupil figure. And it's odd, since there is an utter absence of any evidence that Montessori educates the kids any better than the regular format or prepares the kids any better for real life. In fact, except for a hothoused few children who came out of Montessori programs, who would have excelled in any educational setting, Montessori methods are so anti-academic that they may be crippling children’s literacy and numeracy skills. How? By denying them the foundational basics of logic and language. That's because Montessori is the epitome of ''child-centered education,'' or the ''discovery learning'' process, in which children supposedly teach themselves by learning through play . . . at enormous taxpayer expense, with no evidence that there's more bang for the buck.

With these factors in mind, it's astounding and confounding to learn that Millard parents are still fighting to keep their Montessori program and funding in place, in the face of massive, mega budget crunches in school districts statewide, including in Millard.

But here's what's really weird:

If you type ''Montessori'' and ''occult'' into a search engine, your hair will reach a vertical state within minutes as you read how the Montessori philosophy is linked to spiritism, anti-Christian ideology, goddess worship, pro-humanism, pro-evolution, pro-socialism and pro-globalism.

For a taste of how Maria Montessori saw life and the purpose of education, go to http://mnatal.members.easyspace.com/montessoriinherownwords.htm and see if you think these are the ideas that a public school district in the year 2003 should be using to mold and shape young children.

Montessori was an Italian physician (1870-1952) who apparently was shut out of the choice medical jobs because of gender discrimination. So she turned to working with retarded children in a psychiatric clinic at the University of Rome. She applied her ideas from working with them to a school for slum children in Rome and opened the ''Casa dei Bambini'' (''Children’s House'') for poor children in 1907. Now there are Montessori schools throughout the world, most of them private preschools and grade schools for which parents pay tuition.

Montessori is characterized by a ''prepared environment'' with child-sized materials. That made good sense in the slums of Rome, where the street urchins did not come from homes with plentiful food, books, toys or certainly parental attention. But it's a stark mismatch with today's suburban schoolchildren, and another example of the educational overspending on the wrong things that is squeezing the life’s blood out of our schools.

The Montessori method also is problematic. In stark contrast to what we know from scientific research about the best ways of giving children the building blocks of literacy and logic, the Montessori school allows young children to flit from activity to activity – whatever interests them – instead of receiving a logical, systematic, comprehensive education in the basics of reading, writing, 'rithmetic and all the rest.

With Montessori's system, children discover things on their own. Teachers act as facilitators and suppliers, rather than instructors. Children are free to choose what to work on and to move around the room and talk when they feel like it. The emphasis is on hands-on, group activities. That means the emphasis is off intellectual, individual pursuits, chiefly . . . reading. Sigh.

But the method has come under the most criticism for its unorthodox approach to New Age-style ''spiritual education'' for children that is definitely slanted toward humanism and globalism, and away from traditional concepts like national sovereignty and traditional religions such as Judaism and Christianity. The extreme aversion to anything even approaching direct instruction and authority figures in the classroom has a tendency to produce children with an extreme aversion to systematic rules and methods, and authority in general. That doesn't bode well for the employers and husbands and wives of the future, who will have to work and live with these people.

In addition, Dr. Montessori herself was a unique and controversial figure. Seen as a feminist idol, she bore an illegitimate son and chose to relinquish him in order to fulfill her professional ambitions. She lived at home until she was 42. She had a longtime relationship with Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. He appointed her chief inspector of schools in Italy and gave her schools government funding. They eventually split over his dictate that kids wear uniforms. When she refused, funding was cut off and Montessori schools were closed, so she quit.

Later in life, Dr. Montessori lived in India and was involved in many cross pollinations of world religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and contemporary paganism. Her writings have a constant emphasis on the need for ''world peace,'' and since her goal was to model herself as a ''world citizen,'' she was buried in Holland simply because that's where she was when she died.

Dr. Montessori was in to theosophy, a turn-of-the-century European spiritual movement that has turned out most of the New Age leaders around the world today. Theosophy is patently anti-Christian, was linked to the fascists in Italy, denies Biblical truth, and seeks to promulgate the belief that there is a ''god'' within each of us that we should set free instead of being constrained by all those ''suffocating'' institutions such as organized religion.

Lastly, there's a cult-like attitude among Montessori teachers and parents that becomes an ''us against them'' mentality. There is a lot of bashing of conventional schooling and conventional parents and an air of arrogance and contempt to methods that are in opposition to Montessori methods. This defensive posture blocks the free exchange of ideas about the propriety and sense of many of the methods and practices being used, and if anyone tries to give a Montessori fan any contradictory evidence, that person is liable to get kicked in the head by the sacred cow.

So . . . to review . . .

Montessori is 'way more expensive than regular education . . .

. . . it was developed for retarded and impoverished children in Europe, and for not the typical, well-off, American suburban children found in districts like Millard . . .

. . . there's no evidence it works any better than regular education . . .

. . . it flies in the face of research that clearly shows which are the best educational methods . . .

. . . and it's chock full of weird, New Age occultism . . .

. . . but the Millard School Board should keep it, anyway . . . because the parents want something to brag about . . . or something?

Let's see what the Millard School Board does with this one. Will they cut the sacred cow out of the herd? Or will they continue to put up with this . . . educational bull?

Posted 12:06 PM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA 12th IN THE NATION IN DISABLED CHILDREN?

Nebraska ranks 12th in the nation in the percentage of "Children With Disabilities," as defined by their schools, according to the Congressional Quarterly 2003 State Fact Finder book, based on the 1999-00 school year.

That's not surprising, in light of last week's revelations in these columns that spotlights possible widespread mislabeling of children in Nebraska as being "learning disabled." The phenomenon suggests that schools are deliberately miseducating young children and crippling their reading abilities to force them into special education categories, in a cynical grab for additional federal funding.

This is a scandal, sports fans. One would hope the outcry about this ranking would be a lot louder than the outcry about falling out of the top 10 in football.

Maybe Go Big Ed ought to get some tough, new coaches to go get in the educators' faces and make 'em run the stairs 'til they can show they're doing a better job for our kids.

Posted 11:29 PM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA'S LEARNING DISABILITIES SCANDAL

If you husk the covers off Nebraska's school spending, you'll expose a kernel of truth: we are blowing millions upon millions of dollars needlessly on special education.

Not only that, but our pattern appears to be racist. And the numbers of children identified as troubled learners is growing instead of shrinking, which casts aspersions on our instructional strategies for them, not to mention the cost-efficiency thereof. And we could just about solve our spending crisis and equalize educational opportunity among the races in one fell swoop if we’d do one thing right the first time:

Teach reading.

We're blowing it, especially for Nebraska's poor and minority students. And that ain't no corn.

According to the National Center on Learning Disabilities (www.ncld.org/advocacy) Nebraska had 16,299 students in the 1999-00 school year labeled as having ''specific learning disabilities.'' If they were all enrolled in the same place, it would form one of the largest school districts in the state. A big-spending one, too: spending on learning-disabled kids is several thousand dollars more per year per pupil than spending on regularly-instructed kids.

That means learning disability designations are costing Nebraska taxpayers tens of millions of dollars per year. But now it looks as though at least half of that excess spending is totally preventable with just a few common-sense changes in reading curriculum and instruction in the early grades.

Millions of dollars wasted, year after year? Damaging and destroying the educational prospects of a significant portion of the state's minority population?

That ain't no corn, either. That's a scandal.

According to the NCLD organization, Nebraska’s learning-disabled population is overrepresented by black, Hispanic and Native American children. It also reported that high-school completion rates for learning-disabled (LD) students is far less in Nebraska than for their peers nationwide. In Nebraska, 36.5 percent of the LD kids drop out at age 14 and older, compared to the national average of 27.1 percent of LD kids who fail to finish school.

According to the NCLD’s 23rd annual report to Congress measuring the 1999-00 school year compared to years past, Nebraska's learning-disabled numbers shot up from 13,458 to 16,299 children in the decade of the 1990s.

And according to a separate report issued by the National Association for the Education of African American Children With Learning Disabilities (www.charityadvantage.com/aacld/HarvardNewsRelease.asp), Nebraska's African-American students were six times more likely to be identified as ''emotionally disturbed'' than white students, and four times more likely to be labeled ''mentally retarded'' than whites.

The data were from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, which contended that inappropriate and inadequate special education services may be a leading factor in the overrepresentation of minority adolescents in the juvenile justice system.

The report said, ''Some minority children do need special education support, but far too often they receive low-quality services and watered-down curriculum instead of effective support, the research suggests. Moreover, research reveals that minority students are less likely to be mainstreamed than similarly situated white students.''

It concluded, ''To the extent that minority students are misclassified, segregated, or inadequately served, special education can contribute to a denial of equality of opportunity, with devastating results in communities throughout the nation.''

With that context, consider the impact of recent testimony before the U.S. Congress by Dr. Douglas Carmine of the University of Oregon, director of the National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators (http://idea.uoregon.edu/~ncite/), who spoke March 13 before the Subcommittee on Education Reform of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, urging improvements in reading instruction:

-- 75 percent of the students who are still receiving reading remediation services after third grade never read at grade level.

-- 80 percent of the students labeled ''learning disabled'' actually have reading problems and to be accurate should instead be labeled ''instructional casualties.''

-- Only 14 percent of LD kids get any post-secondary education.

-- We can predict with a high degree of accuracy by January of the kindergarten year which students are at risk for reading problems, but because of special education funding formulas, we have to wait to give them reading remediation services until the third grade, when they have experienced failure and difficulties for two school years.

-- If we would intervene much earlier, right away, in kindergarten and first grade, 70 percent to 90 percent of those ''at risk of not reading'' kids could be brought to grade level and above by the end of second grade. Districts around the country that have switched to that model have experienced sharply reduced numbers of LD populations, exposing that the LD label in most cases is phony.

-- Since about half of all special-education students are there because of an LD label, if it is true that almost all of their ''disabilities'' could be cured by better reading strategies in the earlier grades, then special-education costs in any given district could be reduced by nearly 50 percent simply by switching immediately to systematic, intensive, explicit phonics instruction in the early grades.

To put that into perspective: in the Omaha Public Schools alone, spending on special-ed instruction is nearing 20 percent of spending on regular instruction according to the most recent OPS budget posted online at www.ops.org

The Omaha district spent $35.9 million for special-ed teachers this year, compared to $159.2 million for regular teachers. If it is possible to reduce special-ed enrollment by keeping half of the kids out of that spending category with better reading instruction early on, enormous savings far beyond the instructional budget could be realized. That would free up needed funds for the kids with medically-based disabilities, and reduce other budgets both in and out of the school district as a happy consequence . . . including juvenile justice costs, which are exploding.

Also of note: according to Thursday's Washington Times, in an article entitled ''House GOP to End Misclassifying of Illiterate Children,'' the nation's Republican leaders are confirming that local school districts all over the country are significantly over-identifying minority students as ''learning disabled'' and adding to an already ''crushing burden'' of complex and duplicative special-ed paperwork for teachers.

The article reported that special-ed federal funding was $1.43 billion in fiscal year 1988 but had risen to $8.9 billion in fiscal '03.

Provisions of the federal education bill, No Child Left Behind, are intended to simplify special-ed funding formulas and encourage better methods of teaching reading to sharply reduce LD rolls.

Bottom line: it is highly possible that most of Nebraska's 16,299 LD kids could be miraculously ''un-disabled'' if they were taught to read right in the first place . . . and untold millions of taxpayer dollars could have been saved.

And to anybody who cares about our gigantic budget problems, that certainly ain't no corn. That's an opportunity . . . bigtime.

Posted 11:14 PM by Susan Darst Williams

SEN. RAIKES, STATE AID, AND THE UNCONSTITUTIONAL CAT IN THE HAT

State Sen. Ron Raikes this week declared that LB 540 regarding school tax levies and state aid to education is his priority bill. As chairman of the Education Committee, he's digging in his heels on this one. It would allow a three-fourths vote of a school board -- a handful of people -- to substitute for the wisdom of the school district's total population of voters as being sufficient to order a property tax increase over the Legislature's stated lid.

It can't be constitutional . . . but oh, well.

It's exactly like the old Dr. Seuss kiddie story, "The Cat in the Hat." Remember how the pink bathtub ring got wiped up with a blouse, and then transferred to the bed, and then spread throughout the house? (Hey . . . that rhymes!) Well, so does this: They want to do the same, you know, with what's supposed to be tax-limited dough. (I'm good!)

When the Legislature put the school tax lids in place, the understanding was that school districts would give people property tax relief by cutting school spending. Well, they haven't cut school spending.

THEIR understanding was that, as local property taxes were held in check by the Legislature's lids, state sales and income tax funds would be available to help make up the difference lost in smaller piles of property tax receipts.

But enter the clunky economy and state government's nearly $700 million budget shortfall. All of a sudden, the state's as tight as wallpaper.

So what do the educrats do? Live within their means? Noooooo. They try to switch to a school-board majority vote instead of a vote of the people to jam property tax increases through. Just as the Cat in the Hat took a small problem and made it worse by spreading it all around, this bill would not do what the voters want -- cut unnecessary school spending -- but would continue the upward spiral that is threatening the very future of our public schools.

Lincoln Public Schools voters have turned down tax-lid overrides twice.

Omaha Public Schools voters turned an override down flat, last fall.

Let's all face the Capitol and cup our hands around our lips as we shout loud enough for the senator to hear:

"READ 'EM, RAIKES. NO MORE SCHOOL TAXES! MAKE SCHOOLS CUT SPENDING."

And if you do, Senator, then you won't be the Cat in the Hat. You'll be a cool cat.

Posted 6:36 PM by Susan Darst Williams

TEACHERS AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH: RECENT IRONIC SITUATIONS

A substitute music teacher at Black Elk Elementary School in Millard was apparently dismissed for violating district policy while chatting with students about the possibility of war in Iraq. She apparently told students that if the worst happens, Jesus Christ would save them if they believe in Him.

The fact that she was dismissed, while other full-time teachers are wearing and handing out anti-war buttons, participating in anti-war parades and rallies with their students, allowed to display pagan symbols in the classroom, teaching biological evolution as a fact, and otherwise clearly acting in conflict with and opposition to the religious and political beliefs of the students' families, with no sanctions, is certainly ironic under the circumstances.

The incident sparked lively commentary on local websites such as the KCRO Forum as citizens exchanged views on whether or not it was right for her to say what she said.

From the cheap seats, it looks as though she goofed. According to U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District (kids shouldn't have been suspended for wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War), it's clear that students have unlimited rights of free speech on topics such as religion, so long as their speech isn't disruptive and doesn't directly collide with the rights of others.

But teachers, while still possessing free-speech rights very similar to those of other adults in other types of workplaces, still must be viewed as "agents of the state," particularly when they are influencing younger, more impressionable students who are more or less a "captive audience." Public-school teachers shouldn't be paramoid about expressing themselves, and they can certainly answer religious questions posed by children, but they must not proselytize or make it possible for children to confuse what they say as their personal beliefs with the official, sanctioned policy of the school district.

A good way to have handled the situation might have been that good, old thing that a fellow named Socrates always did: answer a question with a question. If a child had a valid question and expressed some fear about the war, the teacher might turn it into a learning opportunity and ask all of the children in the class about what calms them in times of crisis. Then if a student were to name the name of Jesus and others were to share their beliefs, alike or different, it would have been OK.

For more on the important topic, see "Teachers' Rights in Public Education," a 2002 report from the Rutherford Institute and more good information from the American Center for Law and Justice.

Posted 5:19 PM by Susan Darst Williams

SUPERINTENDENTS AND SUPER PAY

School superintendents in Nebraska were paid nearly $19.2 million as a group in the 2001-02 school year, compared to $14.4 million nine years before. That's a cumulative increase of 33 percent. Figures are the most recent ones available from the State Education Department's finance website.

That's a statistic that's worth some study in the light of Nebraska's projected budget shortfall of nearly $700 million.

A March 9 article in the Chicago Tribune on superintendent pay reported that despite declining student performance in their districts, budget woes, deficit spending, and pay cuts and job losses among the ranks of teachers and other school staff, about one-fourth of Illinois superintendents as a group saw their earnings rise 10 percent or more in the past year.

The phenomenon of school boards who vote their superintendents 20 percent raises in each of their last few years of service, in order to get their pension basis up, was perceived as a key reason for the paradox.

The difficulty is, although local taxpayers pay the superintendent's salary, the taxpayers of the entire state foot the bill for the inflated pensions that those pay increases provide. It can amount to tens of thousands of dollars per year more for the better-paid superintendents.

Also factors are non-salary expenses for superintendents such as tax-sheltered annuities, taxpayer-financed contributions to retirement plans, car and housing allowances, and payouts for hundreds of unused sick days.

The question is: can schools afford to keep up the "super pay" in these less-than-super budget days?

Posted 5:00 PM by Susan Darst Williams

VOTER TAX TURNDOWNS: IS IT A TREND YET?

Eyebrows were raised Tuesday by the 77 percent "no" vote in Valley, Neb., against the school district's bid to override the Legislature's lid on the property tax levy. The 540-160 vote may reflect continuing dissatisfaction with academic shortcomings in the district, the failure to merge with neighboring Waterloo when the opportunity arose, and a "disconnect" in the administrative offices with the link between declining enrollment and the need for fiscal conservatism.

The Valley "no" vote joins a similar significant turndown in Pender (552-280) and a closer "no" vote in Axtell, 246-202.

Although there have been recent voter approvals, too -- a levy override in Diller-Odell School District and a bond issue for a junior-senior high in Battle Creek -- it just may be that the window of opportunity for school districts to avoid budget cuts is now just about closed.

Consultant Paul Dorr of northern Iowa (dcs@iowatelecom.net), who was active in defeating the Omaha Public Schools override election last fall, now has chalked up 12 victories in 14 tries, assisting local citizens' committees in defeating local school bond issues and spending-lid overrides. He is seeking more assignments and has an impressive track record, so if you have a big school spending vote coming up . . . hint, hint.

Posted 4:34 PM by Susan Darst Williams

TECHNOLOGY FOR TEENIES?

Q. Our superintendent wants to hire a technology coordinator for the early primary grades. Is this OK?

No. Technology in the early grades has been shown to be expensive window dressing that can be counterproductive to the educational process. Young children need relationships with other humans, particularly caring adults, and hands-on, multisensory experience with the real world. Computers, video and other ed tech tend to stunt imagination and creativity, and raise concerns about children’s physical, emotional and cognitive well-being. Dangers: eyestrain, obesity, repetitive stress injuries, social isolation and more.

To the adult eye, it would seem to be a smart idea to fill classrooms with multimedia machines, Internet connections, word processing capabilities, digital cameras, spreadsheets, laptops . . . but the truth is, there is no learning advantage from trivial games, inappropriate adult activities and commercialized content, which is often what the ed tech is used for. Meanwhile, adding technology usually means cutting time for the things that young children really need from their schools: art, p.e., recess, nature walks and so forth.

The National Science Board reported in 1998 that costly educational strategies such as increased technology, smaller class sizes and other extras do not appear to enhance student achievement with any degree of cost-effectiveness that approaches good, old-fashioned, solid, traditional curriculum and instruction.

Researcher Larry Cuban, an expert on educational technology, also reports that more than 30 years of studies show only one sure benefit of computers in the classroom: a modest improvement in test scores from “drill and practice” type computer programs. Significantly, though, those improvements are not as great as the higher test scores that are attained when the students are given one-on-one tutoring, which is significantly cheaper than computers as well.

Homework: See the Alliance for Childhood for the report, “Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look at Computers and Childhood.”

Posted 10:16 AM by Susan Darst Williams

THE ASSESSMENT SHUFFLE VS. LOCAL CONTROL

The utter lack of accountability in the statewide assessment program came at an enormous price. Aren't you proud? And documents on file illustrate how the Nebraska State Department of Education views local control. It's not control by local citizens. It's local citizens dutifully implementing what policies and procedures the state wants in place, after plenty of money has been spread around.

This week's Appropriations Committee hearing on the department's budget had the spectacle of the bureaucrats going on record against cutting their budget or any district's budget or state aid or anything that had anything to do with anything, any wee bit, despite the fact that we have a statewide budget shortfall approaching $700 million.

Furthermore, they were attempting to obtain buy-in from the committee to recommend another $457,000 in ESU technology infrastructure funding and $1,273,000 in "core services" for the ESU's instead of making what should have been a no-brainer, $1.7 million cut. The money would be earmarked for a process that has been defined by former State Board of Education member Kathy Wilmot as "much of the 'hanky panky' involved with training and preparation for the Commissioner's 'locally developed, multiple assessment.'"

He can claim these are "locally developed," but they're not. Remember how each state's learning "standards" are all basically from the same place and were sprinkled around from state to state by various means, including the regional education laboratories and certain consultants? Well, it's the same thing with the assessments designed to measure how well the kids learned what was in those boilerplated standards. Naturally, the assessments have been boilerplated, too . . . although it was done in a perplexing, expensive way to try to conceal that from us.

Each district's attempt at crafting an acceptable assessment has been bent, spindled, folded and mutilated through the mega-powerful Buros Center for Testing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Search on a search engine for "Buros" and "assessment," and you'll see for yourself how "trickle-down" assessments trick the people by trickling state-controlled, nonacademic assessments down to the kids via a long, expensive chain of educrats paid to distort and degrade the process of education.

How Nebraska got this house-of-mirrors assessment system is interesting reading. Take the math assessments. Go to the Buros report on the math assessment development process to read more for yourself, but consider that the Nebraska Department of Education hired an arm of the UNL office, the Buros Institute for Assessment Consultation and Outreach, staffed up the whazoo with Ph.D.'s who piled higher and deeper all that they knew about assessment models, and then some.

Then they hired 15 evaluators to "help" the districts work the 24 state-mandated assessment strategies into their so-called "locally developed" assessments. These 15 evaluators formed the District Assessment Evaluation Team -- DAET -- though no local educator would ever want a date with DAET.

But that wasn't the end of it. Then there was a final review by the National Advisory Center for Assessment, with four nationally-known and therefore maximum-paid experts in assessment reviewing all the folderol.

The report contains interesting and almost comical tangents such as the fact that the Westside Community Schools had their assessment writers trained in avoiding bias in the questions they were developing. Keep in mind, this is math. But these writers spent days in meetings learning how to avoid bias in race/ethnicity, gender, religion and who knows what all else in their questions. But even that wasn't enough: then District 66 paid its ESU to conduct an "independent bias review" of the questions after they were written, and so another 13 people representing six ethnic groups went over the questions . . . and if there was ANY math left in them after all of this, it would be a miracle.

What does all this suggest?

Repeal those Goals 2000 "standards," quit trying to do a statewide assessment, let districts devise their own system of off-the-shelf tests and locally-managed assessment techniques, save a canyon full of money, and most of all, sharply reduce the numbers, funding and assignments of the ESU's.

They have no accountability to the State Board of Education or anybody else besides the State Department of Education. They are mushrooming in size and scope because of these silly statewide assessments. They perpetuate the lack of accountability to the public for what Nebraska's public schools are teaching, and they are storing the kids' local, personal data in their databanks and that ain't good.

The State Ed Department dearly wants to pump more and more money and power into the ESU's since they avoid oversight by the State Ed Board, and their own elected boards are such rubber stamps. They're an "accountability avoidance" dream. Now is the perfect time and the budget crisis the perfect excuse to kill several birds with one stone, and sharply reduce their impact and funding.

If the ESU's could be taken out of the assessment business, there wouldn't be a structure for either the State Department of Ed or the local districts to hide behind. As it is now, there is no way for us to track exactly how much this fiasco involving standards, assessment and lack of accountability is costing taxpayers.

Listen, all educators are trained in assessment. That's one of the most important classes they take in teachers' college. Why on earth wouldn't we let them choose how best to measure learning and be accountable to their locally-elected school boards and taxpaying patrons? Why on earth must the state get into what should be a pure, simple process and muck it all up with all this bureaucracy? Why on earth did we ever let them stray from local control?

Despite the millions that have been spent and the tears that have been shed, Nebraskans STILL don't know beans about how well our children are learning through this wacky assessment debacle. It's time to put a stop to it.

Posted 4:28 PM by Susan Darst Williams

THE LEGISLATURE PASSED SMART LAWS
THAT CUT SCHOOL SPENDING TO DO-ABLE LEVELS!!!
. . .

HALLELUJAH!!!

. . .

BUT THEN I WOKE UP AND FOUND OUT . . .

. . . it was all a dream. Dang!

Here’s what I dreamed:

1. We started paying districts state aid based on Average Daily Attendance, not Average Daily Membership, and every child was worth the same subsidy no matter where he or she lives in the state.

We need to end all this wrangling about which kids “need” more than others. That’s socialism. Just figure out how much we have and divvy it up. Done. To meet statutory requirements for K-12 education costs a lot less than they’re spending. They’ll figure out how to make ends meet. That’s what we pay them for. Eh?

Also, there are a lot of “phantom” kids we pay for every day, all across the state, who aren’t there. Maybe this will force districts with huge absenteeism to make school seem worthwhile enough to get kids in their seats Monday through Friday. Too much trouble figuring enrollment so often? Well, heyyyy: what’d we buy you guys all those computers for, if not to manage our money better? The one change would save $22.5 million in the Omaha Public Schools alone, based on budget figures on http://ess.nde.state.ne.us/SchoolFinance/AFR/search/afr.htm

2. In my dream, we started making parents pay for the second half-day of kindergarten, not grant free all-day kindergarten, because it’s a frill; there’s no evidence it’s worth a hoot academically.

With 13 grade levels to pay for, all-day kindergarten represents roughly 7.7 percent of a district’s budget. I know, I know, actual cost is technically less than that because early primary grades cost less than secondary grades, but let’s just see. With OPS’s enrollment, that figures to $23.3 million for kindergarten funding. That means getting rid of that second free half-day would save something like $11.6 million in that district alone. Parents could still have the service if they wanted it. They’d just have to pay for it. What a concept.

3. We investigated whether there is widespread cheating in the federal school lunch funding program.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly one-fourth of the children who are receiving free or subsidized breakfasts and lunches through the federal school-food program for disadvantaged children are not really entitled to as much as they’re getting. It seems a little harsh to call them “cheaters,” but it seems there are more families signed up for the free-or-reduced-food program than U.S. Census figures indicate exist. Parents or guardians self-report family income to qualify, and apparently many have succumbed to the temptation to lie to get the freebies they shouldn’t be getting. In OPS alone, the feds are sending more than $10 million a year in reimbursement; if it’s true that $2.5 million of that is phony, that’s a lot of baloney. This ought to be investigated statewide.

4. We used state lottery proceeds to do performance audits on state aid to public schools.

Duhhh. It’s a bad dream that we’re not doing this already.

5. We figured state aid based on the required 180-day calendar. If schools want to stretch that to 187- or 190-day calendars, they’re on their own, funding-wise.

When times are tough, the tough think statutorily. What does state law require? How can we manage our time and resources efficiently enough to meet the requirement but not go overboard? Don’t suppose we can put the calendar back to a basic Labor Day to Memorial Day calendar with a nice fall break and a full week for spring break? Come on . . . families hate the “Old McDonald” approach to school calendars: “With a half-a-day here and a half-a-day there, here an intercession, there an inservice, everybody goofed up. . . .” Let’s keep it simple, senors and senoritas.

6. We urged State Board of Education member Joe Higgins to show true leadership, and convince his union and its well-coiffed and -leashed senators to get rid of the crazy “Rule of 85” early retirement program that he got in place a few years ago in his union leadership position – a huge reason for budget pressure and teacher shortages now.

Nebraska has just about the most liberal and generous teacher retirement system in the country, allowing teachers to retire at age 55 with 30 years of service. It was a gigantic kick to the solar plexus of both teacher quality and budgetary flexibility a few years ago when many, many experienced teachers took early retirement and left the classroom. The economy was going great then. Now, it’s blah. We can’t afford that kind of self-indulgence in this tax climate, with everybody’s investment portfolios in the dumpster.

7. And if the union won’t do that one intelligent thing . . . then, I realized in my dream although a lot of people already figured this out in their waking hours . . . it’s time to give up on them . . . bust the teachers’ unions and let school districts set their own common-sense compensation packages, including sensible health-care benefit plans.

If we really want to head off the impending teacher shortage because of Nebraska’s aging teacher workforce, we’d let districts pay that hard-to-find math, science, special education or vocational education teacher a little bit more than the garden-variety P.E. teacher who is in ample supply. They’d stay in teaching, or put off retirement, if we made it worth their while. We also should let districts pay their home-run hitters more and their three-times-transferred, marginal, discipline-challenged teachers less. Union rules prevent us from doing those common-sense, private-sector things, and it shows. But consider what the Omaha Education Association says about performance pay in their position statement on salaries (www.oeaomaha.org): they say “any system of compensation based on an evaluation of an education employee’s performance” is . . . hold on to your hats and tie yourself to the fencepost . . . “inappropriate.”

Oh, Mama! That’s what we’re up against. Not exactly an attitude of gratitude. No wonder it’s a budgetary nightmare.

Now I KNOW it was all just a dream. Wahhhh.

The good news is, once a dream is over and you know it was just a dream, that means you must be awake.

Are we, Nebraska? If so, let’s go!

Posted 4:25 PM by Susan Darst Williams

ALOHA-BYE-BYE TO THE IDEA OF 100% STATE FUNDING OF SCHOOLS

State Sen. Chip Maxwell of Omaha made a splash earlier this year with a proposal to shift all responsibility for funding our public schools away from local property taxes, which now bear about half the cost, and onto state sales and income taxes added to the relatively small amount (6 to 8 percent) from federal tax funding.

Comes now a report about the one state in the union that has state control of public schools, Hawaii. It kind of puts the idea of copying them on a surfboard and points it . . . well, away.

State control of the schools has made Hawaii the state with the highest percentage of private-school enrollment in the country, according to an Oct. 12, 2001, New York Times article, "In Hawaii, Public Schools Feel a Long Way From Paradise."

Although Hawaii has a long tradition of private, missionary schools, the growth in them is more recent, with one in five Hawaiian children enrolled in a private school.

Most state legislators send their own children to private schools, according to the article. It quoted observers as saying the buildings are run down, there have been protracted teachers' strikes, there's a serious teacher shortage, there's a threat of a federal takeover, and there have been cutbacks in school construction plans.

Moreover, 48 percent of Hawaiian publicly-educated eighth-graders scored below the "basic" standard on a math exam given nationwide, and 45 percent of the fourth-graders scored that low, as well. The national average was 33 percent "below basic" in the year studied.

Posted 9:31 AM by Susan Darst Williams

NEBRASKA FREEDOM FIGHTERS NEEDED TO ATTEND UPCOMING MEETINGS

If you want to fight for Nebraska's public schools and the children they serve, and if you have been looking for just one thing you could do that would truly make a difference, consider attending one of these upcoming forums on education and "essential curriculum" sponsored by the Nebraska Department of Education:

Thursday, March 6, Lincoln, Cornhusker Hotel, 333 South 13, Ballroom DEF, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Tuesday, March 11, Columbus, Educational Service Unit #7, 2657 44th Street, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Monday, April 14, North Platte, North Platte Community College, Technical Campus, 1101 Halligan Drive, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Tuesday, April 15, Sidney, Country Kettle Restaurant, 284 Illinois Street, 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Consider contacting your State Board of Education member and requesting to be invited to participate in this crucial process. Or else just go and listen in.

The meeting series is related to the failure of the proposed state constitutional amendment in the 1990s that was going to call for "quality" education be provided to every student in a move toward "equity" that appeared to most Nebraskans to be too much like communism ("from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"). State Auditor Kate Witek, then a state senator, was a leader in the movement to expose the tremendous expense of "equity" or "adequacy" changes to a state's education system, and the tremendous damage to real quality that "quality" movements actually cause because they destroy local control.

Bottom line: if this discussion goes the wrong way, Nebraskans could be facing bills for brand-new school buildings for every student in the state because some district somewhere in the state was able to afford in a brand-new building . . . or every district in the state might be required to construct a swimming pool year-round just because another school has that luxury.

It's the "keep up with the Joneses" theory of financing public education . . . and it threatens the very core of our schools' reason for being, which is supposed to be providing a good education without bankrupting the state.

Longtime education observers in Nebraska say that these "adequacy" meetings are part of the "consensus" process being used nationwide to trick citizens into accepting pre-engineered, forced societal change that bureaucrats and school administrators want in order to ensure a steady and increasing supply of cash. The "results," "outcomes" and "conclusions" of these meetings have already been "pre-determined" and the participants will be "manipulated" into thinking the right way.

But if citizens who are awake to the manipulation attend these meetings and listen in, or better yet, participate, they can at the very least shame the perpetrators, make them see what they are doing, and while they probably can't alter the pre-set "outcomes" of these public forums since they're already set in stone, those who attended these meetings can advocate more effectively later on with the state senators who are likely to be considering proposed legislation -- also "pre-set" but supposedly emanating from these forums -- next year.

State Board of Education President Stephen Scherr of Hastings is expected to open the discussions, asking the question: "What education opportunities should be provided and/or available for all Nebraska students?"

Forum participants will review a proposed policy on essential education during their discussion and then present the views of the group. At 7:30 p.m. at each meeting, State Education Commissioner Doug Christensen will speak, wrapping up the discussions at all four locations.

HOW TO COUNTER GROUP MANIPULATION TACTICS
Excerpts from the booklet by B.K. Eakman (rush-order your own copy to be prepared for these meetings: author and education activist B.K. Eakman's website)

1. Control the environment of thought to drive the debate to the real issue. If you don't, they will.

2. Stay quiet in the beginning because the leader, or "facilitator," is busy feeling everyone out to reveal objections and doubts that can be manipulated. Keep yours to yourself until the real issue of the meeting becomes clear.

3. Remember that whoever set up the meeting and the agenda, and is paying the presenter, wants a particular outcome that may not be the same as what citizens and parents want. This is a "sales presentation," so let the buyer beware.

4. The "facilitator" and the insiders will be using tactics such as redefining what people say the way they want it said; redirecting attention away from participants' concerns to their own agenda; intimidating and de-legitimizing people who express another point of view as being "troublemakers" who "insist on having their own way instead of bowing to majority rule"; using repetitive slogans that misstate and manipulate, and appearing to grant a "bone" to the traditional views of education from time to time that really isn't granting anything new, but is designed to try to keep quiet those who are trying to counter the proposed socialistic changes.

5. Listen carefully and don't let them: misquote authorities, misstate what educational research really shows, overgeneralize, use jargon to conceal their real intentions, dismiss alternatives out of hand, change the subject, exaggerate the facts, appeal to peer pressure and popularity, or smear opposing points of view. Beware especially of namecalling; if they call you a bad name intending to label you in some way, point it out to others in attendance, and said, "Now, let's think about this: that is a rude name and so untrue; why would he call me that? What purpose could it serve?"

6. Refuse to play the game. Refuse to be manipulated. Drive the debate back to the subject. Force the facilitator to address your statements, arguments and principles. When you hear something that is not true, raise your hand and ask, "That isn't true. Where on earth did you get that idea?" and demand a research citation that participants can look up. If one is not forthcoming, say, "Oh. Then that's just your opinion, right? And it's completely opposite from what the research I'm familiar with has shown." It's a good idea to come to these meetings armed with research citations for the basic issue, which is generally an attempt to get more money for an untested, controversial and counter-productive change, in case they try to undermine your knowledge or authority. Stand up, if you have to, and demand that your opinions be addressed. Interrupt, although politely, if the "facilitator" tries to blow you off. Insist that all those who make their living, or their spouses do, from public education, raise their hands. Insist that "cost-effectiveness" be on the list of basic goals. You'd be shocked at how often it is swept under the rug at these kinds of meetings because the people putting the meetings on just want the money and don't care whether it's even the best way to go for kids. If citizens keep saying common-sense things that the "facilitator" won't let be written down on the board for all to see, stand up and say, "Here, let me have a turn with the chalk (or marker) because you're missing a lot of what people are trying to say."

7. You will be put in a "circle" that is supposedly a place to openly share your ideas in a small-group setting, but actually, the "facilitator" by now has you targeted, and will put you in the "circle" where you can best be isolated, minimized and silenced. The best thing to do is to say nothing, but as soon as people start moving, go and sit in a different circle than the one to which you were assigned. if the "facilitator" protests, then loudly and firmly say, "What's the big deal which circle I join? Do you have some reason you want particular people in particular circles? Are you trying to fix the outcome, or what?"

Be polite! Be strong, though. It's important. And most of all, thank you . . . for thinking of our children and being willing to invest some time into their best interests.