Living With Guns: My Commentary Published in July 13 Sunday Eunice News

As a military chaplain, I prayed over too many people who were murdered by their spouses, lovers, or friends. I know first hand that guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
People with guns kill the most people, though.
People with guns kill their spouses, their children, their best friends, their co-workers, their lovers, their neighbors, and even strangers who have done nothing to offend them but be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For some strange reason, in the United States of America, we act as if it’s perfectly normal for gun owners to shoot at people when they are mad or sad.
We read in the paper that a man kills his estranged wife, then himself. Ho-hum. Who won last night’s game?
We read that a middle-class man kills four or more of his children. Ho-hum. What’s for dinner?
Our absolute allegiance to the Second Amendment leads us to falsely believe that high murder rates are inevitable if we are to protect our absolute right to bear arms.
But, in fact, the opposite is true.
We can bring down the murder rates in our society and in our state if we do a few things differently: First, we must teach our citizens how to cope with conflict, anger, disappointment without resorting to violence. In states and communities where children, teens and adults are taught it is NEVER okay to hit, attack or shoot another person, murder rates are much lower.
Second, we must provide interventions when we see early signs that a disgruntled youth or adult uses violence against animals or other humans no matter what their “reason” for resorting to violence.
Third, we must demand that the community costs of murder and gun violence are transparent to all taxpayers.
When someone kills their intimate partner, that person may go to jail, but, taxpayers are twice punished. We pay for the criminal trials, prison costs, legal fees, police, hospital and doctor bills.
But, we also have to pay for the victims and survivors of gun violence, such as the nine left behind in a recent St. Landry murder-suicide.
Taxpayers will foot the bill for raising these children for decades. Costs to taxpayers will include a lifetime of trauma counseling, medical care, housing, and special education services for the emotional disturbance that stays with child survivors.
Fourth, we must do a better job of training and regulating the people who own guns. People who own guns MUST demonstrate their competence and fitness to carry and own guns, the same way that automobile drivers must demonstrate their fitness to drive a car, and licensed doctors demonstrate their ability to properly use a scalpel.
There are plenty of laws already on the books that support these goals, but, we don’t bother to enforce the laws we have. Weak enforcement is why the United States of America has insanely high murder and suicide rates.
When I served at Fort Polk as the first woman chaplain in the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment way back in the 1990’s, I saw first hand the impact that strict enforcement of gun and domestic violence laws can have the levels of gun violence in the community.
When the commander made it clear that gun violence would not be tolerated, soldiers learned that their “I just snapped” excuses were as phony as three-dollar bills. They changed their behaviors, and learned how to handle their conflicts like adults.
I remember one soldier who was sentenced to prison for two years for firing a shot in the air to scare his girlfriend. No one was hurt, but the whole base got the message: You will pay a steep price if you take your guns out and use them at the wrong time, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons.
Soldiers learn how to handle their relationships like adults – using words, not fists or guns to solve their problems.
It is never acceptable to take guns out and use them when we are mad at the world. What will it take for our country to embrace this fact and do what we have to do to stop the gun violence in our communities?
Copyrighted July 13, 2014 by Marie deYoung

Skimming MFP - My commentary published in Eunice News on July 6, 2014 Copyright Jul 2, 2014

Louisiana was in the fast lane of the national super highway called “Education Reform” long before other states discovered their public education systems needed to be modernized. Granted, we were further behind when we started, but, Louisiana was modernizing long before President George W. Bush passed the “No Child Left Behind Act” with strong bi-partisan support in Congress.

But, in the past few years, our progress has been stalled. One major reason for this stall: the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and Governor Bobby Jindal refuse to give the fair share of school tax dollars to local school districts.

By refusing to send the legally required fair share of Minimum Foundation Program school funds to each district, Bobby and BESE are in direct violation of our state constitution.

Our state constitution requires the Louisiana Board of Education to provide resources and funding to every district in the state, using what is called the Minimum Foundation Program to make sure that every classroom teacher can do their job right.

Specifically, Article VIII, Section 13 explains the Minimum Foundation Program funding requirements. You can look it up online and read for yourself.

The most conservative estimates suggest that in 2012-13 alone, Bobby and BESE cheated our schools of $323 PER STUDENT! In that one school year, $200 million was skimmed from funds owed to public schools.

Since 2009, we've had major teacher lay-offs every year when Bobby and BESE starved us of our funds.

I can assure you, every teacher lay-off in our schools is directly correlated with a decline in our school performance scores. But, these days, Bobby and BESE would have you believe that certified teachers don't matter. According to their theories, our kids can learn just as easily by surfing on the internet, supervised by high school graduates without college degrees.

That idea is working so badly that the NCAA listed several of Louisiana's online schools as ineligible for placement in college athletics. Bobby Jindal's highly touted K-12, Inc. is high on the list of ineligible online schools, but that's a story for another day.

Research has shown time and again that staffing our classrooms with certified teachers is a very strong predictor of student success.

But, just when school performance scoring rules got tougher, Bobby and BESE skimmed our Minimum Foundation Program funds. Our class sizes ballooned making it difficult to give our poorly performing students the support they need. Our school scores went down.

At $323 per kid, Bobby and BESE owe ¾ of a million dollars to Eunice schools for just ONE YEAR.

We could have 15 more licensed teachers in Eunice public school classrooms to coach our kids in math, reading, science, and social studies if Bobby and BESE did their constitutional jobs.

They took our children's classroom money and spent it elsewhere.

Where did the money go? To fund profit-making Charter School Management Companies, vouchers to private schools that have been rated as below standard, to set up “on-line” schools that take exorbitant fees from the state with failure rates that would put our neighborhood schools out of business.

Why are we not fussing to high heavens about this?

Probably, because most of us did not know that the Louisiana Board of Education and Governor Bobby Jindal were siphoning off our school district Minimum Foundation Program funds to pay for programs that are NOT constitutionally valid.

Bobby and BESE's spending choices ARE NOT constitutionally valid. Our state courts are saying so every time another lawsuit challenging the legality of Bobby and BESE's financial shenanigans hit their court dockets.

Our school boards did not know how to fight these constitutional violations at first. But finally, school districts across the state filed a lawsuit to get our fair share of our tax dollars returned to our schools.

Local school boards are finally leaning on Louisiana's Constitution to force Bobby and BESE to get their act together to properly fund our schools.

We will win this fight. We need your help, though. We need you to contact your BESE board member and Governor Bobby Jindal. We need you to tell these politicians that they owe us at least $323 more per student per year if they want to claim they are true Louisiana patriots.

Whenever you hear Bobby claim his adherence to constitutional principles, it is very important for all of us to respond with one voice: Where's our Minimum Foundation Program funds, Bobby?

You believe in upholding our Louisiana Constitution? Show us the money!

Louisiana Shark Tales

     If you were out of town last week, you might have missed the biggest shark story of all. 

Governor Bobby Jindal and the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education finally admitted they threw our public schools into shark infested waters and then, they slung mud at each other while publicly arguing whether it is a good thing to push your kids in for a swim with very large hungry white sharks.

    Say what?

    On June 17^th, the US Secretary of Education (Arne Duncan) goaded our governor with the claim that Bobby Jindal is only abandoning his education baby, the Common Core, for political reasons – to gain populist support in his campaign for the U.S. presidency.  

    Instead of refusing the bait, Governor Jindal scrambled together a press conference, and did everything he could to pull Louisiana out of the Common Core Program that he himself embraced back in 2010, when he used his immense power of persuasion to convince Louisiana voters Common Core was the BE-ALL in education reform.

   

 What was the governor’s first action once he was reeled into a dysfunctional public brawl with the Louisiana Superintendent of Education?  Jindal sent a letter to The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC,) requesting that they withdraw our state from their “sole-sourced” test-preparation contract

  

  Governor Bobby Jindal DID NOT say, “We regret to inform you that we are no longer participating in these tests because your price gouging contract is bankrupting my state and we already had a rigorous education program in place that we will tweak as needed for a much lower cost to the taxpayer.”

    He couldn’t say that, because it’s the truth.  It’s hard to win presidential elections by telling the truth.

  

    In Jindal’s quest to build national support for his campaign for President of the United States, he jumped into the shark pool that is pushing the Common Core on public school systems across the country. 

    Now, years later, the governor admits that the education sharks he chose to swim with are outsiders who do not care about Louisiana’s children, but, who do have a HUGE financial stake in taking over our Louisiana public schools.

     Here’s the short list of Common Core promoters who stand to make a fortune from testing and test prep materials:

    - Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into propaganda that would push schools to do computerized instruction and testing even though the evidence shows these trends do not produce gains in student learning. 

     -Pearson, the British company that designs one-size-fits-all tests and then, gouges the taxpayer to grade and report test results. 

     -Teach for America, the fake non-profit funded by taxpayers and by corporate stockholders who refuse to accept research-based evidence that untrained teachers may be cheap up front, but, they DO NOT turn around failing schools, if only because they churn and burn at a very fast pace.

  -Michael Bloomberg, former New York mayor bought Louisiana BESE elections to rubber stamp Bobby Jindal’s pick for superintendent – thereby quietly removing John White from Bloomberg’s New York City education system.  If John White was such a rock star, why didn’t Bloomberg keep and promote him to fix his own New York’s schools?

     Bobby Jindal also announced he suspending all PARCC contracts because they were illegal, and then, he ordered a comprehensive audit of all existing contracts relating to the PARCC tests, to determine whether any laws were violated.

     Governor Jindal must have learned this trick when he was in Congress: cancel existing contracts for services because you suspect illegal activity, and then, set up an investigation to be sure you were right.

    

    Immediately after Governor Jindal’s remarks,   John White held  a counter press conference.

   No one was surprised to hear our unqualified Superintendent of Education John White insist that HE and HE alone has the power to decide whether or not Louisiana throws hundreds of millions of tax dollars down the sewer drain that is the badly designed Common Core test-to-death program.

     As Emperor and King of the Department of Education, White claims the absolute right to control every pencil, desk, teacher, and school board on up to the governor.

    

     What are we teaching next year and what material is the state testing?  Who knows? 

      Stay Tuned for Shark Tales II.

     But in the meantime, teachers, children, and parents are all doggy paddling in deep waters, with nary a life boat in sight. And hungry sharks are circling, baring their teeth, ready to eat  lunch.
This column appeared in the Sunday Eunice News on June 29, 2014.  Copyright June 24, 2014.

Vacation Starts Now! NOT!

After one of our iLEAP tests, I monitored a group of students who finished early.  They asked if we could play cards.  I offered to teach them "500 Rummy."

At first, the game was too hard.  They wanted to play fish or war games that did not require math.  But, they stuck with it, and caught on after a few hands.  I started to reminisce about how my mother used to sit on the porch with us and play this game when it was hot and rainy - before the days of airconditioning.

They wanted to know "how far back that was" and I said, "Oh it was a long time ago, before color TVs were invented."

As shocked as they were to find that I might be older than their grandparents, I was surprised at how hard it was for these kids to do math in their head.  Where I was calculating scores by doing addition and multiplication in my head, They wanted to do "arrays" -- where you draw a visual image of the problem to tally rows and columns.

If I didn't know better, I would have guessed these kids did not have math facts in their head.  If I wasn't a trained teacher, I might have concluded that kids today are weak in math.  But, maybe because my training is recent, I do know better.  I am keenly aware that our kids have math skills that you and I know nothing about.  They think and problem solve differently today because of the different teaching methods that are used.

For one thing, our students are exposed to statistics, algebra, and geometry the minute they start the first grade. I don't know about you, but, I never had to study and interpret a data graph until I started my doctoral program.  Algebra, geometry, science were taught in high school - never in the elementary and middle schools.

All these changes have made it very intimidating for parents who want to coach their kids in math - or at least, help with the homework. How can you help when your kid speaks one math language and you were taught a completely different way?

But, that doesn't mean that parents can't do some fun play with embedded math coaching with their kids, as my parents and my aunts coached us when we were little kids.

If your kids see that you care about math skills, they will hone theirs.  Back in the day, when we sat and played "500 Rummy" all day long, each of us had to take turns keeping score to 500.  My mother would watch and check how we added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. Needless to say, we also learned how to count in our heads as we tracked cards for points.

My parents never, ever once let on that they were engaging us in study skills while they played Monopoly with us on Friday nights.  We had a blast playing that game.  It never occurred to us that we were practicing multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, skip counting, etc.

If I had money to spare, I'd set up a math coaching program for parents to help their kids do homework and play games all year round that build practical math skills.

I don't have that kind of money, but, I do have two websites that are MOST helpful for parents and teachers who want to coach their kids in mathematical thinking that I would like to share with you:

The first, aaamath.com is totally free, with lessons, practice sessions, and then, timed contests.  If it weren't for this website, I would not be a teacher today.  I was able to practice skills at every level without feeling intimidated. I started at the very beginning, and worked my way through 12th grade math skills.

The second site, http://www.ixl.com/math/ has parts that are free, and practice sessions that are free.  You can pay for more intense practice sessions.  If my kid struggled with math, and I needed to vary their online math explorations, this would be a good one to try.

It couldn't hurt.

You might get to the point where your kids start seeing math as fun - not hard work.  Because they will have learned that numbers and math magic are the most powerful toys ever invented.
Copyrighted April 24, 2014.  This article first appeared in Eunice Today on Sunday, May 11, 2014

Our Strength Depends on Our Schools

On Good Friday, I stopped by the "Eunice News" to pick up a ham that I won in a drawing at my local bank. My courage was strong that day, so I asked to see the editor.  He was friendly, and so, we discussed the possibility of me writing a column that would deal mostly with education issues.

Jim asked me to share a bit of my background.

I mentioned that I was a published author, a former army officer and chaplain, a music teacher, a minister, and a folk musician.

He wanted to know what background I had that would make it easy for me to write a regular education column. Writing is hard work, after all.

I rattled off my credentials:  Earned my education doctorate by researching factors that help our public schools thrive.  My passion for local public schools stronger goes back decades, because every where I've lived and worked our schools have been helped or hurt by policies that were well-intentioned, but not always well thought out. I've also seen communities turn their schools around by exerting as much local control as they could muster.

Whenever I meet folks from Eunice, they ask me why I chose to settle in this town. Here's my standard answer: Eunice markets itself as a "Retirement Destination."  When I came to the area to teach music, I was attracted to Eunice because I could see myself living independently well into old age.

As a lover of rural community life, I believe Eunice has everything a senior citizen could ask for: nearby grocery stores, beauty salons, live Cajun music, a symphony, a theater company, friendly church communities, a golf course, a walking park, a hospital, farms where you can buy  sweet potatoes and fresh eggs, and comfortable weather for most of the year.

Life will be good when I retire in Eunice.  I can imagine myself writing and publishing my third book: the Great American Novel.  I will spend my days playing music, gardening, baking, and maybe, swimming.

But, "I have miles to go before I sleep," as a famous poet once wrote.

For now, I want to investigate and write about education issues because the strength of our community (and the strength of my retirement) directly depends on the health of our schools.

If you haven't noticed, changes are being thrown at our schools by  the state and the federal government at the speed of light, it seems.  Lots of these changes are good. but too many of the changes are throwing us into an unnecessary tailspin that may be hurtful in the long run.

You may have noticed, for example, that the State Department of Education changed how our schools are graded.

In the 2012-13 Report Card, under the new grading system, the Eunice High School score dropped from a 'B' to a 'C.' On the other hand, the Eunice Junior High School increased from a 'D' to a 'C.'  Eunice Elementary School kept is 'A' score.

There are a lot of outside companies who get giddy when public high school scores go down - because they want to close our public schools and replace them with their brand of charter schools.

Other folks out there are fighting to end the new grading standards and the new "Common Core" curriculum.

Me, I am a devout believer that public education is a state constitutionally-mandated system that is our best chance of forming adults who can work productively, serve with good ethics, and live full lives with their family and friends.

I hope you stay with me in the months ahead, as I take a peek into every crevice and corner that affects our "school scores."  Although students and teachers are being driven to madness with "data-driven" mandates, I promise to keep my column useful, but, I will try my best to keep it interesting, too!

In the end, we may crack the code, together, and find the courage and the will to do what we have to do to make our public schools the best they can be.

If that happens, Eunice will not only be a "Retirement Destination."  It will be a family-friendly destination, not only because of its beautiful ball parks and stadiums, but, because our schools from pre-k to high school will be second to none.
  (This article first appeared in the Eunice News on May 4, 2014)

Mississippi Remembers Governor Waller

As a new Mississippi resident, I am saddened to learn of the death of former Governor William Waller.  He bravely worked for justice, particularly in the murder case of Medgar Evers.   Later, as governor, he strove to modernize the state through empowerment and civic engagement.

On my elementary classroom bookshelf, I have a large video-literary tribute to Medgar Evers - lessons taught regularly to Mississippi school children. Our state is on the path to justice, thanks to the late Governor William Waller and so many other brave men and women who worked for justice when people were often afraid to do the right thing.  Here is a short story of Governor Waller's life, which I hope will inspire you to read his memoir:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/us/politics/william-l-waller-ex-governor-of-mississippi-dies-at-85.html?ref=todayspaper

Thanks to P.J. Crowley for Speaking the Truth about the Abuse of Bradley Manning!



PJ, Mike, Marie Joe Sestak

P.J. Crowley, Assistant Secretary of State and retired Air Force officer, resigned under pressure for speaking his conscience about the foolish and unnecessary mistreatment of US Army soldier Bradley Manning. Bradley Manning is being detained in solitary confinement for his role in the Wikileaks case.  Manning has been subjected to abuses reminiscent of Abu Ghraib during his interrogation.  You may already know that P.J. served the Clinton White House. Since President Obama was elected, he has done a superb job as spokesperson for the current Secretary of State.

Before I continue, let me offer my full disclosure: PJ is a friend of mine, who supported my campaign for state office back in 2006. P.J. and his wife stood by me when I testified as a Halliburton Whistleblower before the United States House Committee on Government Reform, and before the U.S. Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

I have always admired P.J.’s dignity and restraint – his patience and elegant responses during press conferences and media events that might have caused Jesus himself to flip tables on those who choose to distort the truth for profit in the media.

If you know me, you know that I can become quite animated when addressing my passionate social justice concerns. Over the years, I’ve tried to learn from P.J.’s dealings with the press. His temperament has always been gentle, but extremely disciplined.

So, when I read P.J.'s comments about the U.S. military’s treatment of Bradley Manning, I can’t help but believe that his statements to bloggers were deliberate statements of conscience – what we expect of our finest military officers and government officials. But, for speaking truth to power, P.J. lost his platform.

I read that the Obama Administration has distanced itself from P.J.’s comments, which is regrettable. But, if we are concerned with the ongoing Abu Ghraib-ness of our government’s treatment of political and wartime prisoners,  -- if we care about our image as a nation that adheres to the highest principles of military and civilian justice -- then, we need to stand behind P.J.

Right now, I have this to say to my friend: Thank you, P.J., for speaking your gentle truth in these very dangerous times.


But, it is not enough to thank P.J.  for his service to truth.  For the sake of our national integrity, we need to contact our senators and congresspersons to demand that our military interrogators abide by the Geneva Conventions and by the U.S. UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice) in all dealings with prisoners under our control.    Here’s our link: http://www.contactingthecongress.org/