Category: Spring 2005 Newswire
Educators, Lawmakers Cry for No Child Left Behind Reform
By Emily Beaver
WASHINGTON, April 26-If you ask how the No Child Left Behind Act has affected her district, Dr. Doris Kurtz, superintendent of New Britain Public Schools, will begin by telling you, “Well, that’s a tall order.”
Teachers and students are struggling to improve test scores, a slew of administrators who can’t or don’t want to handle the stress are opting for early retirement, and educators’ overall morale has sunk, Kurtz said.
In an April telephone interview, Kurtz said that at the same time budget cutbacks have forced the district to eliminate administrative jobs and “phase in” textbooks with only some students in a class getting new books, the federal government is asking schools to raise student performance.
“Everything has been cut to raise student achievement,” she said.
Kurtz is one of many educators in Connecticut and across the country who have begun to challenge the law they call an unfunded mandate. Changes to the act have been proposed in Congress and lawsuits challenging the law have been filed in court.
The Connecticut chapter along with nine other state chapters of the National Education Association filed a lawsuit in April against the federal government for what it calls a failure to fully fund No Child Left Behind. And earlier in the month, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced plans to sue over the “unfunded mandates” of the federal education reform act.
The term “unfunded mandates” is sometimes applied to provisions of federal laws that require states to implement costly programs without providing the money to pay for them. The National Education Association lawsuit is based on a paragraph in the No Child Left Behind Act that says no state or municipality will be forced to spend local funds under the law.
Now, three years after the landmark federal education act was passed into law, Connecticut lawmakers and interest groups are pushing to change No Child Left Behind at the state and federal levels.
Local educators like Kurtz say these attempts at reform, including more federal funding to track student achievement and more flexible requirements for certifying qualified teachers, are well-intentioned but don’t address some of the most fundamental problems of the law.
Kurtz said she knows the district needs a better system to assess student and teacher performance, smaller class sizes and more pre-school programs.
“But you need resources for all those things,” she said.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, schools are required to monitor and report student achievement using standardized tests. All students must meet the tests’ proficiency requirements by 2014. Schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” toward those goals must provide services such as tutoring or allow students to attend other schools in the district. Schools that do not comply with the law cannot receive federal education aid.
Two Democratic members of the Connecticut congressional delegation have introduced a bill to change the federal law. Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, 3 rd District, in April introduced the No Child Left Behind Reform Act. In addition to giving schools funds to track students’ yearly progress and increase flexibility in guidelines for teacher qualification, the bill also would allow measures other than testing to evaluate student performance, according to a statement from DeLauro’s office.
Using one test to judge all students is one of the most controversial provisions of the act, especially when testing students with disabilities or students learning English as a second language.
Kurtz said teachers who work with children learning English are physically and emotionally drained from the challenging work, but their students may still be labeled “in need of improvement” under the law.
“It’s very rewarding to me to make a difference in a needy child’s life, but it’s also very demanding,” she said.
Rosemary Coyle, president of the Connecticut Education Association, said the proposed changes address some of the major issues educators have with No Child Left Behind. The association, which represents 35,500 educators in Connecticut, is one of the plaintiffs in the suit filed by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union.
“We have always supported the goals of the law,” Coyle said. “But we have two issues with the law. It’s an unfunded mandate.and it’s trying a one-size-fits-all approach that says every child’s going to improve at the same rate.”
The lawsuit focuses on the “the unfunded piece,” she said.
A report by the Connecticut State Department of Education in March estimated that meeting the requirements of No Child Left Behind will cost the state $41.6 million by 2008. The report, which is the basis for Attorney General Blumenthal’s promised lawsuit, blames the shortfall mainly on the requirement that Connecticut administer tests in every grade from second through eighth. The state currently tests students only in grades two, four and six.
The U.S. Department of Education, in an April statement, , called the report a “flawed” cost study that “creates inflated projection built upon questionable estimates.”
This kind of bickering between federal and state government over funding issues is typical, said Jay Greene, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
But paying for No Child Left Behind is just one source of the resistance educators are showing to the law, Greene said. The other source is the pressure of being forced by the government to raise student achievement, he said.
“As that vise is being squeezed, some people are not making progress and are upset,” he said. “You can either say, ‘We’re not doing as well as we should, we need to improve,’ or, ‘There is something wrong with this vise that is squeezing me.’”
Although many educators like Coyle said they supported the aim of No Child Left Behind, Greene said it was much easier for educators to support the law “before it starts to squeeze you.”
Connecticut Voices for Children, a children’s advocacy group, surveyed educators across the state about the law. In March, the group recommended changes to the state legislature, such as tracking the progress of one group of students over time and accommodating children with disabilities.
Daniel Fernandez, a Yale University law student who worked on the study, said the feeling that No Child Left Behind isn’t really necessary and that the state’s former testing system was adequate exists among some educators.
“Down deep, a lot of these educators feel the law is doing more harm than good,” he said. “They feel the entire thing is more of a mistake. Most educators would just be as happy to go back to the old system.”
However, the government is unlikely to do away with No Child Left Behind now that a system of testing and reporting is in place, Greene said.
“I can’t see the constituency that says, ‘We no longer want to see how our kids are doing,’ ” he said. “I think it’s hard to go back.”
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Congress Works to Protect U.S. From Tsunamis
By Liz Goldberg
WASHINGTON, April 26 - Four months after one of the most destructive tsunamis in history killed thousands of people along the Indian Ocean basin, Congress is taking steps to try to prevent similar devastation in the United States should a tsunami occur.
The U.S. has a system to detect tsunamis-large, often destructive waves produced after underwater disturbances-in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and in the Caribbean Sea, but several bills are moving through Congress to expand and improve the detection system and reduce reaction times.
Immediately following last December's Indian Ocean tsunami, President George W. Bush requested and was granted supplemental funds for this year to expand the U.S.'s warning system. The President requested additional money for the plan in his proposed 2006 budget, according to an official from the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Bush's proposal calls for spending $37.5 million over the next two years to develop 32 new detection buoys, according to an Office of Science and Technology Policy press release. Seven of the buoys would be placed in the Atlantic and the Caribbean and the rest in the Pacific, said Greg Romano, public affairs director for the National Weather Service, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
These "next generation" buoys, part of the Weather Service's Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis program, would be able to collect a wide range of data about the oceans, including tsunamis, and would provide more real-time information than the current buoys, said Scott Carter, a congressional affairs specialist for NOAA, who handles Weather Service legislation.
The new system would provide the United States with improved ability to detect coastal tsunamis, allowing responses within minutes. The new system would also "expand monitoring capabilities throughout the entire Pacific and Caribbean basins, providing tsunami warning for regions bordering half of the world's oceans," according to the science and technology office press release.
On the heels of Bush's proposal, several tsunami warning bills were introduced in both chambers of Congress.
Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), co-chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, sponsored a bill exclusively focused on establishing an improved tsunami warning system.
Meanwhile, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), another member of the committee and chairman of its Fisheries and the Coast Guard Subcommittee, reintroduced legislation that would establish a comprehensive system to monitor the condition of the nation's oceans and coastlines, including detecting tsunamis. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) co-sponsored the bill.
The committee has approved both bills, and they are expected to go to the Senate floor for debate soon, Carter said.
According to information about tsunamis on NOAA's Web site, movement on the ocean floor sends water upward, and as the wall of water moves closer to shore and enters shallower water, the wave becomes compressed, slowing its speed but increasing the wave length and height, causing the pileup of water that crashes to shore. The process can repeat a number of times, with flooding occurring between waves.
While a tsunami can occur anywhere, one is much less likely to hit along the Atlantic Coast or in the Caribbean Sea than in the Pacific Ocean because the Pacific has deep, actively moving fault lines that shift to cause an upheaval of water and, thus, a tsunami, Romano said. Earthquakes registering 7.0 or greater on the Richter Scale are generally needed for a tsunami to occur, he said.
But the Atlantic and Caribbean areas are not without risk.
"We have in the Atlantic and Caribbean densely populated areas . so the potential impact should a tsunami occur is huge," Romano said. "It's important that people who live or work or visit coastal communities along any coasts understand that tsunamis could occur and that there are very simple actions that should be taken."
For individuals, one of the most important things to do is to move inland or to higher ground, said Romano. Local communities can help prepare citizens for tsunamis through education and planning.
To that end, NOAA developed the Tsunami Ready Community program so communities can prepare for tsunamis by establishing an emergency operations center, notification system and hazard plan, according to information on NOAA's website. The program is similar to NOAA's Storm Ready program, which educates communities about how to handle tornados and other major storms. Once a community is Storm Ready, it would not take much to become Tsunami Ready as well, Carter said.
But only a handful of communities in New England are Storm Ready, including Fort Fairfield, Maine, and Hampton, N.H., and no place on the East Coast is Tsunami Ready. On the West Coast, where tsunamis are more likely to occur, only 15 or 16 communities are Tsunami Ready, Carter said.
"If communities don't understand what to do when they get a warning or when an earthquake happens, it's not going to do a lot of good," Carter said.
Depending on weather and sea conditions, tsunamis can be of varying heights, and topographic differences can affect how far inland the waves travel. The Northeast region has the advantage of having higher levels of elevation than other parts of the country, Romano said.
"If higher ground is nearby, there's not as much need to go as far inland" to escape the tsunami, he said.
Although Maine is not at great risk for tsunamis, Snowe is concerned about a broader range of oceanic detection issues, said Antonia Ferrier, her press secretary.
"Given that we are so economically dependent on our ocean, we need to do everything we can to make sure it is a healthy and productive resource for our future," Ferrier said.
Carter said Snowe's bill is more "comprehensive" than Inouye's because the detections she has proposed would monitor such things as wave heights, salinity, wind and currents, which are important because linking all possible ocean data would allow for better forecasting.
The current focus on ocean detection systems could help Snowe's bill pass this session.
"We are encouraged by having more people talking about warning systems. It elevates the issue to the forefront," Ferrier said. "It is our hope that the Senate acts swiftly on the legislation."
The Bush administration also is working on developing a global system for countries to develop universal standards and be able to share data collected from the world's oceans.
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Amendment Could Alleviate Visa Shortage for Temporary Foreign Workers (MA)
WASHINGTON, April 26 - For the first time ever, when Michelle Langlois applied for H2B visas this year so that she could hire temporary foreign workers for her Nantucket bed and breakfast, her application was denied.
"I've been at the Brass Lantern for five years, so it's the same that we've done every year and it's the same that the people we bought it from did," said Langlois, the owner of the inn and the president of the Nantucket Lodging Association.
Fortunately, through other resources, Langlois found enough workers to staff the Brass Lantern Inn from early-April to early-December, its usual season, she said. However, other companies haven't been so lucky.
Small and seasonal businesses throughout New England have increasingly been running into problems with the H2B program for seasonal foreign workers due to a nationwide shortage of the visas. In 1990, the federal government set an annual cap of 66,000 H2B visas. For the past two years it has been more actively enforcing the limit, according to Art Canter, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Lodging Association, and the cap has been reached less than six months into the start of the fiscal year, which begins on October 1. That means businesses which want to hire summer workers are especially hard hit since all of the visas are given out by mid-winter.
The shortage is keeping businesses from bringing in foreign workers to do the jobs that Americans don't seem to be taking. As a result, many companies are facing a labor crisis that could force them to shorten their seasons or even shut their doors.
But a measure passed last week by the Senate could end their worries - at least temporarily.
If the House of Representatives agrees to enact the Senate measure, which would be in effect only for the next two years, temporary foreign workers who have been employed in the country under the H2B visa program at least once in the past three years would be exempt from the national cap. Businesses that have been denied visas for this year might then still be able to bring in workers who followed the rules and returned home when they were supposed to.
"For several years in a row, the cap has created a crisis for the tourism industry in Massachusetts and nationwide. Countless small, family-run businesses depend on the ability to hire more workers for the summer season, and they can't possibly find enough U.S. workers to fill the need," Sen. Edward Kennedy said during an April 13 debate on the Senate floor. "Without this amendment, many of these firms can't survive because seasonal business is the heart of their operation."
The amendment passed overwhelmingly in the Senate, with 94 senators voting in favor including John Kerry and Kennedy (D-Mass.). Senator Barbara Mikulski, who introduced the amendment, previously introduced an identical bill in February which Kerry and Kennedy both co-sponsored. She decided to attach the measure to an emergency supplemental spending bill a couple of weeks ago so that the visa changes could be approved and take effect more quickly.
Before businesses can be approved for the visas, they must show that that they have made a rigorous effort to advertise jobs locally. For example, before Dan's Floor Store in New Hampshire applied for H2B visas two years ago, the company put out "help wanted" ads for floor layers locally as well as in the Boston Globe and the New York Times. "They're quite strict, which is good. Then again, it wasn't too helpful for us because we're in Londonderry," said Andrew Ferrier, the store's sales manager.
But in many summer tourism areas throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the population isn't large enough to supply the labor that lodging and restaurant businesses need during their busiest months. Businesses in Cape Cod, the islands, and the Berkshires are being hurt the most by the shortage of visas, according to Canter.
The Cape Cod tourism industry used to rely heavily on college students, according to Canter. "Way back when, the Cape would be rocking and rolling with college students who would be working summer jobs," he said. But now that many businesses have expanded their seasons into the spring and summer months, college students can no longer supply the help that they need.
Summer tourism businesses are also at a disadvantage because they can only apply for the visas 120 days before they will be used. Winter industries like ski resorts need workers at the beginning of the year and are then able to apply for the visas earlier, leaving few visas for summer industries.
This year, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it hit the cap in January, only three months after the start of the fiscal year. If approved, Mikulski's amendment would address this problem by reserving half of the 66,000 visas for companies sending in applications during the last six months of the fiscal year.
"The time for application comes at the time of the year when great numbers are taken up for the winter tourism, which has happened historically, and what we are trying to do with the Senator's amendment is to treat the summer tourism and the summer needs on an even playing field," Kennedy said during a debate on the amendment.
Langlois, who turned in the paperwork for her visas last December, received notice that her application was denied soon after. She found two workers already in the United States who extended their visas so that they could work for her, and one of her friends gave her an "open" H2B visa that had already been approved.
But if she hadn't secured these workers, she would have been forced to make some choices. "What I probably would have looked at was shortening my season.," she said. "We can't change the level of service that our guests are used to expecting so we just have to do whatever is necessary to deliver that."
People from Massachusetts and the rest of the region who visit Cape Cod and the islands every year might find some changes this summer, according to David Noble, director of external affairs at the Massachusetts Lodging Association.
"In certain situations or cases, they will not be able to visit or stay at some of the properties that they otherwise have done in the past," he said. "And as a result, with fewer options for places to stay, they will either be forced to go to another place where there may be wait lists or maybe where the rates will be higher, or they will be forced to go somewhere else out of state."
Paul Hartgen, president of the New Hampshire Lodging and Restaurant Association, said many of the businesses in jeopardy will simply adapt and find alternative labor sources if the amendment doesn't pass. For example, some businesses may be able to hire foreign students through the J1 work-travel program, which allows foreign students to work in the country, usually during the summer. But such alternatives aren't always ideal.
"You get people to do the work, but they may not either know the work, they may not be trained in that particular specialty or they may have to be trained to a different standard," Langlois said.
A conference committee this week, in which the Senate and the House will discuss the legislation, will determine if Mikulski's amendment goes though. Currently, more than 80 House members have cosponsored a bill identical to Mikulski's amendment, which Hartgen calls, "a pretty good signal."
If the amendment is passed quickly, businesses might be able to secure the help they need for this summer or bring in some of the trained foreign workers whom they have employed in the past.
"If it gets passed by mid-May, we could still have people here in July," Langlois said of Nantucket restaurant and lodging businesses. "July and August are our busiest months. So that would help."
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Sununu Proposes Legislation to Create Personal Social Security Accounts
WASHINGTON, April 20 - Sen. John Sununu has become one of the first senators to propose a concrete plan for changing Social Security, re-filing a proposal on Wednesday that would allow workers under 55 years old to eventually invest more than half of their Social Security payroll taxes through personal savings accounts.
"This is a better retirement security system," the New Hampshire Republican said during a Capitol Hill press conference. "They (retirees) own it, it's there for them when they retire and they can leave it to their children and grandchildren."
Co-author Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) said he also would re-file the bill in the House on Wednesday. Last year, Sununu's version of similar legislation failed to get out of the Senate Finance Committee.
Under the measure filed Wednesday, persons 55and older would be covered by the current Social Security program, while those younger than 55 would have the option of diverting a portion of the annual 12.4 percent Social Security payroll tax into their personal accounts.
Between 2006 and 2015, workers would be allowed to invest an average of 3.4 percentage points of the tax, or more than one-quarter of the total tax, through their personal accounts. Starting in 2016, an average of 6.4 percentage points of the tax could be placed into the accounts. These accounts would be backed with a federal guarantee that investors would be able to collect, at a minimum, a sum equal to the Social Security benefit they would be entitled to under the current law, Ryan said at the Wednesday press conference.
The lower percentage of the payroll tax during the first 10 years would allow the plan to be phased in at a lower cost, Ryan said. The transition costs of meeting the benefit payoffs to retired workers while reducing the revenue from the payroll tax would be paid for three ways, Ryan said. The first is to "stop the raid" on current Social Security payroll tax surpluses, which are used to fund other federal programs, he said. Second, the bill places savings resulting from a one percent reduction in the rate of federal spending growth for the next eight years into Social Security. Third, corporate tax revenue generated by the new personal account investments would go to guarantee payment of the benefits under the current law.
"If none of that happens over the next 10 years, we would have to borrow $1.1 trillion to finance this bill," Ryan said. "I would argue that borrowing.$1.1 trillion to pay off a $12 trillion debt is still a very good deal."
Ryan was referring to the Social Security Administration's estimate that the system's "unfunded liability" in perpetuity would amount to at least $11 trillion. Critics have called that estimate meaningless.
President George W. Bush has been touring the nation promoting his agenda to restructure Social Security, including establishment of personal accounts. The White House has said it will be up to Congress to work out the details of any change to Social Security.
On Monday, during a stop in South Carolina on his 60 Stops in 60 Days tour, Bush said that personal accounts would not be enough to save Social Security. He said an increase in retirement age and a change in the formula that determines annual inflation adjustments in benefits under the current system are among the adjustments that should be considered. One idea is to base that formula on annual changes in the cost of living rather than wage increases, Bush said.
Bush's critics have said that applying the Social Security payroll tax to more than the current cap of $90,000 a year would go a long way to solving the system's financial needs without resort to wholesale changes.
Bush's personal accounts plan "diverts money way from the system that provides benefits to working people," Mark MacKenzie, the president of the New Hampshire chapter of the AFL-CIO, said of Sununu's plan. "Even if you look at the future of Social Security, Social Security has been adjusted in the past and the payroll tax has not been raised on Social Security in years and the cap has not been raised on Social Security. They should take the cap up and they'll have some more money going into the system."
MacKenzie said in an interview that corporate cuts in benefits and pensions have left people with little money to put away, resulting in a reliance on social security. Furthermore, the lack of stability in the stock market makes workers reluctant to invest, he said. "They understand it's a crap shoot. They look at a market capable of dropping 100 points in a day."
Sununu said the legislation he filed would not have to resort to changes in benefits or in payroll taxes. "I think our legislation proves that personal retirement accounts, in and of themselves, can bring us a permanently solvent system," he said.
According to a report the chief actuary of Social Security filed last year, the Ryan-Sununu plan would eliminate the $11 trillion unfunded liability in Social Security if it follows its current course. The actuary also found the Ryan-Sununu plan would achieve growing surpluses by 2038, 11 years before the current system is said to go bankrupt, and would produce solvency by 2051, Ryan said.
Sununu said this measure is "the least we could do in order to avoid sticking our children and our grandchildren with a $12 trillion bill."
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Locals Gather at Meehan’s Legislative Assembly
WASHINGTON, April 20 - When Barry Finegold found out that Rep. Martin Meehan would be holding his annual legislative assembly during the week of school vacation, he jumped at the chance to go.
"Every year I get an invitation, and I've always wanted to go because its very interesting and you learn a great deal and Washington is a great city," said Finegold, the Massachusetts state representative for Andover, Lawrence and Tewksbury.
But in the past, he's never been able to attend the event because the Massachusetts House has always been in session when it was held. "But the fact that Marty did it during school vacation week, it worked out," he said, because the House is not in session for the week.
Meehan hosted about 200 Massachusetts residents, most of them from the Fifth District, in a conference room on Capitol Hill Wednesday for his 12 th annual legislative assembly, which he also calls "Fifth District Day." Among the speakers at the assembly were Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry (D-Mass.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), as well as James Carville, the co-host of CNN's Crossfire.
Most of the speakers raised such issues as Social Security, President Bush's energy bill and the federal budget deficit after lauding Meehan for his legislative work.
"Marty is such a leader in so many areas," Kennedy said. "We've worked together on tobacco issues, and campaign finance, and he's been a national leader.as well as working on all the things in the district."
As Kennedy spoke, his Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash, played with Meehan's sons, five-year-old Bobby and two-year-old Daniel, beside the podium.
Patrick Blanchette, the Lawrence City Council president, said he was most looking forward to hearing McCain's speech. "We're from the Bay State," he said. "We get to hear Senators Kerry and Kennedy a lot."
Blanchette, who also teaches at the Greater Lawrence Technical School, also was able to attend the assembly for the first time. He said that he's been to Washington before and would like to plan a class trip to the city.
This year, Meehan held the event during the week of school vacation so that more people could come. About half of the people raised their hands when Meehan asked if they had been to one of his assemblies before, according to Meehan's spokesman, Matt Vogel.
As Kennedy pointed out, the assembly also was held the same day that the Red Sox were playing the Baltimore Orioles, whose stadium isn't far from Washington. Many people planned to go to the game after the assembly.
For Jonathan Blodgett, the Essex district attorney, Meehan's assembly was more about a chance to do some business.
"I wanted to come down to have a chance to talk to him a great deal about some of the issues important to me," he said. "We have a drug education program in my office which we're working very hard on, auto insurance fraud, and gangs. And those were a few things I talked to him about this morning."
But Blodgett also enjoyed hearing some of the speakers. "I got a kick out of Carville," he said. "He's very entertaining. I never heard him before."
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Decades Later, America Still Trying to Leave No Man Behind
WASHINGTON, April 21 -As the nation prepares to mark the 30th anniversary of the end of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, the government is still actively searching for the 1,835 prisoners of war and missing military personnel who-dead or alive- remain somewhere in Southeast Asia.
The nerve center of the search is the Pentagon's Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office, based in Arlington, Va., which uses its 600-member staff spread throughout the world to sift through pages of documents, years of memories, grains of soil and strands of DNA in an attempt to uncover clues that would bring the missing persons home.
While all of the cases of missing service men are active, the more details that are known about the case, including when, where and how the person went missing and if the missing were last seen alive or dead, the greater likelihood the U.S. government will be able to convince a former enemy that it should dig up the country looking for lost soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen, said Larry Greer, spokesman for the Missing Personnel Office.
"We would not allow the Vietnamese to come into the United States and start digging up what they thought were grave sites in the middle of the Pentagon," Greer said in an interview. "Likewise they don't allow us to, but what they do is they try to provide us information gathered by their sources so we can be satisfied, if we trust the information, that we know enough about the case in there, and then we can decide to pursue it."
For example, in the case of Col. Sheldon Burnett, who was recently buried in Arlington National Cemetery 34 years after his death in Laos, the government knew the approximate location of his disappearance, had eyewitness testimony from comrades and former enemies and received the cooperation of the Laotian and Vietnamese governments. This information allowed them to pursue the case and find Burnett's remains.
Burnett was the fourth missing New Hampshire soldier to be found in Indochina. Six Granite staters are still missing, according to the Pentagon office's Web site.
Excavations, such as the one in the Laotian jungle that led to the recovery of Burnett's remains, can start only after an investigation has been narrowed to a specific area and enough evidence exists to suggest "there is a good chance we're going to find the remains," Greer said. "We can't send a very expensive team of 100 people, 100 specialists, into an area and say, 'OK, everybody go out and just start poking.' "
The search includes not only Vietnam servicemen, but also the 128 Cold War missing, the 8,152 Korean War missing, and the more than 78,000 missing from World War II. Many of those missing from World War II were lost at sea, either in sunken ships, downed aircrafts or island-hopping campaigns. Nearly 300 World War II missing have been identified since 1976.
For some groups the office's carefully considered approach, mixing economic prudence with sensitive diplomacy and a slow investigative process, is not good enough. They say the government should be spending and doing more to bring those lost service people home.
"Over 90 percent of the total areas where people are lost are areas controlled by Vietnam," said Ann Mills Griffiths, the executive director of the National League of POW/MIA Families, which represents only families of those missing from the Vietnam War. "We're still not seeing a response from the Vietnamese, nor are we seeing pressure on them by the man in charge of POW/MIAs at the Department of Defense."
Recently, Griffiths' group expressed lack of confidence in deputy assistant secretary of Defense Jerry Jennings, who heads the POW/MIA office, complaining that he seemed unable to work with families of the missing and seemed to be easing the pressure on host nations, such as Vietnam, to turn over information that could lead to the whereabouts of missing U.S. servicemen, she said.
In the group's March newsletter, Griffiths writes about Jennings' "distinct lack of warmth in his demeanor toward the individual families."
Furthermore, she writes, "Mr. Jennings' tenure has been more destructive than helpful, especially in terms of alienating other departments, agencies and senior U.S. and foreign officials, including regional U.S. ambassadors."
The group's 2004 policy assessment concluded that "current leadership positions in the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) have espoused the view that normalization somehow negates the need for steady, determined persistence to gain Vietnam's full cooperation, relying instead on Vietnamese rhetoric and a changed atmosphere in U.S.-Vietnam relations."
Since the end of the Vietnam War, 748 of the 2,583 initially missing have been accounted for, according to the office's Web site.
Jennings could not be reached for comment because he is on indefinite medical leave, but Greer, the department's spokesman, responded for the department.
"I've been here 10 years and worked for three senior leaders" including Jennings, Greer said. Jennings "has traveled more, and met with more senior officials of more foreign governments, than any of our previous leaders," he added. "He has led initiatives into areas where doors were previously closed to us and to our recovery operations."
In the 10 years the United States has been working in North Korea, the office has recovered remains of more than 200 soldiers. Additionally the office has achieved access to documents in Russian, Vietnamese and Laotian archives, which had not been available before, Greer said.
Keeping government leaders opening doors is also the goal of veterans' groups, such as the Vietnam Veterans of America, whose announced mission is to make sure the government does not forget its missing. The group has advocated increasing the funds for the Missing Personnel Office so that more teams can be sent into the field to search for fallen comrades in all wars.
"We want the fullest possible accounting of POWs and MIAs; this is the highest goal of our organization," said Bernard Edelman, the veterans' organization's associate director of government relations. The group also sends members to Indochina to exchange information with Vietnamese soldiers about the location of missing servicemen on both sides in the hope that the information gathered could be of use to teams searching for remains.
"Basically, what we are trying to do is to bring closure to the families," Edelman said. "We have to work with the Vietnamese, the Laotians and the Cambodians if we're going to get people in there to explore different sites."
Efforts to bring a full accounting of war missing costs the government $105 million a year, Greer said. This covers not only the cost of excavations but also the expense of identifying remains sent to labs in Hawaii and Virginia through DNA and other means and of tracing artifacts, such as buttons, fabric, and boots, back to the war, branch, and unit of the deceased serviceman.
"People say we shouldn't be spending anything," Greer said, "but American veterans, American families, American service personnel in uniform say, 'You are doing exactly what we want you to do, this is a national commitment that we are going to hold you accountable for.'. They want to be sure the government does not leave anyone behind, even if it takes 60 years for us to get the answers; they say, 'Get them out, bring them home.'"
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Montville Teacher Receives Presidential Award
By Emily Beaver
WASHINGTON, April 14-After a decade of teaching elementary students in Connecticut, a Montville teacher received one of the nation's highest honors in teaching Thursday.
Joseph DiGarbo, a fourth-grade math teacher at Mohegan Elementary School, received the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching at a ceremony in Washington.
"This whole week has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," DiGarbo said before the awards ceremony Thursday. "I'm representing a lot of people from Connecticut and all of their teaching."
DiGarbo, 33 was one of 95 teachers from across the country who received the award and the only one from Connecticut to receive the award for teaching math.
"It's an honor, a definite honor, to be Connecticut's representative," he said before the awards ceremony.
The award was established by Congress in 1983 to honor outstanding math and science teachers. This year's awardees received a citation from President George W. Bush commending them for "embodying excellence in teaching, for devotion to the learning needs of students and for upholding the high standards that exemplify American education at its finest."
DiGarbo, a graduate of the University of Connecticut, has been teaching at Mohegan Elementary since 1996. He is the school's first faculty member to receive the Presidential Award. He said he encourages students to be independent learners and often uses games to teach students math.
"They want to work and try to solve some problems and be able to come out with a solution.if you make the learning fun," he said.
DiGarbo and other recipients spent the week in Washington participating in professional development programs, including meeting Bill Nye, the host of a television science program for children.
"It was an amazing week, and to meet 94 other award winners from across the country was the best experience," DiGarbo said. "It means a lot to the teaching profession."
The awardees also met Bush at the White House Thursday. The president congratulated the group and posed for photos, DiGarbo said.
Presidential awardees receive $10,000 from the National Science Foundation and professional gifts such as overhead projects from corporate donors.
DiGarbo said he wasn't sure what he will do with his award money but is considering "furthering my own education so I can transfer that art over to my students."
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Students Lobby Sen. Collins for Federal Aid for Drug Convicts
By Liz Goldberg
WASHINGTON, April 14 - Wayne Toothaker Jr. says he knows he made a mistake in using and trafficking in drugs. But he does not think a lifestyle he put behind him a year ago should be preventing him now from getting financial aid for college.
"I learned my lesson," said Toothaker, who said he is in a drug rehabilitation program and has been clean for nearly a year. "I don't get involved with drugs or alcohol anymore. But because of that in my past, I can't get money to pay for college now."
But Toothaker said the changes he has made in his lifestyle are not taken into consideration when he seeks college financial aid.
"All they see is I have that drug conviction," he said.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), for one, agrees that Congress may need to take a second look at the law that is keeping Toothaker and others from financial aid.
Toothaker is one of more than 160,500 students who have been denied federal financial aid for college since 2000, according to statistics from Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a Washington-based organization that "neither encourages nor condemns drug use" but attempts "to reduce the harms caused by drug abuse and drug policies," according to the group's Web site.
Beginning in 2000, students have been required to disclose drug convictions when filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. Student groups have been fighting the provision since it was added to the Higher Education Act in 1998, said Tom Angell, communications director for Students for Sensible Drug Policy.
Toothaker said he was sentenced to six months in prison for marijuana trafficking. The sentence was suspended, he said, and he is serving a year's probation.
"I'm doing so much better now," said the 23-year-old Brunswick resident, who has worked as a dishwasher at a sports bar for almost a year. "Everybody who knows me can see the difference."
Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) introduced a bill on March 9 to repeal the provision when the Higher Education Act is renewed this year. The bill has 62 co-sponsors, including Rep. Tom Allen (D-Maine). Student governments at two universities in Maine are lobbying Sen. Collins to introduce a companion bill in the Senate, Angell said.
"She's been a leader on education issues in the past and she works well with folks on both sides of the aisle," Angell said of the organization's reasons for targeting Collins.
The General Student Senate at the University of Maine in Orono passed a resolution last week stating its opposition to the provision prohibiting financial aid for drug convicts, and the University of Southern Maine's Student Senate is expected to pass a similar resolution in a few weeks, Angell said.
In addition to the student groups, a "fairly broad coalition of higher ed and substance abuse organizations" have united to fight the law, Angell said, including the Maine Higher Education Council, the Maine Association of Substance Abuse Programs, the Maine Civil Liberties Union, the Maine Education Association, the Maine Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators and the Maine Association of Prevention Programs.
Several students met with a member of Collins' staff in Maine last week and said they "got some good signals" of support for the bill, Angell said.
"We really hope that it's all starting to come together and Sen. Collins will take action soon," he said.
In a statement, Collins said: "The law may be too sweeping in its scope and should be re-examined as part of the Higher Education Act reauthorization. We need to consider the rehabilitative effect of education for some people."
Angell said a few senators have expressed interest in supporting a Senate bill, including Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
A Durbin representative said the senator is "examining the issue." Other senators Angell named as supporters of the bill could not be reached for comment.
Toothaker, meanwhile, said he is ineligible to receive financial aid for two years after his conviction.
"In two years I could get the degree that I want," he said, referring to the associate's degree in information technology he plans to pursue at Southern New Hampshire University.
"I'm a smart person," he said. "I could really do something with that if I go to school."
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After 34 Years Missing, A Hero is Finally Laid to Rest
ARLINGTON, VA., April 13 - A long blue line of soldiers wound is way through the sun-filled green fields of Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday, passing stones that mark the resting places of those who fought and died in the nation's wars since the 1860s. Behind the procession of the 3 rd Infantry Division honor guard, a caisson drawn by six white horses carried the flag-draped coffin of U.S. Army Col. Sheldon Burnett, who was finally brought home to rest 34 years after his death in Laos.
"He's finally home and not lying in a shallow grave all alone," said Burnett's daughter. Trish, who was just 6 years old when the helicopter her father was riding in was shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. "I wish we could bring every single one of them home."
On March 7, 1971, Burnett and three other soldiers were flying along the border of Vietnam and Laos on a mission to provide support to American troops fighting the North Vietnamese there. Their helicopter was hit and crashed near the landing zone. Burnett, a New Hampshire resident, and Warrant Officer Randolph Ard, the pilot, were pinned alive under the wreckage.
The two other passengers, who survived and escaped, reported that Burnett and Ard were alive but severely injured when they were last seen. When South Vietnamese troops arrived 11 days later, Burnett and Ard were gone and presumed missing, said Larry Greer, a spokesman for the Defense Department's Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office.
Wednesday's burial was an honor Burnett's children had fought to bestow on their father. It was a fight started by their mother, Margaret, who wrangled for years with the government, filing freedom of information requests atop freedom of information requests to uncover some tidbit of information that might reveal where Burnett lay and what happened all those years ago.
When Margaret Burnett died in 1998, the torch was passed to her children, who continued to track government efforts until last fall,, when investigations by the Laotian, Vietnamese and American governments discovered Burnett's and Ard's shallow graves in the Laotian jungle.
Wednesday, daughter Leigh, 48, said her mother "would have been awfully proud" at the sight of the ceremony, which she said showed "the kind of respect she thought he deserved."
It was a funeral of full military honors. A riderless brown horse, with a pair of boots backward in the saddle's stirrups, followed the caisson, an honor reserved only for those of the rank of colonel or above.
At the gravesite, Trish, Leigh, their brother Mike and their families wept as three volleys of gunfire rang out from the seven-member firing party of "Old Guard" soldiers and Taps was played by a lone bugler.
With mechanical precision, the eight military pallbearers folded the flag into a triangle and handed it to the chaplain, who, kneeling before the family, presented the flag to the siblings "on behalf of a grateful nation."
"It was a nice ceremony," Mike, 49, said afterwards. "I thought he deserved that. It was nice to see that they went all out."
Mike said he was also touched to see that 20 members of Rolling Thunder, an organization of Vietnam veterans that works to bring home prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action, came to pay their respects.
The veterans, who followed the procession on their motorcycles behind the cars of family and friends, presented the family with a plaque marking the recovery of Burnett's body and his burial. Then one by one, they stepped beside Burnett's coffin and laid on it strings of purple, green, white and yellow beads symbolizing the Purple Heart and the Vietnam campaign ribbon. The group comforted the tearful Burnett family with hugs and handshakes.
"It's just an honor bringing these people home, and it's our honor to be here," said Ted Daniels, the sergeant at arms for the group's Virginia Chapter Three. "I hope it makes the family feel good to know they have someone behind them."
Wednesday's burial does not mark the end of the family's struggle to uncover the mysteries surrounding Burnett's disappearance. Trish and her siblings still have questions. Why was he in Laos and what does the Ard family know about what happened that day? These are questions that the stacks of censored documents failed to answer.
Ard was buried in Alabama last month, the Pentagon said.
Despite the missing answers, there is a sense of "resolution," Leigh said. "It's more clear now what happened, when it happened and where he's been for all these years."
"Relief," Trish added. "I can't believe he is home.. It's almost disbelief."
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President Thanks Super Bowl Champs
By Emily Beaver
WASHINGTON, April 13 -Returning to the White House as Super Bowl champions for the third time in four years, players, coaches and owners from the New England Patriots were congratulated by President George W. Bush Wednesday.
"The commentators would say, 'well, they're not the flashiest bunch, they're not the fanciest bunch, they just happen to be the best team," said Bush, flanked by Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and owner Robert Kraft as he made remarks in the Rose Garden.
"They're the team showed that when you play together, when you serve something greater than yourself, you win," Bush said.
More than 30 players from the Patriots, who defeated the Philadelphia Eagles for a Super Bowl win in February, lined up on risers behind the president as he congratulated the team.
Bush congratulated line backer Tedy Bruschi, who suffered a stroke in February, for showing "courage on the field and off the field."
He also thanked the eight team members, including Bruschi, quarterback Tom Brady, and wide receiver Deion Branch, who had visited injured soldiers in the Bethesda Naval and Walter Reed Army hospitals before the White House press conference.
"I think you saw firsthand the definition of courage when you saw those young soldiers who had been wounded that are working hard to overcome their injuries ," Bush said.
"There's nothing better than a Super Bowl champ encouraging somebody to continue to work hard to recover."
After the ceremony, Brady said he admired the recovering soldiers he had seen earlier that day.
"To go in to Walter Reed and see those soldiers.makes what we do seem so unimportant," he said.
Massachusetts Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy attended the ceremony. After the press conference, Kerry said the team was a group of "down-to-earth" guys who spent four hours visiting soldiers in the hospital.
"They're just a good bunch of guys," he said.
