Bomb Threats Are Not Jokes - Published in Sunday Eunice News on September 28, 2014

A plague recently invaded Louisiana. Teenagers have been making bomb threats in our public schools at an alarming rate across the nation.  In the past few weeks, we've had four bomb threats in Rapides Parish. Other threats were made in Baton Rouge, Slidell, and most recently, Mamou.

Not surprisingly, the threats have typically been naïve hoaxes. Students left notes, drawings, email messages or phone calls to convey an impending threat to the school on a beautiful sunny afternoon, knowing full well that our buildings would be evacuated.

Or, they conspired with their friends to call in threats from some remote location.

In their teenage minds, the scares were only meant to guarantee free social time with their friends for a few hours until buildings, lockers, cars, and individuals are screened by professional bomb squads. In their thoughtless minds, creating a bomb scare was easier than taking that weekly quiz in French or Physics.

Fortunately, in every recent Louisiana bomb scare, the bomb threats proved to be pranks. No one was physically harmed. But, no one can afford to treat these stunts as if they are “normal teenage pranks.”

In the moment, no one does. Administrators, teachers, police, fire departments, state and federal agencies all work swiftly to move our children to safety, and to scour the premises for any trace of weapons that can hurt our students.

Parents converge outside safety zones to pick up their children when they get word that schools are under lock down.

But, when these scares are over, the real work begins: investigations to figure out who made the threats. Then, criminal prosecution of the prankster “to the full extent of the law.” The Louisiana penal code prescribes the following punishments for bomb threats:

100. Whoever willfully communicates or causes to be communicated such a threat thereby causing either the evacuation or serious disruption of a school, school related event, school transportation, or a dwelling, building, place of assembly, facility or public transport, or an aircraft, ship or common carrier, or willfully communicates or causes serious public inconvenience or alarm, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than 3 years nor more than 20 years or imprisonment in the house of correction for not less than 6 months nor more than 21/2 years, or by fine of not less than $1,000 nor more than $50,000, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Our children need to be taught the difference between a harmless prank and a serious crime. It is up to our parents and guardians to set limits on their children's sense of humor. It is up to our parents and guardians to teach their children right from wrong.

If your child turns out to be the prankster, it will be too late to argue to the judge “this was just normal teenage behavior.” Your child will do the time if they did the crime.

Bomb threats are NOT jokes. Bomb threats are acts of terrorism. To paraphrase Willy Nelson, “Mama don't let your children grow up to be terrorists.”

Curbside Recycling - Published in Eunice Sunday News on Sunday, September 20, 2014

Our schools do a great job of teaching students the importance of recycling.  By sixth grade, my students often make suggestions about how to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.”

Our state Department of Environmental Quality encourages recycling at home, in the office, in schools and in the community.  It has many suggestions for products that can be donated to charities, and suggestions for composting to give a second life to our yard clippings and other organic materials that could enrich our garden soil.

I’ve often wondered why we have two trash pick-ups per week in Eunice, but, no curbside recycling.  To recycle, we have to haul our recycled glass, paper, plastic and electronic items to the recycling center.

Don’t get me wrong.  Our trash pickup service is wonderful, and very dependable.  And, I am always amazed when I see tree limb piles picked up after storms, regular as clockwork.

And, our St. Landry Recycling Centers are beautiful sites – sparkling clean, very well- organized.  But, their hours of operation are not compatible with work schedules for many adults.  To use these centers, I have to store my recycled bins for months at a time until that rare day comes along when I am off before the Center is closed.

Curbside recycling benefit s most of our working families, and it can be handled in different ways.  Some towns provide two or three bins to each home.  On designated days, residents set out their sorted recycle products for pick up.   This model is known to increase recycling participation, and to reduce the use of landfills.

There is a town in Pennsylvania that makes it even easier for families to recycle.  Residents are given one bin per household.  All the family’s recycle products are placed in that one bin, then, sorted at the town’s recycling centers by paid staff.  This town’s financial manager proved that this model of curbside pickup of single bins with sorting at the recycle center was actually more cost effective. But, it also encouraged more people to use the program, saving the town landfill costs.

There are other ways for us to reduce our trash volume, perhaps making it easier for the town to switch to curbside recycling collection days.

To encourage reduced purchase of unnecessary packaging and disposable products, the town of Vineyard Haven used to sell $2 tickets for each trash can they emptied.  We could recycle all we wanted for free, but, for trash destined for the landfill, we had to pay $2 per can.  No ticket, no pickup.

At first I thought this was ridiculous, and I was sure it would be more expensive for the home owner than the old fashioned monthly fee that we were charged for water and sewage. 

But, paying by the can to dispose trash proved to be quite effective in changing the habits of home dwellers.  Even though I moved away decades ago, I still limit trash accumulation by avoiding unnecessary packaging, and by using reusable containers, dishware, etc.

Some towns make it easy to dispose of toxic waste and electronics by having special curbside pickup of these materials on designated days each year.    And, of course, Eunice and every other town has thrift stores where we can drop off our “gently used” reusable clothes and furniture.

Why am I raising this concern for your consideration?  Because soon, we will be voting for City Council members and other elected officials.

A few years ago, a politician knocked on my door one day to ask for my vote for City Council.  I told him I would vote for him if he would support curbside recycling.  It hasn’t happened yet, but, there is an election coming up.

I’d go to council meetings to make proposals myself, but, I would like to know if this idea would benefit your family.  If you support the idea of curbside recycling, please tell your candidates.  And, I hope you will send me an email at marie.deyoung@gmail.com.    If there is enough interest, I will do my own fair share of advocating for this practical change to our Eunice Recycling programs.

That September Morn... Published in Sunday Eunice News on September 14, 2014

Alan Jackson's song, “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning on that September Morn?” came to mind this week as we approached the anniversary of September 11, 2001.

Life was idyllic for me as a first year rural teacher on that September morn. Teaching band and choir to about 175 students, I drove 45 miles on narrow, hilly country roads, greeting deer, horses, cows, llamas and alpacas as they poked their noses out on the roads to see who was intruding on their playground.

Although I just finished extended weekend Army Reserve duty in Omaha, Nebraska, my peaceful drive to school on Tuesday morning reminded me it was a good choice to put military life behind me.

As I neared school, NPR announcers began describing a plane accident in lower Manhattan. I switched stations, as I did not want to cloud my brilliantly sunny day with images of a major plane accident.

In my first hour, junior high band students ran into the class, and begged me to turn on the television to watch “the Terrorist Attack in New York.” After checking with my colleagues to confirm what was happening, I declined to turn on our classroom television. “No, you can watch this tonight with your parents. Let's take out our instruments.”

We played the National Anthem, with reverence. Then, the band played “God Bless the U.S.A., which we were learning for Veteran's Day. All day long, my students sang and played patriotic and faith-filled songs. The choir sang “Amazing Grace,” and “From a Distance.” Fifth graders were not concerned at all that the world had stopped turning. They honked on their clarinet mouthpieces and buzzed their trumpet mouthpieces as if they were in the woods hunting ducks with their families.

That afternoon, I drove 40 miles to the university for my french horn lesson, numb from listening to sober radio reports. My very young professor probably thought I was being ultra-dramatic when I said to him, “We are at war. The most intelligent thing that happened today was that the airlines were shut down once we figured out we were being attacked.”

Later in the week, my high school students wanted to discuss the attacks in class. They had all kinds of theories about who our enemies were. When I told my students I performed many wedding ceremonies at the World Trade Center Towers, and so, it saddened me to think of all the couples who might have been at the site on that day, they asked why I was crazy enough to move to rural America. They could not imagine how a world traveler could choose to live in such remote conditions where “nothing ever happens!”

“Ah, but, that's why I moved to rural America,” I told them. “Nothing like that would ever happen to us out here. We are safe from all that chaos and violence.”

I never promoted military service after Nine-Eleven, because I could not imagine putting my students in harm's way. It is my hope, as a teacher, to provide possibilities that have nothing to do with war and violence.

On Nine-Eleven anniversaries, I often play Alan Jackson's tender ballad, because it expresses the deepest American values that enrich us, and it puts us in touch with the humanity that will bring us real safety and security in this world:

I'm just a singer of simple songs

I'm not a real political man

I watch CNN but I'm not sure I can tell

You the difference in Iraq and Iran.

But I know Jesus and I talk to God

And I remember this from when I was young

Faith, hope and love are some good things He gave us

And the greatest is love.

Thirteen years later, we still can't tell the difference between Iraq and Iran. I don't know if it is possible to turn our national hearts and minds toward the path of love, but, I sure do think we have to try.

We owe it to our young troops who served faithfully to end this war. We owe our young soldiers a plan for peace so they can come back to the best America has to offer – quiet living in the middle of “nowhere” rural towns where they can safely raise their children to sing simple songs about faith, hope, and love. 

The Four B's of School Leadership: My Sunday Eunice News Column for September 7, 2014

Most school improvement programs today require school principals to become “instructional leaders.” This is quite a shift from traditional expectations for rural superintendents and building principals.

Before the No Child Left Behind Act was passed and signed into law by President George Bush, K-12 school leaders across the nation spent most of their time satisfying parents' concerns about school logistics and school discipline.

Over the years, I've seen principals and small town superintendents work ungodly hours just dealing with beans, balls, buses and behavior issues.

These leaders were successful most of the time because they treated their teachers as professionals, and they saw themselves as agents who gathered resources and ran school logistics in such a manner that teachers could easily and independently plan and deliver instruction consistent with state academic standards.

When NCLB became law, there was a lot of resistance to the idea that school administrators had to become instructional leaders. I've heard many a superintendent and principal insist that they had no time to be Chief Educator. To keep their jobs, they had to spend most of their time satisfying parental concerns about beans, balls, buses, and behavior. Their tenure depended on the satisfaction of parents and school board members, based on their overall management of cafeteria, sports, transportation, and school discipline issues.

But, the paradigm shift is not at all a bad idea. It's just badly implemented most of the time, because public schools rarely have the financial resources to expand their administrations to invest in instructional leadership at the building or school district level.

The State of Louisiana Board of Education, for example, implemented rigid policies about how teachers should teach, with the expectation that classroom instruction would flow the same way in every classroom regardless of subject, student ability, or access to textbooks and computers. Every classroom, every student should look, act, and perform the same way, as if teachers were packaging McDonald's Hamburgers rather than developing the minds and hearts of children.

And, now, using the “Compass” evaluation system, Louisiana has completely undermined the value of instructional leadership, as it was intended to push our schools to higher levels of achievement.

Under “Compass,” principals are supposed to walk around with their clipboards, and downgrade teacher effectiveness if they notice any deviation from the teaching formula that our State Superintendent of Education now requires of all teachers – whether or not the deviation produced better learning in the classroom.

The Compass system encourages principals to downgrade teachers if they engage in direct instruction – even when research shows that at-risk students make greater achievement gains when teachers use direct instruction methods.

Under “Compass,” principals are supposed to walk around with their clipboards, and downgrade teacher effectiveness if they notice that a teacher is not using technology – whether or not the school provides the teacher with technology.

Even when teachers produce high levels of achievement in their students, our state education superintendent has instructed principals to still downgrade teacher evaluations, on the bizarre theory that teachers will work harder if you devalue their accomplishments.

Sadly, there are a few school administrators in Louisiana who have embraced this negative instruction leader model, because their own evaluations now depend on compliance with the Compass System. Is it any wonder that school teachers are leaving the profession they love in droves?

At the outset of NCLB, there was much discussion about whether or not schools needed to have larger administrative staffs in order to accomplish this major shift of responsibilities for top administrators.  Other industries have much smaller supervisor to staff ratios, the reasoning went. So, if we really wanted to improve classroom instruction, we needed to reduce the number of teachers each principal supervises, to make it possible for principals to more closely monitor their teachers.

My own dissertation results showed an inverse correlation between the amount of money spent on administration – the more more money spent on administration, the lower the math and reading scores. Conversely, the more money that was spent inside the classroom, the higher the achievement.

Of course, money spent in the classroom needs to be spent wisely on instruction materials, smaller class sizes, highly-trained, certified teachers and student support systems.

Since the Compass evaluation system was implemented under Superintendent John White, Louisiana's teaching profession is being reduced to a cookie cutter recipe of behaviors that are not based in research, history, psychology, or best practices. Rather than providing instructional leadership, White expects principals to monitor superficial behaviors of teachers and students, with the expectation that both will move and act with robotic precision.

Our children and our schools performed much better when our teachers were permitted to act as professionals. Until Louisiana's administrators are allowed to be positive instructional leaders to their team of professional, certified teachers, it may be best for administrators to focus on what they do best: keep everybody happy with a steady flow of beans, balls,buses, and behavioral interventions.