DebateGate

Congrats, Pooch!  I can understand your feelings about being the last male to carry on the family name - my paternal grandfather had three sons.  One died when he was 19, and of the other two, my uncle had two daughters by his first marriage and no sons with his second wife.  My father had two sons - one died shortly after a premature birth, and my older brother has been married twice and never wanted children.   

Genealogy can be fascinating, and the internet has opened up so much in terms of research.  Recently I wanted to find out some information about my paternal grandfather, and so I signed up for the free trial on ancestry.com.  Although I didn't find exactly what I was looking for about him, I did find a copy of the register showing when he and his wife emigrated to the U.S., crossing from Canada at Port Huron, as well as several copies of the yearly census which listed him and his family. All of these documents were copies from the original handwritten ledgers.

To my surprise, I found many news articles about both of my parents.  When I was born, my father was a Lt. Colonel in the Army Air Corps and was the commander of the base hospital.  There were mentions of him at various functions - hosting dinners and giving awards and so on - and also mentions of my mother in her role in the Officer's Wives Club at their meetings and luncheons.  There were even two articles that had photographs, although the one with my mom was too blurry to even make her out.  Later in his life, my father was the chief psychiatrist at a prison, and I found articles quoting him in newspapers across the country concerning an experimental drug that was being used at the time, and another article where he testified during a state inquiry of prison conditions. 

There was something in one of the articles that I found very interesting.  My father was asked by an assemblyman how the prison coped with the problem of homosexuality (this was back in early 1972).

My father responded that there was a 47-bed ward separated from the rest of the institution for what he termed "flamboyant, effeminate homosexuals".  He said confirmed homosexuals were advised when they first arrived at the institution, "Okay, you're a homosexual.  Try not to get in trouble while you're here."

"Homosexuals receive very little therapy treatment," he testified. "We don't have the staff, and even if we did have the staff, we still don't have the answer to homosexuality."

Another assemblyman voiced his concern that the prison hadn't been active enough in denying reports that operations such as lobotomies had been taking place there.  My father responded that the facility had made extensive efforts to discount the reports as completely unfounded.

My father died the following December, shortly before I turned 18.  I don't remember any talk at home about his testimony before the prison reform investigating committee (although I will confess that at the time, I was busy experimenting with an entirely different class of drugs...).  As a teenager, I never got the chance to know my father on an adult level, and there's so much that I'll never find out.  Finding these articles was an eye-opening experience for me, and
I was amazed at the amount of information that the website had.

There's so much wrong with this story that I don't even know where to start.
___________________________________________________________________

Palmerton Area money used for teen magazines, camp, airfare and modeling school

Rebecca Maykish is 17 and dreads school so much that she stopped going regularly.

In fourth grade.

Those days off have come at a price to her school district and the Palmerton taxpayers who support it. Since 2004, the Palmerton Area School Board has authorized payments of more than $45,000 to help Rebecca make up for her missed school days. Rebecca's mother, Barbara, has used the money for at-home tutoring and education software purchases. She has also spent it on modeling classes for Rebecca, subscriptions to teen magazines, and travel to New York and Toronto with a summer camp.

All of the expenses were approved by the district.

Until December, Rebecca's education was paid through a compensatory education fund, which is supported through local property taxes and controlled by the school board. Compensatory education funds are distributed to students whose school districts have failed to give them an appropriate education, as required by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act.

Compensatory education fund

In 2004, a special education hearing officer with the state ordered the district to set up a compensatory education fund for Rebecca, according to Fred Stanczak, Barbara Maykish's attorney. Maykish and Palmerton Area school officials agreed in a private meeting to compensate Rebecca for 1,000 hours of missed instruction, at a rate of $45 an hour, Stanczak said.

The agreement allowed Barbara Maykish to spend the money on anything that would be educational, therapeutic or enriching, which gave her wide discretion, Stanczak said. The fund hit the $45,000 cap in December.

State education officials say they have no control over compensatory education funds and do not know how many exist. The Allentown District has a $57,000 fund set up for a special education student, said Superintendent Karen Angello. She would not disclose the nature of the student's need but did say the district has never set up a compensatory education fund for a student with school phobia.

The Bethlehem Area and Easton Area districts currently have no compensatory education funds in their budgets.

Scott Engler, special education director for the Palmerton district, said school officials had little say over how the money in Rebecca Maykish's fund was spent.

''The expenditures were paid under the terms of an order that gave virtually total discretion to the parent to determine what was educationally necessary,'' he said.

Last spring, about seven months before Rebecca Maykish's fund ran out, she left a California boarding school that she had attended for part of the 2006-07 school year. The district followed up with truancy notices.

Since then, Rebecca has been fined $1,900 and her mother $11,329 for truancy. In March, a district judge ordered Barbara Maykish to pay $8,000 for the 80 days that Rebecca missed this year.

''It's been really bad. I have my house for sale (to pay the fines) ... (But) when she did go to school, she would cry nonstop,'' Maykish said as she sat in the living room of her Lehigh Avenue home with her two Japanese Chin lap dogs and a Boston terrier nearby.

Rebecca says she's not lazy, but the thought of going to school has made her sick with anxiety. So she has just stayed home.

A 'long-standing' phobia

According to a psychiatrist and psychologists who have evaluated her, she suffers from an emotional disorder called school phobia, or school refusal.

In 2004, an Orefield psychiatrist noted in a report -- which Barbara Maykish shared with the The Morning Call -- that Rebecca had a ''generalized anxiety disorder'' that made her fear school.

''This is a young lady who has long-standing school phobia,'' wrote Dr. Larry Dumont, who recommended that Rebecca receive at-home instruction.

School phobia is a medical condition but is not one of 13 federally approved disabilities that allow a student to qualify for an individualized education program under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, said Rick Agretto, the director of special education for the Bethlehem Area School District.

However, a student with school phobia could qualify for some accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, including a compensatory education fund.

When the final bills were tallied, the fund set up for Rebecca had reached $46,361. All the money paid to her came from district funds, said Steve Serfass, Palmerton Area School District solicitor.

Barbara Maykish spent $3,892 on at-home instruction, and hundreds more on educational software. She spent $2,100 for Rebecca to take classes at the Barbizon modeling academy, and nearly $6,000 to attend summer camp in Ferndale, N.Y., and go on field trips to Toronto and New York. The fund also covered $54 for subscriptions to Seventeen, Teen Vogue and Teen People magazines, according to documents provided by Maykish and the school district.

The documents show Barbara Maykish spent $222 to board her dogs while visiting Rebecca at a California boarding school in 2007; $2,329 for her and Rebecca to fly to the school and $500 for tuition and spending from March-May.

All of the expenses were allowed under the agreement Barbara Maykish reached with the school district.

Barbara Maykish never received cash up front. Instead, she would purchase items and submit a receipt to the school district for reimbursement.

Stanley J. Majewski Jr, assistant superintendent for finance in the Bethlehem Area district, said the district has had few special education cases that have required the funds. None, he said, has included the kinds of expenses Rebecca Maykish has accumulated.,

''I've not seen anything come through for such things as [magazine] subscriptions,'' Majewski said.

Palmerton School Board President Carl Bieling Jr. said he and the board approved the payments because district administrators told them they were permitted under the terms of the compensatory education fund. He added that the expenses were first approved by former members of the board.

But he said he was bothered that Rebecca and her mother were receiving so much money.

''We are aware of the case, we are aware of the California thing. ... We've been advised that these expenditures were needed under the circumstance,'' Bieling said.

''It is troubling to see monies go out to one student that could have been used across the whole district,'' he said.

Acting Superintendent Lamar Snyder did not return repeated calls.

Compensatory education funds are typically set up to help students who have not received appropriate instruction in the classroom. They usually fund tutoring, according to Charles Pugh, an attorney with Education Law Advocates in West Chester, Chester County. The funds can also be used to help students with emotional or behavioral development, providing such things as psychological care or speech therapy. Or for equipment purchases that help a child with a physical disability, Pugh said.

Justified expenses?

Barbara Maykish said expenses for modeling school and summer camp were justified because the education fund was also intended to boost Rebecca's self-esteem and help her interact with kids her age.

At the beginning of most school years, Rebecca has tried to attend school but the longest she has made it was toThanksgiving in fourth grade. She began this year as a junior at Palmerton High School but stopped going after the third week of September.

''It's kind of humiliating to start out at the beginning of the year,'' Rebecca said. ''People always say 'Didn't you used to go to this school? What happened?' ''

Rebecca says she reads for pleasure, enjoying parodies such as ''Zen of the Zombie,'' a mock self-improvement book. But her writing skills are weak and she can only do basic multiplication and division on downloaded worksheets. She estimates she spends three hours a day learning. Barbara Maykish has opted not to homeschool her, saying she worried that she would not be able to help Rebecca with her math and writing problems.

Rebecca said she has only one friend in Palmerton. She spent her 17th birthday in March with her mother, who is her only close companion. Her father lives in Peru.

When Rebecca was a kindergartner, she would grip the bannister in her home to keep from going to school, Barbara Maykish said.

''You would have to peel her fingers off the railing. It would take two people,'' she said.

For the first couple of years, Barbara Maykish said, she would force her daughter to go to school. But Rebecca would cry, shake, and throw up in the mornings.

Some elementary school students get that kind of separation anxiety, but it is almost never seen among teens, said Elna Yadin, a psychologist at the Child Study Institute at Bryn Mawr College.

In his 16 years as special education director, Agretto, of the Bethlehem Area district, said he may have seen 10 cases of school phobia, most of them involving elementary school students.

''It comes in all levels of degree,'' Agretto said. ''You have to take each case on face value.''

School phobia, which affects between 1 percent and 5 percent of students, is often associated with other anxiety problems or depression, according to a 2003 report in American Family Physician by Dr. Wanda B. Fremont, a psychiatry professor at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University. Children with school phobia usually stay in their house during school hours because it is considered a safe and secure environment and are willing to do schoolwork at home, while truants are likely to be out of the house and have no interest in doing school work, Fremont wrote.

Rebecca is an extreme case of school phobia, according to Yadin and Palmerton school officials, who say they have never had a truancy case like this.

Typically, it develops when a student has a reason to dread school, such as a bully, a mean teacher, or a fear that something bad will happen if they leave the house, said Yadin. Once the cause is known, school officials and parents can usually find a way to address it.

''If you teach kids to stay away from what you're afraid of, that is not a good solution in the long term,'' Yadin said. ''Avoidance becomes a way of life.''

Palmerton sent tutors to Rebecca's house during the 2004-05 school year. Barbara and Rebecca Maykish said they got along with one tutor, calling her ''phenomenal,'' but did not like the tutor who replaced her. They disagreed over appointment times, and Rebecca felt the tutor was not working with her. Tutoring stopped the following year.

In November of 2006, Rebecca enrolled at the Academy of the Sierras, a boarding school in California. Rebecca said being immersed in a school environment helped her anxiety, and she made friends and went to classes. But the school phobia soon returned, and she left around April 2007.

When Rebecca came home, she and her mother had no plan for her education. Palmerton school officials tried to work out a new individualized education plan for her, but Barbara Maykish and school officials could not reach an agreement.

That's when the fines started arriving again. Barbara Maykish has been fined 111 times for truancy, with the earliest cases filed in 2003, a year before the compensatory education fund was set up.

She fought the fines, but has lost every case in Palmerton district court, and 10 appeals so far in Carbon County. Maykish, who is unemployed, has paid $1 so far. State law allows a jail term of five days for each unpaid fine, although no judge has threatened jail yet, said Serfass, the school district solicitor.

Payment schedules call for her to pay about $35 a month through the year 2037.

Maykish plans to appeal to federal court, arguing that Rebecca cannot be expected to go to a regular school.

Her attorney, Stanczak, said the local courts have ignored Rebecca's disability. He said Palmerton has not accommodated her.

''This is an unusual disability and it's not something that schools are used to dealing with,'' he said.

Now that she is 17, Rebecca could legally drop out, but she says she wants to earn a diploma. She can attend Palmerton Area High School until she is 21, but she thinks a cyberschool or another boarding school would be better options.

Because her daughter has gone the past year without any formal education, Barbara Maykish said she thinks she might need another compensatory education fund.

www.mcall.com/news/local/all-a1_1phobia.6371961may18,0,5700457.story

Clarke was responsible for my love of science fiction...one of my favorite books - and one that I can read over and over - is Childhood's End.  I've always wanted to see that made into a movie.

Damn...this really hit home.

My youngest child just turned 18, and she's brought such joy to my life. Thank you for posting the link to this video - the message it contains reflects my personal philosophy of raising children, and it would be wonderful if more people understood how truly precious the time we have with our children is.

Here's an article that describes the results of a WWII history quiz given to an 11th grade class by the S.F. Chronicle; some of the answers were truly dismal.  But there are teachers who are trying to find ways to expand the curriculum. I guarantee none of the students involved in this project will forget anything they learned:

At Palo Alto High, a lightbulb lit for 11th-grade history teacher David Rapaport a few years ago when a student's father handed him a World War II scrapbook he'd found in a dumpster.

"It was amazing," Rapaport said. "It was in perfect condition."

A soldier's wife named Barbara Costello had saved not only letters, telegrams and military orders, but every napkin and receipt remotely related to the service of her husband, William Costello.

Last year, Rapaport asked his students to trace the soldier's life.

The kids spent the year learning about the man, and ended up writing a "A Soldier's Scrapbook," a colorful, 40-page book they published themselves.

It's part World War II history, part love story. A photo of the couple's graves is on the back cover.

"Instead of listening to and reading history, we have uncovered it ourselves," writes Ali Arams, one of the book's 150 authors. "Our class has discovered history like no one else has before."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/02/BA61S87F0.DTL

(CBS) CALDWELL, N.J. Two local middle school teachers are in hot water after assigning students a controversial project on slavery that's angered parents.

Over 100 sixth graders at Grover Cleveland Middle School in Caldwell spent several days last week taking part in an assignment where they used terms like "build a plantation" while completing their "Lap of Luxury" social studies project.

The project instructed students to create an advertisement defending the use of slave labor to run a newly built plantation in South Carolina. Students are told to come up with a '"catchy" name for the plantation and give three reasons why slave labor is the "best idea" and to add illustrations.

One student, who is not being identified because of his age, read to CBS 2 what he wrote for the assignment: "Slave labor is the way to go because slaves aren't paid, so all money is profit."

Parents are astonished by the assignment's nature.

"It's really offending," said Tyiesha Hameed, whose child is one of the only eight black students who attends the school. "There's so many other ways and tools to show our kids how to learn and teach them in reference to slavery."

One question parents and officials are asking is whether the 11- and 12-year-olds even understand the lesson which was given to them.

"The students have to use their creative spirits to create justification. That gets the mind pretty worked up, and it embeds some things in their process that will be there for forever," said James Harris, president of the New Jersey NAACP chapter.

Casey Shorter, the school's principal, said he didn't find out about the project until after he spoke with a concerned parent. "Our intent was not to be insensitive. After reviewing the assignment and listening to feedback, from an administrative and teaching perspective, we determined it was insensitive and inappropriate. And we will eliminate it from the curriculum," he said.

Citing privacy issues, Shorter would not say what he's done with Dana Howarth and Beth Rutzler, the two language arts teachers who created the controversial "Lap of Luxury" project. He adds this is actually the second year that the teachers have given the assignment.

http://wcbstv.com/local/local_story_275172255.html

DUNKINSVILLE, Ohio (AP) ? Despite a tradition of shunning modern technology, the Amish in southern Ohio are finding ways to use solar energy, windmill power and the Internet to produce and market their homemade goods.

Electricity generated in the outside world and brought into Amish communities through power lines is usually forbidden, but generating their own power is considered acceptable.

That's especially true for businesses like the one run by Daniel Miller and his brothers, where family members come together for a common purpose.

"What we might do in our business, we would not do in our homes," said Miller, who runs the family's furniture store in Adams County, about 70 miles east of Cincinnati. "That is more by tradition than anything else."

Solar panels have also become prevalent among Amish in northeast Ohio, where hundreds see getting energy from the sun as a safe alternative to natural gas and kerosene as a source of light.

At Miller's Furniture, Bakery and Bulk Food, freezers, cash registers and other equipment are operated by energy generated by a windmill and solar panels at the family's country complex. The family, which also makes and sells pies, cheeses and bread, stores the electricity in truck-sized batteries.

In 30 years, they haven't had to pay a single electric bill.

"The world may run out of oil and gas," Miller said. "But we will always have the sun and wind."

The family also is using Internet advertising to attract non-Amish customers from Cincinnati, Columbus and Dayton. The Millers hired ZoneFree Ohio Marketing and Public Relations, a public relations company that highlights the family's various products on a website that caters to tourists.

"Some people see them as simple and backward," said Frank Satullo, ZoneFree Ohio founder. "And yet they went 'green' years ago. These plain-living people in horses and buggies are way ahead of the world."

At the bottom of the ZoneFree website featuring the Millers' store, Satullo runs a disclaimer that his company, not the Miller family, created and maintain the site.

"I have to say that, because, of course, the Millers can't have their own website," Satullo said. "But I can use the Internet for them."

Miller also buys ads in newspapers, which usually run in a paper's Internet site as well. But it's an advertisement he'll never see.

"We just can't go there," he said. "But, yes, it is a tool that can be used to tell people we're here."

Miller's Furniture, Bakery and Bulk Food
http://www.ohiotraveler.com/ohio_amish_stores.htm

In spite of the numerous organized religions who believe in a Heaven/Hell destination after death, none of us really know for sure what we will face once our lives end.  The concepts serve a purpose as incentives to follow the precepts and guidelines of a chosen faith - if you do all the right stuff, you'll gain the rewards of Heaven.  If you screw up, you'll be denied entrance and depending on the magnitude of your infractions, you might even be condemned to eternal Hell.  For some, the idea of Hell isn't the fire brimstone version, but having to dwell in the absence of God's glory as a direct consequence of their actions.

I don't believe that there is just nothingness after we die, but where that undefinable thing that makes each person unique goes, I don't know.  What I do know is that we'll all find out someday, and I'm fairly certain that some of us are in for a big surprise. That's why the Golden Rule makes the best guideline for all of us - it encourages acceptance and empathy towards others, even if they don't share our beliefs.  Who knows?  They might be the ones checking off names in the Book of Life, after all.