spedrpt

One room Amish school in Lancaster County, PA tragedy, and increased security in Connecticut as a result. Demolition, return to the earth here. Virginia Tech link...and a similarity we noticed; from across the pond, story of Omaha mall event. Remember Bernadine Dorne and Bill Ayers, the "Weathermen?" A blast from the past, as it were...opening the door for Charter School debate once again? In CT 2011, yup!

Thorny issues schools, colleges and society at large are facing in the 21st century:

Revisions coming in 2012 for ECS formula..."there are lies, damn lies and statistics" (Mark Twain - CT resident);
Binding Arbitraration changes the key to shifting funds from wealthy districts? Thought provoking commentary here.
ADVANCED PLACEMENT;
CHARTER SCHOOLS IN CT;
REGIONALISM IN EDUCATION BEGINS IN CT IN EARNEST?
BRIDGEPORT
TECHNOLOGY AND TEXT BOOKS;
TAKEOVERS NEXT? NCLB waiver sought.
FUNDING PROBLEMS COMING VERY FOR CT EDUCATION?
Radical? Or just ego-driven? Or maybe on or onto something? NEW IDEA?
SHEFF IN THE 21ST CENTURY; link to history of the case/issue; New Jersey in the news (the state where Federal Court made initial relationship between zoning and education and poverty).
Special Education in Weston,
in other CT districts;
racial imbalance...
troubled teen seeks "fame" and providing a safe learning environment, free from violence.
When students graduate and go on to college (NOTE: both Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois U. had school colors of Black and Red) and university, then what?
What about politics?

Wait, You are Against Binding Arbitration? Really?
What? Wait! Blog
January 12, 2012

Binding Arbitration: The process by which the parties to a dispute submit their differences to the judgment of an impartial person or group appointed by mutual consent or statutory provision.

Some “education reformers” are calling for an end to the teacher seniority system or want to “reform tenure as we know it,” but actively opposing binding arbitration?

That’s a new one for me.

Here in Connecticut it’s been a while since we’ve heard legitimate advocacy groups call for an end to binding arbitration.

Binding arbitration has been universally recognized as an appropriate and successful way to resolve contract disputes without strikes or lockouts. It’s a system that ensures that, even if there is a contract dispute, government services, including schools, will continue to function.

More than 36 years ago, Connecticut adopted a system of binding arbitration for municipal employees. Binding arbitration was then expanded in 1979 to cover all teachers and in 1986, with a Democratic Governor and the Republicans in control of both chambers of the General Assembly, binding arbitration was extended to cover state employees.

As a freshman state legislator I remember watching as the great Otto Neumann of the 62nd House District, a respected, common-sense Republican, rose to address the House Chamber as to why Republicans and Democrats had come together to institute a fair arbitration system that would ensure that the public received the services it was entitled to even in the face of contract disagreements between the state and its unions.

Negotiation, mediation and if absolutely necessary, arbitration would put an end to public employee strikes. Children would return to classes at the beginning of the school year no matter what. Just look around at some other states to see the sad alternative.

While some have talked about “tinkering” with the actual arbitration process, it has been widely recognized as a huge success.

The Connecticut Legislature’s bi-partisan Program Review & Investigations Committee conducted a major study about the impact of binding arbitration and released their report in 2006.

The investigation found that binding arbitration was used in about 10 percent of teacher contracts and only 4 percent of the time in municipal employee contracts.

Over the years, when it came to salary increases, the last best offers for towns and unions were about 1% apart. In the time period studies these differences actually ranged from 0.7 percent to 1.2 percent.

As for arbitration awards for teacher contracts, arbitrators came down on the side of the boards of education and teachers at about the same rate. Teacher unions were a bit more successful when it came to salary increases while towns were more successful when it came it came to the important contract language.

The final report concluded that “Overall, the committee found no evidence that arbitration has driven up costs. For the period analyzed, higher general wage increases were not found in arbitration awards in comparison to negotiated contracts.”

With that as the background I was really surprised to find that when the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCAN) calls for an end to the seniority system which they say requires districts to lay off teachers based solely on seniority without regard to any factors of job performance” they go on to demand that binding arbitration be reformed “to ensure that future collective bargaining agreements better account for the interests of children.”

Unfortunately, there appears to be no reference as to what ConnCAN means when it comes to “reforming binding arbitration.”

However we can get a better sense of what is meant when we look to ConnCAN’s sister organization RI-CAN. As their website explains, RI-CAN is part of “50CAN: The 50 State Campaign for Achievement Now, which aims to bring ConnCAN-style campaigns and ConnCAN-style success to states across the country.”

Readers may recall that in 2005 a group of Achievement First’s Directors set up ConnCAN and the Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Advocacy, Inc., ConnCAN serves as the “education” arm of the operation while the second company spent the next five years paying over half a million dollars to lobby Connecticut’s executive and legislative branches of government. It wasn’t until last year that ConnCAN started paying the bill for the lobbyists, which, by that time had reached $95,000 a-year.

Meanwhile, one of the Achievement First/ConnCAN directors formed yet another group called 50CAN which “was created to bring this proven model [ConnCAN] to new states, starting with Rhode Island, Minnesota, New York and Maryland and reaching half the country by 2015. One will note that 50CAN’s organizing plan tracks nicely with Achievement First’s strategic plan.

So two years ago, RI-CAN was formed in Rhode Island to do what ConnCAN has been doing in Connecticut.

RI-CAN’s Executive Director Maryellen Butke, who is the equivalent to Patrick Riccards, ConnCAN’s new Executive Director here in Connecticut, is far clearer about how the CAN organization sees binding arbitration.

Despite the fact that binding arbitration has been recognized as a great success, RI-CAN’s Butke recently said that “Binding arbitration would be a disaster for students, localities”

In a commentary piece in the Providence Journal last June she stakes out RI-CAN’s position saying “Rhode Island has made great leaps forward in the past few years in the effort to transform our schools. Binding arbitration would be a costly step backwards that would reverse much of the progress we have made. Our message to the General Assembly is simple: Do what’s best for kids and reject binding arbitration.”

In addition, a group of anti-union activists created the Rhode Island Coalition against Binding Arbitration last summer with RI-CAN as its first member organization.

In Connecticut ConnCAN may call it “reforming” binding arbitration; in Rhode Island they call it a disaster and are lobbying against it.

It makes me wonder what some of ConnCAN’s Advisory Board Members would say.

Are they opposed to binding arbitration. Do they know they are on the advisory board to a group that does?

If you see any of the following individuals ask them whether they too, as advisers to ConnCAN, oppose binding arbitration:

Lorraine M. Aronson (Former Vice President and CFO, University of Connecticut and Former Connecticut Deputy Commissioner of Education)

Timothy Bannon (Former Chief of Staff for Governor Dannel Malloy)

William J. Cibes (Former Chancellor, Connecticut State University System and Former Secretary, Office of Policy and Management)

William Ginsberg (President and CEO, Community Foundation for Greater New Haven)

Janice M. Gruendel, Ph.D., M.Ed. (Deputy Commissioner, Department of Children and Families)

Dr. Richard C. Levin (President, Yale University)

Dr. Julia M. McNamara (President, Albertus Magnus College)

Anthony P. Rescigno (President, Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce)

Dr. Theodore Sergi (Former Connecticut State Commissioner of Education)

Allan B. Taylor (Chairman, Connecticut State Board of Education)

An Advanced (Placement) debate -- A closed gate, or an open door?
Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, CT MIRROR
December 12, 2011

At many high schools, Jensun Yonjan, who speaks limited English, would have been diverted away from taking college-level Advanced Placement courses. But luckily for Jensun he goes to Conard High School in West Hartford, where officials have adopted an "every student takes an AP course" mantra.

"I am trying my best," Jensun said during a break from class. "I like being challenged."

Jensun first met Steve Bassi, his AP Government teacher, in his English-language learning classes when he moved from Nepal to West Hartford two years ago. Bassi says Jensun is pulling off a low B in the class.

"He's struggling in both of his [AP] courses," Bassi said. "He's working so hard for that B in my class. I'm proud of him."

Bassi's faith in these nontraditional AP students has become somewhat of a culture in West Hartford. It even caught the eye of Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor, who visited last week during his inaugural tour of high-achieving schools and programs across the state.

"This ethos permeating throughout the building is an enormous accomplishment," Pryor told a room of about 20 teachers and other state officials.

With almost half of Conard graduates leaving with some college credit from an AP course they completed, and 60 percent of students having taken at least one AP course in the 2009-10 school year, the most recent year with data available, they are far outpacing other schools throughout the state and country. Statewide, 27 percent of students have taken at least one AP course and just 20 percent leave high school with college credit, reports the State Department of Education. Nationwide, 17 percent of high school graduates earn AP college credit.

West Hartford: where every student is 'AP material'

It's the first day of school for the incoming freshman class at Conard, and Principal Peter Cummings has a message for them.

"You will take an AP course by the time you graduate," he replayed his spiel for the new education chief. "Our core belief is that every student here can achieve at a high level."

But participation numbers available from the state board of education show that other districts have struggled to follow that model.

"In other districts some students don't even have a chance to take an AP course. They tell them, 'You're not AP material.' There's no such thing in West Hartford," said Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, and co-chairwoman of the legislature's Higher Education Committee.

AP participation is increasing both state- and nationwide, which has caused some consternation from those concerned that the caliber of the course is being compromised by opening enrollment. A national survey of 1,024 Advanced Placement teachers in 2009 said more gatekeeping is needed to keep the quality of the course from diminishing.

"Teachers told us that, even though they believe that the program's quality is holding up in the face of tremendous expansion, they also see troubling signs in their classrooms," the report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education advocacy think tank, said. Most of the respondents said they believed that high schools are expanding their programs in an effort to improve their rankings.

West Hartford's efforts -- which has the average graduate leaving with two college courses under his or her belt at its two public high schools -- are routinely listed as one of the best in Newsweek magazine's annual rankings. But several West Hartford teachers told Pryor they disagree with the strategy of judging before a student takes a class how they will do. For students like Jensun, his teacher said his exclusion from AP courses would have likely been sealed at another school. Instead, he's on track to take a computer science and at least one other AP course next semester.

"Every kid can succeed if we give them the chance," Bassi tells the education commissioner.

Jensun is glad they took that chance on him.

"I won't have to take so many courses when I go to college," the future computer engineer said.

And even when these students earn a 2 on the final exam -- which is not a high enough score to earn college credit -- they still celebrate.

"It's like getting a five," Cindy Vranich, an AP English literature teacher, said of the highest score possible.

Because some students are behind, she said, "We've had to change how we teach." But that doesn't mean the rigor is lost. Only 13 percent of the AP test takers at her school don't score high enough to earn credit, according to State Department of Education data.

Connecticut has had modest growth overall in students taking AP courses -- 7 percent in the past five years. And it doesn't seem to be hindering performance, as Connecticut has one of the fastest increases in the number of students earning college credit in the nation and is behind only Maryland, New York and Virginia with the percent of graduates leaving high school with some credit, according to the College Board's most recent annual report.

But much work remains. Despite black and Hispanic students having the fastest increases in participation in AP courses, their performance lags far behind their white peers, following suit with the achievement gap that is plaguing the state's education system as a whole. For example, while 12 percent of Connecticut 2010 graduating class was black, only 2.4 percent earned college credit in an AP course -- one of the worst rates in the nation. The results are similar for Hispanic students.

Struggling to expand

Simsbury High School officials made the decision years ago that they needed to increase participation in their advanced placement courses.

"It was only for an elite level of students," said Principal Neil Sullivan. "I was sure more could succeed in these courses. ... I think we were just in opening that door to more students."

Test scores show Simsbury officials were right, with almost half of their students taking an AP course and 42 percent leaving with some college credit. But not all districts are as fortunate in being able to expand as Simsbury, one of the wealthier districts in the state.

"It's not an inexpensive venture," said Lydia Tedone, Simsbury's school board chairwoman and president of the state's school boards association. She estimates it costs her district an added $40,000 a year for each additional course they offer for supplies, training and a teacher.

"It's a costly budget item, and some districts may be forgoing it because of this, or because they want other programs like a full-day kindergarten."

In low-income districts, Project Opening Doors is helping with about half the start-up and first year expenses. They have helped Waterbury, Hartford and New Haven schools open numerous math, science and English AP courses.

"It may be that the district didn't have the resources or the qualified staff to teach these courses. We're trying to change that," said Cam Vantour, who runs the nonprofit agency funded by Exxon Mobil Corp., the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Connecticut Business and Industry Association and Northeast Utilities. "Districts recognize they need to do more."

The end-of-course exams alone cost $87, and in many districts like West Hartford they ask parents to pick up that cost. The College Board does waive some of the cost for students from low-income families, but the price still falls at $57 per exam.

Plans for future expansion?

Pryor, who has been on the job for just a few months, told state board members last week he is planning in the next couple of months to release a sweeping education reform legislative package to coincide with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's intention to make the coming General Assembly session focused on education.

Pryor's stop at Conard was part of a tour he says is helping him figure out what to include. He was mum on his plans for advanced placement, but did say there are "several best practices" taking place at the school he wants to see spill over into other schools across the state.

Malloy Defends Pryor, Calls Conflict of Interest Accusations ‘Ridiculous’
CTNEWSJUNKIE
by Christine Stuart | Jan 10, 2012 2:29pm

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy called allegations that his Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor has a conflict of interest heading the state Education Department because he previously worked for a charter school organization, “utterly and fantastically ridiculous.”

What people, who have been writing about this, have to understand is that Connecticut only has public charter schools, Malloy said after a meeting at the Legislative Office Building Tuesday.

“They are public schools. So in essence what you’re saying is because someone’s involved in public schools, they shouldn’t be allowed to be involved in public schools. It’s utterly and fantastically ridiculous,” the governor said.

In an interview with WNPR Tuesday morning Pryor said he was the first one to ask the Office of State Ethics staff for an opinion about his past position as founder of the Amistad Academy in New Haven and his volunteer position on the board of Achievement First, the management company which runs charter schools in Connecticut and New York. He said he was told very “rapidly no and definitively no.”

“The first person to raise this issue was me,” Pryor told WNPR‘s John Dankosky. “We’re talking about public schools here. Just like a superintendent of schools or a school board chair who becomes a commissioner no one would claim that there’s a conflict of interest with the schools in that jurisdiction.”

But he said he’s very “sensitive to perceptions of conflicts,” so on Dec. 5 he sent a letter the Citizen’s Ethics Advisory Board. The board is expected to review the draft opinion at its Jan. 26 meeting.

Meanwhile, Pryor’s previous work for on behalf of Achievement First, has been debated online on blogs and amongst his critics who have called on him to recuse himself on matters involving Achievement First.

“As an Achievement First Board member, Stefan Pryor helped create and adopt that strategic plan, a plan that when fully implemented would increase Achievement First’s revenue from $4 million a year in ‘management fees’ to upwards of $10 million a year,” Jonathan Pelto, a former lawmaker and Democratic operative, wrote on his blog.

“To achieve its goal, it will be critical for Achievement First to expand in Connecticut,” Pelto wrote. “Now Pryor, a founder and long time member of Achievement First’s Board of Trustees finds himself in the unique position of being able to determine whether that aggressive growth plan will succeed or fail.”

However, Pryor said as commissioner he’s not ultimately in charge of deciding whether a charter school is renewed, expanded, or approved. He said that’s up to the State Board of Education.

Pryor said he doesn’t want to preempt any decision by Office of State Ethics, but he will take that decision and work with his colleagues at the Education Department to come up with procedures to create an “open, fair, and clear process.”

Only two new charter schools have opened in the state over the past six years and the state didn’t accept applications at all in 2006 and 2009, even though 20 applications were submitted.

Charter school advocates were hopeful when Pryor was named Education Commissioner because they saw it as their best opportunity to get more charter school seats. But Pryor has repeatedly said he supports all high achieving schools.

“There are a number of schools that are exemplary” across the state, that are “achieving at a level that would not be expected,” Pryor said in November at an event at the Amistad Academy. That includes not just charters, but other successful public schools as well.

Charter Schools and Connecticut Education Policy: Part 3 in a series of 3 commentary pieces
Jon Pelto, "What? Wait!" blog
December 1, 2011

Leaving Out Connecticut’s Latinos and others whose primary language is not English…

It may be the Rule of Unintended Consequences, but unintended Segregation is still Segregation:

Few, if any, topics that I’ve written about have generated as many comments or strong feelings than the columns about charter schools. Connecticut’s charter schools are blessed with parents and advocates who truly believe in the charter school model and have experienced firsthand the direct benefits that their children received at their charter school. In all my previous commentaries I have failed to successfully differentiate between the good that charter schools are doing for the children and families they serve versus the underlying public policy challenges we face as we try to ensure every child has access to a quality education and receives the knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in this increasingly complex world.

Following each column, some very angry and frustrated parents write to make it clear that not only did their children benefit from charter schools but that my comments are an assault on the very essence of the educational model charter schools provide.

The following column is the third in a series of some of the key public policy issues that our elected officials must address as they grapple with the allocation of scarce resources. My comments are not intended to be an attack on the quality of charter schools or the people who utilize them. Quite frankly I think charter schools appear to be a viable model as we try to find ways to close the terrible achievement gap that is destroying large segments of our society.

What I am addressing are two key public policy issues.

Charter schools regularly claim that they succeed where public schools don’t. In addition, in the proposal called “money follow the child”, charter schools are saying that regardless of whether government expands funding for primary and secondary education in Connecticut, if a child moves from the public school system to a charter school all of the money allocated to “pay” for that student should move as well.

That is what the discussion is about. It is not about whether charter schools are good or that charter schools are successfully educating their students. The debate is about the legal and moral obligation government has when it comes to ensuring that all children have access to a quality education.

While reasonable people may differ about what should be done, the facts are not in dispute. Connecticut’s urban charter is more racially isolated that the communities in which they exist. The student bodies in these urban charter schools are significantly “less poor” (as measured by the number of students that qualify for free or reduced lunches) and these charter schools serve a significantly lower percentage of ELL students (students who are not English language proficient).

Charter schools may in fact provide students with “better educational outcome “However, the increased racial isolation means these schools (like many of our urban schools) are unconstitutionally racially isolated. And second, since poverty and English Language proficiency are two main reasons students don’t do as well on the standardized tests, charter schools will inherently do better if when they are serving less poor and fewer non-English speaking students.

That does not mean charter schools should be closed, but it does mean that policy makers have a moral and legal responsibility to consider those factors as they modify the way Connecticut schools are funded.

The last variable I’ll use to showcase this issue is the huge discrepancy when it comes to students going home to households in which English is not the primary language. There are poor parents who get actively involved in their children’s education just as there are non-English speaking parents who provide the necessary parental involvement to ensure students do a better job. That said, both poverty and language proficiency serve as barriers for many families.

In Hartford a total of 43% of the public school students go home to households in which the primary home language is not English. In fact, Hartford school students go home to at least 70 different home languages.

At the same time, Achievement First’sHarford Academyhas only 4.8% of its students going home to non-English speaking households and in their case there are 4 different home languages. And at the other major charter school,Jumoke Academy, there are no students who go home to non-English speaking households. English is the only language home language that Jumoke Academy teachers need to deal with.

In New Haven, 27.9% of the school system’s students come from homes where English is not the primary language (with a total of 61 different languages). Amistad Academy has only 11.8% of its students going home to non-English households (with a total of 3 different languages). In Achievement First’s other New Haven charter school, Elm City College Preparatory, even fewer, 8.8% of students return to non-English speaking homes (3 languages)

And in Bridgeport, 40.4% of the students come from homes where English is not the primary language (There are a total of 73 different home languages in Bridgeport).

By comparison, Achievement First’s Bridgeport Academy has 6.3% of its students from non-English speaking households (2 languages), The Bridge Academy has 16.7% of its students from non-English speaking homes (6 languages) and Park City Preparatory has only 2.5% of its students going home to households whose primary language in not English (with a total of 2 different languages)

It is true that the evidence is that Connecticut Mastery Test scores are marginally higher in charter schools than in the nearby traditional public school systems. And to the extent that it is the teaching that explains that difference, the charter schools deserve credit for that success. Yet at the same time, the evidence also suggests that charter school teaching methods may not fully explain those results.

Charter schools rationalize these issues by beginning and ending with the argument that they have “open lottery systems” that provides every child who wants to attend an equal opportunity to do so. Open lottery systems are important but an open lottery system does not guarantee that the study body is representative of the entire community. Charter schools have targeted marketing programs that some parents may find more persuasive than others.

And intentional or note, schools maybe be seen as more welcoming or more accessible to some than to others. Furthermore, since the “burden” to engage in the charter school lottery system is primarily on the backs of parents, the process obviously self-selects parents that are more attentive and active in the education of their children and have an easier time understanding and navigating through the steps necessary to get their children into the schools lottery and then into the school.

Since poverty and language barriers are obviously factors as to who approaches the lottery process and who does not, it is not surprising that the “open enrollment process” ends up with fewer poor students, fewer non-English language students and fewer students who go home to households in which English is not the primary language. The net result is that students who generally have higher success rates will end up in the charter school while those who face more barriers are left in traditional schools.

The situation is then exacerbated if the official funding policy is to shift dollars to the kids who are statistically more likely to have better outcomes and reduce the resources to those who actually need the greater supports.

Although unintended, the outcome is that the system promotes “De facto racial discrimination” which in turn creates “De facto racial segregation”.

If the law actually discriminates it’s called “De Jur” discrimination. Much of the “De Jur” discrimination was outlawed in the United States by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other related legislation. The problem in Connecticut is really not due to laws that force segregation but traditions, systems and processes (along with housing, transportation and political boundaries) that end up segregating our population. Even though these results are not a result of a specific law and may not even be intended, they are still creating segregation and discrimination which is not only immoral but unconstitutional and illegal.

Connecticut’s Major Charter Schools Face More Questions
WHAT? WAIT!
Jon Pelto blog
November 28, 2011

Despite their rhetoric, not only are most of Connecticut’s charter schools actually increasing racial isolation, they are naively or knowingly overlooking key factors in their ongoing claims that they provide better educational outcomes. A review of Connecticut’s School Profile Reports raises even more serious questions and concerns are about some of Connecticut’s largest charter schools. Meanwhile, advocates and lobbyists are engaged in a major effort to persuade policymakers to adopt a concept called “Money Follows the Child” in the upcoming 2012 Legislative Session.

The policy change would move scarce resources away from the public schools systems that presently educate about 99% of Connecticut public school students.

Instead of trying to expand the pot of money that is provided for primary and secondary education in Connecticut, thereby helping all public school children, some charter school supporters have changed their strategy and are now pushing to modify the state’s school funding system so that when a child shifts from a public school to a charter school all of the state money associated with the education of that student would shift as well.

This approach would leave more and more of Connecticut’s public schools without the money needed to provide comprehensive education programs and would, in the end, threaten the quality of education in our public schools while leading to higher local property taxes as towns are forced to rely even more heavily on regressive property taxes.

At stake are both the issue of racial segregation and the quality of education in Connecticut.

At the core of the debate is the fundamental principle that federal and state laws prohibit the use of public funds to promote racial and ethnic segregation. However, virtually every one of Connecticut’s major charter schools, all of whom receive major state subsidies, are not only failing to reduce racial isolation but are, in fact, significantly less racially diverse than the public schools in the same communities. While some charter schools, like the Odyssey School in Manchester are successfully meeting the diversity challenge, others, especially those run by Achievement First, a major charter school operator with charter schools in New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island is not.

For example, Achievement First’s Bridgeport Academy, Achievement First’s Hartford Academy, Achievement First’s Amistad Academy and Achievement First’s Elm City Preparatory are all significantly more racially isolated than are the school systems in which they are based – Bridgeport, Hartford and New Haven. As the state spends literally hundreds of millions of dollars to address its moral, legal and constitutional responsibility to make our schools less racially isolated, Connecticut’s charter schools are moving Connecticut in exactly the wrong direction.

What makes this issue particularly troubling is that Connecticut’s new State Commissioner of Education has repeatedly said he will work to expand charter schools in Connecticut even though it is clear from the evidence that most charter schools are unwilling or unable to be a part of the overall effort to reduce racial isolation in our state. While conveniently overlooking the growing racial isolation in charter schools, Achievement First and other major urban charter schools base their demand for more public funds by claiming that their standardized test scores prove that their charter schools are providing students with a superior education.

However, there is a fundamental flaw in the argument these charter school advocates are putting forward

Putting aside the broader problems associated with using standardized mastery tests to measure educational outcomes; there is overwhelming evidence that test scores are impacted by a number of factors beyond simply what is going on in the classroom. Study after study has indicated that poverty and standardized test scores (like the mastery test) are closely correlated. More poverty means lower school test scores; less poverty means higher school test scores.

What policymakers are not regularly told is that although poverty level in all urban schools are high (both at charter and at traditional public schools), the students at many of Connecticut’s urban charter schools are significantly “less poor” than the students who attend the public schools in those same communities.

In Bridgeport, where 99% of the city’s public school students qualify for free or reduced lunches, according to the data provided to the State Department of Education, the number of students who meet that standard at Achievement First’s Bridgeport Academy is more than 30 points percentage points lower. The percentage of students at the other two major Bridgeport charters (The Bridge Academy and Park City Preparatory) who qualify for free or reduced lunches are also significantly lower than in the Bridgeport school system.

There is a similar pattern in Hartford, where 93% of public schools students qualify for free or reduced lunches compared to 68% at Achievement First’s Harford Academy and 72% at the Jumoke Academy charter school. And it is the same in New Haven, where 81% of all New Haven public school students qualify for free or reduced lunches, while at the Amistad Academy 66% meet that poverty standard. At Achievement First’s other New Haven charter school, Elm City College Prep charter school, the number of students getting free or reduced lunches is 69%.

Considering these schools are more racially isolated these statistics indicate that charter schools have the effect of leaving the poorer students in each city’s public schools systems. According to their marketing materials and testimony at legislative hearings, charter schools claim that their students score 10 to 30 percent better on master tests than do students in the nearby public schools. However, a portion of that difference may be due to the poverty level of the students served in those schools.

An even greater impact may come from the language barriers students bring with them to school.

When it comes to the Connecticut Mastery Tests (3-8 grades), 84% of all Connecticut students score at the proficient or better level in math. However, for English Language Learners (ELL students) that is, “students who lack sufficient mastery of English,” the percent of students who achieve a proficient or better score drops all the way down to 57%.

The language barrier has an even more stunning impact on the test results for the reading portion of the Connecticut Mastery Test. While 78% of all Connecticut students score at the proficient level or better, only 37% of ELL (those not proficient in the English Language) test at the proficient level or better. These numbers mean that schools that have more ELL students do significantly worse than schools that don’t have as many non-English proficient students.

So, back to the data on charter schools:

In Bridgeport, 13% of the public school students are ELL students. At Achievement First’s Bridgeport Academy the number is just 6%.

Less than ½ of 1% of the students at The Bridge Academy charter school are ELL students, while only 2.5% of the students at Park City Prep charter school are ELL.

In Hartford, where over 17% of public school students are non-English proficient (ELL), the percent of ELL students at Achievement First’s Harford Academy is less than 5% and there are literally no ELL students at the Jumoke Academy charter school. In New Haven, the disparity is less prevalent. 12% of New Haven public school students are ELL, which is similar to the percent at the Amistad Academy charter school, but at Elm City College Prep charter school only 9% of the students are ELL.

While the impact of these statistics has yet to be fully documented, the fact remains that Connecticut’s charter schools are simply not in a position to claim that the quality of their education programs are substantially better than the education in the public schools.

Charter schools may claim that they utilize an “open lottery system and that allows every child to have access to their schools, but the facts simply don’t back up the charter schools’ claim that their student populations represent the full spectrum of students that attend public schools. Therefore their claim of educational superiority doesn’t add up. Before Connecticut policy makers shift additional resources from Connecticut’s public schools to the charter schools they have an obligation to address these fundamental issues.

Achievement First and a number of the other urban charter schools are more racially isolated, they educate a student population that is less poor and they fail to take on their fair share of non-English proficient (ELL) students. While CMT test scores in charter schools may be marginally higher than public school scores, the evidence suggests that their teaching methods may not fully explain those results. The Governor and the Legislature should be seeking answers to these questions before turning over any more of the taxpayers’ money to these schools.

Ed commissioner sets focus on Bridgeport
Linda Conner Lambeck, CT POST Staff Writer
Updated 10:42 p.m., Sunday, October 23, 2011

HARTFORD -- A week into his job as the state's new commissioner of education, Stefan Pryor was in Bridgeport for most of the day, combing through school district finances, talking to local officials and wrapping his arms around what is bound to be his thorniest challenge: turning around a failing urban school district.

Pryor, whose last job was as economic development director in Newark, N.J., won't say much about what he learned but indicated he did leave with the impression the district is being guided in the right direction.

"With the new board taking action to change conditions in Bridgeport, there is an opportunity," said Pryor.

"There are other districts and other schools exhibiting low performance within the state ... but Bridgeport is very important and it represents a significant opportunity. There is a real chance here to advance a system that ought to be producing better results for the students in Bridgeport."

Fixing the state's achievement gap, which is the worst in the nation, is one of the prime challenges Pryor assumed as the state's top education chief. Bridgeport, with just one out of three elementary students scoring in the goal range in reading and math on the Connecticut Mastery Test compared to two out of three for the state, is certainly one of the gap's biggest contributors.

Bridgeport doesn't have Pryor's exclusive attention, but is a chief focus of the state Department of Education as it moves to elevate performance levels in low performing school districts.

At the same time, Pryor plans to "get out of the way" of districts that are doing well -- and hold them up as models.

"I am a data-obsessed person, so I am still evaluating at an intricate level Connecticut's data. I wouldn't want to necessarily point out any district by name before I am done looking very closely, but there are surely districts in our state that are exemplars," Pryor said.

Pryor said there are also schools in the state that shatter expectations, such as those that work with urban students facing all of the challenges associated with poverty.

"We know it can be done," he said.

Yet, at the same time that the state seeks to narrow the achievement gap between wealthier suburban students and low-income urban students, it may very well seek a waiver of the federal No Child Left Behind law which requires 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by 2012.

The goal, said Pryor, is arbitrary, unattainable and meant to undermine the system. In its place, Pryor said the state will set rigorous benchmarks that are suitable. The benchmarks won't be the same for every district.

A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, Pryor, 39, served from 1998-2001 as the vice president for education at the Partnership for New York City, where he led the organization's public education efforts and served as executive director of its main school reform program.

He is described by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy as the right person to move the state forward. Others call him a workaholic with something to show for his efforts.

"His entire career has been about taking on big problems and fixing them. That is what we need right now," said state Rep. Andrew Fleishmann, co-chair of the Legislature's education committee.

Pryor is also viewed as an advocate for charter schools. He was part of a team that helped create the Amistad Academy, one of the state's first charter schools, which was highlighted by the U.S. Department of Education in 2007 as a model for closing the achievement gap.

Pryor said what he advocates are effective schools. When Amistad was developed, the idea was to create an effective middle school, something New Haven lacked.

"Charter schools happened to be the best way to create a new school," Pryor said.

Pryor wants Connecticut to have a portfolio of great public schools, be they charter schools, technical high schools, magnet schools or conventional schools.

In Bridgeport, Pryor offered new board members suggestions about districts that have organized themselves for success and talked about the trajectory those districts have followed to achieve real progress. He told the board their first priority is to find the right replacement for School Superintendent John Ramos, whose job has been terminated as of Jan. 1. Pryor said he gave the board names of great superintendents, but won't say publicly who he suggested.

"I also made it clear that it is the local school board's decision," he said. "We will answer any question. We will be helpful in any way conceivable, but it is their process to run and their decision to make."

Another topic Pryor won't talk about is the fiscal state of the Bridgeport school system, although he said he is familiar with it at a reasonably high level of detail. Insufficient funding is considered by many to be a big factor in the district's inability to boost student achievement. The district has been flat-funded for four years, and its $215.8 million operating budget is substantially less than the operating budget for Hartford or New Haven schools.

"The main point I would make," said Pryor, ``is that it is essential, given that funding is a factor in the success of the system, that the local parties resolve their issues as it pertains to the financial conditions."

Out With Textbooks, in With Laptops for an Indiana School District
NYTIMES
By ALAN SCHWARZ
October 18, 2011

MUNSTER, Ind. — Laura Norman used to ask her seventh-grade scientists to take out their textbooks and flip to Page Such-and-Such. Now, she tells them to take out their laptops.

The day all have seen coming — traditional textbooks being replaced by interactive computer programs — arrived this year in this traditional, well-regarded school district, complete with one naysaying parent getting reported to the police. Unlike the tentative, incremental steps of digital initiatives at many schools nationwide, Munster made an all-in leap in a few frenetic months — removing all math and science textbooks for its 2,600 students in grades 5 to 12, and providing a window into the hurdles and hiccups of such an overhaul.

The transformation, which cost $1.1 million for infrastructure, involved rewiring not just classrooms but also the mindset of students, teachers and parents. When teachers started hearing that “the server ate my homework,” they knew a new era had begun.

“The material we’re teaching is old but everything around it is brand-new,” said Pat Premetz, chairwoman of the math department at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Munster, who described the initiative as both “very overwhelming” and “the most exciting thing to happen in my 40 years of teaching.”

“This isn’t stressing out students,” Ms. Premetz added. “It’s stressing out teachers because of some of the technological problems, and parents who are wondering why their kids are on the computer so much.”

Munster is hardly the first district to go digital. Schools in Mooresville, N.C., for example, started moving away from printed textbooks four years ago, and now 90 percent of their curriculum is online. “It didn’t happen overnight for us — it was an incremental change,” said Mark Edwards, Mooresville’s superintendent of schools. “The competency is evolutional.”

But Munster’s is part of a new wave of digital overhauls in the two dozen states that have historically required schools to choose textbooks from government-approved lists. Florida, Louisiana, Utah and West Virginia approved multimedia textbooks for the first time for the 2011-12 school year, and Indiana went so far as to scrap its textbook-approval process altogether, partly because, officials said, the definition of a textbook will only continue to fracture.

“We’ve stopped pretending that the state board of education is the biggest school district in the state,” said Tony Bennett, Indiana’s superintendent of public instruction. “I believe in local control, and we don’t have the ability to be the keeper of knowledge we have been in the past. We’ll be better off if we uncuff people’s hands.”

Uncuffed, Angela Bartolomeo’s sixth graders spent a recent Wednesday rearranging terms of equations on an interactive Smart Board and dragging-and-dropping answers in ways that chalkboards never could. (In between, a cartoon character exclaimed that “Multiplying by 1 does not change the value of a number!” in his best superhero baritone.)

When the children followed up the lesson with exercises on their laptops, the curriculum, Pearson Education’s “Digits,” not only allowed them to advance at individual rates, but also alerted Ms. Bartolomeo via her iPad when they were stuck on a particular concept and needed help.

Software wirelessly recorded the children’s performance in a file that the teacher would review that night. “Last year I’d have to walk around and ask every kid how it’s going, and I’d be grading sheets, that kind of thing,” Ms. Bartolomeo said. “This way I can give my time to the kids who really need it. And it’s a lot more engaging for the kids. They’re actually doing their homework now.”

Ms. Norman, the seventh-grade science teacher, is using material from Discovery Education, which on that Wednesday included videos from Discovery’s “Mythbuster” series (commercial-free), an interactive glossary and other eye candy to help students investigate whether cellphones cause cancer. When Ms. Norman told the students to take out their ear buds to watch a video, two in the back yelped, “Cool!”

“With a textbook, you can only read what’s on the pages — here you can click on things and watch videos,” said Patrick Wu, a seventh grader. “It’s more fun to use a keyboard than a pencil. And my grades are better because I’m focusing more.”

Even as more and more schools nationwide have eschewed traditional textbooks, spending an estimated $2.2 billion on educational software last year, vigorous debate continues over whether technology measurably enhances achievement. But long before Munster will have a chance to reap any potential rewards, there has been a steep learning curve.

It was left to Maureen Stafford, Munster’s director of instructional programs and assessment, to convince skeptical colleagues (some of whom did not want to relearn how to teach) and parents (some of whom did not want their children to be exposed to the online wilderness) that the switch could be made in a matter of months. The town contributed about half of the $1.1 million to build the wireless infrastructure in the district’s three elementary schools, middle school and high school, with district funds covering the rest.

Each student was issued a laptop, with an annual rental fee of $150. The computers are cut off from noneducational Web sites, including social networks. The children are not allowed to use any other computer for their work because, she said, “kids on the south end of town will have Cadillacs and others on the north end will have eBay versions. That’s not equitable.”

Some parents balked at the expense and risk, even though the fee is the same as what the district had long been charging for textbooks, and includes insurance. Then there were the Luddites: one father sent so many nasty e-mails to Ms. Stafford that she reported him to the police for, fittingly, cyber-harassment. (He ceased and desisted.)

“You don’t want your child to have a laptop?” Ms. Stafford said. “What are we going to do? That’s our textbook! There’s nothing else.”

There were the inevitable technical glitches. One girl in Ms. Norman’s class missed the video because she could not connect to the network, so she had to catch up in the Media Center (formerly known as the library). During a contentious meeting with a Pearson representative, several math teachers complained of assignments disappearing, tests not saving, and network failures lasting hours while students struggled to get online for homework.

“We have no record of any outages at that time,” the Pearson representative, Chuck Dexter, explained as the teachers grew angrier. “That’s what we need to figure out.”

Ms. Stafford, 62, has long planned to retire in 2013, and noted in an interview that it would have been far easier for her, and many others in Munster, to stay with print textbooks for another few years. But when Indiana made multimedia an option, she felt she had no other.

“This wasn’t a technology initiative — this was a curriculum initiative,” Ms. Stafford said. “The best programs out there needed the technology required to implement it. It was time.”

Cut the summer break: Study backs longer school year
Better grades, better graduation results seen
The Washington Times
By Ben Wolfgang
Friday, September 30, 2011

Students may not want to hear it, but schools that have experimented with extra periods and longer school years report higher graduation rates and higher test scores, according to a new report from the National Center on Time and Learning, a Boston-based nonprofit advocacy group.

About 1,000 school districts now keep their youngsters in class well past 3 p.m., and some have extended their year deep into the summer. Many policymakers want to see that trend continue. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said it’s no surprise the U.S. is falling behind global competitors who aren’t bound by the traditional 180-day school year.

“If we’re serious about closing achievement gaps … we can’t keep doing business as usual,” he said Friday at a roundtable discussion hosted by the Center for American Progress.

“Right now, children in India, children in China and other places, they’re going to school, 30, 35 days more than our students. If you’re on a sports team and you’re practicing three days a week and the other team is practicing five days a week, who is going to win more? Anybody who thinks we need less time, not more, is part of the problem,” he said.

Increased learning time is an issue that has garnered support from both Republicans and Democrats and has been a talking point of education secretaries for decades. Despite the support, the idea hasn’t caught on as much as proponents would like.
A librarian at the Deanwood Neighborhood Library in D.C., talks June 16, 2011, to a group of kindergarten students from nearby Houston Elementary School about the Pledge of Allegiance. (Pratik Shah/The Washington Times)A librarian at the Deanwood Neighborhood Library in D.C., talks June 16, 2011, to a group of kindergarten students from nearby Houston Elementary School about the Pledge of Allegiance. (Pratik Shah/The Washington Times)

But that could soon change, thanks in large part to the President Obama’s plan, announced Sept. 23, to offer states waivers from the deadlines and penalties of the No Child Left Behind federal education law if they implement detailed reform plans. Many education specialists are encouraging states to make longer days and longer years a cornerstone of their proposals, which must be approved by the Education Department.

“Expanded learning time is a valuable tool for improving student achievement, as demonstrated by the schools that have implemented this,” wrote Isabel Owen, a policy analyst at CPA, in a position paper supporting more time in school for students nationwide.

Breaking from tradition, however, is often a hard sell.

School administrators may be unwilling to make drastic changes to their calendar for a variety of reasons. Students would surely disapprove of the move, as it could cut into their free time each afternoon and eliminate a chunk of their summer break. Employees may object because they’d have to work longer hours.

Teachers would probably see little, if any, increase in their pay, but would work more days out of the calendar year. The extra work may lead teacher labor unions to demand salary increases, putting an even greater strain on cash-strapped districts and states.

In addition, some school leaders simply want things to remain just as they’ve been for decades, said John King, New York’s commissioner of education.

“Most people in school buildings … their starting place is how things were when they went to school. They have a set of expectations around that,” he said, also speaking at the CPA forum.

Even supporters of the longer school year do not believe that every student in the nation needs more time in school. The best-performing students from the safest, wealthiest neighborhoods, Mr. Duncan said, are probably doing all right under the current system. But in poor, urban settings, he added, more time off the street and in the classroom can have positive effects beyond better grades and test scores.

“Our schools, beyond being places of learning, are places that are safe,” he said.

Mr. Duncan’s remarks came on the same day the Obama administration announced two initiatives to improve teacher quality. The Education Department is reducing the paperwork districts must submit every year, saying it will free up valuable time for lesson preparation and other vital tasks.

Is there a link here?
With half of schools failing NCLB, Malloy to seek a waiver
Jacqueline Rabe Thomas, CT MIRROR
September 23, 2011

With almost half the schools in Connecticut failing to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was quick to say the state would be seeking a waiver from the federal law's requirements under a process announced today by President Obama.

"I anticipate that we would be looking at a waiver," Malloy said. "As No Child Left Behind was drafted I think there were some major mistakes made and this is one way to clarify that. Cleary not [this many] American schools are failing, that's just not the case."

Malloy's decision comes a few days after he was non-committal when asked if the state would try to seek a waiver. But he did not hesitate today, confirming his intention to reporters about 15 minutes after the president announced states would be granted waivers.

"To help states, districts and schools that are ready to move forward with education reform, our administration will provide flexibility from the law in exchange for a real commitment to undertake change. The purpose is not to give states and districts a reprieve from accountability, but rather to unleash energy to improve our schools at the local level," Obama said in a statement.

The waivers will give school districts some reprieve from the requirement that 100 percent of their students be proficient in reading and math in three school years. The tradeoff will be that states show they meet certain conditions, such as imposing standards to better prepare students for college or employement and setting evaluation standards for teachers and administrators.

"This waiver will put more of a sense of reasonableness in getting better outcomes from students," said Mark Linabury, a spokesman for the State Department of Education. Linabury said the state's incoming education commissioner Stefan Pryor attended the announcement this morning by the Obama Administration.

Results released Monday by the state Department of Education showed 47 percent of the schools in the state did not meet the requirements of the law -- a long way from the benchmarks the state department is required to meet. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has estimated that more than 80 percent of the nation's schools are not meeting the requirement benchmarks.

Details of what reforms Connecticut's will pitch to the U.S. Department of Education in their waiver application were not immediately available, but if it is approved if could exempt districts from NCLB sanctions --which include offering students the option to transfer to other schools or firing principals and teachers.

According to a fact sheet released by The White House on the waiver, the current requirement that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014 will be pushed back if states "establish ambitious and acheivable goals ... to support improvement efforts for schools and students."

However, that flexibility will only be provided to states that launch interventions to turn around their lowest-performing schools and for those that measure teacher and administrators performance with student outcomes as a factor.

Hartford's Departing Superintendent To Supervise Windham Schools
State Department Of Education Appoints Adamowski As Special Master In State Intervention
The Hartford Courant
By VANESSA DE LA TORRE, vdelatorre@courant.com
11:57 AM EDT, July 7, 2011

The state Department of Education has appointed former Hartford school Superintendent Steven Adamowski to be a "special master" supervising the struggling Windham public schools, a temporary arrangement that will begin in August.

The appointment is the latest in a series of interventions to pull Windham from its steady decline in academic achievement, even among top students.

State education officials have also cited the school system's inability so far to successfully teach the community's growing number of Hispanic students who come from homes where English is the second language.

For the past five years, Adamowski, 60, led the public schools in Hartford, where he implemented an aggressive reform plan that has been credited with improving test scores at some of the city's lowest performing schools.

Adamowski still has a contract with the Hartford Board of Education to serve as a special advisor to new Superintendent Christina Kishimoto through the end of July.

Windham Superintendent Ana Ortiz said Thursday that she welcomed Adamowski, who was her superintendent when Ortiz was principal of Bellizzi Middle School in Hartford through 2008.

"I think I can learn a lot from Dr. Adamowski," said Ortiz, who has also been an assistant principal at Hartford Public High School and a principal at Betances Elementary School. "Even though we're not a full-fledged urban district, we're a microcosm of Hartford and your New Havens and Bridgeports."

Of the roughly 3,450 students in the Windham district, which includes the city of Willimantic, nearly 70 percent are Hispanic.

The state Department of Education first announced its plans in April to take control of Windham schools through the appointment of a special master, whose tasks will include overseeing the school system's operations, implementing the district improvement plan and assisting Ortiz with curriculum.

The state has characterized the decision as a friendly intervention, and Ortiz said she did not feel threatened.

"Not at all. Are you kidding me? No way," Ortiz said. "I see every challenge as an opportunity."

Acting Education Commissioner George Coleman announced Adamowski's appointment on Wednesday, after the state board of education approved a takeover of Bridgeport city schools. At a special meeting of the Windham school board Wednesday night, Coleman said Adamowski would begin his new role in mid-August.

It was unclear Thursday how much Adamowski will be paid and for how long he will work for the state.

Adamowski could not be reached for comment Thursday morning, but last week said he hoped to remain in Connecticut and "try to do something useful and supportive of school reform."

Malloy and Finch aides planned out Bridgeport schools' takeover
CT POST
Ken Dixon, Staff Writer
Updated 12:17 a.m., Friday, July 8, 2011

HARTFORD -- Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's top aides were instrumental in helping Bridgeport officials lay the behind-the-scenes groundwork for this week's stunning state takeover of the city's troubled public school system.

Details that emerged from interviews with Malloy administration officials and others show that Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch and his aides played key roles in working with the governor's office in advance of the takeover votes to make sure they were following state law. The governor said Thursday he was not very involved in the negotiations because of his focus on the current $1.6 billion budget shortfall after the collapse of a concessions deal with state employee unions.

"But I'm certainly interested in urban education," said Malloy, the former 14-year mayor of Stamford.

Malloy said Timothy F. Bannon, his chief of staff, was the administration's point man on the preliminary discussions that also involved the state Board of Education. After a request from Finch, Bannon directed several meetings with city and state officials, including with lawyers who reviewed state law that allows for the new oversight.

On June 29, Bannon and Benjamin Barnes, secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, spoke with Bridgeport officials and state Department of Education personnel in a discussion that centered on the legal requirements should the Bridgeport board ask to be reconstituted. On Tuesday, at a hastily called special meeting, the local school board voted 6-3 to ask the state to take over the district. The next day, the state Board of Education voted 5-4 to honor Bridgeport's request.

"The meetings I had were mostly to do with the process," Bannon said Thursday. "Certainly our goal and the mayor and superintendent's stated goal is to improve the educational opportunities for Bridgeport kids. That's it. From what I heard from all parties is that the education system is failing the kids. My emphasis was to bring the people together to get the right thing to happen."

Bannon described his job as "expediting" the events that led to this week's state Board of Education decision to take control of Bridgeport's schools. Participants in the Capitol discussions included Finch, his chief of staff, Adam Wood, school board President Barbara Bellinger, Schools Superintendent John Ramos and Robert Henry, the associate superintendent. Bannon said that during the legislative session there had been talk of a bill setting the scene for the Bridgeport takeover, similar to legislation that passed to allow state control of the Windham school district, but it was never brought out for debate.

"State statutes spell out the way things will be decided and our role was to make sure the decision under the statute occurred in a timely manner," Bannon said.

Wood said Thursday, "We approached the Malloy administration on Barbara Bellinger's behalf and asked what was available. The superintendent's office had questions, so we were acting as facilitators between the state and those folks. There were our attorneys and their attorneys."

There were several meetings in the Capitol, and conference calls as well.

"It's a painful but positive step for the students," Wood said. "There are clearly changes need in the Board of Education and our goals are positive outcomes for the children."

Barnes, who before becoming Malloy's budget chief was the operating officer for Bridgeport schools, overseeing the school system's facilities, transportation, technology and its nearly $216 million budget, said Thursday that it was clear the city schools -- and the governing board -- were in crisis.

"I have some experience with that school board, and I can attest to the fact that some of the conflict on the board has been a significant distraction to education," Barnes said. "I hope the new board can help focus improvement on outcomes."

What law allowed state to BOE takeover?
CT POST
July 7, 2011 at 6:19 pm by Jim Shay

Q. What law allowed the state Board of Education to vote to replace the Bridgeport Board of Education:

A. Former State Rep. Jason Bartlett, who was on the Legislature’s education committee when the law was passed a year ago said the provision was requested by former Commissioner of Education Mark McQuillan to give him a tool to use to intercede in chronically failing school districts. No one imagined school districts would initiate use of the statute.

It was part of a state school accountability law.

The provision in question reads: (h) The State Board of Education may authorize the Commissioner of Education to reconstitute a local or regional board of education pursuant to subdivision (2) of subsection (d) of this section for a period of not more than five years. The board shall not grant such authority to the commissioner unless the board has required the local or regional board of education to complete the training described in subparagraph (M) of subdivision (2) of subsection (c) of this section. Upon such authorization by the board, the commissioner shall terminate the existing local or regional board of education and appoint the members of a new local or regional board of education for the school district. Such appointed members may include members of the board of education that was terminated. The terms of the members of the new board of education shall be three years. The Department of Education shall offer training to the members of the new board of education. The new board of education shall annually report to the commissioner regarding the district’s progress toward meeting the benchmarks established by the State Board of Education pursuant to subsection (c) of this section and making adequate yearly progress, as defined in the state accountability plan prepared in accordance with subsection (a) of this section. If the district fails to show adequate improvement, as determined by the State Board of Education, after three years, the commissioner may reappoint the members of the new board of education or appoint new members to such board of education for terms of two years.

State Board Votes 5-4 To Take Over Bridgeport Schools
Vote Comes In Response To 'Unprecedented' Request From Mayor, Superintendent And School Board President
The Hartford Courant
Courant Staff Report
3:39 PM EDT, July 6, 2011

The state Board of Education voted 5-4 Wednesday to reconstitute Bridgeport's school board, at the request of the city's mayor, school superintendent and school board president.

By a margin of only a single vote, the state Board of Education voted Wednesday to take over Bridgeport schools at the request of the city's mayor, school superintendent and school board president.

Faced with budget problems and poor student performance, the Bridgeport board had voted 6-3 Tuesday evening to ask the state education commissioner to reconstitute the board and take other steps to help the school district.

"It's quite unprecedented," said state Education Commissioner George Coleman. "We want to know more about what are the details that precipitated this — to have the board want to surrender its own authority."

The extraordinary moved by the state board was opposed by three of Bridgeport's school board members, who say the request was an effort to remove them as a vocal minority voting bloc on the board and that the move undercuts representative government.

A new state law allows the state education commissioner to replace a school board that has become ineffective, but the law has never been tested. Windham has welcomed the state's recent intervention in its school district, but that intervention was initiated by the state and did not involve replacing the school board.

Other struggling school districts have inquired about a state intervention, wondering what it would mean for their district, though none but Bridgeport has actually made a request, Coleman said. He said that in many cases the requests are driven by struggles with tight school budgets.

"If it's financial relief they're seeking, we have so little capacity at the state to offer that," Coleman said.

In Bridgeport, Mayor Bill Finch, School Superintendent John J. Ramos Sr. and school board President Barbara P. Bellinger initiated the request for state help.

State authorizes takeover of Bridgeport schools
Jacqueline Rabe, CT MIRROR
July 6, 2011

By a single vote, the State Board of Education on Wednesday gave Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch the "miracle" he says is needed to turn around the troubled schools in the state's largest city: a takeover by the state of Connecticut.

"The status quo in the Bridgeport Public School System is not OK," Finch told the state board during a two-hour meeting. "We don't have anywhere to go ... and that is why we are here."

Bridgeport's school system is facing a 7 percent cut to its $233 million budget, a situation that has exacerbated tensions among the current nine board members and led to an impasse on passing a budget for the fiscal year that began last week.

"There is something wrong in Bridgeport. I don't know how we say 'no' to the request," said Allan Taylor, the chairman of the state board. "I think we have an obligation."

"I have never seen a more hostile situation," said Tom Mulligan, a Bridgeport board member. "This board cannot achieve its purpose. ... It is an emergency situation."

And on Wednesday, members of the state board agreed, voting to grant the state commissioner of Education the power to appoint a new board to manage the 20,000-student district. But the board was split, voting 5-4 in favor of intervention.

"It is the role of this board is to place more scrutiny on failing schools," said Stephen P. Wright, a member of the state Board of Education from Trumbull, a suburb next to Bridgeport. "They are asking for our help. We need to give them some measure of help."

But about a dozen Bridgeport parents and voters traveled to Hartford with a clear message for the state board: Stay out. They said the residents elected the current nine-member board and throwing them out of office is troubling.

"It is outrageous to me that my rights as a registered voter are being taken away. It is not fair," Shavonne Davis, a mother of five children in Bridgeport schools.

The takeover is a reflection of a board that some say is dysfunctional beyond its inability to agree on a budget. The problem facing the current school board, the delegation from Bridgeport in Hartford said, is there are three board members that are very disruptive to the process.

Barbara Bellinger, president of the Bridgeport board, said while she has the majority votes she needs to pass important issues facing the schools, three members are able to delay business because a two-thirds vote is needed to go into executive session or to pass anything if one member is absent.

Hearing those comments, one mother from Bridgeport in the audience yelled out, "That's called transparency."

And with an election just three months away for four of the current board members, the Bridgeport delegation said they are not confident any election will solve this problem.

"I do not think the election will change the situation," Mulligan said.

The uncertainty of their budget is nothing new to Bridgeport schools, as it has faced major deficits to cope with flat-funding from both the state and the city in recent years and is the plaintiff on a pending class-action lawsuit against the state for its funding levels.

Patricia Luke, a member of the state board voting against the intervention, said the problem isn't the current board, it is that the chaos facing them now is a direct result of being underfunded.

"How is reconstituting your board going to change those problems? You don't have enough money," she asked. "It's not going to solve anything, except you will probably pass a budget for this school year."

But Taylor, who witnessed firsthand the state takeover of the Hartford school, said that's exactly was this intervention is aimed at solving, as well as other issues long-term. The new board will be in place for three years and Acting Education Commissioner George Coleman said he believes it will be made up of five members.

"I am not sure the solutions will be immediately evident," he said, adding he will name new members shortly. "Certainly we want people who have the time and commitment."

Bridgeport is not new to state oversight. Its financial problems led more than two decades ago to a state panel taking control of the city's budgeting.

School board vote asks for state takeover
CT POST
Linda Conner Lambeck, Staff Writer
Updated 06:57 a.m., Wednesday, July 6, 2011

BRIDGEPORT -- By a 6-to-3 vote, the Board of Education voted Tuesday to ask for a state takeover that will potentially replace its members and use a budget Superintendent of Schools John Ramos called "terrible" as a guide in helping the district teach 20,000 students in 2011-12.

"I have found this board to be dysfunctional in the manner in which it conducts its business ... The local board and Bridgeport public schools have proven themselves unable to deliver education that the children of Bridgeport deserve," said board President Barbara Bellinger.

She said the intervention request was her idea, not Mayor Bill Finch's or Ramos'. Bellinger said she has contemplated going to the state since December and called the status quo unacceptable.

She said she got help drafting the resolution from the city attorney's office as well as with state guidance.

The action essentially leaves district finances in limbo. Two weeks ago, Ramos got board approval to wait until October to make wholesale cuts in a $233 million spending plan that needs to be whittled to $215.8 million. The board action Tuesday leaves open the possibility deeper cuts could come sooner, since guidance the state will be given includes recommendations for wholesale cuts of staff and district programs.

Associate School Superintendent Robert Henry acknowledged some layoff notices are being prepared. He couldn't say how many, but they are in accordance with a revised list of reductions Ramos presented at a rally staged last week.

Sue Smith, director of social work for the district, said Tuesday she doesn't know what she will do if the board follows through with elimination of 18 social workers. It would leave one social worker for every 760 students in the district. Korene Garcia, incoming president of the district-wide Parent Action Council, said parents believe the budget will cripple student education.

"We have so many questions that need to be answered. How do we weigh in on process?" she asked.

Ramos was not at the meeting, held in a packed Batalla School cafeteria. Many in the back of the room held signs calling for the removal of Ramos, Finch and Bellinger.

Finch, also not at the meeting, issued a statement over the weekend in support of the resolution and another Monday calling the board action an opportunity to move things forward in a positive manner. Adam Wood, Finch's chief of staff, said if anything, his boss was taking a political risk, four months before an election, agreeing the school system wasn't functioning well.

"He has zero control over the Board of Education," Wood said.

Bellinger said she is convinced state intervention will come with assistance enabling the district to better serve its students, raise test scores and resolve a budget gap of nearly $20 million. Allan Taylor, chairman of the state Board of Education, said earlier Tuesday the one thing the state can't offer the city is more money. Commissioner of Education George Coleman called the board action unprecedented -- unlike the Windham school district, where state intervention was initiated by the state, or Hartford's school district, where a state takeover in 1997 was driven by the Legislature.

City school board members Maria Pereira, Sauda Baraka and Bobby Simmons made several failed attempts to get the motions postponed, altered or sent to committee. Pereira said if some board members feel they can't do their jobs, they should resign, not ask the state to replace the entire board.

"Perhaps we should all be dumping tea in Bridgeport's Harbor," said Pereira. She called the action a political ploy and a conspiracy to deny citizens their right to vote because four members, who are in the majority, are up for re-election. Pereira is a member of the Working Families Party, which shocked the Democratic Party last fall by winning two board seats. Bellinger denied the action was political.

Baraka said she will take their case to the state. "It's not even up to the people of Bridgeport anymore," she said.

"Tonight is just another example of the divisions on this board. They are deep and irreconcilable," said Thomas Mulligan, the newest board member.

The district has been flat-funded for four years, and federal stimulus money that kept the district afloat the past two years is gone.

Board member Thomas Cunningham sought assurances the board was only asking the state to consider the cuts proposed by Ramos, not necessarily enact them.

Bellinger called it a "road map" for the state to use. She also said it's up to the state to decide who stays on the board and who goes. "If they gave me the option, I'd have to think about it because this combination, doesn't work."

The approved resolutions will be taken up at the state Board of Education meeting Wednesday.

A high price to pay for help
CT POST editorial
Published 05:51 p.m., Tuesday, July 5, 2011

With no budget and not enough money, the Bridgeport school system is at an impasse. A state takeover, as the school board was prepared to request at Tuesday night's meeting, might be the best path forward.

But there are reasons for caution.

The Board of Education, whatever its faults, is made up of duly elected officials, chosen by the population of Bridgeport. Election results are not to be casually tossed aside, no matter what crisis is at hand. And few would disagree the problems Bridgeport is facing go far beyond anyone currently in office.

Faced with the fourth consecutive year of no funding increase from the city, Schools Superintendent John Ramos recommended and the school board agreed last month not to adopt the proposed budget for the coming year. The gap between what was needed and what was available, Ramos said, was simply too large. That point is not in dispute. The state responded by saying that no help could be forthcoming without adopting a budget of some sort.

Mayor Bill Finch, Ramos and School Board President Barbara Bellinger then proposed a resolution that asks the state to replace the nine-member school board and, in effect, take over the district. This is the resolution that was to be discussed Tuesday.

It's true that a vocal minority on the school board has put up some obstacles to the majority's plans. But that's simply the nature of a political board. Those members were elected like everyone else. And there's little evidence a state takeover would close the budget gap; the chairman of the state Board of Education has said as much.

Ramos has called the inequity in education funding between the city and suburbs "perverse." That is the real issue, and it goes far beyond any squabbling on the Board of Education.

State help for the Bridgeport schools would be welcome, and may ultimately be necessary. But not at the expense of overturning elections.

CT Commission of Education (retiring)...how does this affect this idea?
Finch, Ramos ask for state takeover of Board of Education
CT POST
Linda Conner Lambeck, Staff Writer
Updated 08:18 a.m., Tuesday, July 5, 2011

BRIDGEPORT -- Schools Superintendent John Ramos, along with Mayor Bill Finch and School Board President Barbara Bellinger, are asking for what amounts to a state takeover of the city school board.

The board of education is scheduled to meet in special session at 6 p.m. Tuesday in Batalla School, 606 Howard Ave., to consider a resolution asking the state Board of Education to ask the state commissioner of education to reconstitute the local nine-member school board.

If approved, the board would be agreeing to "set itself aside" and for the commissioner to appoint a new board, Ramos said. It remains to be seen, he added, if "this is the kind of game-changer we need for our kids to have a different kind of hope going forward."

"The Bridgeport Board of Education as it is currently constituted is dysfunctional. It's hard to argue that. We also generally agree that our city can't provide an equitable education to its children given its financial constraints. This resolution from my perspective reflects these realities and essentially appeals to the state for help in a more deep and impactful way," said Ramos.

The board, at Ramos' suggestion, agreed last month that it could not provide a decent education for the district's 20,000 students on the $215.8 million operating budget it will receive for the fourth straight year, coupled with a sharp reduction in federal grant money.

Ramos called it drawing a line in the sand. He acknowledged that along with reconstituting the board, the state could very well decide to shake up district staff, including his office.

"That may well be a consequence of this. This can't be about policy and job security. My job is not necessarily secure in this process as far as I am concerned," Ramos said.

Finch, in a prepared statement, said he believes that state oversight will be the best way to calm the waters and take politics out of the process.

"As a public school parent, I realize our school system is at a critical crossroad," Finchsaid. He added that state oversight will allow a renewed focus on improving outcomes for students.

At least two school board members said Sunday that they see it differently.

Sauda Baraka said it is up to the superintendent, who earns more than $225,000 a year, to guide the school board. She sees the resolution as an attempt to remove three members of the board, herself included, who have disagreed with many of the actions taken by Ramos and a majority of the board this school year.

Board member Maria Pereira said it makes no sense to target the board when Ramos asked the board not to pass a budget. She also said that if a majority of the board admits they are incapable of acting in the best interest of children, the minority should not be held responsible. She called the proposal purely political and a possible misuse of a relatively new state statute, part of the so-called parent trigger law, that allows the state to take over districts based on poor student performance.

Bellinger could not be reached for comment. In a statement released by Finch's office, she is quoted as saying what is most important are the children.

"This has been a long and difficult process for our board. ... During the past few years, the Board has struggled to gain a consensus on many issues. Without a laser-like focus on student achievement we are unable to dramatically improve student outcomes, our most important mission," she said in the release.

The two-page resolution blames board conduct at meetings for delaying board business and preventing the board from meeting its goals and improving student outcomes.

Ramos said a state takeover of the district has been talked about for years and the idea got traction after the budget was not passed. He said the mayor's office has been in direct contact with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's office over the matter.

The superintendent said board reconstitution is an opportunity only if it is devoid of politics and is about students, not protecting jobs.

"If we allow this process to be diluted in any way or compromised by politics in any way then its a nonstarter," said Ramos, who does not plan to attend Tuesday's meeting. He is moderating a Connecticut Conference of the Church of Christ. He said he expects the mayor will be at the meeting.

Fiscal pressures push districts toward regional cooperation
Robert A. Frahm, CT MIRROR
November 9, 2010

NORWICH - When this cash-strapped town closed its schools for spring vacation last April, it still had to pay to keep school buses rolling. The school district continued operating buses for students attending programs outside the district, including a New London magnet school and state-run technical and agricultural high schools.

The cost of running the buses that week, about $20,000, could have been saved if all of the schools had been on the same vacation schedule, officials said.

This week, the Norwich Board of Education is expected to vote to join other districts in adopting a common school calendar to avoid such conflicts, hoping eventually to coordinate schedules with more than two dozen school systems in the region. Pressured by Connecticut's mounting fiscal crisis, school districts are warming to the idea of working together to hold down costs - a sharp break from the longstanding Yankee tradition of local control and immutable district boundary lines.

"We need to let go of these border lines and boundaries that inhibit and make education costs so expensive," said Charles Jaskiewicz, Norwich's school board chairman. "We really need to work on regionalizing better."

A uniform school calendar could be one of the first steps. Educators also are discussing regional approaches to health insurance, purchasing agreements, busing and even curriculum, especially as schools across the state brace for more layoffs and budget cuts next year.

"I think [regionalism] is being pursued more seriously now than I've ever seen it," said Joseph Cirasuolo, executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents.

In other parts of the nation, too, school districts increasingly are looking for ways to share costs and work together under the pressure of tight budgets, especially in states with numerous small districts confined to small geographic areas, said Bruce Hunter, associate executive director of the American Association of School Administrators.

"That is going on almost everywhere," he said. "It's money. It's efficiency. It's also access to resources."

The budget crisis is particularly urgent in places such as Norwich, where the school district laid off more than 10 percent of its workforce this year, closed two schools and saw class sizes balloon. Jaskiewicz, the board chairman, sees potential savings in areas such as busing, where he believes neighboring towns could jointly operate buses to take students to state-operated technical high schools, for example. Under the current system, he said, "A lot of times you'll see a bus going down the highway with only a handful of students on it, and other towns will follow the same route."

Officials from Norwich and other nearby districts also are exploring the possibility of cooperative arrangements for insurance coverage," Jaskiewicz said.

The push for regional cooperation gained momentum last January when Democrats in the state House of Representatives created the Commission on Municipal Opportunities and Regional Efficiencies (MORE) to examine potential collaborations among towns, school districts and regional organizations. More recently, the issue was raised by an ad hoc committee of the State Board of Education. The committee, which is studying school finance, has asked the state's regional education service centers to collect information on the feasibility of cooperative approaches to busing and insurance coverage.

There are six regional education service centers in Connecticut, assisting school districts in areas such as special education, technology, curriculum development, professional training and purchasing.

"This year, more than ever, we're engaged in discussions to help [districts] put people together to reduce costs," said Craig Edmondson, executive director of ACES, a regional center based in North Haven.

Some educators believe the legislature's passage of a major school reform law earlier this year, including new graduation requirements, could lead to a more standardized statewide curriculum. "If that were to take place . . . it may help school districts to not spend significant resources to develop [their own] curriculums," Edmonson said. A common curriculum also could allow for districts to make joint purchases of textbooks.

"We need to think differently than we have in the past," Edmondson said.

The major factor behind the renewed interest in regional cooperation is the sputtering economy, including a looming $3.3 billion state budget deficit.

"All of this has come with the recession," said Bruce Douglas, executive director of the Capitol Region Education Council, a regional agency covering Greater Hartford. "How can we create economies of scale so we can reallocate needed resources back to the classroom?"

In Connecticut, nearly all of the state's 169 towns operate their own separate school districts and often cling fiercely to the notion of local autonomy - even in towns with only a few hundred students. Nevertheless, said Douglas, "There are multiple ways [regionalism] can work - information technology services, technology repair, facilities management, food services, transportation. Probably the most important one is health benefits and regional contracts."

Joint purchasing agreements already are relatively common as districts join municipal cooperatives or other school systems to buy paper, classroom materials, custodial supplies and other materials. "I've been doing that for years," said Maria Whalen, the business and finance director for New London's public schools.

In Plainville, public schools are involved in cooperative purchasing arrangements for things such as special education services, paper, copiers, oil and electricity, said Richard Carmelich, the school system's director of finance and operations.

"Most districts do at least some things regionally," he said. "We're part of a number of consortiums."

As educators squeeze what they can from their budgets, they are expecting little, if any, additional help this year from the state. Lawmakers will be hard-pressed just to maintain existing levels of state aid to schools.

"I think the smart districts are the ones being creative," said State Sen. Thomas Gaffey, D-Meriden, co-chairman of the legislature's Education Committee. "The budget situation we're in really dictates that."

Gaffey is among advocates for regional cooperation, including a common statewide school calendar. So is state Education Commissioner Mark McQuillan. A common calendar "is very important and, arguably, a simple thing to do. . . . We're not that big a state," McQuillan said. "I can't imagine you couldn't have a post-Labor Day start and the same basic configuration of days off."

Educators believe a uniform calendar not only would help neighboring towns to coordinate bus schedules, it would also allow them to share the cost of hiring speakers or running training programs for teachers on days scheduled for professional development.

"If you can get common vacation days and common professional development days - that would make a difference," said Patrice McCarthy, deputy director and general counsel for the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education.

However, some districts set vacations and teacher training days in labor contracts while others have well-established traditions they may be reluctant to alter. "Everyone has their own idea as to what the perfect vacation schedule is," McCarthy said. "You get lots of opinions. People are wedded to what they've been doing."

Nevertheless, she said school boards are expressing a "significantly heightened interest" in working together on matters such as busing, special education, professional training and summer school.

"The time is right," she said.

A former mayor plans to tackle state's education aid formula
Jacqueline Rabe and Robert A. Frahm, CT MIRROR
April 4, 2011

As mayor of Stamford, Dannel P. Malloy grew so frustrated seeing his wealthy neighbors get almost the same per-pupil education grants from the state as his city did that he joined a class-action lawsuit over the funding system. As governor, he intends to change that system from within.

"There are two ways to do it: We could leave it up to the courts or we could take it up ourselves," Malloy said in an interview with The Mirror. The current system, he says, "does a bad job of telling us where we should spend money."

The state spends about $2.7 billion on primary, secondary and adult education each year. Malloy is calling for a fresh look at how the state spends almost $2 billion of that money dispersed for public schools through the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) grant, the largest single source of state support for public education to the state's 169 towns, and about 10 percent of the state's total budget.

The ECS system, which dates back more than two decades, relies on a complicated formula measuring each town's wealth, tax base and level of need based on family poverty and other factors.

It is designed to equalize education spending among the state's wealthy and poor towns, but the formula has never been funded to the level originally intended and has been the subject of an annual tug-of-war and frequent political compromises in the legislature.

"We just need to have an honest conversation about it," Malloy said. "It's been tinkered with enough."

Malloy also wants to change other elements of the education funding system, including:

    Funding of magnet schools, a key part of the state's strategy for meeting the goals of the Sheff vs. O'Neill school desegregation settlement. Critics say some $1 billion spent on magnets has not produced the intended results. "I'm not rushing to fund more magnet schools," Malloy said.

    School construction grants. The state currently pays 20 to 80 percent of the cost of new schools, depending on the wealth of the town. That system has resulted in too many schools built at too high a price; he wants to cut back the state's share and apply stricter oversight of projects.

    Regionalization. Although he does not support mandating regionalization, Malloy said school officials "would be very wise to get ahead of that curve... We're paying for with state dollars, we are subsidizing, too many superintendents, too many deputy superintendents, too many facility managers, too many department heads."

But the big money, and probably the toughest political fight, is in changing the ECS grant formula. Every effort to adjust the formula comes up against the same obstacle: Barring substantial added funding, any change makes some towns winners and some losers.

Leaders of local school boards and teachers' unions, frequently at odds, agree on one thing: The primary problem with ECS is that not enough money is put into it.

Patrice McCarthy, general counsel for the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education, said addressing the formula will help -- but the chronic underfunding from of education is a large contributor to the state continuing to have one of the largest achievement gaps among poor and wealthy students in the nation.

"A greater commitment from the state is still necessary," she said. "You have to both fund the formula and apply it... You really have to do both."

"I think perhaps the single greatest problem with the ECS formula is its underfunding," agreed John Yrchik, executive director of the Connecticut Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union. "I don't think an equity formula can be fixed by simple redistribution."

A soon-to-be-published study commissioned by CEA found that the formula -- if it were fully funded as originally designed -- would result in more than $1.3 billion in additional support for public schools.

But that money isn't forthcoming any time soon, Malloy said, given the deficits the state is facing in coming years.

"That's why looking at how we allocate the dollars we know we're going to spend is very important," he said. "Every dollar that we do have to spend needs to be spent wisely."

Some critics say the measures of poverty in the ECS formula are too low. They also wonder why rich districts still receive a minimum grant and why the figures used to measure a town's wealth are rarely updated and drawn from aged data.

Malloy said he believes the formula does a good job of measuring town wealth, but fails to account adequately for student needs, and he cites the example of Stamford and its western neighbor, Greenwich.

Both communities rank high in terms of property tax base per capita--Greenwich is No. 1 of 169 municipalities, while Stamford is 27th, according to state calculations. But the ratio of poor students in Stamford, as measured by eligibility for subsidized school lunch, is three times higher than in Greenwich. Still, the $386 per pupil that Greenwich gets in state aid is nearly 75 percent of Stamford's $521.

"That's the big, giant disconnect," he said. "It doesn't make any sense."

Tom Murphy, longtime spokesman for the State Department of Education, said the way the state factors in poverty is problematic.

"Some cities with high amounts of poverty have not benefited from this formula," he said.

With a budget deficit as high as $3.7 billion to deal with this year, Malloy isn't proposing to change ECS as well. But he plans to have a study panel make recommendations for changes by January 1 and hopes the legislature will change the formula by next May.

"It would be wrong for Connecticut state government to be a defender of the status quo,' he said. "The status quo is not working."

Slicing a smaller pie: Educators consider how to share reduced funding
Jacqueline Rabe, CT MIRROR
November 9, 2010

Governor-elect Dan Malloy may have promised not to cut state aid for schools, but state education leaders aren't taking that for granted: They're scrambling to form a plan for dealing with a major loss of funding.

For the current school year, state lawmakers capped school aid at $1.9 billion, but $270 million of that was paid for with one-time federal stimulus money. Education leaders are not confident the state will be able to afford to fill that $270 million gap, which amounts to 14 percent of state aid for schools, in the face of a $3.3 billion deficit.

So a panel of education leaders -- including teachers unions, the superintendents association, the state board of education members and Education Commissioner Mark McQuillan -- are weighing the options.

Should funding for school districts be cut across the board? Should poor communities be spared? Should districts with more English language learners or special education students not be cut as much? Those are among the issues the panel will weigh and offer recommendations on to Malloy and state lawmakers as early as December. The panel's final recommendation will likely be a starting point for state lawmakers, who will have to decide how much state aid will be given and how it will be distributed.

"We have a long journey here," said McQuillan. "For every change we make, there will be a tradeoff."

Joseph Cirasuolo, the executive director of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, agreed.

"If someone's making money, then another district is losing money, and that's a problem," Cirasuolo told the education panel Monday.

Alex Johnston, head of the New Haven-based school reform group ConnCAN, said renewing the current funding structure and having across-the-board cuts is not the right answer.

"Politically, of course the easiest thing to do is to just give everyone a haircut," he said. "The formula should not be about what [a district] brings back from the state Capitol. It's, 'Are we funding our students fairly based on their needs?'''

Brian Mahoney, the budget director for the State Department of Education, presented the panel a laundry list of options and how the changes would impact different school districts. For example, basing funding only on a district's wealth and special education needs would result in 38 of the richest communities receiving nothing from the state.

"This really would be a way to drive money to these urban districts," said John Yrchik, the executive director of the Connecticut Education Association, but stripping any district of funding may not be a good idea.

"This is a fundamental question that I think we are going to have to answer."

The panel meets again in December, and at that time hopes to adopt recommendations for what the state funding formula should look like. The next step is convincing Malloy and state legislators to agree.

"If we can get it in the governor's budget then that's a good first step for it becoming a reality," Mahoney said.

PRIOR TO NOV. 2, 2010 BELOW

Ex-Radical Talks of Education and Justice, Not Obama
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
October 27, 2008

Over the last several months, as pundits and partisans have debated the significance of his relationship with Senator Barack Obama, William Ayers has avoided the limelight, steering clear of political commentary and public pronouncements.

But on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Ayers, 63, a founder of the 1960s-era radical group the Weather Underground, a former fugitive, former Chicago Citizen of the Year and current professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, appeared without fanfare at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, in Chelsea, to participate in a symposium on educational justice.

In 1995, Mr. Ayers held a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama, who was running for a seat in the Illinois State Senate. The two men later served together on the boards of two Chicago philanthropic groups as well as on the board of an education reform organization. The two men have been described as friendly, but not close.

The campaign of his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain, has used Mr. Obama’s ties to raise questions about his fitness to be president.

On Sunday, after Mr. Ayers was introduced to an audience of about 50 people who had bought tickets to the event, the moderator, the WNYC radio host Leonard Lopate, asked, “Does this mean I can’t run for president?”

“It means you can win,” Mr. Ayers said in response.

But Mr. Ayers, who was part of a group that claimed responsibility for bombing several buildings including the Capitol, the Pentagon, banks and police stations, seemed to go out of his way to avoid presidential politics.

When he spoke about a person from his neighborhood — Mr. Obama has several times referred to Mr. Ayers as simply “a guy from my neighborhood” — some audience members leaned forward in anticipation.

It turned out that Mr. Ayers was not talking about the junior senator from Illinois but rather about the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who was also from Chicago.

While describing his views on education and social justice, Mr. Ayers hardly resembled the unrepentant terrorist that his critics have sought to paint him as while attacking the Obama campaign.

He urged one man in the audience, a principal of a South Bronx high school, to establish closer ties with parents in his school district. He praised students at a high school in Detroit who started a farm.

And he called upon educators to establish curriculums that help equip students to be active in society.

“In a democracy, we educate for citizenship,” he said. “Not for obedience of authority, but for participation.”

After the discussion, some audience members asked questions.

“What happened to the activism?” one woman asked. “What happened to the revolution?”

Mr. Ayers at first mentioned the realignment of 1994, in which Republicans took control of Congress, which some Republicans referred to as a revolution, and then went on to talk about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s uses of the term “revolution,” and saying that it would be futile to emulate political models from the 1960s and ’70s.

“Can we imagine another world?” he said.

New federal rule complicates desegregation efforts
Robert A. Frahm, CT MIRROR
September 7, 2010

On an enrollment form at Hartford's Classical Magnet School, seventh-grader Elisa Laureano's mother lists Elisa's race as white but also checks a box categorizing her ethnicity as "Hispanic." So is Elisa white? Hispanic? Both?

For Classical Magnet, it's a $4 million question.

Under a federal rule that takes effect this year, students can identify themselves in multiple racial and ethnic categories. Critics say the rule could upset a variety of race-related programs, from measuring academic achievement to ensuring civil rights compliance.

One immediate impact in Connecticut is that the rule complicates the process of determining whether schools such as Classical meet the racial balance standards in the court-supervised desegregation settlement of the Sheff vs. O'Neill desegregation case. Schools throughout the region take their official census on Oct. 1, and depending on how the question is resolved, some could lose their magnet status - and a financial lifeline from the state.

"We have a problem," said Classical Principal Tim Sullivan. "It could be a game-breaker for us."

If Classical--hailed as a model in the regional desegregation effort--were to fall below the required quota of white students, it could lose up to $4 million in state magnet school grants and be forced to send suburban students such as Elisa, who is from West Hartford, back to schools in their hometowns, Sullivan said.

The state could wind up back in court if it fails to meet the standards established in the desegregation settlement. That settlement grew out of a 1996 state Supreme Court ruling ordering Connecticut to desegregate Hartford's mostly black and Hispanic public schools.

Classical is one of about two dozen magnet schools in the Hartford region created to help meet the court order. The schools, featuring specialty themes, are designed to draw racially mixed student bodies from Hartford and the city's predominantly white suburbs.

Under the Sheff agreement, white students must make up at least 25 percent of a magnet school's enrollment. (The minimum is 20 percent for some newer magnet schools that have been granted a grace period to meet the goal.)

But, under the new federal regulation, who counts as white?

Seventeen-year-old Alexis Deschenes, a senior at Classical Magnet, checked two boxes on her enrollment form this year.

"I listed myself as white and black," said Alexis, whose father is white and mother is black. "It feels good to identify myself as both races rather than just choosing one," she said.

Alexis lives in East Hartford and has attended Classical since seventh grade. "I love it here," she said. "I wouldn't be anywhere else." Until now, she had been classified as white on the school rolls.

As America grows increasingly diverse, many people - among them President Obama - can claim mixed ethnic or racial heritage. At schools such as Classical, multiracial students are common.

"On the surface, Classical looks like it's a diverse school," Sullivan said. But depending on how strictly or loosely the state categorizes students, Classical's white population could be as low as 21 percent or as high as 44 percent, he said. Last year, while Classical was still in a grace period under the Sheff agreement, the official percentage was just under 24 percent.

For the first time this year, students across the state are being asked to identify themselves in one or more of five racial groups: Black, white, Asian, American Indian or Alaskan native, and Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. In a separate question, they are asked whether or not they are Hispanic, considered an ethnic but not a racial category.

The new rule allows students "to more accurately reflect their racial and ethnic background by not limiting responses to only one racial or ethnic category," the U.S. Department of Education says in a policy memo.

The regulation could have far-reaching implications beyond those in the Sheff case.

"It's going to produce all kinds of chaos. This is just one of the examples," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and a nationally recognized proponent of school desegregation. Orfield and other civil rights leaders have opposed the rule, saying it will make it difficult or impossible to conduct research or monitor civil rights compliance.

"It's going to make data impossible to compare," he said. "It doesn't relate very well to actual social reality. . . . It's a terrible mistake."

The identification of students in multiple racial categories could require schools to rethink the reporting of racial data on matters such as graduation rates, test performance, and college attendance rates, for example.

"All of those things have traditionally been reported with a simple definition. That all can change," said Tom Murphy, a spokesman for the State Department of Education. "It's really going to be an interesting challenge."

Bruce Douglas, executive director of the Capitol Region Education Council, oversees several magnet schools, most of them in suburban towns near Hartford. The CREC-operated schools have been able to meet the quotas under the Sheff plan, and Douglas said he has no problem with the new federal rule.

"This allows families to identify every aspect of who they are," he said. "I think it's a good thing."

However, at Classical and several other magnet schools located in Hartford and operated by Hartford Public Schools, officials have had to scramble to attract enough white students.

Lawyers for the Sheff plaintiffs said they have discussed the new racial classification rules among themselves but have not yet met with state officials to establish guidelines for measuring compliance with the Sheff settlement. If the two sides cannot agree, the matter could wind up before a judge.

Sullivan, the Classical principal, applauds the intent of the new federal rule. "It allows students not to have to deny part of their heritage," he said. "They can acknowledge what they really are."

But, he wonders, how will the state decide who they really are?

"This is a tough one," he said.

Deal Reached In School Lawsuit; Desegregation Fight In Hartford Dragged On For 12 Years
By Associated Press
Published on 4/5/2008

Hartford (AP) — A tentative settlement was reached Friday in the long-standing school desegregation lawsuit that for 12 years has sought to remedy the racial isolation in Hartford schools.

The question of whether the city's schools must be desegregated was settled by the landmark state Supreme Court Sheff vs. O'Neill ruling in the case in 1996, but the high court left it to the Sheff plaintiffs and the state to figure out how to do it.

The latest deal requires the state to develop a detailed plan to address racial disparity, including more magnet schools in Hartford suburbs and an increase in the number of spots available in suburban schools for Hartford students.

The agreement also requires that at least 80 percent of Hartford students who want to attend integrated schools be accommodated by 2012.

The settlement must be approved by a state judge and the General Assembly.

“This is a watershed day in our ongoing efforts to ensure that all of Hartford's children are afforded their constitutional right to a quality integrated education,” said Dennis Parker, Director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program and an attorney in the case.

Parker said that for the first time in 12 years, the state must follow a detailed framework to assure racial balance.

Others involved in negotiating the agreement included lawyers with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. and Center for Children's Advocacy.

The original case was brought in 1989 on behalf of Milo Sheff, who was then a 10-year-old student in Hartford's Annie Fisher School. Following the 1996 Supreme Court ruling, the case landed back in lower courts after plaintiffs complained over a lack of progress.

The two sides reached an agreement on a four-year plan in 2003: It was left largely to Hartford to implement the terms of the settlement by building magnet schools and sending students to suburban schools through the “Open Choice” program.

However, the numerical goals of the 2003 agreement specifying levels of integration were not met and after the accord expired last year, the plaintiffs returned to court.

“Equal opportunity to a quality, integrated education is a fundamental right and for the first time there is a clear structure in place for the state to follow to ensure that no child is denied that right,” Parker said.

Some See Connecticut Reflected In Obama Speech
By RINKER BUCK | Courant Staff Writer
March 19, 2008

In his landmark speech on race Tuesday in Philadelphia, Sen. Barack Obama pointedly addressed America's long "racial stalemate" in terms that were bound to strike familiar chords throughout the country.

But Obama's heartfelt ode to a "more just, more equal, more free" America also was a stark and brutally familiar description of Connecticut, where geography and neighborhoods are often defined by race, where Hartford schools continue to be embroiled in the Sheff v. O'Neill lawsuit and where even major areas of government like the state police are grappling with racial strife.

Obama scheduled his remarks in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Constitution, after news reports on the comments of his friend and former Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., on American racism continued to dog his campaign over the weekend.

In his speech, Obama condemned Wright's comments as "not only wrong but divisive," yet he did not just issue the politician's standard distancing from a supporter who has embarrassed him. He instead used his speech as a springboard for a remarkably candid and perhaps risky assessment of the continuing problem of race in American society, words that echoed the theme of challenging the status quo that has marked his campaign.

"Nutmeggers can really recognize what Obama was talking about in his speech," said John C. Brittain, one of the lawyers who filed Connecticut's Sheff v. O'Neill school desegregation lawsuit in 1989. "Because what he was saying is the story of their home, too."

Despite the Connecticut Supreme Court's 1996 finding that "extreme isolation" characterized the state's schools, the legislature, the governor and the parties to the lawsuit are still haggling over implementing the desegregation order more than 12 years later.

"There has been some limited progress as a result of Sheff v. O'Neill, where minority kids, say, have a chance to attend better suburban schools," Brittain said. "But 18 years after the case was filed we still face the essential issue that Hartford schools are completely black and the suburbs are white. That's exactly the kind of stalemate Obama was talking about in his speech."

Obama is significant, Brittain said, because instead of running on the race issue and appealing only to his own community, his campaign is about aspirations to go beyond past obstacles over race and offer genuine hope for change. "The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society," Obama said in Philadelphia. "It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen — is that America can change."

In a far-ranging speech that attempted to link racial issues from America's constitutional era to the present, Obama also said the Constitution "was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery." He said anger over racial issues is justifiable within both the African American and white communities, concluding that the country is stuck in a "racial stalemate."

Obama also said the race issue is distracting the public from other problems facing America, and he excoriated an American "corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed."

"I've certainly never heard a politician use language this blunt," said Mark Silk, the director of Trinity College's Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life and author of "Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II."

Silk said most politicians are deliberately vague on the subject of race to avoid raising a difficult subject, a stricture that Obama abandoned in Tuesday's speech. Silk also said Obama might have been most frank in addressing the assumptions of black Americans, not whites.

"At the core of the Obama campaign is a riposte to the notion in the black community that American society is irredeemably racist," Silk said. "Going all the way back to Booker T. Washington, and his doctrine of self-reliance for blacks, there has been a deeply separatist strain in the thinking of the black community.

"Because racism was considered so ingrained in America, so the thinking went, blacks had to go it alone and be apart. But Obama's speech was a call to move away from this past. It was courageous."

New Englanders should find significance in what Obama said for another reason, Silk said. He pointed out that he spent 10 years in Atlanta in the 1980s before returning north, which gave him a fresh perspective on the Northeast.

"In Atlanta, race just seems to be center stage all the time, while in Connecticut, because of the way neighborhoods and schools are divided up, it becomes easy to ignore race issues," Silk said. "For a lot of white people who don't live down South, the presence of race in life and society is just not front-of-mind. But Obama has been forced to deal with this himself, and now he is forcing us to think about it, too."

Obama joined Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side 20 years ago, impressed by the congregation's dedication to economic revival and community service. The Rev. John Deckenback of Frederick, Md., a conference minister, or bishop, for the UCC denomination, said many of the themes in Obama's speech date from historic commitments of the church. This included the large role the church played in the 1840s in the case of the Amistad, the Spanish ship that carried slaves who rebelled and who eventually were freed after standing trial in New Haven and Hartford.

"You have to remember that in the UCC, the same denomination that Wright and Obama belong to, we are the religious descendants of the same people who raised money to return the Amistad captives back to Africa," Deckenback said. "UCC has in its DNA from its very beginnings being responsible critics of our society. That's rooted in the Amistad story, which holds a special place in UCC's teachings."

Deckenback said that after the New England — and largely Connecticut — founders of the Amistad Defense Committee finished paying for the return of the Amistad slaves to Africa, money left over was used to establish the American Missionary Association, which founded schools for freed blacks throughout the South, including Howard University in Washington and Fisk University in Nashville.

"These were New England Congregationalists who believed that education is the foundation of opportunity and that churches play a vital role in keeping communities together," Deckenback said.

"Obama partly built that speech on those beliefs and on church history."

School Desegregation Agreement Withdrawn
Courant Staff Report
March 5, 2008

A settlement reached last year to meet the Hartford school desegregation targets set by the Sheff v. O'Neill lawsuit was withdrawn Tuesday from the General Assembly, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said.

Blumenthal said he hopes to submit a new agreement for ratification by the end of March.

The decades-long case to integrate city children in schools with their suburban peers returned to court last fall after the legislature failed to act on an agreement between the state and the plaintiffs on how to proceed with desegregation.

The original Sheff settlement, which was reached in 2003 and expired last year, set a target calling for 30 percent of Hartford students to be enrolled in racially integrated schools by 2007, but that effort fell considerably short.

In January, the Superior Court judge hearing the case ruled that the prior agreement was still technically pending in the legislature and would take effect March 6 if not withdrawn or voted down.

The two sides are negotiating changes broader than the changes originally proposed under the multiyear agreement that set annual desegregation targets, according to legislators with knowledge of the talks.

Among the ideas now being considered are opening magnet schools for children in the suburbs and the expansion of the Open Choice program, which enables Hartford students to enroll in suburban schools.

Suburban Magnet Schools May Ease Hartford’s Endemic Segregation Problem
State Eyes A New Tack
By RACHEL GOTTLIEB FRANK | Courant Staff Writer
March 3, 2008

In an acknowledgment that attracting white students to Hartford has been a tough sell, the focus of court-ordered desegregation efforts in Greater Hartford may soon be shifting to the suburbs.

State education officials are talking about channeling more than $100 million toward building new magnet schools in Hartford-area towns and increasing the number of slots for city students in suburban schools through the Open Choice program. Officials are scrambling to meet a deadline to either withdraw or revise an outdated agreement between the state and the plaintiffs in the Sheff v. O'Neill lawsuit to see if a legislative, rather than judicial, solution can be found to the problem of unequal, segregated education in the capital region.

The idea of basing magnet schools in the suburbs, broached last year by Education Commissioner Mark K. McQuillan, has garnered support from key legislators. At least three suburban districts have endorsed the idea for the preschool and early elementary grades, according to state Rep. Andrew Fleischmann, D-West Hartford, co-chairman of the education committee. But significant hurdles remain, not the least of which is that McQuillan does not have authority to force suburban districts to accept city children through the voluntary Open Choice program.

"There may be a need for some additional authority for the commissioner to open more seats. That issue, among others, will need to be addressed if that option is adopted," said state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who would not discuss the specific proposals under discussion.

The decades-long case to integrate city children in schools with their suburban peers returned to court late last year after the legislature failed to ratify an agreement between the state and the plaintiffs on how to proceed with desegregation. In January, the Superior Court judge hearing the case ruled that the prior agreement was still pending in the legislature and would take effect March 6 if not withdrawn or voted down.
McQuillan could not be reached for comment last week. But Fleischmann, who has been meeting with McQuillan, the secretary of the Office of Policy and Management, other key legislators and representatives from Blumenthal's office said that McQuillan's ideas are included in written proposals submitted to the plaintiffs.

To date, Blumenthal said, the only consensus reached is that dates in the agreement submitted to the legislature last year must be updated. Other components of the original agreement — including the funding of charter and vocational technical schools — remain in the revised version that the state is hoping plaintiffs will approve and then send back to the legislature for ratification. The newstrategy recognizes that suburban parents have been reluctant to send their children to Hartford.

The original Sheff settlement, which was reached in 2003 and expired last year, set a target calling for 30 percent of Hartford students to be enrolled in racially integrated schools by 2007, but the effort fell short.

A study by Trinity College researchers shows that just 9 percent of the city's students attend schools that have enough white students to qualify as racially integrated. Meanwhile, enrollment at many Hartford schools, including some magnets, remains almost entirely black and Hispanic. Safety in the city is a concern that holds some suburban parents back, state officials have found.

In November, McQuillan conceded that the assumption that suburban youngsters would be drawn to magnet schools run by Hartford was mistaken, but said that six or seven magnet schools run by suburban towns and focusing on children in pre-kindergarten through 3rd grade could work. Parents who otherwise would pay to send their preschool-aged children to day care would find the offer of an all-day public preschool school program enticing, McQuillan said.

Key legislators support McQuillan in his bid to carve a bigger role for the suburbs. "Magnet schools in the suburbs — that makes sense to me. We've tried the Hartford magnet experience and that hasn't worked that well toward reducing racial isolation," said Sen. Thomas Gaffee, D-Meriden, co-chairman of the legislature's education committee.

"Parents are extremely reluctant to send their kids into Hartford except for some of the unique offerings like the school for the performing arts," Gaffee said. They're concerned about the crime rate and kids getting killed. I know that would weigh on my mind as a parent. Suburban parents will feel a lot more secure sending their children to a magnet school in the suburbs."

"It's a multi-pronged approach that is less reliant on Hartford," said Fleischmann.

Hartford officials declined to comment. At least three suburban districts have expressed interest in building magnet schools for young children, Fleischmann said. Windsor, for example, formed a task force to examine the potential for building a magnet school for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. Students who live outside Windsor would return to their town's schools for first grade. Simsbury is also forming a task force to explore the option of building a magnet school in the town.

The state pays 95 percent of construction costs and contributes to the operating costs of inter-district magnet schools. Now the plaintiffs must sign on.

Elizabeth Horton Sheff, mother of the case's first named plaintiff, Milo Sheff, said magnet schools probably would be more successful in the suburbs than in Hartford. Waiting lists for successful magnet schools and for Open Choice slots show that there is demand among Hartford youngsters, she said. What troubles Sheff is the limited age group that the magnets would accommodate.

"What happens after third grade? They go back to their neighborhood schools?" she asked. "You have to talk about the 'what next?' There should be a path all the way through."

As further incentives for towns to create more room for Hartford students in their schools, Fleischmann and Gaffee said they would support increasing state aid tied to children who enroll in suburban districts. The additional funding, coupled with an emphasis on enrolling children beginning at an earlier age, addresses the concerns some districts express about accepting older urban children who are years behind in their studies, taking the hit for their low test scores and providing enough support to help them catch up.

"If you get to educate a child from the age of 3, it's easier to make sure they progress the way you like them to," Fleischmann said.

Closing arguments in latest desegregation court action
Norwalk HOUR
Associated Press
January 5, 2008

HARTFORD — Closing arguments have been made in the latest court action involving Connecticut's landmark school desegregation case, Sheff vs. O'Neill.

The question of whether the city's schools must be desegregated was settled by the state Supreme Court ruling in the case in 1996, although the high court left it to the Sheff plaintiffs and the state to figure out how to do it.

The two sides reached an agreement on a four-year plan in 2003: It was left largely to Hartford to implement the terms of the settlement by building magnet schools and sending students to suburban schools through the "Open Choice" program.

However, the numerical goals of the 2003 agreement specifying levels of integration were not met and after the accord expired last year, the plaintiffs returned to court.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs argued Thursday that a detailed court order be issued to specify what the state must do to end the racial isolation.

"We're not asking for mandatory busing," Dennis Parker, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, argued. "We are asking that a comprehensive plan be put into effect."

A lawyer for Hartford urged Judge Marshall K. Berger Jr. to appoint a monitor to oversee the desegregation case.

John Rose, Hartford's lawyer, called the 2003 stipulated agreement between the state and the plaintiffs "a failure.

"We need a plan and it needs to be monitored by the court, he said.

It can take us places where we have never gone before," Rose said. "This case is about children who are going nowhere fast."

An attorney for the state of Connecticut argued that no order, nor monitor is necessary or desirable.

Ralph Urban, arguing for the state, opposed any judicial intervention, saying a court-issued comprehensive plan to desegregate Hartford's schools would lock resources into specific programs, making it impossible to move them into areas where the money would be better spent.

Berger has 120 days from Thursday to issue a ruling.

Desegregation By Order?
Plaintiffs' Attorneys In Sheff v. O'Neill Argue For Court-Ordered Plan, Monitor To Direct It
By RACHEL GOTTLIEB FRANK | Courant Staff Writer
January 4, 2008

Attorneys in the landmark Sheff v. O'Neill school desegregation case offered sharply conflicting recommendations to a Superior Court judge who is considering ways to end the racial and social isolation of Hartford schoolchildren.

In closing arguments Thursday, plaintiffs' attorneys asked Judge Marshall K. Berger Jr. to issue a detailed order spelling out exactly what the state should do to integrate city students with their suburban counterparts. A lawyer for the city urged the court to appoint a monitor to oversee the task.

An attorney for the state of Connecticut argued that no order, nor monitor was necessary or desirable. The state education commissioner can bring about the desegregation goals without judicial intervention, he said.The closing arguments followed a six-week hiatus in the hearing. Testimony concluded in November and Berger gave lawyers time to prepare legal briefs.

If his questions to the lawyers offered any indication, Berger is at least considering requests that he issue a plan for desegregation or appoint a monitor to oversee progress.

The question of whether the city's schools must be desegregated was settled by a state Supreme Court order in 1996, though the high court left it to the Sheff plaintiffs and the state to figure out how to do it. The two sides reached an agreement on a four-year plan in 2003: It was left largely to Hartford to implement the terms of the settlement by building magnet schools and sending students to suburban schools through the "Open Choice" program. However, the numerical goals of the 2003 agreement specifying levels of integration were not met and after the accord expired last year, the plaintiffs returned to court.

In testimony in November, the plaintiffs proposed leaving desegregation efforts voluntary for parents and children, but imposing stricter guidelines for the state and the 22 Hartford-area towns in the Sheff district. They called for doubling the space available for city children in suburban schools and a heavier hand by state officials to ensure that every city child who wants a place in a suburban school or a magnet school is accommodated.

"We're not asking for mandatory busing," Dennis Parker, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, argued Thursday. "We are asking that a comprehensive plan be put into effect." Efforts to date, he argued, have been ad hoc.

"African American and Latino children of Hartford have earned the right to question what a constitutional right means," Parker said. "A declaration of their rights by the Supreme Court has been ineffective for so long."

John Rose, Hartford's lawyer, called the 2003 stipulated agreement between the state and the plaintiffs "a failure;" though he didn't offer a specific remedy, Rose asked for judicial oversight beyond the role that the court has played in the past.

"We need a plan and it needs to be monitored by the court. It can take us places where we have never gone before," Rose said. "This case is about children who are going nowhere fast."

Berger asked Rose who he should name as a monitor if he does appoint one. Rose suggested that the court ask the parties to suggest names. At one point, Berger asked Parker what he would think of appointing the commissioner of education as a monitor. Parker objected to the idea, saying he doesn't have faith in the state's overseeing its own progress. Since 1996, Parker said, the state's posture has been "trust us — we're on top of this."

Ralph Urban, arguing for the state, vehemently opposed any judicial intervention, saying a court-issued comprehensive plan to desegregate Hartford's schools would lock resources into specific programs, making it impossible to move them into areas where the money would be better spent.

He conceded that the state was disappointed by the number of slots suburban districts made available for city children and by the number of white students enrolled in some magnet schools. But, he said, the state is addressing concerns suburban districts have about admitting more students through the Open Choice program by increasing the transportation and educational subsidies and by helping to pay for more kindergarten slots in the suburbs so districts can work with children from a young age and avoid having to offer more remedial services for older children.

"The question is 'What now?'" Berger asked Urban.

Now, Urban replied, the state is still working on achieving the goals established for the first two years of a plan agreed upon in 2003.

But that's a four-year plan, Berger said. "The only people who signed on to this plan are the plaintiffs. Hartford has not signed on." The state legislature did not ratify the plan either.

Last year, a plan negotiated between attorneys for the Sheff plaintiffs and the state failed to win legislative approval. It would have required the state to spend $112 million to expand the network of magnet, charter and vocational schools.

Urban said that the state's education commissioner has agreed to work on the kind of plan that the plaintiffs have sought.

So "you're not averse to creating a strategic plan?" Berger asked.

"Right," Urban said. "But we don't want to be subject to a court order."

"Are you telling me that you don't want a strategic plan, but you will deliver to me a strategic plan?" Berger asked.

"We don't think we should be ordered to deliver a strategic plan," Urban said. But if the court orders the state to create one, he said, then it will.

While Urban asserts that the matter doesn't belong in court, the plaintiffs disagree. They argue that the state Supreme Court previously ruled that court has jurisdiction and that a second generation of children is languishing in segregated schools since the Supreme Court first ruled in 1996.

Berger can craft a ruling that grants the plaintiffs what they're seeking, he can agree with the state and refrain from issuing an order, or he can fashion a compromise that he devises himself. He has 120 days from Thursday to issue a ruling.

A Shift Of Minorities In Schools; 18 Years After Sheff Suit Filed, Noticeable Change In Suburbs
By MICHAEL REGAN | Courant Staff Writer
December 26, 2007

In the early 1980s, as the state engaged in a school desegregation debate that would lead to the landmark 1989 Sheff v. O'Neill lawsuit, Bernice O'Neal's daughter was one of the few black children enrolled in Manchester's Verplanck Elementary School, where the minority student population was less than 20 percent.

"There wasn't a whole lot of African American children there at all," O'Neal recalls. Today, O'Neal's granddaughter is among more than 220 minority students who make up about 70 percent of the pre-K through sixth-graders at Verplanck.

And the Sheff case is back in front of a judge, who last month heard arguments that there has not been enough progress in reducing the racial isolation of Hartford schoolchildren. But if not much has changed in Hartford in the 18 years since Sheff was filed, dozens of schools in the region look much different than they did then.

While the number of minority students in Hartford's schools has declined slightly since then, the number in the rest of the region has nearly tripled. Outside of Hartford, school districts within the 36-town Capitol Region Education Council enrolled almost 38,000 minority students in the 2006-07 school year, up from a little more than 14,000 in 1988-89. And while some schools outside of Hartford have themselves become overwhelmingly minority, three out of four minority students in those districts attend schools that would meet the Sheff goal of having a minority enrollment below 75 percent.

They include schools such as Manchester's Verplanck, where parents like Lilliam Irizarry, whose son Alejandro is in the fifth grade, say the diversity makes their children's educations richer.

"He has black friends, he has Spanish friends, he has white friends, he has Asian friends, he has friends from Pakistan, from India, from Africa," Irizarry said. "He would be able to deal with any kind of people."

But with the town's minority population growing steadily, Manchester officials already are grappling with the issue of balancing the racial makeup of its elementary schools. Longer term, some wonder if an individual town can maintain integrated schools on its own.

"Given the small size of suburbs in Connecticut, the suburbs are going to need regional plans as well if they're going to maintain reasonable residential stability," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and a witness in the original Sheff lawsuit. "If you are going to have stable integration, you usually have to have policies for it."

Moving To The Suburbs

The movement of minority families to the suburbs is a major factor in the findings of two recent national studies: While Connecticut remains one of the more segregated states in the country by several measures, it is one of very few to have made any progress in reducing the racial isolation of black and Hispanic students. One study, by the Pew Hispanic Center, found that the proportion of Latino students attending schools that were more than 95 percent minority fell from 24 percent in the 1993-94 school year to 18 percent in 2005-06, the largest decline among six states. Black enrollment in the nearly all-minority schools dropped from 28 percent to 23 percent, fourth among seven states and the District of Columbia.

But the other study, by Orfield's Civil Rights Project, used the same national data to conclude that Connecticut was among the 20 most segregated states on three measures: the proportion of black and Latino students in schools that are more than 50 percent minority; the proportion of blacks and Latinos in schools more than 90 percent minority; and the percentage of white students in schools attended by the typical black or Latino student.

Orfield said there's no inconsistency between the studies: The desegregation effort mandated by Sheff, while "small potatoes" in his estimation, is better than what's going on elsewhere. "There are very few places that have any policy encouraging them to think about this issue at all," Orfield said. "Almost anything that you do can make a small improvement in the statistics."

What's improved the statistics most, however, is suburbanization, an analysis of state numbers shows:

•Inter-district magnet schools — the principal means of reducing urban segregation in Hartford and statewide — first opened in the early 1990s. Since then, enrollment has grown to more than 18,000, including almost 13,000 minority students.

•In the seven school districts that were more than 50 percent minority in 1988 — suburban Bloomfield and the cities of Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven, New Britain, New London and Waterbury — total minority enrollment in traditional, non-magnet public schools was about 75,000 in the 2006-07 school year. That represents an increase of about 8,000 — less than 12 percent.

•Meanwhile, the number of minority children attending traditional schools in the remaining districts increased by almost 60,000, or 156 percent, to more than 98,000. Orfield and Richard Fry, author of the Pew study, said the growth of minority households outside central cities is part of a national trend.

"All groups of students are suburbanizing," Fry said. "That's true both of public school enrollments and of the whole population."

Fry's study noted that in past years the most racially isolated students nationally have been white, and the same was true of Connecticut: In 1988, almost half of the state's white public school children went to schools that were at least 95 percent white. Last year, that proportion was about 12 percent. The number of almost-all-white schools — those with minority enrollment of less than 5 percent — has fallen from almost 400 in 1988 to just over a quarter that number in 2006, almost entirely because of the increase in minority students in the suburbs. In Wethersfield, for example, where only one school had minority enrollment over 5 percent in 1988, none of the schools now has less than 18 percent.

But that "suburbanization" doesn't occur uniformly. Of the 77,000 minority students enrolled in districts that were less than 50 percent minority in 1988, more than half live in just 12 communities.

"Are those places going to remain integrated, or are we just seeing a temporary process, a transitional process?" Orfield said. "That's the billion-dollar question here."

The Right Way To Go

The original Sheff lawsuit was premised on the idea of a largely minority city in the center of a largely white region, said Jack Dougherty, an assistant professor at Trinity College who has studied the Hartford-area desegregation efforts and was a witness in the latest Sheff hearing.

"It's less clear now if that's the right way to frame things," Dougherty said. "There are more suburban communities that have much more in common demographically or fiscally with the city of Hartford."

"Should the remedy be reorganized to include different suburbs in different ways? That's the question," he said. "A great opportunity to make a cognitive shift here is to think about both city and suburban schools, and to recognize the variety of suburban schools. Not all suburbs are alike."

Hartford lawyer Wesley Horton, an attorney for the plaintiffs in Sheff v. O'Neill, said changes in the region are irrelevant to the case. "The fact that the suburbs are more integrated isn't any use for the kids still in Hartford," he said. "Certain kids are lucky enough that their parents can move to the suburbs. That's wonderful. … But what about the kids that can't?"

And Elizabeth Horton Sheff, a Hartford city council member and mother of named plaintiff Milo Sheff, said it's too soon to be tinkering with the settlement. Although the state Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in 1996, it was another 5½ years before the state legislature approved a plan to settle the case.

"When we started in 1989, yes, things were different," she said. "But we didn't really get cracking with Sheff until 2003 — that's four years ago."

Years before the settlement was approved, though, the two main remedies of Sheff — development of magnet schools in Hartford and the region and voluntary busing of students from Hartford to the region — were in the works. Last year, fewer than 10 percent of Hartford's minority students attended schools that actually met Sheff's goal of having a minority enrollment below 75 percent, according to Dougherty's study. Progress has been "very discouraging," Horton Sheff said. But, she said, where the settlement's goals have been met, there have been promising results, like higher test scores.

Still, she said, Sheff is only one means of reducing racial isolation. Improved economic and housing opportunity would give parents of minority students more choices of school districts.

"I believe that affordable housing should be on the plate," she said. But, she added, "if you think that talking about providing quality integrated education raises hackles, talk about putting affordable housing in the suburbs and see how far you get."

A Limiting State Law?

Meanwhile, many suburban towns are themselves forced to deal with the racial makeup of their schools under a 38-year-old state law that prohibits racial imbalance within any district. The state says a school is out of balance if the minority student population is 25 percent or more above or below the district average in the same grades.

Dougherty, the Trinity professor, said the imbalance law is of limited usefulness in promoting racial balance on a regional basis.

"The state really has no mechanism for dealing with racial change in suburbs if Sheff doesn't address it and if the suburban racial change is uniform," he said. "All we have right now is a mechanism that says, 'If one part of your suburb is out of whack with the rest of your suburb, that's a problem.' But that's a limited mechanism, because that talks about each box independently."

The most recent list released in the spring by the state Department of Education says six schools in four districts are not in compliance with the law because the minority student populations are 25 percent or more above or below the district average. Districts with schools that are out of compliance have to submit plans for ending the imbalance.

Another 30 schools are approaching racial imbalance, the department says, because their minority enrollments are 15 percent to 25 percent above or below the town average. Of the 13 towns on that list, Manchester is the most often cited: six of its 10 elementary schools have an impending imbalance, including Verplanck.

The prospect of coming under state scrutiny doesn't sit well with many in Manchester. "They sit there and say Verplanck might be out of balance," said Louise Svalestad, president of the Verplanck PTA and mother of two students at the school. "You're looking at [a school in which] 30 percent are Hispanic, 30 percent are white, 30 percent are black — how much more balanced can you get?"

Diane Kearney, supervisor of equity programming for the Manchester schools, said the district is looking at options for improving racial balance in the schools so they reflect the world Manchester's children will live in.

"School is a microcosm of what it used to be, so from that perspective, it's important to maintain racial balance. But it shouldn't be forced on us, that's the problem," she said. "I think it becomes counterproductive and divisive when the law says, 'You have to do this.'"

Longer term, though, the district is more concerned with improving race relations townwide than with counting heads school-to-school.

"It's about building good race relations, so ultimately it doesn't matter," said Kearney, who also has been a teacher and assistant principal in Manchester. "If you better your race relations, then difference becomes healthy and not divisive. Then it doesn't matter if there's an imbalance."

To achieve that, Kearney said, the town has been engaged in conversations about race involving students, faculty and parents for the last several years.

"I think Manchester really is moving in a direction in which hopefully race doesn't matter, because we are having conversations about race," she said. "Once you begin that conversation, I think the rest becomes easy." "We have an advantage because we have to work together."

Sheff Case Turns Into A Classroom; College, Magnet School Students Are Court Observers
By MAGDALENE PEREZ | Courant Staff Writer
November 19, 2007

Before Jared Chase took a course on educational inequalities at Trinity College, he never thought much about the challenges city students in public schools face.

Chase grew up in Farmington, where his family of four had a house and five cars. He went to a good school where the work was challenging, the teachers supportive, and there was enough money to pay for state-of-the-art facilities.

But then Chase enrolled in "Cities, Suburbs and Schools," a class taught by Jack Dougherty, director of education studies at Trinity.

Dougherty is a witness for the plaintiffs in the landmark Sheff v. O'Neill school desegregation case, which was recently back in court for a hearing. And Chase — like students from many colleges and high schools across the area — sat in as a way to learn more about educational equality and the legal process.

In fact, research by some of Dougherty's students was key in creating a report on the state's desegregation efforts — and where it falls short — that Dougherty presented in court earlier this month.

For Chase, what really brought the differences between city and suburban education home was a book he read in Dougherty's class, "The Children in Room E4," that chronicled the experiences of fourth-graders at Hartford's Simpson-Waverly Elementary School.

The book describes a rare field trip the children took out of the city. Some students were amazed to see the Connecticut River. They pointed and cheered.

"You get an understanding of the isolation city students experience," Chase said. "A lot of things you might take for granted."

Chase was one of several dozen students from Trinity, the University of Connecticut and other schools to visit Hartford Superior Court over the past two weeks as the Sheff v. O'Neill case returned to court. Teenagers, graduate students, city magnet school children and first-year law students attended the hearings with notebooks in hand. Even two undergraduates studying psychology sat in the benches.

The reasons behind sending students into the courtroom is simple, educators said: The case is being fought on behalf of educating every Connecticut student fairly, and the hearing is an opportunity to give students an up-close understanding of educational and legal issues.

In the nearly two decades since Sheff v. O'Neill was filed in 1989, it has been the subject of many a master's thesis, Ph.D dissertation and high school writing assignment, said Eugene Leach, a co-plaintiff in the case and history professor at Trinity College.

"It's still a very innovative suit," Leach said. "I think students of education have a lot to gain by studying it."

A former student at Wesleyan University, Ana Weibgen, wrote her senior thesis on the Sheff case in 2005. She is now a paralegal for the racial justice program at the American Civil Liberties Union, part of the legal team representing the plaintiffs.

The long-running case aims to end the racial and economic isolation of Hartford children. The plaintiffs, 10 families representing 19 children, first brought the case in 1989. The state Supreme Court ruled on their behalf in 1996, but left it up to them to reach a compromise with the state. A decade later, the plaintiffs are still arguing that the state has not done enough to improve city education and integrate schools.On the hearing's opening day, so many high school students filled the courtroom that the judge called a recess to provide more seating. Among those attending were 23 juniors and seniors from Capital Preparatory Magnet School, accompanied by their social studies teacher, Juliet Sullivan.

The trial provided a perfect opportunity for the city magnet, which engages students in issues of social justice, to teach about a legal battle that is important to the lives of its students, Sullivan said.

"We want the students to understand how decisions are made," Sullivan said. "Everything that they were doing there could potentially directly affect us."

Some educators have made the Sheff v. O'Neil trial a part of their curriculum. At Capitol Preparatory, Sullivan is following the field trip with a math and geography lesson that will study minority enrollment in suburban schools.

And at Trinity, it was student research on the Project Choice program and other desegregation efforts in the Hartford region that produced the report Dougherty presented at the Sheff v. O'Neil hearing. Students interviewed parents, created computer tables and even analyzed data on the distances children travel to school.

"One thing we're trying to do is get students out of the classroom," Dougherty said. "I want them to not just read, but interact with real people."

And students have appreciated leaving the chalkboard behind.

"It's actually kind of cool to see the things we've been reading about in real life," said Mari Zigas, a student in Dougherty's class. "We got to meet Elizabeth Sheff and some of the other plaintiffs. It's like what we read come to life."

Schools Chief Makes A Pitch; Adamowski Seeks Regional District
By RACHEL GOTTLIEB FRANK | Courant Staff Writer
November 15, 2007

A regional school district that would craft and run interdistrict schools could be an effective way to diminish the racial and economic isolation of Hartford's schoolchildren, the city's superintendent of schools, Steven Adamowski, testified Wednesday.

The existence of 166 local and regional school districts in 169 towns has had the effect of segregating minority children, he said in the final day of testimony at Superior Court in Hartford in the landmark Sheff v. O'Neill desegregation case.

"All the poor students are bottled up in one place. It is essentially the reason we have the Sheff case," said Adamowski, whose city is now party to the case...full story here.

Open Dialogue On Sheff
Hartford Courant
Stan Simpson
November 10, 2007

The excuses have certainly mounted about why there hasn't been more suburban school engagement in Open Choice - an inclusion program that transports Hartford students to suburbia to get them a better education.

Class size issues. Enrollment increases. Paltry state tuition reimbursement.

An emerging concern from the 'burbs, usually expressed privately, is test scores. The fear is that under No Child Left Behind, their schools will be unduly penalized for taking in city kids, many of whom have significant academic deficits.

I've heard it all - and I'm not unsympathetic.

The buy-in for Open Choice, now in its 41st year, has been uneven at best - and particularly disappointing in the last few years. Of the 1,600 Open Choice seats the state set as a goal, about 500 slots are available, and there is waiting list of 206 Hartford kids.

There's been a slow-go approach with Open Choice and for the construction of several theme magnet schools, the two primary remedies agreed upon after the landmark Sheff v. O'Neill desegregation court ruling 11 years ago. The state Supreme Court ordered the legislature to remedy the problem of segregated schools.

Well, the 24,000-student Hartford school district is more segregated than ever. Several of the magnets have not been built. Those magnets that are up are indeed attracting suburban students, but they are mostly black and brown kids, not the intended target - whites.

The Sheff plaintiffs and the state were in court again this week. The plaintiffs say the state is moving at a snail's pace; the state says it's doing the best it can. This is what happens when a court makes the right decision, then undermines it by allowing lawmakers to use the honor system for implementation.

Since the 1996 decision, millions have been expended for new schools and programs, yet wholesale segregation continues and test scores have not significantly improved.

Unfortunately, the Sheff case is reviving discussions about whether integration in education is worth it. Demographers tell us this reality: Minority workers - black, brown and others - will make up more than 40 percent of the state's workforce by 2030. A large majority of that population will come from urban markets. By 2050, the country's minority populations will be in the majority. Over the years, I've highlighted a smattering of urban, segregated schools with mostly poor kids that have defied the odds and produced impressive test scores. But I believe there's tremendous value to a child learning among peers from different ethnic, racial and economic backgrounds.

If Open Choice is to work, and magnet schools are to be built in a timely manner, there has to be Open dialogue. Yes, more magnets should be built in suburban towns if that will better encourage white parents to participate. And yes, Hartford's role in running some of these magnets should be handed over to the Capitol Region Education Council, which has a record of running quality, diverse magnets. If suburban schools are concerned about reimbursements and potentially being punished because they are accepting city students with lower test scores, then put those issues on the table - and come up with solutions.

Twice in the past 12 months the state education commissioner's office has met informally with Hartford-region superintendents to discuss the impediments to Open Choice. It should also meet with white suburban parents to find out why they are not enrolling in the Sheff magnets.

If we want to promote real choice - then open up the discussion.

Money Should Follow City Kids To Suburbs
Hartford Courant
Rick Green
November 9, 2007

We've got over 100,000 seats in public school classrooms in suburbs around Hartford and there's room for just 1,000 city kids.

One percent. That's so pathetic it's embarrassing to even say. But as the Sheff school desegregation case is again in Superior Court this week, it's a failure we have to confront.

Sure, Hartford schools must improve. Perhaps we need more regional magnet programs. But can't we do better than the 1,070 children currently in the 40-year-old Project Choice voluntary school busing program?

Our affluent and middle class towns say they don't have space for more than this. Fine, but there are consequences here - be prepared for the day when we can't find enough skilled workers or bunks in our prisons.

There are hundreds of children on the waiting list for this proven program that disperses poverty and opens opportunity. Suburban superintendents will tell you these children invariably succeed and end up in college. Isn't this what the Sheff case - and public education - is about? As it turns out, there's a reason for this limited success: Most of the money doesn't follow the kid to the suburbs.

"The grant that follows the child is woefully insufficient," said Bruce Douglas, director of the Capitol Region Education Council, which runs Project Choice.

So, for example, the state of Connecticut - which is under a court order to desegregate metropolitan Hartford schools - gives Avon about $2,500 for each of the 41 children it takes. The district, however, spends about $11,000 per child. Meanwhile, Hartford keeps most of the money it would have spent educating this child. Much of that money comes from state taxpayers. This is no education crisis, it's a taxpayer rip-off.

"There isn't enough of an incentive," said Avon Superintendent of Schools Richard Kisiel, in comments repeated to me by other superintendents.

There are a million bureaucratic reasons why the legislature set the $2,500 amount. The idea that taxpayers' money should follow the student is a radical notion in public education, where failure is almost never penalized. Meanwhile, because "my parents are screaming about class size," Kisiel said, Project Choice becomes "an issue I try to keep it as low-profile as I can."

The Sheff plaintiffs say the state should have the authority to order districts to take more kids. State Education Commissioner Mark McQuillan told me he doesn't want to strong-arm districts to take more Hartford kids, but he has commissioned a study to look at how much space they really have in their classrooms.

"Some of this is about will," McQuillan told me. But it's also about hiring teachers and expanding classrooms for children who don't live in their town - not to mention overcoming worry that city kids will lower test scores. Just look at the numbers: Glastonbury accepts 42 kids, while Wethersfield has a woeful 13.

Two decades ago, West Hartford had 267 students coming from Hartford; now it has 77. School Board Chairman Jack Darcey told me his district is now 34 percent minority and schools have grown more overcrowded.

"We can probably do a little more," Darcey said. "You send the money with the kid, you will see a different response."

One percent. We need a judge, a governor or an education commissioner with the backbone to tackle this.

The Adamowski Gambit
Hartford Courant editorial
October 8, 2007

Controversial though it may have been, a comment by Hartford Superintendent of Schools Steven Adamowski at a state Board of Education meeting last week points to an underlying change in the nature of the Sheff v. O'Neill dilemma.

In a discussion about quotas of white children in Hartford's host magnet schools, Mr. Adamowski told state officials that "there is no research to suggest that minority students will do better by sitting next to a white student."

The context was money. The state has withheld operating funds for four of the city's host magnet schools because they are not in compliance with the requirement that no more than 75 percent of a student body be made up of racial minorities. (For schools in operation before 2005, the requirement is no more than 80 percent of students from the same district.)

Hartford can get the funds - about $1 million per school - if it files an "enrollment management plan" for each school explaining how it plans to bolster the school and non-minority enrollment. Mr. Adamowski has signaled that he wants to cooperate with the state, so presumably he will file the paperwork and get the funds.

The broader question some critics raised is whether Mr. Adamowski is settling for some variation of "separate but equal." His comment brought a sharp response from desegregation advocates, who aver that minorities and whites benefit from integrated classrooms. Indeed, most people, Mr. Adamowski clearly included, see great value in racially integrated schools.

But Mr. Adamowski said in a later interview that research shows economic integration - a child from an affluent family sitting next to a child from a poor family - results in better learning.

That opportunity has been lost at many Hartford schools.

The Sheff case was filed in 1989 to reduce both racial and economic segregation in Hartford schools. Since then, large numbers of middle-class African American and Latino children have moved to suburban schools, yet Hartford's schools remain overwhelmingly minority. That suggests that poorer minority children are being left behind.

The focus of resolving the Sheff case has been on racial balance. Almost nothing is said of economic integration, yet that seems to be an increasing part of the problem. Public policy should embrace both challenges. The interdistrict magnet schools should be going after suburban kids, white and minority.

Alan Hadad, dean of magnet schools at the University of Hartford, persuasively argues that admission requirements instead of admission lotteries would draw more bright suburban kids to Hartford. A new state law that allows regional magnet schools to fill vacancies with students from towns that do not have formal partnerships with the magnets should also bring more white kids to the magnet schools.

On the economic front, the state should stop building so much low-income housing in Hartford, and should move more state jobs into the city. Perhaps we should stop looking at schools in isolation.

The magnet schools have left Hartford with a two-tiered school system that Mr. Adamowski rightly believes must end. He has proposed a bold program to turn all city schools into schools of choice. The state should support this effort, and apparently does. The best of these schools will draw students of all hues. If a school is "separate but better," it won't stay that way for long.

A Study of the Special Education Program
WESTON, CONNECTICUT PUBLIC SCHOOLS
JUNE 2000
BY CLAIRE S. GOLD AND KATE MCGRAW
(NOTE: This document contains 57 pages of text and 22 pages of appendices; below please find only the "Conclusion" section. Copies of the full document are available at the Weston Board of Education at no charge. Also, please note that the type face and other format characteristics of this Internet version of the Conclusions of the study are different--but the text is identical! It is reported that the Board of Education listened to public comment about the Special Education Program and discussed this report at its June 19, 2000 regular meeting for the first time. "About Town" was not present at that meeting.)

Section IV. Conclusion

The findings of this report should be weighed within a historical context. Weston has gone through a recent history of much administrative turnover, the superintendent, a new assistant superintendent, and three new principals. The superindendency alone has been in significant transition with at least four different individuals holding that position in the last dozen years. This, coupled with turnover on the Board of Education, has contributed to changing focus and ever different policy and decision making. This set of circumstances is in part responsible for the pendulum swings so apparent in the special education program.

A rather rigid and cost saving approach of past years was replaced by one which some view as too permissive and expensive. It should be clear that it is not the Director of Special Education, alone, that establishes policies and practices for special education.

Weston shares some of the same issues that other affluent districts experience. A high powered curriculum, without a program of studies and teaching methodologies, broad enough to accommodate different rates and styles of learning, will leave average and/or minimally learning disabled students struggling or failing. This issue is now more pronounced because the nature of the student body is changing. If it ever was, Weston is certainly no longer the exclusive domain of the intellectually gifted. The numbers of children with a wide variety of cognitive, emotional and physical difficulties has increased markedly. The most important mission of a school district is to assure that each and every student develops to his maximum potential; the mission is not merely getting through the curriculum.

Although there are situations when parents’ aspirations exceed their children’s ability, by and large, parents are generally satisfied if they see that every effort is being made to help their children progress. When that does not happen, parents will press for academic support and special education services.

Weaknesses in the reading program, gaps in remedial services and basic curriculum and the absence of alternative programs, particularly at the high school, exacerbate the demand for special services.

While there are significant problems to be resolved in the special education department, many of the issues will not be resolved without a holistic approach by the entire school district. The Director of Special Education will need the power and authority of the Board of Education and the Superintendent in order to work out a complementary relationship with regular education. The education of one hundred percent of the students belongs to the entire school district. At the present time there are students disabled by the curriculum. Teachers who see their responsibility as confined to the so-called normal student need to be required to broaden their perspective and practices; building administrators who may not see these children as their province need to be brought into a much closer relationship with the special education department in planning, supervision, and accountability. Ownership of the educational development of special children does not lie only with the Department of Special Education.

With the dollars spent and the general high quality of much of the staff, Weston should be able to be more effective. There is need for further development of a program continuum in special education, improved communication, and consistency of application of special education procedures.

Parents need to be viewed as partners, not adversaries. As partners, parents, too, need to keep their commitments to fulfill their role in the partnership. The IEP, Individualized Education Program, is not an end in and of itself; it is a contract which should be fulfilled.

Planning is going to be the key to rectifying the existing problems. It must begin with clear direction from the Board of Education to the administrative team. It must be understood that whatever is done in one aspect of the educational process, will ultimately effect other aspects of the educational’ endeavor. Programmatic changes in regular education will either abate or exacerbate special education problems. Therefore, it is imperative that planning be joint and begin with a team effort at the central office.

Staff development planning will be crucial. What is needed is staff development that is prescriptive i.e., based on the specific instructional needs of students. It should be targeted to specific groups of staff, be continuous with good follow-up. It needs also to be a requirement of holding a position. Knowledge of the education issues associated with various disabilities has to be the cornerstone of good instruction.

Although the anticipated retirement of many staff in the next few years is a challenge, it is also an opportunity for rebirth. New teachers require consistent, intensive and on-going training. Experienced exemplary teachers should be involved in mentoring these new staff members. It will be an excellent opportunity for the district to reexamine its goals and implement new and strong programs.

This report is replete with findings and recommendations. It is the sincere hope of the consultants that it be considered carefully. The Board of Education, the staff and the school community will have to consider which recommendations seem to have the greatest merit. This will require prioritization, defining the tasks and laying out a plan for implementation. This plan must include the individuals responsible, the resources needed, a time line, the means by which achievement will be judged, and an assessment of the potential impact on other aspects of the school system.

The consultants have appreciated the opportunity to work with the Weston school community. We hope to have played some part in helping the district to realize its full potential.

Report: Special ed needs changes
Greenwich TIME
By Keach Hagey, Staff Writer
Published December 24 2005

An independent review of Greenwich schools' special education programs recommends splitting the department that runs them in half and eliminating the heads of two of the district's alternative high school programs, among other streamlining measures. The report, prepared by Florida-based management consulting firm MGT of America, contained 18 commendations and 40 recommendations, determined through visits, surveys and reviews of department data throughout the last six months.

Mary Forde, director of Pupil Personnel Services and Special Education, the department that now runs the programs, said the district's leadership has not yet discussed the report's recommendations in detail, but a few of the suggestions did give her pause.

"I have some questions about the recommendations about the structural changes," she said.

The recommended structural changes include breaking up her department into two new departments: one for special education, and another for pupil personnel services, which includes things like guidance, psychology and social work. Under this plan, the director of special education would report to the assistant superintendent of curriculum, research and evaluation, a position currently held by John Curtin.

They also include eliminating the positions of program associate at the ARCH School and special education program administrator at the high school, and converting one of the high school's psychologist positions into a bilingual position. Such a reorganization would save the district $36,090 a year, for a total savings of $180,450 over five years, according to the report.

In order to help reduce the expenses from legal disputes with parents, the firm recommended that the district conduct a risk analysis of its disputes to determine those practices that must be changed to reduce the district's exposure to expensive disputes. For example, the district paid out $239,346 in 2003-04 and $324,321 in 2004-05 for mediation and due process settlements, the report noted.

Some progress in this area has already been made, according to the report. In addition to including a line for settlements in the 2006-07 budget, the district has helped reduce its legal costs in recent years by hiring the Hartford-based education law firm Shipman and Goodwin for particularly complex cases requiring specialized knowledge, Forde said.

The report commended the district for its ability to maintain consistent special education policies, commitment to closing achievement gaps and Forde's knowledge and expertise in special education matters. It also approved of the district's inclusive pre-kindergarten program for children with disabilities, new Data Dashboard database system to help design intervention strategies and inclusion of parents through the Special Education Services Committee of the PTA Council.

Paige Davis, who represents Greenwich High School on the committee, had not had a chance to look at the report in detail, but said that the parent group had a good relationship with the district and looked forward to working with them to improve special education.

"I think educating children like ours is tricky business, and as parents, we want our kids to make as much progress as they can every year," she said. "I think that anything that focuses on accountability, measuring success for our kids and the better integration of special education with regular education is a good thing. Some of our kids have really great potential, if the teacher sees that in them and tries to teach them at their highest level."

Forde said school officials now plan to meet with the consultants to discuss the report, decide how to best align the report's recommendations with their own goals for serving students and set up a series of hearings with stakeholders to determine a plan of action.

"These are recommendations," she said. "We will look at them and decide where we want to go in terms of outcomes for kids."

Corda wants changes
Norwalk HOUR, Monday, Jan. 3, 2005
By BRIAN FRAGA Hour Staff Writer

NORWALK -- School officials brought up the potentially thorny issue of how the state classifies minority students during a recent discussion with state legislators on the racial and cultural balances in the public schools.

Schools Superintendent Salvatore Corda said current state guidelines that define minority students as simply being non-white threaten to put the Norwalk school district -- which has a minority population greater than 50 percent -- to be classified as racially unbalanced.

That is because state law stipulates that racial imbalance exists within minority districts when the proportion of minority (non-white) students is less than 25 percent or more than 75 percent of the total school population. According to a recent report from the school board's racial balance committee, the school district's demographic makeup consists of three main groups: 27 percent black, 34 percent Hispanic, 35 percent white and the rest Asian.

Although there is no one dominant cultural group, the school district is still subject to the 25/75 rule because blacks and Hispanics together account for more than 50 percent of the student population. Corda is proposing for the state to identify racial and ethnic groups based on the characteristics that define them as groups, rather than lumping everybody who is non-white into one category.

"A school which reflects what Norwalk actually looks like, could be considered by the state to be racially unbalanced, and that to me doesn't make a whole lot of sense," Corda said.

"It would seem to me logic behind the law was developed when the dominant populations in terms of minority was African-American, and Hispanics were very slight," Corda said.

"That is no longer the case, so there needs to be a rethinking how groups are characterized... They need to be differentiated." Several legislators who were present during the special meeting with Corda and the school board, however, warned the proposal would be a lightning rod in Hartford, and could go to the heart of the Sheff v. O'Neill court case that barred unintentional segregation in the Hartford school district. State Rep. Larry Cafero, R-142nd District, warned about a "suspicious eye" being gazed by other districts at legislation that would be perceived as a "Norwalk bill."

"I would suggest you get some other support from other like-situated towns so that people in Hartford know this isn't just a Norwalk problem," Cafero said.

Outgoing state Sen. Robert L. Genuario, R-25th District, also warned of a possible rollout effect where certain schools in the city would have disproportionate percentages of white and minority students.

"You have to consider if it is OK for Norwalk to have one school that is 90 percent non-white and another school 50 percent white, and if we are comfortable with that, " Genuario said.

"That could be the roll out. It's not an easy thing to deal with." The Norwalk Board of Education has been dealing with the issue since adopting its policy on racial balance in the 1960s. The policy calls for ensuring the balance of students from the different racial and cultural groups in each individual school mirrors the community's demographics. State law requires that school boards formulate and submit plans to correct any existing racial imbalances in the schools.

The Norwalk school board's existing plan to ensure racial balance is to have the individual schools not deviate from the system-wide average for each minority group by plus or minus 10 percentage points. According to October 2003 data compiled by the school board's racial balance advisory committee, seven schools were out-of-balance based upon the 10 percent deviation guideline.

Those were Naramake, Kendall, Jefferson, Fox Run, Cranbury and Brookside elementary schools. The racial balance advisory committee -- comprised of administrators, parents, citizens and teachers -- has been looking into possibilities of implementing new mechanisms to ensure racial balance, such as developing magnet schools and instituting modified parental school choice.

The committee will conduct a financial analysis of the various choices -- which include the existing program -- in March and is expected to choose a course of action in June. No changes would be made before the 2006-07 academic year.

Brian Fraga covers education. He can be reached at (203) 354-1045 or by e-mail at education@thehour.com.

N E W J E R S E Y E D U C A T I O N F O R M U L A R E W R I T E I D E A

In New Jersey, this issue has been around for a long time...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/12/11/nyregion/20071212_JERSEY_GRAPHIC.html

Corzine Wants to Change Formula for Local Aid
NYTIMES
By DAVID W. CHEN
Published: March 28, 2008

LAMBERTVILLE, N.J. — After listening to weeks of complaining by small-town officials over proposed budget cuts, Gov. Jon S. Corzine said on Thursday that he wanted to do away with the state’s 13-year-old multibillion-dollar formula for municipal subsidies and come up with a new system by the end of the year.

The proposal would not affect Mr. Corzine’s current $33 billion budget, which calls for $168 million in cuts to municipalities as part of an overall reduction of $500 million. Instead, Mr. Corzine said that he hoped his new plan would be in place by the start of the next fiscal year, which starts in July 2009, four months before he is expected to seek re-election.

But the notion of revamping the entire formula, which is based on a town’s per capita expenditures, suggests that Mr. Corzine is taking to heart a bipartisan chorus of criticism from legislators and mayors.

The revamping proposal reflects a broader attempt by Mr. Corzine to change the way the state has financed its public schools and is trying to alter the way hospitals are reimbursed for costs associated with caring for the poor, often in emergency rooms.

He said that while the formulas “may have very well served the state at one point,” they “don’t relate to the realities of the world today.”

“The closer we can get to formulas that people believe are objective and nonpolitical, I think, the better we are,” Mr. Corzine said at a news conference, where he recognized the efforts of Lambertville and West Amwell to share services, a procedure he has been advocating.

When asked about his proposal, mayors from towns large and not so large said that they were stunned. They offered a guarded assessment, saying that although they liked the principle, they were worried about the details.

“I think it could be one of the most significant policy changes in the past 35, 40 years,” said William G. Dressel Jr., executive director of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities. “But recasting funding formulas and trying to achieve fairness in the midst of one of the most severe fiscal crises in the history of our state makes me a little nervous, to say the least. There’s going to be large winners and losers, and that concerns us greatly.”

As Mr. Dressel put it, “If he thinks he’s getting political heat now, he hasn’t seen it.”

Municipal aid has been one of the most wrenching topics in Trenton this year, not only because of Mr. Corzine’s proposed cuts, but also because of the way he wants to achieve them: taking the biggest percentage of money from the smallest towns, with populations under 10,000, in an effort to force them to merge more operations with neighboring communities.

But in budget hearings in recent weeks, many mayors have testified that they are already sharing, and sharply criticized Mr. Corzine’s proposed cuts as arbitrary.

As a result, Mr. Corzine said on Thursday that he and Joseph V. Doria Jr., the state’s community affairs commissioner, would consider factors like population density, income and special needs in arriving at a new formula.

Robert Bowser, the mayor of East Orange, said in a telephone interview that whatever formula is arrived at, he hopes that Mr. Corzine allows municipalities to get involved early — unlike this year’s budget process.

“I understand the governor is trying to do exactly what he was elected to do — fix the whole financial mess of the state,” Mr. Bowser said. “But he can’t do it by himself. This is not the corporate world.”

New Jersey Revamps State Aid to Schools
NYTIMES
By DAVID W. CHEN
Published: January 8, 2008

TRENTON — After a tense three-hour stalemate, legislators handed Gov. Jon S. Corzine a dramatic political victory on Monday night when they approved his $7.8 billion plan to revamp New Jersey’s formula of financing the state’s public schools.

Now on the Governor’s Desk (January 8, 2008) After the Legislature threw in an extra $20 million for special education with his approval, Mr. Corzine, a Democrat, was able to sway three Republican senators and overcome opposition from urban lawmakers.

The plan is designed to direct more money to children who live outside the poorest districts, which now receive more than half of all state aid.

If the plan survives the scrutiny of the State Supreme Court, which Mr. Corzine will seek, the state would apportion funds to schools based on demographics, including family income, population growth, language ability and special academic needs.

Under the formula, education spending would increase by an estimated $532.8 million the first year, with all districts receiving at least a 2 percent increase for the next three years, and some receiving as much as 20 percent more.

But for hours, the fate of the bill — and by extension, a major pillar of Mr. Corzine’s agenda — was uncertain.

With the legislative session due to close on Tuesday at noon, the bill stalled initially in the Senate when six Democrats joined 13 Republicans to freeze the vote at 20-19 in favor of the bill, one vote shy of the majority needed.

So for the next three hours, Democratic and Republican supporters of the bill surrounded one colleague after another who had initially voted no, hoping to change minds.

The drama yielded moments of pure political theater and high-stakes brinkmanship. At one point, at least 15 senators huddled in the middle of the Senate floor, not unlike the way baseball players, anxious, huddle around the pitcher’s mound.

At another point, Assemblyman Joseph R. Malone III, a Republican who was part of a 41-36 majority that approved the bill in the Assembly earlier in the evening, wandered down the hall to the Senate. He escorted Senator Martha W. Bark, a fellow Republican who had voted no, to his office, fueling speculation that he was trying to win her over.

But in the end, it was something much simpler — a promise, with Mr. Corzine’s approval, of an additional $20 million for special education in next year’s budget — that compelled Ms. Bark and two other Republicans, Senator Gerald Cardinale and Senator Joseph A. Palaia, to switch their votes.

“I’m jubilant,” said Senator Barbara Buono, a Democrat from Metuchen who was the bill’s sponsor, and who helped to craft the compromise. “This is the way it’s supposed to work.”

Mr. Corzine said in a statement: “The new law replaces a flawed system with an equitable, balanced, and nonpartisan formula that addresses the needs of all students, regardless of where they live. This formula puts the needs of all children on an equal footing, and will give them the educational resources they need for success.”

The vote on school financing capped a frenetic final day of the legislative session. With the two houses meeting simultaneously, the corridors of the State House teemed with lobbyists, reporters, educators and other interest groups until 11 p.m.

Among the dozens of measures that passed on Monday, the two chambers overwhelmingly approved bills authorizing a formal state apology for New Jersey’s role in slavery. New Jersey, the last Northern state to abolish slavery, became the first Northern state to apologize for it.

The two chambers also passed bills to increase judicial salaries, offer tax credits for businesses that invest in urban transit areas and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Assembly also approved a bill, previously passed by the Senate, to toughen the state’s hate crime and bullying laws.

Those legislators who will continue serving when the next session begins on Tuesday will not have much time to catch their breath.

A few hours after they are sworn in, Mr. Corzine is scheduled to outline in his State of the State address his long-simmering proposal to squeeze more money out of the state’s toll roads. He is expected to call on the Legislature to approve his idea of selling billions of dollars worth of bonds that would be backed by higher tolls on the state’s three toll roads, the New Jersey Turnpike, Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway.

But on Monday, the focus was education, which for the last two decades has largely been guided by a landmark State Supreme Court ruling, Abbott v. Burke, which found that students in poor and urban districts were not receiving the same education as their counterparts in wealthier ones, and therefore deserved a bigger percentage of the state’s aid to schools.

Those who opposed Mr. Corzine’s bill did so for a variety of reasons, including the sense that it was being rushed through, or that it threatened to cut funding to poor urban districts. All six Senate members of the Legislative Black Caucus opposed the bill.

“They don’t want the middle class suburban schools to examine this formula, not in terms of what it takes from Abbott, but what it takes from us,” said Senator Nia H. Gill, a Democrat from Montclair.

After the vote, Senate President Richard J. Codey summed up the relief felt by the bill’s supporters when he grabbed Joseph V. Doria Jr., Mr. Corzine’s commissioner of community affairs, who until recently had been a Senate colleague.

“Joe, it’s like delivering a baby,” Mr. Codey joked. “It’s painful, but it’s worth it.”

Panels Approve New Jersey School Financing Plan
NYTIMES
By DAVID W. CHEN
Published: January 4, 2008

TRENTON — Despite mounting criticism from the mayors of the state’s largest cities, Gov. Jon S. Corzine’s proposal to revamp New Jersey’s formula for financing schools cleared two important legislative hurdles on Thursday.

By comfortable margins, the budget committees in both the State Senate and Assembly approved Mr. Corzine’s plan directing more money to children who live outside the poorest districts, which now receive more than half of all state aid, in accordance with a court mandate. The plan would also apportion funds to schools based on demographics including family income, population growth, language ability and special academic needs.

Over all, the formula would increase education spending by $532.8 million the first year, with all districts receiving at least a 2 percent increase for the next three years, and some receiving as much as 20 percent more.

The plan will go to the floor of both chambers on Monday, the last full day of the legislative session. But its passage was hardly assured, since several of Mr. Corzine’s fellow Democrats, particularly from urban areas, have promised to reject the new formula for financing unless substantial changes are made.

Over the last two days, Mr. Corzine has met with two Democratic mayors — Jerramiah T. Healy of Jersey City and Cory A. Booker of Newark — who have been among his strongest allies, yet have been sharply critical of the school plan.

Although Mr. Booker said Thursday that Mr. Corzine had given him some reassurances on such issues as improving student performance, he expressed qualms about what he said was the haste with which the formula was being pushed through the Legislature.

“My preference is more deliberation,” he said. “The more deliberation, the better.”

These sentiments were echoed by nearly all members of the Senate budget committee, during the testimony of the education commissioner, Lucille E. Davy.

State Senator Shirley K. Turner, a Democrat from Mercer County who is chairwoman of the Education Committee, was especially curt, noting that all but one of the towns she represents would receive the minimum 2 percent increase.

“They feel that they are being given the shaft,” Ms. Turner said. “I’m in no position to support this school funding formula today.”

But in the end, she was one of four senators to abstain, and the committee approved the measure 7-1, with some changes, including more money for charter schools.

“I really believe this formula is logical, and it’s fair,” said State Senator Barbara Buono, a Democrat from Middlesex County, who sponsored the bill.

The measure was approved on a 9-3 vote in the Assembly committee.

But even if the measure is approved by the full Legislature on Monday, it still requires the approval by the State Supreme Court.

The court has been guiding school financing issues since its ruling more than two decades ago, Abbott v. Burke, found that students in poor and urban districts were not receiving the same education as their counterparts in wealthier ones.

Earlier on Thursday, the proposal cleared another hurdle when Attorney General Anne Milgram released a letter saying that the new formula would not violate the law.

Yet that did not prevent Gary S. Stein, a former State Supreme Court justice who participated in numerous Abbott v. Burke decisions, from warning legislators in a letter that the bill could be “‘one of the most costly and counter-productive votes ever cast by the State’s Legislature.”

Reaction to Corzine Plan Better Than Anticipated
NYTIMES
By DAVID W. CHEN and WINNIE HU
Published: December 14, 2007

TRENTON — It could have been a lot worse.

For decades, education financing — one of New Jersey’s most intractable issues — has tripped up many a governor, thanks to court decisions that required the state to spend the bulk of its education funds on students in historically poor urban districts.

So when Gov. Jon S. Corzine began tackling a new financing formula after taking office in January 2006, the odds were against him. And early on, the signs were discouraging, as one delay begat another, and people in Trenton began to whisper that a new formula might never emerge because of the combustible mix of schools, money and politics.

Then, as word circulated in recent weeks that the financing plan promised a year ago was ready, Mr. Corzine seemed to lose control of the issue. Parts of the plan dribbled out to the press, but the administration delayed releasing specific numbers. Educators and legislators filled the vacuum by complaining about the formula’s general tenets. Republicans criticized the timing of the formula, which came near the end of a legislative session.

But when Mr. Corzine finally released his plan on Wednesday, the reaction was, with some notable exceptions, not as poisonous as anticipated. A group of Republicans set to join the State Senate next month met on Thursday morning with Mr. Corzine, and actually said that they were encouraged. And though they cautioned that they had concerns about the fate of special education under the plan, and that they needed to see an actual bill elaborating on the formula, the governor had been fair and inclusive in devising the proposal, they said.

“I think the process that the governor and his team have got has been very different from previous governors in both parties,” said Assemblyman Bill Baroni, a Republican from Mercer County who sits on the education committee. “We may not always agree, but they’re listening and they’re talking, and that is a fundamental change from what has happened in the past.”

The proposal, “A New Formula for Success: All Children, All Communities,” the proposal would steer more state money to poor and disadvantaged children who live outside the so-called Abbott districts, which now receive more than half of all state aid. The new approach, which would increase overall spending by $532.8 million in the first year, would apportion money to schools based on the characteristics of the students, including income, language ability and special academic needs.

Some education advocates contend that if the formula were applied in full during the next school year, the state would have actually cut its spending by more than $300 million. But by pumping more money into education to come out $532.8 million in the black, and promising that no district would see a reduction in aid for three years, Mr. Corzine may have quelled some dissent.

As the formula makes its way through the State Legislature, of course, changes will be inevitable. About two dozen mayors, for instance, released a report on Thursday recommending alterations, like keeping the system of allocating special education aid to districts without regard to community wealth.

“Multiple governors have struggled with this issue, and no funding formula has been deemed to be both constitutional and sustainable,” said Jun Choi, the mayor of Edison and a former state education official. “The fact that we are still struggling with this is an indication of how challenging and complex the problem is.”

Perhaps the most vocal critics of the Corzine proposal have been advocates for the Abbott districts, despite the fact that those districts tend to be heavily Democratic.

“There seems to be a lot of discomfort and uncertainty about aspects of the plan,” said Jerome C. Harris, chairman of the New Jersey Black Issues Convention, a coalition of 35 African-American groups. “Not having access to the details, and not being able to evaluate it whole cloth, has left people who might have been supporters voicing cautious optimism, and in some cases, skepticism.”

Yet, if nothing else, Mr. Corzine clearly cares about the issue. At briefings on Wednesday with legislators at Drumthwacket, the governor’s mansion, he was very much on top of the specifics of the plan, and passionate about his goals, according to Assemblywoman Jennifer Beck, a Republican from Red Bank. Mr. Corzine is so determined that the formula be enacted before the end of the legislative session on Jan. 7 that he unveiled the plan on two consecutive days in different districts — on Wednesday in Burlington Township and on Thursday in Carteret. His education commissioner, Lucille E. Davy, attended both events, and testified on Thursday for an hour at a hearing of the Senate budget and education committees.

Some legislators have criticized what they say is the haste with which the administration is pushing the formula.

But Mr. Corzine, in Carteret, said: “Quite frankly, this concept has been debated since 2002 — since we’ve stopped using formulas altogether. This has been the slowest-moving train I can ever imagine. When people say we are going too fast, I think they are failing to look at the history of how long this kind of discussion has been happening.”

Mr. Corzine acknowledged that some people had complained about the delay in the release of the details, but he said that the administration was waiting for some population statistics to incorporate into the formula.
Even supporters of the formula, however, noted that the governor could, by handling the plan’s unveiling more deftly, have gained a bit more political capital.

“Over all, I’m pleased with the way he’s handled it, because anyone can be a Monday morning quarterback, and you’re never going to please everybody with a school funding formula,” said the Senate president, Richard J. Codey, who is, like Mr. Corzine, a Democrat.

“I only wish that he had announced the formula earlier,” Mr. Codey said. “He could’ve done that lobbying maybe six months ago, and said, in general terms, this is what it probably will look like, and try to work out those kinks ahead of time.”

Increases in Education Aid Range From 2 to 20 Percent Under Corzine Plan
NYTIMES
By WINNIE HU and DAVID W. CHEN
Published: December 13, 2007

Each of New Jersey’s 615 school districts would receive 2 percent to 20 percent more in state aid next year under a new financing formula officially unveiled by Gov. Jon S. Corzine on Wednesday, nearly two weeks after parts of the proposal were revealed by state lawmakers and state education officials.

The proposed increases represent the largest gain in state aid in more than a decade for some affluent suburban districts, but they were a sharp disappointment for many historically poor urban districts that have received more support in the past. Last year, every district also received an increase in state aid, with the increases varying from 3 percent for wealthier districts to 10.3 percent for those less well off.

The new formula would raise overall state education spending in the 2008-9 school year by $532.8 million, slightly less than the $579.1 million increase in the governor’s 2007-8 budget proposal. The state proposes spending $7.8 billion total on education next year.

The plan, part of the governor’s effort to address criticism that many districts have been shortchanged in favor of poor schools, will now go before the State Legislature, where it is likely to be a subject of intense debate.

The districts that would fare the best are working-class communities like Carteret, Hamilton and Roselle Park, which have large and growing numbers of poor and disadvantaged students. In all, 146 districts would receive the maximum increase of 20 percent; these districts received far less last year, about 9.6 percent on average, according to budget figures.

The districts that would fare the worst under the plan are cities like Newark, Asbury Park and Camden, each of which would receive a 2 percent increase. At the other end of the spectrum, districts in wealthy beach communities also would receive the minimum increase. In Cape May County, for instance, all 18 districts, including Stone Harbor and Sea Isle City, would receive the 2 percent increase.

Education Commissioner Lucille E. Davy said that the Cape May County districts had “the worst of both worlds” when it came to calculating their share under the new formula: fewer students with shrinking enrollments and greater wealth with rising property values.

“Those are the kinds of things that are likely to impact a district being a candidate for additional aid,” she said.

Governor Corzine presented the new formula at a news conference on Wednesday at B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington Township. He received loud applause when he said that the district would probably receive the maximum increase in part because it had a high number of at-risk and special education students. “I knew there was a good applause line in there somewhere,” he said.

For more than a year, Governor Corzine has made clear that he wants to send more money to poor and disadvantaged students who live outside the state’s 31 so-called Abbott districts, which receive more than half of all state education aid under a court-ordered remedy.

The new formula would apportion money to schools based on the characteristics of the students, including income, language ability and special academic needs, regardless of where they live. It would also reshape the way that the state divides nearly $1 billion a year for special education by shifting a larger share of the money to special education students in poor districts.

Preliminary breakdowns of state aid show that about two-thirds of the Abbott districts would receive the 2 percent increase, though a few would receive more. For instance, Union City would get a 16 percent increase, and the City of Orange a 5 percent increase.

To seek support for the new formula, Governor Corzine said that no district would see a reduction in aid for three years, though after that a district could receive less if its enrollment were to decrease. The governor said that he was confident that the new formula would withstand a court challenge, saying that he and Commissioner Davy had worked with lawyers “every step of the way to meet our thorough and efficient mandate.”

Joseph Del Grosso, president of the Newark Teachers Union, which represents 5,000 teachers in the city’s public schools, said he was disappointed by the 2 percent increase for the Newark district.

“You might as well say you’re flat-funding the district,” he said. “I’m sure the Abbott districts have to pay just as much for operating expenses like heating oil as the suburban districts, and 2 percent will mean they will have to reduce educational services.”

New Jersey School Districts Compared In the Orange school district, Nathan Parker, the superintendent, said that it was not clear to him how the state aid had been calculated under the new formula. Even though the district would receive a 5 percent increase compared with 3 percent last year, he said, the money would only partially offset the district’s increased costs for teacher salaries, health care benefits and utility bills, among other things.

David G. Sciarra, executive director of the Education Law Center, which has represented Abbott plaintiffs for years, condemned the proposed formula. He said that if the formula were applied, the state would essentially be cutting school aid by $320 million, with the bulk of it in Abbott districts. Because of political sensitivities, he said, he estimated that the state was adding $850 million “to minimize the harm that would occur to over a third of the districts if the formula were actually used.”

But some suburban districts viewed the proposed formula favorably. The Glen Ridge district would receive a 10 percent increase in state aid, to $1.2 million — nearly all of it directed toward special education, and its largest increase in years. The money would be used to cover the costs of educating a student population that has grown to 1,795 students this year from 1,497 in 2000.

As part of that total, the district would receive about $250,000 more for 190 special education students, an increase partially offset by decreases in other categories of state aid. “I’m surprised and pleased and hopefully the funding is moving in the right direction toward equity for funding of all students in the state of New Jersey,” said Daniel Fishbein, the Glen Ridge superintendent.

Though Governor Corzine had pushed lawmakers to approve the formula by the end of the session on Jan. 7, Mr. Corzine said on Wednesday that he wanted a formula in place by Feb. 15 so that districts could plan their budgets, which are due in April.

Hoboken’s Rebirth Fuels School Aid Formula Fight
NYTIMES
By WINNIE HU
Published: December 12, 2007

HOBOKEN, N.J. — In the early 1970s, Hoboken was so broken down that some residents feared for their lives. Crime and arson were rampant, and those who could afford to fled to neighboring towns like Secaucus.

But gleaming restaurants and luxury condominiums now beckon affluent newcomers to Hoboken, like Gov. Jon S. Corzine, who keeps an apartment there. And the city’s public school system, which once educated Frank Sinatra, is going through a renaissance, with enrollment growing to 1,874 students this fall, after years of decline.

Hoboken’s rags-to-riches transformation is often cited by critics of New Jersey’s so-called Abbott system, in which 31 historically poor urban school districts receive the bulk of state school financing, to illustrate its shortcomings. Cities like Hoboken, these critics say, are no longer impoverished enough to merit special treatment.

“Hoboken is exactly why we need a new school funding formula,” said Assemblyman Bill Baroni, a Republican from Mercer County. “Hoboken has been blessed by an economic renaissance that a lot of other towns have not seen. That’s why we need to make a new formula that talks about kids and not ZIP codes.”

Governor Corzine is expected to officially unveil a new school-financing proposal on Wednesday that would shift the emphasis away from the Abbott system — which takes its name from a landmark New Jersey Supreme Court case — by directing at least $400 million in new state education money to poor students who live outside the Abbott districts.

But Abbott districts say that academic achievement has risen significantly under the system and that they should not be penalized in an effort to expand benefits to the state’s 584 other districts in rural and suburban areas. They also say that rising property values do not always mean more money for schools.

In Hoboken, for example, school officials said that a majority of their students come from housing projects, not the upscale condos whose owners often send their children to private or parochial schools. Seventy-five percent of the district’s students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced lunch, the seventh-highest level among all Abbott districts, according to state statistics. Union City is first, with 92.7 percent, followed by Passaic (84.7 percent) and Asbury Park (81.9 percent).

Jack Raslowsky, the Hoboken schools superintendent, said that another point lost in the political rhetoric is that Hoboken receives far less state aid than the other Abbott districts. In the district’s $54 million budget, state aid accounted for just $12.4 million, of which only $4.2 million for preschool programs was tied to its Abbott status. The local share of contributions was $35 million.

But because it is an Abbott district, Hoboken’s school construction projects are paid for by the state. This year, an $8.5 million renovation was completed on the Calabro elementary school. In the last five years, the state has spent $18 million to bring the district’s six schools up to health and safety standards, which included repairing leaking roofs and replacing windows and boilers.

The state has also agreed to renovate the Connors elementary school and the Brandt middle school and build a new $25 million school complex that will include high school and elementary school buildings and athletic fields to accommodate the growing enrollment, particularly in the preschool and lower grades.

But those projects were suspended last year after the state ran out of money, and with the current debate over financing for Abbott districts, their future remains uncertain. Hoboken school officials say they cannot afford to pay for the new complex without state assistance.

Mr. Raslowsky said that because they are in an Abbott district, his schools have been subject to more rigorous academic and financial oversight. In return, he said, he expects the state to follow through on its commitment to improve the district. “We’ve been promised this great banquet,” he said. “We’ve finished the appetizers, but there’s still the meal to go and we’re hungry.”

David Sciarra, an advocate for the children of the Abbott districts, called the criticisms of Hoboken a “red herring” because the district receives so little Abbott aid. More important, he said, were the educational reforms introduced under Abbott to address decades of neglect and concentrated poverty in urban schools. One such reform is the focus on preschool programs in Abbott districts. “The Legislature could remove Hoboken from Abbott, but it must have a plan in place to continue those educational reforms,” he said.

At the Connors elementary school, which overlooks a housing project, the 300 students were supposed to move into temporary classrooms this September while their century-old building was being renovated. When the renovation was suspended, students stayed where they were and the building remained in disrepair.

The Abbott money has paid for three preschool classes at the school, two of which are squeezed into the basement because of a shortage of classroom space. The free preschool program has helped many families. Danny LaViena, 49, a repairman, said that his 4-year-old grandson, Selman Brashaw, was able to attend preschool only because of the Abbott money.

“We’re low-income people, and we can’t get no money to pay for that,” he said.

But on Monday afternoon, as a dozen 4-year-olds napped on mats on the floor of one classroom, their teachers rattled off the things that they still did not have: their own bathroom, child-friendly sinks or even a school playground.

Glock pistols the rage: weapon of choice for terroristists using guns.

'Jihad Jane' terror suspect pleads guilty in Pa.
YAHOO
By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press
1 February 2011

PHILADELPHIA – A Pennsylvania woman who called herself "Jihad Jane" online pleaded guilty Tuesday to her role in a plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist who had offended Muslims. Colleen LaRose, 47, helped foreign terror suspects intent on starting a holy war in Europe and South Asia, prosecutors said.

LaRose, who also was accused of using the online screen name "Fatima LaRose," has been in custody since October 2009 and faces a possible life sentence under the four charges to which she pleaded guilty.

Speaking clearly but quietly, LaRose said Tuesday she had never been treated for any mental health problems and was entering her plea freely. She whispered a few comments to her lawyers, some of them prompting a smile from public defender Mark T. Wilson. Wilson declined to comment afterward.

"We'll have a lot to say at sentencing," he said.

LaRose and co-defendant Jamie Paulin-Ramirez of Leadville, Colo., are the rare U.S. women charged with terrorism. Paulin-Ramirez pleaded not guilty after being arrested in Ireland with other terror suspects. The March 2010 indictment charged LaRose with conspiring with jihadist fighters and pledging to commit murder in the name of a Muslim holy war, or jihad. The indictment was announced hours after authorities arrested seven suspected terrorists in Ireland allegedly linked to LaRose.

In e-mails recovered by the FBI over 15 months, LaRose agreed to marry an online contact from South Asia so he could move to Europe. She also agreed to become a martyr, the indictment said. The man she had agreed to marry told her in a March 2009 e-mail to go to Sweden to find the artist, Lars Vilks, who had depicted the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog, the indictment said.

Vilks has questioned the sophistication of the plotters but said he is glad LaRose never got to him. LaRose pleaded guilty Tuesday to four counts: conspiracy to support terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, lying to investigators and attempted identity theft.

LaRose and her co-conspirators discussed that her appearance and American citizenship would help her blend in while carrying out their plans, prosecutors said.

"Today's guilty plea, by a woman from suburban America who plotted with others to commit murder overseas and to provide material support to terrorists, underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face," said Assistant U.S. Attorney General David Kris.

Both LaRose and Paulin-Ramirez come from difficult backgrounds. LaRose, born in Michigan, moved to Texas as a girl and had married twice by age 24. Her first marriage came at 16, to a man twice her age. Both unions were long over by the time she met Pennsylvanian Kurt Gorman in 2005.

LaRose lived with Gorman and his father in Pennsburg, caring for the older man while Gorman worked at his family's small business, Gorman said last year. He called her a "good-hearted person" who mostly stayed around the house.

But her online ties grew to a loose band of allegedly violent co-conspirators from around the world, prosecutors said. They found her after she posted a YouTube video in June 2008 saying she was "desperate to do something somehow to help" ease the suffering of Muslims, the indictment said. Despite Web images that show LaRose in a Muslim head covering, Gorman said he never picked up on any Muslim leanings. She did not attended religious services of any kind, he said. Gorman said he sensed nothing amiss in their five-year relationship — until LaRose fled days after his father's funeral.

LaRose had removed the hard drive from her computer and set off for Europe, according to the indictment. She had swiped Gorman's passport and planned to give it to the co-conspirator she had agreed to marry, the indictment said. It's unclear how she was able to travel overseas, given that the FBI, presumably tipped to her online postings, had interviewed her in July 2009. According to the indictment, she then denied soliciting funds for any terrorist causes or making the postings ascribed to "JihadJane."

By Sept. 30, 2009, she wrote online that it would be "an honour & great pleasure to die or kill for" her intended spouse, the indictment said. "Only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!" she is accused of writing.

She was arrested the following month upon her return to the U.S. Among those LaRose allegedly recruited was Paulin-Ramirez, a single mother who also spent long hours on the Internet before moving to Ireland with her 6-year-old son and marrying a terror suspect from Algeria the day she arrived. Paulin-Ramirez, who allegedly went by "Jihad Jamie," faces a maximum 15-year term if convicted of aiding terrorists.

A lawyer for her has not returned calls for comment this week on whether she too plans to plead guilty.

Pa. suspect: Caretaker by day, 'Jihad Jane' online
YAHOO
By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press Writer
Thu Mar 11, 8:11 am ET

PHILADELPHIA – Colleen LaRose spent long days caring for her boyfriend's father in a second-floor apartment in Pennsburg, a small town north of Philadelphia.

But online, federal authorities say, the devoted caretaker developed a daring alter ego, refashioning herself as "Jihad Jane" while helping recruit and finance Muslim terrorists — and eventually moving overseas to try to kill an artist she perceived as an enemy to Islam.

LaRose, 46, was charged Tuesday with conspiring with jihadist fighters and pledging to commit murder in the name of a Muslim holy war, or jihad. The indictment was announced hours after authorities arrested seven suspected terrorists in Ireland allegedly linked to LaRose, who has been in prison since her Oct. 15 arrest while returning to the United States.

In e-mails recovered by the FBI over 15 months, LaRose agreed to marry an online contact from South Asia so he could move to Europe. She also agreed to become a martyr, the indictment said.

But perhaps she felt like one already.

Born in Michigan, LaRose moved to Texas as a girl and had married twice by age 24. Her first marriage came at 16, to a man twice her age in Tarrant County, Texas, public records show. There are no records or reports of any children from either union, both of which were long over by the time she met Pennsylvanian Kurt Gorman in 2005.

LaRose lived with Gorman and his father in Pennsburg, caring for the older man while Gorman worked at his family's small business in another town, Gorman said this week.

"She was a good-hearted person," he said Wednesday. "She pretty much stayed around the house."

But online, she grew increasingly devoted to a loose band of what authorities say were violent co-conspirators from around the world. They found her after she posted a YouTube video in June 2008 saying she was "desperate to do something somehow to help" ease the suffering of Muslims, the indictment said.

She eventually agreed to try to kill Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had angered Muslims by depicting the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog, according to a U.S. official who wasn't authorized to discuss details of the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Despite Web images that show LaRose in a Muslim head covering, Gorman said he never picked up on any Muslim leanings. She never attended religious services of any kind, he said. Gorman, 47, sensed nothing amiss in their five-year relationship until the day after his father's funeral last August.

"I came home and she was gone. It doesn't make any sense," he said Wednesday outside his firm in nearby Quakertown.

That same day, LaRose had removed the hard drive from her computer and set off for Europe — federal authorities won't specify where. She had swiped Gorman's passport and planned to give it to the co-conspirator she had agreed to marry, the indictment said.

It's unclear how she was able to travel overseas, given that the FBI, presumably tipped to her online postings, had interviewed her July 17. According to the indictment, she denied soliciting funds for any terrorist causes or making the postings ascribed to "JihadJane."

By Sept. 30, she wrote online that it would be "an honour & great pleasure to die or kill for" her intended spouse, the indictment said. "Only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!" she is accused of writing.

Her federal public defenders, Mark T. Wilson and Ross Thompson, declined to on the case again Wednesday.

Irish police disclosed, though, that they had arrested two Algerians, two Libyans, a Palestinian, a Croatian and an American woman married to one of the Algerian suspects. They were not identified by name.

"I'm glad she didn't kill me," Vilks told The Associated Press on Wednesday, saying the suspects appeared to be "low-tech." He said he has built defense systems in his home to thwart would-be terrorists, including a safe room and electrified barbed wire.

LaRose is scheduled to appear in court March 18 on the indictment, which was returned March 4 and unsealed Tuesday. The document does not link her to any organized terrorist groups.

She is unusual in being one of just a handful of U.S. women ever charged with terrorism, the Justice Department said. And her online conversations suggest she knew that to be an advantage — as she thought her blond, American profile would help her move freely in Sweden to carry out the attack, the indictment said.

The case "shatters the conventional wisdom that somehow the U.S. is immune to the heady currents of radicalization that have affected citizens of other Western countries," said Georgetown University professor Bruce Hoffman, an international securities expert.

LaRose lived in a tidy red brick apartment building on Main Street, a busy roadway lined with porch-front houses, many decorated with American flags, and a post office.

"It's a great place. A quiet little town," said Pennsburg real estate agent Debbie Turner. "But you never know who your neighbors are. You have to be careful."

LaRose had a few minor convictions in Texas in the 1980s for trespassing and other misdemeanors, according to online records, which list her then as 4 feet 11 and 105 pounds. She was also twice arrested in Texas on misdemeanor public intoxication charges.

"For all intents and purposes, she's the neighbor next door," said Hoffman, noting that the Internet enables like minds around the world to meet up, for better or worse.

"You could get all the thrills of participation in an illegal clandestine act in the comfort of your own bedroom," he said. "This is someone who, I think, because of the communicative power of the Internet is able to ... enter into something that is larger than herself."

FACT CHECK: Civilian police officers responded to the incident and a female police officer fired 4 shots into the suspected terrorist.
I-BBC - Page last updated at 17:03 GMT, Sunday, 8 November 2009

US Senate may probe army shooting

flag flies at half mast in front of the Army"s III Corps headquarters at Fort Hood, Texas, Friday, Nov. 6, 2009

Flags at Fort Hood and the across the US are flying at half mast

Senior US Senator Joe Lieberman says he plans to open a congressional investigation into last week's deadly shooting at a Texas army base.

Mr Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told Fox TV that he wanted to find out whether it was a terrorist attack.

Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim army major, is suspected of killing 13 people.

Mr Lieberman also said he hoped to determine whether the army missed signs that Maj Hasan harboured extreme views.

The 39-year-old army psychiatrist opened fire at the Fort Hood base on Thursday. Besides those killed, 29 people were wounded.

Maj Hasan was shot by a fellow soldier and remains in a coma.

'Rants'

Mr Lierberman said that if Maj Hasan had shown signs of becoming an Islamist radical, the army should have discharged him.

MAJOR NIDAL MALIK HASAN

Born in US to Palestinian parents

Joined the army and trained to be a psychiatrist

Treated soldiers returning from combat zones

Described as a devout Muslim

Said to have been unhappy about imminent overseas deployment

Shock and insecurity at Fort Hood

Mardell: No clear motive

Profile: Major Nidal Malik Hasan

US media on Fort Hood shootings

Fears for Muslims in US army

Dealing with stress in military

The Associated Press news agency reports that some of Maj Hasan's colleagues had expressed concern about his growing anger over the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Another army psychiatrist, Val Finnell, told AP he had complained to army administrators about what he considered Maj Hasan's "anti-American" rants.

"In retrospect, I'm not surprised he did it," Mr Finnell said of the shootings.

Investigators are still looking into the motive of the attack.

But Army Chief of Staff George Casey warned against speculation.

He told ABC's This Week programme on Sunday that focusing on Maj Hasan's religion could "heighten the backlash" against all Muslims in the military.

Reports suggested that Maj Hasan, who was due to be sent to Afghanistan, had been increasingly unhappy in the army.

His cousin told US media last week that he had been opposed to his imminent deployment, describing it as his "worst nightmare".

Mr Hasan's cousin also said the gunman had been battling racial harassment because of his "Middle Eastern ethnicity."

Maj Hasan was born in the US of Palestinian parents and has been described as a devout Muslim.

Colo. Church Gunman Had Been Kicked Out
NYTIMES
By JUDITH KOHLER | Associated Press Writer
6:40 PM EST, December 10, 2007

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The gunman believed to have killed four people at a megachurch and a missionary training school had been thrown out of the school a few years ago and had been sending it hate mail, police said in court papers Monday.

The gunman was identified as Matthew Murray, 24, who was home-schooled in what a friend said was a deeply religious Christian household. Murray's father is a neurologist and a leading multiple-sclerosis researcher.

Five people -- including Murray -- were killed, and five others wounded Sunday in the two eruptions of violence 12 hours and 65 miles apart.

The first attack took place at Youth With a Mission, a training center for missionaries in the Denver suburb of Arvada; the other occurred at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, where Murray was shot to death by a security guard. The training center maintains an office at the 10,000-member church.

"Through both investigations it has been determined that most likely the suspect in both shootings are one in the same," police said in court papers.

Colorado Springs police said the "common denominator in both locations" was Youth With a Mission.

"It appears that the suspect had been kicked out of the program three years prior and during the past few weeks had sent different forms of hate mail to the program and-or its director," police said.

In a statement, the training center said health problems kept Murray from finishing the program. It did not elaborate. Murray did not complete the lecture phase or a field assignment as part of a 12-week program, Youth With a Mission said.

"The program directors felt that issues with his health made it inappropriate for him to" finish, it said.

Police gave no immediate details on the hate mail. And the training center said that Murray left in 2002 -- five years ago, not three -- and that no one there can recall any visits or other communication from him since then.

Earlier Monday, a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity said it appeared Murray "hated Christians."

Investigators have not said whether Murray singled out his victims. But the two people killed at the church -- sisters Stephanie and Rachael Works, ages 18 and 16 -- frequented the training center, their uncle Mark Schaepe of Lincoln, Neb., told The Gazette of Colorado Springs.

Authorities searched the Murray house on a quiet street in Englewood on Monday for guns, ammunition and computers. No one was home when a reporter visited the split-level brick home early Monday. Murray's father, Ronald S. Murray, is chief executive of the Rocky Mountain Multiple Sclerosis Center in Englewood.

Matthew Murray lived there along with a brother, Christopher, 21, a student at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla.

A neighbor, Cody Askeland, 19, said the brothers were home-schooled, describing the whole family as "very, very religious."

Christopher studied for a semester at Colorado Christian University before transferring to Oral Roberts, said Ronald Rex, dean of admissions and marketing at Colorado Christian. He said Matthew Murray had been in contact with school officials this summer about attending the school but decided he wasn't interested because he thought the school was too expensive.

Police said Murray's only previous brush with the law was a traffic ticket earlier this year.

Senior Pastor Brady Boyd of New Life Church said the gunman had no connection to the church. "We don't know this shooter," Boyd said. "He showed up on our property yesterday with a gun with the intention of hurting people, and he did."

The gunman opened fire at 12:30 a.m. at the Youth With a Mission center. Witnesses said the man asked to spend the night there and opened fire with a handgun when he was turned down. They described him as a young man, perhaps 20, in a dark jacket and cap.

Later, at New Life Church, a gunman wearing a trench coat and carrying a high-powered rifle opened fire in the parking lot and later walked into the church as a service was letting out.

Jeanne Assam, a church member who volunteers as a security guard, shot and killed Murray, who was found with a rifle and two handguns, police said. The pastor called her "a real hero."

"When the shots were fired, she rushed toward the scene and encountered the attacker there in a hallway. He never got more than 50 feet inside our building," he said. "There could have been a great loss of life yesterday, and she probably saved over 100 lives."

Boyd said the gunman had a lot of ammunition and estimated that 40 rounds had been fired inside the church, leaving what looked like a "war scene."

Jessie Gingrich, who had left New Life and was in the parking lot getting into her car, saw the gunman get a rifle from his trunk and open fire on a van with people inside. Gingrich said she cowered in her vehicle, fumbling with the key.

"I was just expecting for the next gunshot to be coming through my car. Miraculously -- by the grace of God -- it did not," she told ABC's "Good Morning America."

About 7,000 people were in and around the church the time of the shooting, Boyd said. Security had been beefed up after the shootings hours earlier in Arvada, he said. The church had a total of 15 to 20 volunteer security officers inside at the time of the attack, he said.

Some members of the congregation reacted with compassion and forgiveness, in keeping with their faith.

Ashley Gibbs was getting into a car with David Harris when they heard the gunshots. They stayed in the vehicle.

"It was obvious that he was in some sort of pain and going through a lot," Gibbs told "Today." "I just prayed God would bring him peace."

New Life, with a largely upper middle-class membership, was founded by the Rev. Ted Haggard, who was dismissed last year after a former male prostitute alleged he had a three-year cash-for-sex relationship with him. Haggard admitted committing unspecified "sexual immorality."

The two people killed at the missionary center were identified as Tiffany Johnson, 26, and Philip Crouse, 24.

Johnson, who grew up in Chisholm, Minn., loved working with children and wanted to see the world, said family friend Carla Macynski.

"Tiffany was a well-liked, easygoing 26-year-old. She was friendly, adventurous and a definite leader," Macynski said as she choked back tears. Johnson had traveled to Egypt, Libya and South Africa with the missionary group.

Crouse, of Alaska, was a former skinhead who went through a dramatic spiritual conversion at 18. He had helped build a foster home at a Crow Indian reservation in Montana, said Ronny Morris, who works with a Denver chapter of the mission.

"Whenever somebody asks me to give a specific situation where a kid's life has been changed or transformed, I always think of Phil, because he had such a radical transformation of life," said pastor Zach Chandler in Anchorage, Alaska.

Youth With a Mission was started in 1960 and now has 1,100 locations with 16,000 full-time staff, said Darv Smith, director of a Youth With a Mission center in Boulder.

The Colorado shootings came days after a 19-year-old gunman opened fire at a busy department store in Omaha, Neb., killing eight people and himself.

Site of Amish Schoolhouse Shooting Razed
DAY
By MARTHA RAFFAELE, Associated Press Writer
Oct 12, 8:18 AM EDT

NICKEL MINES, Pa. (AP) -- Workers with heavy machinery rather than hand tools moved in before dawn Thursday and demolished the one-room Amish schoolhouse where a gunman fatally shot five girls and wounded five others.

Construction lights glared in the mist as a large backhoe tore into the overhang of the school's porch around 4:45 a.m., then knocked down the bell tower and toppled the walls. Within 15 minutes, the building was reduced to a pile of rubble. By 7:30 a.m., the debris was gone, leaving just a bare patch of earth.

The schoolhouse had been boarded up since the killings 10 days earlier, with classes moved to a nearby farm. The Amish planned to leave a quiet pasture where the schoolhouse stood.

"I think the Amish leaders made the right decision," Mike Hart, a spokesman for the Bart Fire Company, said as loaders lifted debris into dump trucks to be hauled away.

The Amish are known for constructing buildings by hand, without the aid of modern technology, but for this job they relied on an outside demolition crew to bring closure to a painful chapter for their peaceful community.

A group of 20 to 30 people, many of them in traditional Amish dress, gathered nearby to watch as the schoolhouse was leveled.

"It seems this is a type of closure for them," Hart said.

The destruction of the West Nickel Mines Amish School came a week after the solemn funerals of the five girls killed by gunman Charles Carl Roberts IV. Roberts came heavily armed and apparently prepared for a long standoff. He held the 10 girls hostage for about an hour before shooting them and killing himself as police closed in.

The five girls wounded in the Oct. 2 shooting are still believed to be hospitalized. The hospitals are no longer providing any information about the patients at the request of their families.

Hart, who has been coordinating activities with the Amish community and whose company will help provide security, said destroying the school is about trying to reach some closure.

Hart said private contractors were handling the demolition, and the debris would be hauled to a landfill.

He has said classes were expected to resume for the school this week at a makeshift schoolhouse in a garage on an Amish farm in the Nickel Mines area.

What Good Looks Like
The lessons the world can learn from a community that rejects modern times.
By Day Staff Writer
Published on 10/9/2006

The 1985 movie “Witness” starring Harrison Ford presented a gripping view of the Amish culture, which attempts to isolate its members from the corrupting influences of modern civilization. The movie speculated about what can happen when modern-day evil penetrates that insular world.

Last week, the world saw the same plot in real life, when a gunman invaded an Amish one-room school in rural Pennsylvania and shot and killed five young girls. While the event shocked the community of the victims, the lessons about the nature of good and evil were ours to learn.

The most striking of these lessons had to do with the attitude of the Amish toward the murderer and his family. The assailant, who killed himself after his killing spree, had driven a milk truck serving the Amish dairy farmers. The Amish not only forgave him, but also offered to help his family cope with their sorrow. They've even set up a fund for the dead murderer's wife and three children.

This sounds incredible here in the outside world, where revenge is more commonplace and if that's not enough, is stirred up on television talk shows. In our world, children play electronic games about killing in which there is no pain or consequences. In place of meeting real people, many in our modern world meet and communicate over the Internet. It is possible to engage in the “global community” without coming into direct contact with a real person.

But, as we have seen in the barrage of news coverage following the killings, the Amish find out what's going on by meeting with one another, not through text-messaging or cell phone calls.

Their world eschews all modern conveniences, including automobiles. One of the news photographs from this past week's events showed an Amish horse and buggy passing a row of television vans with satellite dishes, vividly illustrating the contrast of cultures and values.

Simplicity seems to characterize everything Amish, from the simple tools and agricultural implements they use to the wooden caskets in which the five young girls were buried last week.

They have not escaped evil. They would be the first to admit that's not possible. But they have rejected the influences that implement it: cars that pollute the atmosphere and endanger life on earth and all the noisy electronic messaging that agitates our lives and provides a voice for bad influences as well as good. The Amish don't rail against that world, but choose not to live there. They aren't angry at the murderer who killed their children because they understand the world from which he came better than most of us.

Our world has benefits, too. Through the eyes of our cutting-edge electronic communications, we were able to watch this week as the Amish buried their dead with simplicity and grace and we saw, lest we forget, what good really looks like.

A pattern in rural school shootings: girls as targets; Monday's deadly shooting in Nickel Mines, Pa., was the fourth such incident in five weeks.
By Gail Russell Chaddock and Mark Clayton | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
Wednesday, 10/04/06

NICKEL MINES, PA., AND BOSTON – The scene Monday at the buff-colored, one-room schoolhouse in the gentle heart of Amish country was wrenching, but also distressingly familiar. One of four fatal school shootings to beset rural America in just over a month, the rampage that killed five young girls raises anew a host of old concerns - about campus security in countryside settings, access to guns by unstable individuals, and "copycat" violence advanced by media attention.

They are startling incidents against the backdrop of declining numbers of school fatalities. But this premeditated attack, like another one five days earlier in which a drifter corraled teenage girls, killing one, at the high school in Bailey, Colo., have an unusual and disturbing feature: girls as targets.

"The predominant pattern in school shootings of the past three decades is that girls are the victims," says Katherine Newman, a Princeton University sociologist whose recent book examines the roots of "rampage" shootings in rural schools.

Dr. Newman has researched 21 school shootings since the 1970s. Though it's impossible to know whether girls were randomly victimized in those cases, she says, "in every case in the US since the early 1970s we do note this pattern" of girls being the majority of victims.

The two cases are reminiscent of a 1989 shooting in Canada, when a jobless hospital worker killed 14 female engineering students at the University of Montreal, accusing them of stealing jobs from men, says Martin Schwartz, an Ohio University sociologist and an expert on violence against women. He sees such incidents as related to a culture of violence against women, "a mutation - something beyond."

In Bailey, an armed drifter walked into Platte Canyon High School last Wednesday, ordering men out and sexually assaulting some of the six girls he held hostage, shooting one before killing himself. In this week's tragedy in Pennsylvania's bucolic Lancaster County, the gunman ordered boys and adults to leave, bound the 10 girls, and shot them, then himself.

Small towns are no safeguard

Another similarity between the Pennsylvania and Colorado cases - as well as two other recent school shootings in Vermont and Wisconsin - is their rural settings. It is rare for mass school shootings to occur in cities, Newman says. Despite their safe image, rural communities can be an especially fertile breeding ground for revenge, she and others agree.

"People think small towns are safer, but in a small community grievances can fester," says Cheryl Meyer, a professor of psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, who has researched similarities of school shootings in rural and small towns. "It's so often about revenge. Even if something happened 20 years ago, it doesn't mean it is gone. People talk about it and everybody remembers. It just trails after you."

Such a motive may have factored into Monday's shootings in the tiny hamlet of Nickel Mines, Pa., police say.

Flanked by corn fields and a few white oaks, the Amish schoolhouse could have been lifted out of the 19th century. With no guards, chain-link fence, or "drug-free zone" signs - or even a telephone - it seemed a world apart.

The gunman, Charles Carl Roberts, lived just down the road with his family in a double-wide trailer. He hauled milk from Amish farms at night, usually before the next day's milking began about 4 a.m. A co-worker says he might never have met the farmers he serviced. Then, he would take his children to school.

On Monday, however, he left suicide notes for his family, then drove his pickup truck to a school he no doubt passed many times on late-night milk routes. He brought to the school a semi-automatic pistol, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a 12-gauge shotgun, and a rifle - along with restraints, lumber to block the doors, and a change of clothing. In a scene that seemed to echo the Bailey shooting, the gunman ordered boys and school aides out, then bound 10 girls ages 6 to 13. He called his wife on his cellphone.

Police arrived after a teacher ran for help to a nearby farm. They called him on his cellphone, but no answer. Then the gunman opened fire, and police stormed the barricaded building, breaking through windows. Five of the girls died at the scene or at hospitals. At press time, officials said five remained in critical condition.

Law-enforcement officials, working to unearth Roberts's motive, said Tuesday that sexual assault seemed the most likely one. In a suicide note, they said, Roberts recalled an incident 20 years ago when he, a pre-teen at the time, molested younger children. The note indicated he had been haunted by dreams about molesting young girls, police said.

"I don't think it was an attack on the Amish community, but a target of opportunity," Col. Jeffrey Miller, commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police, said Monday. "It was almost impenetrable," he said of the barricaded school. "His goal was to be in there for an extended period of time. He was hunkering down for a hostage-related siege."

'Copycat' concerns

The apparent similarities between the Bailey and Nickel Mines shootings - and their close proximity in time - raise experts' concerns about "copycat" attacks.

News media bear some responsibility for this phenomenon, says James Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. This is especially the case when attackers' personalities and grudges are exposed to high-profile public analysis - as when two teenage attackers in the Columbine attack were featured on the cover of a news magazine, he says.

"We've seen with school shootings and postal shootings that the shooters can become role models for others," Dr. Fox says. "While most sympathize with the victims, others empathize with the shooters. It's the publicity they get that turns the shooter into a celebrity that spawns more of them."

Some see in the latest school shootings echoes of the 1980s, when there was a spate of carefully planned attacks on students by adults from outside the schools.

Between 1988 to 1989, there were nine premeditated attacks by adults targeting schoolchildren, says Fox. In those cases, however, there was no pattern of girls being targets - a new wrinkle. To him, that year stands out for its "contagion of adults who got even with society by killing its most beloved members - schoolchildren."

While national crime statistics show a steady drop in the murder rate, including violent school fatalities, there seems to be fewer incidents but "more spectacular stuff going on," Dr. Schwartz says. "Splashy violence is what's going up, even though crime as a whole going down. The only thing not going down is fear engendered by these types of high-profile events."

In Nickel Mines, the news media showed up almost as promptly as police - within minutes jamming the narrow streets and nearby fields with satellite trucks, television crews, and crane-high lights.

For grieving Amish families, driving past the crime scene late into the night or talking quietly in small groups nearby, the fierce media glare came as a shock to a community that resolutely avoids the spotlight.

"I was irate when I first heard about the school, then the hurt started," says an Amish fireman, who helped maintain a security perimeter around the school late Monday night. He says local firemen and policemen had expected a crush of news media, because of the intense public interest in school shootings. But, he adds, "we never expected to have to deal with it here."

"It's unbelievable. We never expected that anything like this would happen," says Ruth, a Mennonite neighbor who wanted to give only her first name.

"I don't understand it, but it's not from God," says Fannie Beiler, another Mennonite. "He wants us to love one another."

There are scores of such schools in the quiet farming communities around Lancaster County, a center for the Old Order Amish in the United States. An estimated 28,000 Amish live in the area - of about 200,000 nationwide.

Amish families live simply - no cars, electricity, cellphones, or iPods - and grieve quietly. A keystone of their faith is pacifism. When a young Amish boy in the next town of Bart was killed on his way to help a neighbor with the milking by a hit-and-run driver two weeks ago, there was no talk of lawsuits. Nor did Amish families join their "English" neighbors in calling for a new sign cautioning drivers to slow down.

In Bart, Paula Flinn set up a hand-painted sign on her front lawn for their Amish neighbors, who drove past the house in closed, black buggies at a rate of 50 an hour, some late into the night, after the shooting. Her sign reads: "Our prayers and thoughts are with you."

5 Girls Dead in Amish School Shooting; Police: Gunman at Amish School Heavily Armed
By MARK SCOLFORO Associated Press Writer
Article Launched: 10/03/2006 08:16:00 AM EDT

NICKEL MINES, Pa. (AP) -- Two more children died Tuesday morning of wounds from the shootings at an Amish schoolhouse, raising the death toll to five girls plus the gunman who apparently was spurred by a two-decades-old grudge.

The toll from the nation's third deadly school shooting in less than a week rose twice within a matter of hours Tuesday with the deaths of a 9-year-old girl at Christiana Hospital in Delaware and a 7-year-old girl at Penn State Children's Hospital in Hershey.

Five additional girls were hospitalized.

The Bush administration on Monday called for a school violence summit to be held next week with education and law enforcement officials to discuss possible federal action to help communities prevent violence and deal with its aftermath. State police spokeswoman Linette Quinn said the two girls who died early Tuesday had suffered "very severe injuries, but the other ones are coming along very well."

"Her parents were with her," hospital spokeswoman Amy Buehler Stranges said of the 7-year-old. "She was taken off life support and she passed away shortly after."

Authorities said the gunman, Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, wrote what authorities described as suicide notes, took guns and ammunition and went to a nearby one-room schoolhouse, where he opened fire on several girls and took his own life, authorities said. Roberts, a father of three from nearby Bart Township and was not Amish, did not appear to be targeting the Amish and apparently chose the school because he was bent on killing young girls as a way of "acting out in revenge for something that happened 20 years ago," said state police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller.

"This is a horrendous, horrific incident for the Amish community. They're solid citizens in the community. They're good people. They don't deserve ... no one deserves this," Miller said.

The names of the dead were not immediately released.

Of the injured, a 6-year-old girl remained in critical condition and a 13-year-old girl was in serious condition at Penn State Children's Hospital, spokeswoman Buehler Stranges said. She said the names of the children were not being released. Three girls, ages 8, 10 and 12, were flown to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where they were out of surgery but remained in critical condition, spokeswoman Peggy Flynn said.

Roberts brought with him supplies necessary for a lengthy siege, including three guns, a stun gun, two knives, a pile of wood and a bag with 600 rounds of ammunition, police said. He also had a change of clothing, toilet paper, bolts and hardware and rolls of clear tape.

He released about 15 boys, a pregnant woman and three women with infants, barred the doors with desks and wood and secured them with nails, bolts and flexible plastic ties. He then made the girls line up along a blackboard and tied their feet together. The teacher and another adult fled to a nearby farmhouse, and authorities were called at about 10:30 a.m. Miller said

Roberts apparently called his wife from a cell phone at around 11 a.m., saying he was taking revenge for an old grudge. Miller declined to say what the grudge could have been.

"It seems as though he wanted to attack young, female victims," Miller said.

Miller told NBC's "Today" that Roberts lost a daughter "approximately three years ago" and that that may have been a factor in the shooting. He said a teacher had to run to a farm house to call police because there wasn't one at the school, in keeping with Amish custom. Parents refused to fly in planes - again in keeping with Amish tradition - and had to be driven to see their children at hospitals, Miller told "Today." Some were taken to the wrong hospitals in the confusion, Miller said.

From the suicide notes and telephone calls, it was clear Roberts was "angry at life, he was angry at God," and co-workers said his mood had darkened in recent days, Miller said.

In a statement released to reporters, the gunman's wife, Marie Roberts, called her husband "loving, supportive and thoughtful."

"He was an exceptional father," she said. "He took the kids to soccer practice and games, played ball in the backyard and took our 7-year-old daughter shopping. He never said no when I asked him to change a diaper."

"Our hearts are broken, our lives are shattered, and we grieve for the innocence and lives that were lost today," she said. "Above all, please pray for the families who lost children and please pray too for our family and children."

The attack bore similarities to a deadly school shooting last week in Bailey, Colo., but Miller said he believed the Pennsylvania attack was not a copycat crime. "I really believe this was about this individual and what was going on inside his head," he said. On Friday, a school principal was shot to death in Cazenovia, Wis. A 15-year-old student, described as upset over a reprimand, was charged with murder.

Milk Man Kills Girls at Pa. Amish School
DAY
By MARK SCOLFORO; Associated Press Writer
Oct 2, 3:36 PM EDT

NICKEL MINES, Pa. (AP) -- A 32-year-old milk truck driver took about a dozen girls hostage in a one-room Amish schoolhouse Monday, barricaded the doors with boards and killed at least three girls and apparently himself, authorities said.

It was the nation's third deadly school shooting in less than a week, and similar to an attack just days earlier at a school in Colorado.

The gunman, identified as Charles Carl Roberts IV, was inside for over half an hour and had barred the doors with 2x4s with the girls inside, State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said. By the time officers broke windows to get in, three girls and the gunman were dead, Miller said. Seven others were taken to hospitals, three in critical condition.

"It appears that when he began shooting these victims, the victims were shot execution style in the head," Miller said.

Roberts had walked into the one-room West Nickel Mines Amish School with a shotgun and handgun, then released about 15 boys, a pregnant woman and three other women with infants before barring the doors with the girls inside, Miller said.

The girls were lined up along a blackboard, Miller said. "He had wire ties with him and flex ties, and he began to tie the girls' feet together," Miller said.

A teacher was able to call police around 10:30 a.m. and reported that a gunman was holding students hostage.

About 11 a.m., Roberts apparently called his wife from a cell phone, saying he was "acting out in revenge for something that happened 20 years ago," Miller said. "It seems as though he wanted to attack young, female victims."

Moments later, Roberts told a dispatcher he would open fire on the children if police didn't back away from the building. Troopers heard gunfire in the building seconds later. The school has about 25 to 30 students in all, ages 6 to 13.

"It seems as though he wanted to attack young, female victims," Miller said. He released no further details about that what the grudge Roberts mentioned could have involved.

Lancaster County Coroner G. Gary Kirchner initially said six people were killed, but later said he wasn't certain about that number.

At least seven people were taken to hospitals, including at least three girls, ages 6-12, who were admitted to Lancaster General Hospital in critical condition with gunshot wounds, spokesman John Lines said. The small school, surrounded by a white board fence, sits among farmlands just outside Nickel Mines, a tiny village about 55 miles west of Philadelphia.

Hours after the attack, about three dozen people in traditional Amish clothing, broad-brimmed hats and bonnets stood near the small schoolhouse as investigators walked in a line through fields searching for evidence.

The shootings were disturbingly similar to an attack last week at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, Colo., where a man took several girls hostage in a school classroom and then killed one of them and himself. Authorities said the man sexually molested the girls.

"If this is some kind of a copycat, it's horrible and of concern to everybody, all law enforcement," said Monte Gore, undersheriff of Park County, Colo.

"On behalf of Park County and our citizens and our sheriff's office, our hearts go out to that school and the community," he said.

Nationwide, the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., remains the deadliest school shooting, claiming the lives of 15 people, including the two teenage gunmen. On Friday, a school principal was gunned down in Cazenovia, Wis. A 15-year-old student, described as upset over a reprimand, was charged with murder in the killing.

Several killed in Pennsylvania school attack
October 2, 2006

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A gunman attacked an Amish school in Pennsylvania on Monday, shooting and killing a number of people including an unknown number of students before he was captured or killed, police said.

"There are a number dead. The exact number I am not sure at this point. There are also a number of wounded. And the shooter is not at large," said state police Corporal Ralph Striebig of rural Lancaster County.

"There are multiple injuries. There are multiple casualties. I cannot give any names or numbers. It's a horrible, horrible tragedy," Lancaster County Coroner Gary Kirchner told Reuters.

A local hospital said that three girls including one aged 11 were in critical condition with gunshot wounds.

The hostage-taker was either killed or captured at the scene. "One or the other, but he's not at large," Striebig said.

The incident, the third school shooting in a week in the United States, happened at Georgetown Amish School in Bart Township.

"The three that are here are in a critical condition, they will be airlifted from our hospital to pediatric hospitals in the region," said Lancaster General Hospital spokesman John Lines. "They arrived here suffering from gunshot wounds."

A spokeswoman at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center said it was also receiving patients from the school, but gave no information yet on how many.

Amish schools typically group students from the first through eighth grade -- aged about six to 14 -- in the same schoolhouse, so the victims were likely "teens or pre-teens. They're all in one school from first grade up," Striebig said.

The Amish people dress and live simply in Lancaster County farm country, shunning modern machines and vehicles including cars, and cultivating their land using old-fashioned traditions.

The shooting was a shock to a community that one resident called almost crime-free.

Aaron Meyer, owner of a local buggy company, told CNN: "In this township of about 30,000 people, we have no police. Because there's just virtually no crime. Many of these townships here have no police at all."

The shooting in Pennsylvania followed reports earlier on Monday of lockdowns at two Las Vegas area schools as police searched for an armed youth, local television reported.

Last Friday a 15-year-old student killed his school's principal in western Wisconsin.

Last Wednesday a drifter took six female high school students hostage, molested them and then shot one to death and killed himself as police closed in.

Coroner: 6 Dead in Amish School Shooting
By MARK SCOLFORO, Associated Press Writer
1:58 PM EDT, October 2, 2006

NICKEL MINES, Pa. -- A gunman killed six people at a one-room Amish schoolhouse Monday morning in Pennsylvania's bucolic Lancaster County, and several others were taken to hospitals with injuries, authorities said.

"So far, six confirmed dead, and the helicopters are pulling into (Lancaster General Hospital) like crazy," Coroner G. Gary Kirchner said.

It was unclear if the shooter was among the six. State Police Cpl. Ralph Striebig said earlier that the shooter was dead.

Three girls, all in critical condition with gunshot wounds, were admitted to Lancaster General Hospital, spokesman John Lines told WGAL-TV. Officials at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center confirmed that victims also were being admitted there. A spokeswoman said the hospital anticipated more than one patient.

Police surrounded the one-room school in southeast Lancaster County late Monday morning, and the Lancaster County 911 Web site reported that dozens of emergency units were dispatched to a "medical emergency" at 10:45 a.m.

Three dozen people in traditional Amish clothing, broad-brimmed hats and bonnets stood near the small school building, surrounded by a low white fence, speaking to one another and authorities. Others gathered with a group of children at a nearby farm while investigators stretched out in a line across a field searching for evidence.

The school is situated among farmlands just outside Nickel Mines, a tiny village about 55 miles west of Philadelphia.

Gun Reported at North Las Vegas School
Hartford Courant
By Associated Press
12:14 PM EDT, October 2, 2006

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Two schools were locked down Monday while police searched for a teenager who had been spotted on a high school campus with a gun, authorities said.

No students were hurt, and police said there was no initial indication that the teenager, who they said was not a student, had threatened anyone with the weapon, said Sean Walker, a North Las Vegas police spokesman.

The teen ran from the school after being confronted by campus police as students were arriving at Mojave High School, Walker said.

A handgun was found behind a nearby church, and both the high school and nearby Elizondo Elementary School were locked down while police searched the surrounding neighborhoods for the teen, Walker said.

School districts across the country have been especially sensitive to threats after deadly shootings last week at schools in Wisconsin and Colorado.

On Friday, a school principal was gunned down in Cazenovia, Wis., and a 15-year-old student, described as upset over a reprimand, was charged with murder. Just two days earlier, an adult gunman held six girls hostage in a school at Bailey, Colo., before killing a 16-year-old girl and then himself.

On Sept. 21, three high school seniors in Green Bay, Wis., were charged with conspiracy to commit homicide for allegedly planning to attack a school with guns and bombs.

School Safety Back Under Scrutiny
Hartford Courant
By JON SARCHE, Associated Press Writer
7:02 PM EDT, October 1, 2006

DENVER -- A bearded drifter walks into a Colorado school and fatally shoots a student before taking his own life. Wisconsin authorities charge three boys with plotting a bomb attack on their high school and, two weeks later, a student in a rural school allegedly shoots his principal. A gunman bursts into a Vermont elementary school looking for his ex-girlfriend and guns down a teacher.

All of this in the past month alone.

Since the 1999 Columbine massacre that left 15 people dead, there has been a determined effort among administrators, principals and teachers to improve school safety. Law enforcement officers across the nation and around the world have added training specifically intended to address school violence.

But experts say there is simply no way to guarantee that a stranger or student won't be able to injure or kill on school grounds.

"There's no perfect security, from the White House to the schoolhouse," said Kenneth Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm in Cleveland.

Since Columbine, school officials have gotten better at preventing student violence, he said, but authorities can't prepare for every problem.

"When you factor in unpredictable outsiders, when you have a roaming monster walking into the schools, we have to be realistic," Trump said. "There are some incidents you're not going to be able to prevent."

Trump's firm counts 17 nonfatal school shootings so far this school year, beginning Aug. 1. There were 85 the previous school year and 52 in the 2004-2005 school year.

Since Columbine in 1999, the number of fatal school shootings in a school year has ranged from three (2002-03) to 24 (2004-05), according to National School Safety and Security Services. The firm does not track cases before Columbine.

Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener was among the law enforcement officials who eagerly applied for federal aid to beef up security at Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, the site of last week's attack in which a man held six girls hostage before killing one and himself.

A deputy was assigned to be the school's resource officer -- essentially, its security guard. But that guard was called away on sheriff's business last Wednesday and gunman Duane Morrison walked inside with two handguns. He reportedly sat in the school parking lot and wandered the hallways for as long as 35 minutes before the siege began.

Despite the death of 16-year-old Emily Keyes, things could have been worse, authorities said.

"Basically, the tragedy of Columbine taught law enforcement and educators how to avoid future tragedies," Gov. Bill Owens said. "In a couple of significant ways, the tragedy of Columbine may have helped prevent an even worse tragedy (here)."

He said educators had been instructed in August on what to do. The school was also designed using concept learned from the Columbine attacks, which helped authorities keep the gunman in one room.

Ever since Columbine, school officials have been taught to write emergency response plans and practice them, to lock down schools and evacuate when it appears safe. That seemed to work well in Bailey as hundreds of students were whisked to safety.

Law enforcement officers who once were taught to set up a perimeter and wait for SWAT teams to show up are now trained in "active shooter" programs that call for the first officers on the scene to enter the building and work as quickly as possible to locate the gunman, Trump said.

"That's why we were able to isolate it to just one room and get everybody else out," Wegener said. "Still, you can't prepare for something like this. You do the best you can."

Student Zach Barnes, 16, also said students last year practiced drills for emergencies including a gunman in the school. Students were told to remain calm, taught where to go and how to leave the school. Still, there appeared to be at least one glitch Wednesday.

"We were sitting there in math class and over the intercom they said, `Students and teachers, we have a code white, repeat code white,' and nobody really knew what a code white was," Barnes said.

He said his teacher pulled a sheet of paper from her desk, checked it and then herded her students into a nearby classroom that had a solid door. After about 25 minutes, a police officer led them into the hallway and out of the school.

Colorado has left decisions on providing security in schools up to some 172 school boards, but state lawmakers said they will look at training and other issues following the Bailey attack.

Providing security guards at every entrance to every school would be difficult, said Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, D-Golden, but others said video cameras and security systems could help fill the gap.

"If we could plug in some technology, that would help," said George Voorheis, superintendent of Colorado's largely rural Montrose & Olathe Schools District RE1J.

Gunman's Friendly Exterior Masked Past
NYTIMES
By ASHLEY M. HEHER and CARYN ROUSSEAU | Associated Press Writers
9:42 AM EST, February 16, 2008

DEKALB, Ill. - Steven Kazmierczak's quiet, dependable and fun-loving exterior masked troubling details from his past that emerged as a stunned community struggled to understand what caused the 27-year-old to open fire on a class at Northern Illinois University, leaving six people dead.

A former employee at a Chicago psychiatric treatment center said Kazmierczak was placed there after high school by his parents. She said he used to cut himself, and had resisted taking his medications.

He also had a short-lived stint as a prison guard that ended abruptly when he didn't show up for work. He was in the Army for about six months in 2001-02, but he told a friend he'd gotten a psychological discharge.
Exactly what set Kazmierczak off -- and why he picked his former university and that particular lecture hall -- remained a mystery.

On Thursday, Kazmierczak, armed with three handguns and a pump-action shotgun, stepped from behind a screen on the lecture hall's stage and opened fire on a geology class. He killed five students before committing suicide.

University Police Chief Donald Grady said Friday that Kazmierczak had become erratic in the past two weeks after he stopped taking his medication.

Kazmierczak spent more than a year at the Thresholds-Mary Hill House in the late 1990s, former house manager Louise Gbadamashi told The Associated Press. His parents placed him there after high school because he had become "unruly" at home, she said.

Gbadamashi said she couldn't remember any instances of him being violent.

"He never wanted to identify with being mentally ill," she said. "That was part of the problem."

The attack was baffling to many of those who knew him.

"Steve was the most gentle, quiet guy in the world. ... He had a passion for helping people," said Jim Thomas, an emeritus professor of sociology and criminology at Northern Illinois who taught Kazmierczak, promoted him to a teacher's aide and became his friend.

Kazmierczak once told Thomas about getting a discharge from the Army.

"It was no major deal, a kind of incompatibility discharge -- for a state of mind, not for any behavior," Thomas said. "He was concerned that that on his record might be a stigma."

Kazmierczak enlisted in September 2001, but was discharged in February 2002 for an "unspecified" reason, Army spokesman Paul Boyce said.

He worked from Sept. 24 to Oct. 9 as a corrections officer at the Rockville Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Rockville, Ind. His tenure there ended when "he just didn't show up one day," Indiana prisons spokesman Doug Garrison said.

Authorities were searching for a woman who police believe may have been Kazmierczak's girlfriend. According to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is still under investigation, authorities were looking into whether Kazmierczak and the woman recently broke up.

On Feb. 9, Kazmierczak walked into a Champaign gun store and picked up two guns -- a Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun. He bought the two other handguns at the same shop -- a Hi-Point .380 on Dec. 30 and a Sig Sauer on Aug. 6.

All four guns were bought legally from a federally licensed firearms dealer, said Thomas Ahern, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. At least one criminal background check was performed -- Kazmierczak had no criminal record.

Kazmierczak had a State Police-issued FOID, or firearms owners identification card, which is required in Illinois to own a gun, authorities said. Such cards are rarely issued to those with recent mental health problems.

NIU President John Peters said Kazmierczak compiled "a very good academic record, no record of trouble" at the 25,000-student campus in DeKalb. He won at least two awards and served as an officer in two student groups dedicated to promoting understanding of the criminal justice system.

Kazmierczak (pronounced kaz-MUR-chek) grew up in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village. He was a B student at Elk Grove High School, where school district spokeswoman Venetia Miles said he was active in band and took Japanese before graduating in 1998. He was also in the chess club.

A statement posted on the door on the Urbana home of Kazmierczak's sister, Susan, said: "We are both shocked and saddened. In addition to the loss of innocent lives, Steven was a member of our family. We are grieving his loss as well as the loss of life resulting from his actions."

At NIU, six white crosses were placed on a snow-covered hill around the center of campus, which was closed Friday. They included the names of four victims -- Daniel Parmenter, Ryanne Mace, Julianna Gehant, Catalina Garcia. The two other crosses were blank, though officials have identified Kazmierczak's final victim as Gayle Dubowski.

By Friday night, dozens of candles flickered in packed snow at makeshift memorials around campus as hundreds of students, mostly wearing the school colors of red and black, packed a memorial service.

"It's kind of overwhelming. It feels strong, it feels like we're all in this together," said Carlee Siggeman, 18, a freshman from Genoa who attended the vigil with friends.

___

Associated Press writers Don Babwin, Deanna Bellandi, Dave Carpenter, Tamara Starks, Carla K. Johnson, Lindsey Tanner, David Mercer, Nguyen Huy Vu, Michael Tarm and Mike Robinson in Chicago, Anthony McCartney in Lakeland, Fla., and Matt Apuzzo and Lolita Baldor in Washington contributed to this report, along with the AP News Research Center in New York.

A graduate student:
NIU Gunman Stopped Taking Medication
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: February 15, 2008
Filed at 1:58 p.m. ET

DEKALB, Ill. (AP) -- The man who gunned down five people at Northern Illinois University in a suicidal rampage became erratic after halting his medication and carried a shotgun to campus inside a guitar case, police said Friday.

The man, 27-year-old former student Stephen Kazmierczak, was also wielding three handguns during Thursday's ambush inside a lecture hall.

Two of the weapons -- the pump-action Remington shotgun and a Glock 9mm handgun -- were purchased legally less than a week ago, on Feb. 9, authorities said. They were purchased in Champaign, where Kazmierczak was enrolled at the University of Illinois.

A spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said the other two guns were also traced to the Champaign gun shop, but the ATF was still determining when Kazmierczak picked them up.

Kazmierczak had a valid Firearm Owner's Identification Card, which is required for all Illinois residents who buy or possess firearms, authorities said.

The gunman's father, Robert Kazmierczak, briefly came out of his single-story house in Lakeland, Fla., to talk to reporters.

''Please leave me alone. I have no statement to make and no comment. OK? I'd appreciate that. This is a very hard time. I'm a diabetic and I don't want to go into a relapse,'' he said before breaking down crying.

He then went back inside his house, which has a sign on the front door that says ''Illini fans live here.''

President Bush talked by telephone with NIU President John Peters and said people will be praying for the families of the victims and for the Northern Illinois University community.

Campus Police Chief Donald Grady said investigators recovered 48 shell casings and six shotgun shells following the attack in Cole Hall. The gunman paused to reload his shotgun after opening fire on a crowd of terrified students in a geology class, sending them running and crawling toward the exits. He shot himself to death on the stage of the hall.

Kazmierczak, whose first name was earlier listed as Steven, was taking some kind of medication, Grady said.

''He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks,'' Grady said, declining to name the drug or provide other details.

Correcting information his office released earlier Friday, DeKalb County Coroner Dennis J. Miller said five students, not six, were killed in the rampage, in addition to the gunman. Miller said the higher victim total was the result of confusion over the fate of a patient taken to another county for treatment.

''There was a miscommunication,'' Miller said.

The motive of the killer, who graduated from NIU in 2006 but was a student there as recently as last year, was still not known. Grady said Kazmierczak was an ''outstanding'' student while at NIU and authorities were still trying to determine why he would kill. There was no known suicide note.

''We were dealing with a disturbed individual who intended to do harm on this campus,'' Peters said.

Witnesses said the gunman, dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap, emerged from behind a screen on the stage of 200-seat Cole Hall and opened fire just as the class was about to end around 3 p.m. Officials said 162 students were registered for the class but it was unknown how many were there Thursday.

John Giovanni, 20, of Des Plaines said the gunman calmly fired at the greatest concentration of students.

''He was shooting from the hip. He was just shooting,'' said Giovanni, who turned and ran so fast that he lost a shoe. ''I was running but I was hurtling over people in the fetal position.''

Peters said four people died at the scene, including three students and the gunman. The other died at a hospital. The teacher, a graduate student, was wounded but was expected to recover.

Miller released the identities of four victims: Daniel Parmenter, 20, of Westchester; Catalina Garcia, 20, of Cicero; Ryanne Mace, 19, of Carpentersville; and Julianna Gehant, 32, of Meridan.

Another victim, Gayle Dubowski, a 20-year-old sophomore from Carol Stream, died at a Rockford hospital, Winnebago County Coroner Sue Fiduccia said.

The killer had been a graduate student in sociology at Northern Illinois as recently as spring 2007, Peters said. He also said the suspect had no record of police contact or an arrest record while attending Northern Illinois, a campus with 25,000 students about 65 miles west of Chicago.

The gunman was a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Chancellor Richard Herman said. The university is about 140 miles south of Chicago.

Lauren Carr said she was sitting in the third row when she saw the shooter walk through a door on the right-hand side of the stage, pointing a gun straight ahead.

''I personally Army-crawled halfway up the aisle,'' said Carr, a 20-year-old sophomore. ''I said I could get up and run or I could die here.''

She said a student in front of her was bleeding, ''but he just kept running.''

''I heard this girl scream, 'Run, he's reloading the gun!'''

More than a hundred students cried and hugged as they gathered outside the Phi Kappa Alpha house early Friday to remember Parmenter. Flowers, candles and small notes were left in the snow near Cole Hall. Flags were flying at half-staff. At a house across the street, a hand-drawn banner made out of a sheet said: 'NIU We Pray 4 U'

The campus was closed on Friday. Students were urged to call their parents and were offered counseling at any residence hall, according to the school Web site.

The school was closed for one day during final exam week in December after campus police found threats, including racial slurs and references to shootings earlier in the year at Virginia Tech, scrawled on a bathroom wall in a dormitory. Police determined after an investigation that there was no imminent threat and the campus was reopened. Peters said he knew of no connection between that incident and Thursday's attack.

------

Associated Press writers Carla K. Johnson, Michael Tarm, David Mercer, Martha Irvine, Nguyen Huy Vu, Sarah Rafi, Mike Robinson, Anthony McCartney in Lakeland, Fla., and photographer Charles Rex Arbogast contributed to this report.

Glock pistols. The extra long clip that Congress opposes; Mr. Himes illustrates karate chop alternative.
Who cares about politics? Putting bread on the table is prioty #1. Center, the extra-long gun clip that may be outlawed by Congress..

Himes promotes legislation banning high-capacity ammo clips
Greenwich TIME
Neil Vigdor, Staff Writer
Published: 10:31 p.m., Friday, January 21, 2011

Silent for the most part on gun control during his first two years in Congress, U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said he can see no reason for civilians to have high-capacity gun magazines like the one that was used in this month's shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., that left six people dead and wounded 14 others, including his House colleague Gabrielle Giffords. Himes is an original co-sponsor of a bill introduced this week by U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., seeking to ban the production and transfer of gun magazines holding more than 10 bullets.

McCarthy's husband was murdered and her son was severely wounded by gunman Colin Ferguson during the 1993 Long Island Rail Road shooting rampage.

"I've never heard a good argument why hunters, target shooters or people interested in self-defense need to fire more than 10 rounds," Himes said.

All 57 sponsors of McCarthy's bill, which endeavors to restore a restriction that was part of the federal assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004, are Democrats.

"In the wake of the attack on Gabby on others, I just realized the debate shouldn't be pro-gun and anti-gun," Himes said. "It should be how do we keep guns out of the hands of madmen and how do we restrict technology that produces massacres."

Bob Montlick, 74, a self-described independent who said he voted for Himes in 2008 and owns Bob's Gun Exchange in Darien, called the legislation misguided.

"The magazine ban is totally useless," Montlick said. "What they're doing of course is knee-jerk-type response."

Montlick recommended that politicians focus on the types of individuals who can obtain a gun, which he said is a lethal weapon irrespective of the number of bullets fired from it.

"So the capacity has nothing to do with the intent of the user," said Montlick, a Norwalk resident. "A legal gun owner is not the problem, and the high-capacity gun is not the problem."

Montlick's shop sells the Glock 19, the same semi-automatic model used by Tucson gunman Jared Loughner, a 22-year-old with an apparent history of mental illness. Retailing for $529 at Montlick's shop, the Glock 19 comes with a standard capacity magazine that holds 15 rounds. Optional magazines are available that hold 17, 19 and 33 bullets.

Among the gun-control groups supporting the ban is the Washington, D.C.-based Violence Policy Center, which noted that high-capacity ammunition magazines have been used in 10 of the nation's deadliest shootings.

"The Arizona attack joins a long list of mass shootings made possible by the easy availability of ammunition magazines that can hold up to 100 rounds: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Luby's, Wedgewood Baptist Church, Stockton, and all too many others," Kristen Rand, the group's legislative director said in a statement posted on the organization's website. "High-capacity ammunition magazines facilitate mass shootings by giving attackers the ability to fire numerous rounds without reloading," Rand said. "An effective ban on high-capacity magazines will help prevent tragedies like the one that claimed six lives and wounded numerous others (Jan. 8). We can save lives in the future with this simple, effective proposal."

Himes said that the only reason that Loughner was subdued was because he stopped to reload.

"They hit him with a chair when he stopped to reload," Himes said.

Himes insisted that he is not trying to encroach on the Second Amendment rights of citizens.

"I like shooting. I really enjoy shooting," Himes said. "I have no interest in taking away guns from people who are going to use them responsibly."

Messages seeking comment from the National Rifle Association were left with the group's media affairs office on Friday. Himes also pointed out that existing high-capacity clips would be grandfathered under the bill.

"If you own a high-capacity clip, it's not going to get taken away from you," Himes said. "Possession is not a crime. You just can't transfer it."

Montlick said that it's unfair to blame gun manufacturers for incidents such as the one in Tucson, however.

"Some people say, `Let's blame Glock for this,'" Montlick said. "That's no different than saying, `Let's blame General Motors when someone gets killed in a Chevrolet.'"

Monltick disputed whether a ban on high-capacity ammunition clips would even be effective.

"You shove the next one in and you keep shooting," Montlick said of reloading. "It's a matter of one or two seconds. If (Himes) wants to come in the store, I'll be glad to show him."

Insanity plea likely in Arizona shootings, experts say
New Haven REGISTER
By Angela Carter, Register Staff, acarter@nhregister.com
Monday, January 17, 2011

In the wake of Jared Lee Loughner’s attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., the legal community finds it plausible that his defense attorney will use the so-called insanity plea.

“There is no other defense. He did it in front of hundreds of people,” said high-profile New Haven defense attorney Hugh Keefe, who has argued that a client was not guilty by reason of insanity in many cases, and taught about its standards at the University of Connecticut last semester. Loughner’s court-appointed lawyer, Judy Clarke, is known for serving on the defense team that convinced a jury to spare the life of Susan Smith, a mother who drowned her two sons, ages 3 and 14 months.

Keefe said it would not be a surprise if Clark used the insanity defense, not just to avoid the death penalty, but to make sure Loughner gets treatment during his sentence if he is convicted but found to be mentally ill.

Loughner, 22, is accused of opening fire and unleashing 31 shots in Tucson Jan 8, where Giffords was holding a meet-and-greet with constituents she calls “Congress on Your Corner.” Authorities charged him with multiple counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder and attempting to kill a member of Congress. He could face state charges as well in the wounding of 13 others and the deaths of six people, including one of Giffords’ staff persons; 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was born the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and Arizona’s chief federal judge, John M. Roll.

Keefe said he defended a man who attempted to rape a woman in Milford at midday and in front of witnesses, claiming he believed Jesus wanted him to impregnate her. The client was found guilty and committed to Whiting Forensic Institute. In Connecticut, he said the question that forensic psychologists must answer is not whether the killer knew right from wrong. Examiners must establish whether the act was committed as a result of some mental disease or defect and therefore the defendant could not appreciate the wrongfulness of the act; or, whether the defendant could not control his or her behavior because of paranoia or delusions, for example.

“It’s used very infrequently,” he said. “You’re essentially looking for a place where the guy who has a mental problem can get some treatment.”

Keefe and Clint David, an attorney, nationally known legal expert and managing shareholder with David, Goodman & Madole in Dallas, both said the insanity defense is unpopular with juries.

“Whenever anybody does anything like this, the first reaction is the person must be crazy,” David said. But crime investigators look into whether the accused took steps to cover up their actions or evade police, which can make it difficult to prove that at the time of the offense, the person was unable to distinguish right from wrong.

“People are cynical. Jurors are cynical,” Keefe said, counting in the media as well.

According to a timeline made public by the Pima County Sheriff’s department, Loughner was out the entire night before the 10:10 a.m. shooting. He took 35mm film to Walgreens to be developed, shopped at Circle K convenience store and booked a room at Motel 6.

He tried twice to buy ammunition and was able to make a purchase the second time at a Super Walmart. Loughner’s final message to friends via his MySpace account was “goodbye.” He flashes a smirk in his arrest mugshot.

A “battle of the experts,” takes off in the court room, David said, between the prosecution and defense teams, with prosecutors having an advantage when it comes to influencing the jury.

“You’ve kind of got the jury on your side already because they’re going: Yeah, right,” in response to mental impairment arguments from the defense, David said. Four state have banned the use of the insanity plea: Idaho, Kansas, Montana and Utah. Congress made it harder to apply insanity claims after John Hinckley Jr. was found not guilty by reason of insanity in his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. Hinckley remains confined at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Among the murderers who were unsuccessful in using the insanity plea were David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, Sirhan Sirhan and Charles Manson and Jack Ruby, who fatally shot Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

The insanity defense is not reserved for those who kill. Lorena Bobbitt argued she was insane at the moment she cut off her husband’s penis. She was set free after three months of psychiatric treatment.

The most common instance of mass murder occurs in families, with someone shooting all the family members and them himself or herself, said James Cassidy, associate professor and coordinator of Criminal Justice Graduate Programs, director of the center for Forensic Psychology and chair of the Criminal Justice Department at the University of New Haven.

Loughner’s case, one where a perpetrator assaults strangers, is more rare. Typically, there are warning signs, Cassidy said, in a person’s remarks or claims of hearing voices or seeing things. There may be a history of arrests, assaults or even bomb-making. Cassidy said that in a study of criminal cases across eight states, only one percent of defendants used the insanity plea, and of them, only 25 percent were acquitted on those grounds.

Keefe said it is a misperception that defendants “get off” free and clear. They serve out their sentence in a hospitalized setting but receive as much time — or more — as they would without claiming insanity. In 2006, the Supreme Court upheld restrictions that Arizona places on the admission of mental health evidence.

Assistant House Democratic Leader Steve Farley, D-Tucson, said there has not been any talk in the Arizona legislature since the shootings about introducing legislation related to using or banning the insanity plea.

“I’m not a big proponent of rushing through any legislation based on what we’re feeling now,” said Farley, who was with Giffords’ family in the hours following the shooting. “I doubt we can stop this type of thing by legislation. The best thing we can do is to fully fund out mental health programs. We need to prevent people who are mentally ill from having guns and make sure they’re getting access to treatment.”

Farley’s campaign manager, Daniel Hernandez, rushed to Gifford’s side and applied pressure to her wounds. Hernandez is credited with saving Giffords’ life, has been heralded as a hero and sat beside President Barack Obama during a televised memorial last week.

“I’m so proud of him. He and his sisters are part of our family. I love him like a son,” Farley said.

Officers stopped suspect on day of Ariz. shooting
YAHOO
By AMANDA LEE MYERS and JUSTIN PRITCHARD, Associated Press
12 Ja nuary 2011

TUCSON, Ariz. – A wildlife officer pulled over the suspect in the assassination attempt against an Arizona congresswoman less than three hours before the deadly attack, authorities said Wednesday as they pieced together more details of a frenzied morning. Jared Lougher ran a red light but was let off with a warning at 7:30 a.m. Saturday, the Arizona Game and Fish Department said. The officer took Loughner's driver's license and vehicle registration information but found no outstanding warrants on Loughner or his vehicle.

Wildlife officers don't usually make traffic stops unless public safety is at risk, such as running a red light, the department said in a news release, which didn't say where the stop took place. It's the latest evidence of Loughner's busy morning before police say he shot and killed six and wounded more than a dozen at a Tucson grocery store. Also that morning, Loughner, 22, ran into the desert from his angry father, who was chasing his son after seeing him remove a black bag from the trunk of a family car, said Rick Kastigar, chief of the department's investigations bureau. Investigators are still searching for the bag.

The sheriff's deputies who swarmed the Loughners' house removed what they describe as evidence Loughner was targeting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who doctors said Tuesday was breathing on her own for the first time after taking a bullet to the forehead. Among the handwritten notes was one with the words "Die, bitch," which authorities told The Associated Press they believe was a reference to Giffords.

Investigators with the Pima County Sheriff's Department previously said they found handwritten notes in Loughner's safe reading "I planned ahead," "My assassination" and "Giffords." Capt. Chris Nanos said all the writings were either in an envelope or on a form letter Giffords' office sent him in 2007 after he signed in at one of her "Congress on Your Corner" events — the same kind of gathering where the massacre occurred.

Meanwhile, this city held a tribute to victims the eve of a presidential visit.

On Tuesday night, several hundred mourners filled a Tucson church for a public Mass to remember the slain and pray for the injured. As people filed in, nine young girls sang "Amazing Grace." The youngest victim of the attack, 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, was a member of that choir.

"I know she is singing with us tonight," said Tucson Bishop Gerald Kicanas, who presided over the service.

President Barack Obama visits Arizona Wednesday and will honor the victims in a speech to a rattled state and nation. In one apparent reaction to the shooting, the FBI said background checks for handgun sales jumped in Arizona following the shootings, though the agency cautioned that the number of checks doesn't equate to the number of handguns sold. Still, there were 263 background checks in Arizona on Monday, up from 164 for the same day a year ago — a 60 percent rise. Nationally, the increase was more modest: from 7,522 last year to 7,906 Monday, a 5 percent jump.

Loughner's parents, silent and holed up in their home since the shooting spree, issued a statement Tuesday, expressing remorse over the shooting.

"There are no words that can possibly express how we feel," Randy and Amy Loughner wrote in a statement handed to reporters waiting outside their house. "We wish that there were, so we could make you feel better. We don't understand why this happened.

"We care very deeply about the victims and their families. We are so very sorry for their loss."

Sheriff's deputies had been to the Loughner home at least once before the attack, spokesman Jason Ogan said. He didn't know why or when the visit occurred, and said department lawyers were reviewing the paperwork and expected to release it Wednesday. The visits were for nonviolent incidents, including a report by Jared Loughner of identity theft, a noise complaint and Amy Loughner's claim that someone had stolen her license plate sticker, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

In addition to the new details about the hours before the shooting, interviews with those who knew Loughner or his family painted a picture of a young loner who tried to fit in. Before everything fell apart, he went through the motions as many young men do nowadays: Living at home with his parents, working low-wage jobs at big brand stores and volunteering time doing things he liked. None of it worked. His relationship with his parents was strained. He clashed with co-workers and police. And he couldn't follow the rules at an animal shelter where he spent some time.

One close high school friend who requested anonymity to avoid the publicity surrounding the case said he would wait outside 10 minutes for Jared to leave the house when they were going out. When Jared would get into the car, he'd say that it took so long because his parents were hassling him. The parents of another close friend recalled how Loughner's parents showed up at their doorstep in 2008 looking for their son, who had left home about a week before and broken off contact.

While the friend, Zach Osler, didn't want to talk with the AP, his parents Roxanne and George Osler IV did. With the Loughners at their house, Zach Osler told them the name of the place where their only child was staying, Zach's father said. Loughner was arrested in October 2008 on a vandalism charge near Tucson after admitting he scrawled the letters "C" and "X" on a road sign in a reference to what he said was Christianity. His address listed on the police report was an apartment near his home.

Loughner eventually moved back in with his parents. Even when Loughner tried to do good, it didn't work out. A year ago, he volunteered walking dogs at the county animal shelter, said Kim Janes, manager of the Pima Animal Care Center. He liked dogs; neighbors remember him as the kid they would see walking his own. But at the shelter, staff became concerned: He was allowing dogs to play in an area that was being disinfected after one had contracted a potentially deadly disease, the parvovirus.

"He didn't think the disease was that threatening and when we tried to explain how dangerous some of the diseases are, he didn't get it," Janes said.

Loughner wouldn't agree to keep dogs from the restricted area, and was asked to come back when he would. He never returned. Loughner also jumped from paid job to job because he couldn't get along with co-workers, according to the close high school friend who requested anonymity. Employers included a Quiznos sandwich shop and Banana Republic, the friend said. On his application at the animal shelter, he listed customer service work at Eddie Bauer.

Loughner grew up on an unremarkable Tucson block of low-slung homes with palm trees and cactus gardens out front. Fittingly, it's called Soledad Avenue — Spanish for solitude. Solitude found Loughner, even when he tried to escape it. He had buddies but always fell out of touch, typically severing the friendship with a text message. Zach Osler was one such friend. Loughner's father moved into the house as a bachelor, and eventually got married, longtime next-door neighbor George Gayan said. Property records show Randy Loughner has lived there since 1977.

Gayan said he and Randy Loughner had "differences of opinion but nothing where it was radical or violent." He declined to provide specifics. "As time went on, they indicated they wanted privacy," Gayan said.

Unlike other homes on the block, the Loughners' is obscured by plants. It was assessed in 2010 at $137,842. Randy Loughner apparently has not worked for years — at least outside his home.

Amy Loughner got a job with the county parks and recreation department just before Jared was born, and since at least 2002 has been the supervisor for Roy P. Drachman Agua Caliente Park on the outskirts of the city. She earns $25.70 an hour, according to Gwyn Hatcher, Pima County's human resources director.

Linda McKinley, 62, has lived down the street from the Loughner family for decades and said the parents could not be nicer — but that she had misgivings about Jared as he got older.

"As a parent, my heart aches for them," she said.

She added that when she was outside watering her plants she would see Jared riding down the street on his bike, often talking to himself or yelling out randomly to no one. McKinley recalled that once he yelled to some children on the street: "I'm coming to get you!"

Majority doesn't blame rhetoric for Giffords shooting
YAHOO
11 January 2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A majority of Americans reject the view that heated political rhetoric was a factor in the weekend shootings in Arizona which killed six and critically wounded a congresswoman, a CBS News said on Tuesday.

Since the Saturday incident in which Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot at point-blank range, various politicians and commentators have said a climate in which strong language and ideological polarization is common may have contributed to the attack.

Some of the analysts cited anti-government statements from the man arrested in the shooting, Jared Lee Loughner, as support for that view.

But CBS said its nationwide telephone poll found that, "57 percent of respondents said the harsh political tone had nothing to do with the shooting, compared to 32 percent who felt it did."

Rejection of a link was strongest among Republicans, 69 percent of whom felt harsh rhetoric was not related to the attack, while 19 percent thought it played a part.

Among Democrats 49 percent placed no blame on the heated political tone against 42 percent who did. Among independents the split was 56 percent to 33 percent, CBS said.

It said its poll of 673 adults had a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

Community College drop out
VIDEO: Ariz. rampage suspect may seek Unabomber lawyer
Associated Press
Article published Jan 10, 2011

PHOENIX (AP) — A 22-year-old man described as a social outcast with wild beliefs steeped in mistrust faces a federal court hearing on charges he tried to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson shooting rampage that left six people dead.

Public defenders are asking that the attorney who defended Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Timothy McVeigh and "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski defend Jared Loughner, who makes his first court appearance Monday at 2 p.m. MST (4 p.m. EST).

The hearing in Phoenix comes just a few hours after President Barack Obama leads a shocked and saddened nation in a moment of silence for the victims and their families. Obama will observe the moment of silence at 11 a.m. EST with White House staff on the South Lawn.

As authorities filed the charges against Loughner Sunday, they alleged he scrawled on an envelope the words "my assassination" and "Giffords" sometime before he took a cab to a shopping center where the congresswoman was meeting with constituents Saturday morning.

A federal judge, a congressional aide and a young girl were among the six people killed, while Giffords and 13 others were injured in the bursts of gunfire outside a Tucson supermarket.

Giffords, 40, lay in intensive care at a Tucson hospital, after being shot in the head at close range. Doctors said she had responded repeatedly to commands to stick out her two fingers, giving them hope she may survive.

About 200 people gathered outside Giffords' Tucson office Sunday evening for a candlelight vigil. Earlier in the day, people crammed the synagogue where Giffords has been a member, as well as the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ, which lost one member in the attack and saw another one wounded.

"I don't know how to grieve. This morning I don't have the magic pill, I don't have the Scripture... I can't wrap my head around this," said the church's Rev. Mike Nowak, his strong preacher's voice wavering.

Authorities weren't saying late Sunday where Loughner was being held, and officials were working to appoint an attorney for him. Heather Williams, the first assistant federal public defender in Arizona, said they're asking that San Diego attorney Judy Clarke be appointed.

Clarke, a former federal public defender in San Diego and Spokane, Wash., served on teams that defended McVeigh, Kaczynski and Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who drowned her two sons in 1994.

Loughner is charged with one count of attempted assassination of a member of Congress, two counts of killing an employee of the federal government and two counts of attempting to kill a federal employee. More charges are expected.

Discoveries at Loughner's home in southern Arizona, where he lived with his parents in a middle-class neighborhood lined with desert landscaping and palm trees, have provided few answers to what motivated him.

Court papers filed with the charges said he had previous contact with Giffords. The documents said he had received a letter from the Democratic lawmaker in which she thanked him for attending a "Congress on your Corner" event at a mall in Tucson in 2007.

Investigators carrying out a search warrant at his parents' home in a middle-class neighborhood found an envelope in a safe with the words "I planned ahead," ''My assassination" and the name "Giffords" next to what appears to be his signature.

Neighbors said Loughner kept to himself and was often seen walking his dog, almost always wearing a hooded sweat shirt and listening to his iPod.

Comments from friends and and former classmates bolstered by Loughner's own Internet postings have painted a picture of a social outcast with almost indecipherable beliefs steeped in mistrust and paranoia.

"If you call me a terrorist then the argument to call me a terrorist is Ad hominem," he wrote Dec. 15 in a wide-ranging posting.

Two high school friends said they had fallen out of touch with Loughner and last spoke to him around March, when one of them was going to set up some bottles in the desert for target practice and Loughner suggested he might come along. It was unusual — Loughner hadn't expressed an interest in guns before — and his increasingly confrontational behavior was pushing them apart. He would send bizarre text messages, but also break off contact for weeks on end.

"We just started getting sketched out about him," the friend said.

Around the same time, Loughner's behavior also began to worry officials at Pima Community College, where Loughner began attending classes in 2005, the school said in a release.

Between February and September, Loughner "had five contacts with PCC police for classroom and library disruptions," the statement said. He was suspended in September after college police discovered a YouTube video in which Loughner claimed the college was illegal according to the U.S. Constitution.

He withdrew voluntarily the following month, and was told he could return only if, among other things, a mental health professional agreed he did not present a danger, the school said.

Police said he purchased the Glock pistol used in the attack at Sportsman's Warehouse in Tucson in November.

An official familiar with the shooting investigation said Sunday that local authorities were looking at a possible connection between Loughner and an online group known for white supremacist, anti-immigrant rhetoric.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation, said local authorities were examining the American Renaissance website for possible motives.

The group's leaders said in a posting on their website that Loughner never subscribed to their magazine, registered for any of the group's conferences or visited their Internet site.

Giffords, a conservative Democrat re-elected in November, faced threats and heckling over her support for immigration reform and the health care overhaul. Her office was vandalized the day the House approved the landmark health care measure.

It was not clear whether those issues motivated the shooter to fire on the crowd gathered to meet Giffords.

The six killed included U.S. District Judge John Roll, 63, and 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, who was born on Sept. 11, 2001, and was featured in a book called "Faces of Hope" that chronicled one baby from each state born on the day terrorists killed nearly 3,000 people.

The author, Christine Naman, said: "Tragedy seems to have happened again."

Green was recently elected as a student council member and went to the morning's event because of her interest in government.

Others killed were Giffords aide Gabe Zimmerman, 30; Dorothy Morris, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and Phyllis Schneck, 79.

In the matter of the Virginia Tech disaster...

Twists Multiply in Alabama Shooting Case
NYTIMES
By SHAILA DEWAN and KATIE ZEZIMA
February 15, 2010

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — On Friday, this city of rocket scientists and brainy inventors was stunned when a neuroscientist with a Harvard Ph.D. was arrested in the shooting deaths of three of her colleagues after she was denied tenure.

But that was only the first surprise in the tale of the neuroscientist, Amy Bishop, who was regarded as fiercely intelligent and had seemed to have a promising career in biotechnology. Every day since has produced a new revelation from Dr. Bishop’s past, each more bizarre than the last.

On Saturday, the police in Braintree, Mass., said that she had fatally shot her brother in 1986 and questioned whether the decision to dismiss the case as an accident had been the right one.

On Sunday, a law enforcement official in Boston said she and her husband, James Anderson, had been questioned in a 1993 case in which a pipe bomb was sent to a colleague of Dr. Bishop’s at Children’s Hospital Boston. The bomb did not go off, no one was ever charged in the case, and no proof ever emerged connecting the couple to the bomb plot. On Sunday, Mr. Anderson firmly defended his wife in an interview at their home in Huntsville, saying that she had been completely cleared in the pipe bomb case and that her brother’s death had been accidental.

“That’s incorrect,” he said about reports linking him and his wife to the bomb plot. “We were not suspects. They questioned everybody that ever knew this guy.”

The target of the mail bomb was Dr. Paul Rosenberg, according to The Boston Globe, which first reported that the couple had been questioned in the case. After returning home from a vacation, Dr. Rosenberg opened a package that contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries, The Globe reported. The doctor and his wife fled and called the police.

Officials said that Dr. Bishop was concerned that Dr. Rosenberg would give her a negative evaluation on her doctorate work, the newspaper wrote, and that they were concerned about the incident involving her brother. The authorities in Boston searched Dr. Bishop’s computer at the time and found a novel she was working on about a scientist who killed her brother and atoned by excelling at her work, The Globe reported.

Though he firmly protested his wife’s innocence in the earlier cases, Mr. Anderson said he remained mystified over Friday’s shootings, which left three professors dead and three other people wounded after a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Dr. Bishop was charged with capital murder; three charges of attempted murder were added on Sunday. Mr. Anderson said he did not know of any specific incident that could have led to the shooting, and did not know that his wife allegedly had a gun when she went to the meeting.

“I had no idea,” he said. “We don’t own one.”

Those killed were Gopi Podila, 52, the chairman of the biology department; Maria Ragland Davis, 50, a professor who studied plant pathogens; and Adriel Johnson, 52, a cell biologist who also taught Boy Scouts about science. Two of the wounded were Joseph Leahy, 50, a microbiologist, and Stephanie Monticciolo, 62, a staff assistant, both of whom were in critical condition. The third was Luis Cruz-Vera, 40, a molecular biologist, who was released from the hospital on Saturday.

Mr. Anderson said that months ago, the university administration overruled a successful appeal of the decision to deny Dr. Bishop tenure in spring 2009.

“She won her appeal,” he said, “and the provost canned it.”

The university has declined to elaborate on the details of Dr. Bishop’s tenure application, saying only that she was denied last spring and that she could stay at the university only until the end of this academic year. Even if a faculty member successfully appeals a tenure denial, the final decision rests with the administration.

But Dr. Bishop had continued to fight, appealing to two members of the University of Alabama System’s Board of Trustees for help and hiring a lawyer, who was “finding one problem after another with the process,” Mr. Anderson said. One issue was a dispute over whether two of her papers had been published in time to count toward tenure, he said.

“She exceeded the qualifications for tenure,” Mr. Anderson said. “The review board said, ‘Grant it or go through the process again.’ ”

Mr. Anderson said that his wife’s research was generating millions of dollars for the university, that she had published numerous papers and that she was a good teacher.

But that estimate of her financial benefit to the university seems likely to be premature. One of her innovations, an automated system for producing cell cultures that the couple developed together, has attracted $1.25 million in financing but has not yet reached the market. Another, a potential treatment for degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, is in the process of being licensed from the university. Typically, universities share the proceeds from such licenses with the scientists responsible.

The police said Saturday that Dr. Bishop was 45, but her birth date on a university Web site indicated that she was 44.

Mr. Anderson said he could not gain access to his wife’s e-mail account and did not know if she had received any news that might have set off the shooting. The police, he said, had taken a thick binder documenting her tenure battle, her computer and the family van. At least one of the trustees had recently told her that he could not help reverse the tenure decision, a family friend said.

Mr. Anderson said he had already told the Huntsville police that they might come across the Boston pipe bomb incident during their investigation.

Sylvia Fluckiger, who worked as a laboratory technician at Children’s Hospital when Dr. Bishop and Dr. Rosenberg were working there, said Dr. Bishop had acknowledged that she was questioned by the police about the pipe bomb incident.

“She was visited by the police,” Ms. Fluckiger said. “What she said is they asked her if she had ever used a stamp, taken it off an envelope and put it somewhere else.”

Ms. Fluckiger said Dr. Bishop “had a smirk on her face” when asked about the incident. “I don’t know why she was smirking,” she said. “It was a funny expression on her face.”

“We did know that there was a dispute between Paul Rosenberg and her,” Ms. Fluckiger said, adding that she could not recall the details.

On Saturday, the police in Braintree said they were considering reopening the case of the shooting death of her brother, Seth Bishop, 18. Although a state police report said investigators determined that the shooting was an accident, Police Chief Paul Frazier said other officers remember that it came after an argument and questioned why local police documents could not be found.

On Sunday, Mayor Joseph C. Sullivan of Braintree, a Boston suburb, issued a statement saying the town would conduct a “full and thorough review” of its records for any material relating to Seth Bishop’s death. But he noted that records from 1986 were created and maintained manually, which would complicate their retrieval.

Standing at his door after church on Sunday, Mr. Anderson confirmed the existence of the novel reported in The Globe, as well as two others his wife worked on in her spare time. The couple has four children, ranging from grade-school to college age. Mr. Anderson said that somewhere in his files he had a letter sent by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms after the bomb investigation, saying: “You are hereby cleared in this incident. You are no longer a subject of the investigation.”

“This is one thing from the past I hoped would not be dredged up,” he said.

Shaila Dewan reported from Huntsville, and Katie Zezima from Boston.

Denied tenure, kills three at Biology Dept. at U. of Alabama.
Accused Alabama prof shot, killed brother in 1986
DAY
By KRISTIN M. HALL and DESIREE HUNTER, Associated Press Writer
Feb 13, 9:15 PM EST

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) -- The professor accused of killing three colleagues during a faculty meeting was a Harvard-educated neurobiologist, inventor and mother whose life had been marred by a violent episode in her distant past.

More than two decades ago, police said Amy Bishop fatally shot her teenage brother at their Massachusetts home in what officers at the time logged as an accident - though authorities said Saturday that records of the shooting are missing.

Bishop had just months left teaching at the University of Alabama in Huntsville when police said she opened fire with a handgun Friday in a room filled with a dozen of her colleagues from the school's biology department. Bishop, a rare woman suspected in a workplace shooting, was to leave after this semester because she had been denied tenure.

Police say she is 42, but the university's Web site lists her as 44.

Some have said she was upset after being denied the job-for-life security afforded tenured academics, and the husband of one victim and one of Bishop's students said they were told the shooting stemmed from the school's refusal to grant her such status. Authorities have refused to discuss a motive, and school spokesman Ray Garner said the faculty meeting wasn't called to discuss tenure.

William Setzer, chairman of chemistry department at UAH, said Bishop was appealing the decision made last year.

"Politics and personalities" always play a role in the tenure process, he said. "In a close department it's more so. If you have any lone wolves or bizarre personalities, it's a problem and I'm thinking that certainly came into play here."

The three killed were Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. The wounded were still recovering in hospitals early Saturday. Luis Cruz-Vera was in fair condition; Joseph Leahy in critical condition; and staffer Stephanie Monticciolo also was in critical condition.

Descriptions of Bishop from students and colleagues were mixed. Some saw a strange woman who had difficulty relating to her students, while others described a witty, intelligent teacher.

Students and colleagues described Bishop as intelligent, but someone who often had difficulty explaining difficult concepts.

Bishop was well-known in the research community, appearing on the cover of the winter 2009 issue of "The Huntsville R&D Report," a local magazine focusing on engineering, space and genetics. However, it was unclear how many of her colleagues and students knew about a more tragic part of her past.

She shot her brother, an 18-year-old accomplished violinist, in the chest in 1986, said Paul Frazier, the police chief in Braintree, Mass., where the shooting occurred. Bishop fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.

Frazier said the police chief at the time told officers to release Bishop to her mother before she could be booked. It was logged as an accident.

But Frazier's account was disputed by former police Chief John Polio, who told The Associated Press he didn't call officers to tell them to release Bishop. "There's no cover-up, no missing records," he said.

Attempts by AP to track down addresses and phone numbers for Bishop's family in the Braintree area weren't immediately successful Saturday. The current police chief said he believed her family had moved away.

After being educated at Harvard University, Bishop moved to Huntsville and in 2003 became an associate professor at the University of Alabama's campus there. The school, with about 7,500 students, has close ties with NASA and is known for its engineering and science programs.

Setzer, the chemistry chairman, said he was not aware of the incident with Bishop's brother.

Bishop and her husband placed third in a statewide university business plan competition in July 2007, presenting a portable cell incubator they had invented. They won $25,000 to help start a company to market the device.

Her husband, James Anderson, was detained and questioned by police but has not been charged. Police said Bishop was quickly caught after Friday's shooting. A 9-millimeter handgun was found in the bathroom of the building where the shootings occurred, and Huntsville police spokesman Sgt. Mark Roberts said Bishop did not have a permit for it.

Bishop was in custody and it wasn't immediately known if she has an attorney. No one was home at the couple's house.

Several experts said campus shootings commonly occur because the shooter has some kind of festering grievance that university officials haven't addressed, and the granting of tenure can be a polarizing and politicized process for many academics.

"Universities tend to string it out without resolution, tolerate too much and to have a cumbersome decision process that endangers the comfort of many and the safety of some," said Dr. Park Dietz, who is president of Threat Assessment Group Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based violence prevention firm.

Tenure, which makes firing and other discipline difficult if not impossible, can seem generous to outsiders. But the job protection gives professors the freedom to express ideas and conduct studies without fear of reprisal. The system typically emphasizes research over teaching, and tenured professors typically are paid more.

While it's rare for the stresses of the tenure process to incur violence, what's even rarer is for a woman to be accused in such an incident like the one Friday that also left three of Bishop's colleagues injured, two critically.

"Workplace shootings of that kind are overwhelmingly male," said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor and director of violence prevention at the University of California, Berkeley. "Going postal was essentially a monopoly position of the XY chromosome."

---

Associated Press Writers Jay Lindsay in Braintree, Mass., and Thomas Watkins in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Troubling portrait emerges of Fort Hood suspect
YAHOO
By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE, Associated Press Writer
November 6, 2009

WASHINGTON – His name appears on radical Internet postings. A fellow officer says he fought his deployment to Iraq and argued with soldiers who supported U.S. wars. He required counseling as a medical student because of problems with patients.

There are many unknowns about Nidal Malik Hasan, the man authorities say is responsible for the worst mass killing on a U.S. military base. Most of all, his motive.

For six years before reporting for duty at Fort Hood, Texas, in July, the 39-year-old Army major worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center pursuing his career in psychiatry, as an intern, a resident and, last year, a fellow in disaster and preventive psychiatry. He received his medical degree from the military's Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., in 2001.

While an intern at Walter Reed, Hasan had some "difficulties" that required counseling and extra supervision, said Dr. Thomas Grieger, who was the training director at the time. Grieger said privacy laws prevented him from going into details but noted that the problems had to do with Hasan's interactions with patients. He recalled Hasan as a "mostly very quiet" person who never spoke ill of the military or his country.

"He swore an oath of loyalty to the military," Grieger said. "I didn't hear anything contrary to those oaths."

But, more recently, federal agents grew suspicious.

At least six months ago, Hasan came to the attention of law enforcement officials because of Internet postings about suicide bombings and other threats, including posts that equated suicide bombers to soldiers who throw themselves on a grenade to save the lives of their comrades. They had not determined for certain whether Hasan is the author of the posting, and a formal investigation had not been opened before the shooting, said law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the case.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Hasan's aunt, Noel Hasan of Falls Church, Va., said he had been harassed about being a Muslim in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and he wanted out of the Army.

"Some people can take it and some people cannot," she said. "He had listened to all of that and he wanted out of the military."

She said he had sought a discharge from the military for several years, and even offered to repay the cost of his medical training.

A military official told The Associated Press that Hasan was in the preparation stage of deployment, which can take months. The official said Hasan had indicated he didn't want to go to Iraq but was willing to serve in Afghanistan. The official did not have authorization to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A second military official said Hasan's family has Palestinian roots. There have been reports that he was harassed for his Muslim religion, but the official says there is no indication Hasan filed a complaint within the military about that. Terrorism task force agents plan to interview several of Hasan's relatives Friday, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the case.

Noel Hasan said her nephew "did not make many friends" and would say "they military was his life."

A cousin, Nader Hasan, told The New York Times that after counseling soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder, Hasan knew war firsthand.

"He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy," Nader Hasan said. "He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there."

Federal law-enforcement agents ordered an evacuation of the apartment complex where Hasan lived in Killeen, Texas, Thursday night and conducted a search of his home, said Hilary Shine, director of public information for the city. She didn't say what was found during the search. Officials said earlier that federal search warrants were being drawn up to authorize the seizure of his computer.

Retired Army Col. Terry Lee, who said he worked with Hasan, told Fox News that Hasan had hoped President Barack Obama would pull troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Lee said Hasan got into frequent arguments with others in the military who supported the wars, and had tried hard to prevent his pending deployment. Hasan attended prayers regularly when he lived outside Washington, often in his Army uniform, said Faizul Khan, a former imam at a mosque Hasan attended in Silver Spring, Md. He said Hasan was a lifelong Muslim.

"I got the impression that he was a committed soldier," Khan said. He spoke often with Hasan about Hasan's desire for a wife.

On a form filled out by those seeking spouses through a program at the mosque, Hasan listed his birthplace as Arlington, Va., but his nationality as Palestinian, Khan said.

"I don't know why he listed Palestinian," Khan said, "He was not born in Palestine."

Nothing stood out about Hasan as radical or extremist, Khan said.

"We hardly ever got to discussing politics," Khan said. "Mostly we were discussing religious matters, nothing too controversial, nothing like an extremist."

Hasan earned his rank of major in April 2008, according to a July 2008 Army Times article. He served eight years as an enlisted soldier.

He also served in the ROTC as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. He received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry there in 1997.

New Tech Gunman Records Fail to Predict Bloodshed
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
August 19, 2009 (Filed at 5:53 p.m. ET)

ROANOKE, Va. (AP) -- Recently discovered mental health records released on Wednesday contain no obvious indications that the Virginia Tech gunman was a year and a half away from committing the worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history.

The records contain previously unseen handwritten notes from the counselors who talked to Seung-Hui Cho in 2005, and in one report Cho denied having any suicidal or homicidal thoughts. On April 16, 2007, Cho killed 32 students and faculty members on the Blacksburg, Va., campus and took his own life. The counselors' notes indicate they were concerned for the troubled student, but the records don't contain any evidence that they saw serious warning signs to believe Cho would commit violence.

The missing files were released almost five weeks after they were discovered at the home of the former director of the university's counseling center.

University officials have said Cho talked to two different therapists during 45-minute telephone triage sessions in the fall, then made one court-ordered 45-minute in-person visit that December. Cho denied the homicidal thoughts in the telephone sessions and in the in-person meeting with counselor Sherry Lynch Conrad on Dec. 14, 2005. Cho met with Conrad at Cook Counseling Center after being detained in a mental hospital overnight because he had expressed thoughts of suicide.

''He denies suicidal and/or homicidal thoughts. Said the comment he made was a joke. Says he has no reason to harm self and would never do it,'' Conrad wrote.

That was Cho's last contact with the counseling center. The counselor wrote that she gave him emergency contact numbers and encouraged him to return the next semester in January, but he didn't make an appointment. Edward J. McNelis, an attorney for Conrad and the counselors who spoke with Cho by phone, said he had advised them not to comment because they are named in civil lawsuits filed by two of the victims' families.

A telephone message left for Conrad was not immediately returned.

The files first turned up July 16, when former Cook Counseling Center director Robert C. Miller found them in his home while preparing for those civil suits, which name him as a defendant. Miller said in a court filing that the Cho records were in a manila folder along with several others, and he packed it up with his personal documents in late February or early March 2006 when he transferred from the center to another position at the university. The files were released by Virginia Tech following the approval of Cho's family. It was their decision whether to release them because of privacy laws.

''My mother, father and I all agree that it is the correct thing to do to release the newly discovered medical records of my brother,'' Cho's sister, Sun Cho, said in a letter authorizing the release.

University spokesman Mark Owczarski said with the release of the records the school was seeking to provide the victims' families ''with as much information as is known about Cho's interactions with the mental health system.''

Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said in a statement he was pleased that the Cho family wanted the records released and that his administration remained committed to openness about events surrounding the mass shootings.

''We will never fully comprehend what led Seung-Hui Cho to carry out his assault on his fellow students and instructors,'' Kaine said. ''His actions were by nature inexplicable, and I don't expect the questions surrounding the tragedy will ever really end.''

Robert Hall, attorney for the families who have sued, noted that the file contained no mention of discussions former English Department Chairwoman Lucinda Roy had with Miller about Cho. She consulted the counseling center director when she was trying to tutor Cho that fall after his disturbing writings and bizarre behavior got him kicked out of class.

''It's like there are parallel universes,'' he said, one in which the faculty is concerned and tries to get help for a seriously disturbed student and another in which the school therapists appeared to know little about Cho's troubles.

Relatives of victims said the files showed that Cho slipped through the cracks despite red flags.

''They definitely weren't paying attention, and that's what led to April 16th,'' said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin was wounded but survived.

''It just sounded like he was going through a McDonald's,'' said Michael Pohle, whose son Michael Pohle Jr. was killed. ''It just looked like he was passed through from one person to another person and there was no collaboration going on.''

Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily Haas was injured, said she was more concerned about the circumstances under which the records were found more than two years after the shootings.

''I'm just suspicious of the manner in which information has been dribbled out,'' she said.

Roger O'Dell, whose son Derek O'Dell was injured, said he hoped the records could be helpful in altering treatment of troubled individuals.

''There are lessons to be learned,'' he said.

------

Associated Press Writer Steve Szkotak in Richmond contributed to this report.

Va. Tech Families Want Shooting Probe Reopened
NYTIMES
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 28, 2009, Filed at 11:22 a.m. ET

ROANOKE, Va. (AP) -- Families of the Virginia Tech shooting victims asked Gov. Tim Kaine on Tuesday to reopen a state commission's investigation of the 2007 mass killings in which 32 people died.

A group of parents of many of those killed and injured in the rampage by student gunman Seung-Hui Cho issued a statement urging Kaine to reopen the review because of inaccuracies in the report.

The families' statement followed disclosure last week that the former director of the university's counseling center recently found missing mental health records for Cho at his home.

Cho committed suicide after killing students and faculty members in a dormitory and classroom building on the Blacksburg campus on April 16, 2007 -- the worst mass shootings in modern U.S. history.

''We still suffer emotional pain dealing with the impenetrable layers of bureaucracy in our simple quest for answers,'' the statement said. ''An accurate, complete and thorough accounting of what happened before, during and after April 16th, 2007 is the legacy we seek on behalf of those who died and those who survived.''

The families said they want more information about the discovery of Cho's records at the home of Dr. Robert C. Miller. Miller has said he inadvertently took the files as he left his job as director of Cook Counseling Center more than a year before the shootings.

Kaine said in response to a caller's question on his monthly radio show on Washington's WTOP that the professional staff who investigated and wrote the Virginia Tech Review Panel report is already investigating Miller's possession of Cho's records.

Reconvening the appointed members of the panel, including former State Police Superintendent Gerald Massengill and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, would be a problem because all were volunteer members when they served.

''These records are critical. They never should have been removed from the counseling center. I want to know why,'' Kaine said.

Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was wounded but survived, said she and other family members who have conducted their own investigation of the events of that day have found other errors in the report.

''With the revelation that Dr. Miller has discovered the missing records, it just raises whole new questions of what else is out there that we're unaware of,'' she said.

The review panel issued its report four months after the shootings, in August of 2007. A separate criminal investigation into the shootings is ongoing. A telephone message left for Massengill was not immediately returned.

Va. Tech Gunman’s Mental Health Records Found
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:08 p.m. ET
July 22, 2009

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) -- Mental health records for Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho that were missing for more than two years have been discovered in the home of the university clinic's former director, according to a state memo sent to victims' family members.

Cho killed 32 people on April 16, 2007, then committed suicide as police closed in. His mental health treatment has been a major issue in the vast investigation of the shootings, yet the records' location had eluded authorities until they were uncovered by attorneys for some families of Cho's victims.

A memo from Gov. Tim Kaine's chief legal counsel to victims' family members says Cho's records and those of several other Virginia Tech students were found last week in the home of Dr. Robert C. Miller. The memo was obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The memo said Cho's records were removed from the Cook Counseling Center on the Virginia Tech campus more than a year before the shootings, when Miller transferred from his position at the clinic. Records for several other students were also at his home, the memo said.

''I appreciate your call, but I'm not making comment at this time,'' Miller said when reached at a number for his private practice.

Kaine said a Virginia State Police criminal investigation was under way into how the records disappeared from the center where Cho was ordered to undergo counseling. Removing records from the center is illegal, he said. Kaine said he was dismayed that it took two years before they were found by the attorneys.

''That is part of the investigation that I am very interested in and, of course, I'm very concerned about that,'' Kaine said.

The medical records are protected under state privacy laws. The state planned to release the records publicly as soon as possible, either by consent from Cho's estate or through a subpoena. The discovery calls into question the thoroughness of the criminal probe two years ago and the findings of a commission Kaine appointed to review the catastrophe, one victim's relative said.

''Deception comes to my mind in my first response,'' said Suzanne Grimes, whose son Kevin Sterne was injured in the shootings.

''To say it doesn't make sense is an injustice,'' she said. ''It gives me the impression: 'What else are they hiding?'''

She praised Kaine's willingness to investigate the disappearance of the records and have them released.

''Until we get all the answers to what happened on that day and days prior, there's no sense of closure,'' Grimes said.

Andrew Goddard, whose son, Colin, survived four gunshots, welcomed the new information.

''We're not looking to hang people. We're looking for more of the truth about what happened,'' he said.

While a large part of the shooting investigation focused on how university officials and law enforcement responded following the first reports of deaths in a Virginia Tech dormitory, family members of victims have also inquired how the troubled Cho slipped through the cracks at university counseling.

In April, on the second anniversary of the shootings, families of two slain students sued the state, the school and its counseling center, several top university officials and a local mental health agency, claiming gross negligence in the chain of events that allowed Cho to commit his killing spree. The lawsuits also claim the local health center where Cho had gone to say he felt suicidal did not adequately treat or monitor him.

The discovery shakes up that lawsuit, an attorney for the two families said.

''Why would he (Miller) take any student mental health records to his home at any time, and why that student?'' Robert T. Hall said.

''It certainly is a question of whether there is more to the Seung-Hui Cho mental health history than we've been told,'' Hall said in a telephone interview from vacation in Vermont.

Goddard, who was appointed last year to the state board of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services, said he wasn't sure how helpful the records would be.

But he said if they showed Cho was ''anything other than this mildly upset student,'' that needed to come out.

Internet Key in Probe of Va. Tech Gunman
Hartford Courant
By ADAM GELLER and CHRIS KAHN, Associated Press Writers
6:20 AM EDT, April 22, 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Computer forensics are playing a key role in the probe of the Virginia Tech gunman, with investigators revealing he bought ammunition clips on eBay designed for one of two handguns used to kill 32 people and himself.

The eBay account and other Internet activities provided insight Saturday into how Seung-Hui Cho may have plotted for the rampage, including the purchase of two empty ammo clips about three weeks before the attack.

EBay spokesman Hani Durzy said the purchase of the clips from a Web vendor based in Idaho was legal and that the company has cooperated with authorities. Attempts to reach the Idaho dealer were unsuccessful.

"Within 24 hours, after Cho's identity was made public, we had reached out to law enforcement to offer our assistance in any investigation," Durzy said.

Authorities are also examining the personal computers found in Cho's dorm room and seeking his cell-phone records.

Cho, 23, also used the eBay account to sell items ranging from Hokies football tickets to horror-themed books, some of which were assigned in one of his classes.

A search warrant affidavit filed Friday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho's e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com. Durzy confirmed Cho used the same blazers5505 handle on eBay.

Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said investigators are "aware of the eBay activity that mirrors" the Hotmail account.

One question investigators hope to answer is whether Cho had any e-mail contact with Emily Hilscher, one of the first two victims. Investigators plan to search her Virginia Tech e-mail account.

Experts say that when the subject of an investigation is a loner like Cho, his computers and cell phone can be a rich source of information. Authorities say Cho had a history of sending menacing text messages and other communications -- written and electronic.

On March 22, Cho bought two 10-round magazines for the Walther P22. A day later, he made a purchase from a vendor named "oneclickshooting," which sells gun accessories and other items. Details on the purchase were unclear, and the seller could not be reached for comment.

Cho sold tickets to Virginia Tech sporting events, including last year's Peach Bowl. He sold a Texas Instruments graphics calculator that contained several games, most of them with mild themes.

"The calculator was used for less than one semester then I dropped the class," Cho wrote on the site.

He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester.

His eBay rating was superb -- 98.5 percent. That means he received one negative rating from people he dealt with on eBay, compared with 65 positive.

"great ebayer. very flexible," the buyer said of his Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl tickets, which went for $182.50.

Andy Koch, Cho's roommate from 2005-06, said he never saw Cho receive or send a package, although he didn't have much interaction with the shooter. Students can sign up for a free lottery on a game-by-game basis, and the tickets are free.

"We took him to one football game," he said. "We told him to sign up for the lottery, and he went and he left like in the third quarter, and that was it. He never went again. He never went to another game."

Cho sold the books on the eBay-affiliated site half.com. They include "Men, Women, and Chainsaws" by Carol J. Clover, a book that explores gender in the modern horror film. Others include "The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre"; and "The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense" by Joyce Carol Oates -- a book in which the publisher writes: "In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves."

Books by those three authors were taught in his Contemporary Horror class.

Experts say things like eBay transactions can be hugely valuable in trying to figure out the motivation behind crimes.

An examination of a computer is "very revealing, particularly for a person like this," said Mark Rasch of FTI Consulting, a computer and electronic investigation firm. "What we find ... particularly with people who are very uncommunicative in person, is that they may be much more communicative and free to express themselves with the anonymity that computers and the Internet give you."

Cho's computer could hold a record of just about anything he has done, even of activities or communications he may have tried to erase. But Rasch said that likely will not be a problem, noting the way the gunman created a record of his thinking in videos, photos and documents.

"This guy wanted to leave a trail. He wasn't trying to conceal what he did," Rasch said.

AP: Va. gunman's family feels hopeless
By ALLEN G. BREED and AARON BEARD, Associated Press Writer
April 20, 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va. - The family of Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho told The Associated Press on Friday that they feel "hopeless, helpless and lost," and "never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence."

"He has made the world weep. We are living a nightmare," said a statement issued by Cho's sister, Sun-Kyung Cho, on the family's behalf.

It was the Chos' first public comment since the 23-year-old student killed 32 people and committed suicide Monday in the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

Raleigh, N.C., lawyer Wade Smith provided the statement to the AP after the Cho family reached out to him. Smith said the family would not answer any questions, and neither would he.

"Our family is so very sorry for my brother's unspeakable actions. It is a terrible tragedy for all of us," said Sun-Kyung Cho, a 2004 Princeton University graduate who works as a contractor for a State Department office that oversees American aid for Iraq.

"We pray for their families and loved ones who are experiencing so much excruciating grief. And we pray for those who were injured and for those whose lives are changed forever because of what they witnessed and experienced," she said. "Each of these people had so much love, talent and gifts to offer, and their lives were cut short by a horrible and senseless act."

The Chos' whereabouts are unclear. But Virginia State Police said they are under law enforcement protection.

The statement was issued during a statewide day of mourning for the victims. Silence fell across the Virginia Tech campus at noon and bells tolled in churches nationwide in memory of the victims.

"We are humbled by this darkness. We feel hopeless, helpless and lost. This is someone that I grew up with and loved. Now I feel like I didn't know this person," Cho's sister said. "We have always been a close, peaceful and loving family. My brother was quiet and reserved, yet struggled to fit in. We never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence."

She said her family will cooperate fully and "do whatever we can to help authorities understand why these senseless acts happened. We have many unanswered questions as well."

Wendy Adams, whose niece, Leslie Sherman, was killed in the massacre, said of the family's statement: "I'm not so generous to be able to forgive him for what he did. But I do feel for the family. I do feel sorry for them."

"I do believe they're living a nightmare," she added.

Robert Jeffers of Idaho Falls, Idaho, a friend of slain 25-year-old student Brian R. Bluhm, said: "I hope people can see that the right action to take from all of this is love, not hate."

"Based on this sorrowful statement, it is apparent that the family grieves with everyone in the world," Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Cho's name was given as "Cho Seung-Hui" by police and school officials earlier this week. But the the South Korean immigrant family said their preference was "Seung-Hui Cho." Many Asian immigrant families Americanize their names by reversing them and putting their surnames last.

While Cho clearly was seething and had been taken to a psychiatric hospital more than a year as threat to himself, investigators are still trying to establish exactly what set him off, why he chose a dormitory and a classroom building for the rampage, and how he selected his victims.

"The why and the how are the crux of the investigation," Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said. "The why may never be determined because the person responsible is deceased."

During the campus memorial, hundreds of somber students and area residents, most wearing the school's maroon and orange, stood with heads bowed on the parade ground in front of Norris Hall, the classrooom building where all but two of the victims died. Along with the bouquets and candles was a sign reading, "Never forgotten."

"It's good to feel the love of people around you," said Alice Lo, a Virginia Tech graduate and friend of Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, a French instructor killed in the rampage. "With this evil, there is still goodness."

The mourners gathered in front of stone memorials, each adorned with a basket of tulips and an American flag. There were 33 stones — one for each victim and Cho.

"His family is suffering just as much as the other families," said Elizabeth Lineberry, who will be a freshman at Virginia Tech in the fall.

President Bush wore an orange and maroon tie in a show of support. The White House said he also asked top officials at the Justice, Health and Human Services and Education Departments to travel the country, talk to educators, mental health experts and others, and compile a report on how to prevent similar tragedies.

Seven people hurt in the rampage remained hospitalized, at least one in serious condition.

Va. Tech stunned by images of gunman
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
April 19, 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Two days after the worst killing spree in modern U.S. history, videos and photographs of an armed Cho Seung-Hui stunned the university community where he killed 32 people before committing suicide Monday.

In the photos and recordings mailed to NBC midway through his rampage, 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui delivered a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich "brats" and their "hedonistic needs."

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," he says in a harsh monotone. "But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

NBC said the package contained a rambling and often incoherent 23-page written statement, 28 video clips and 43 photos. Several of the photos showed him aiming handguns at the camera.

The package arrived at NBC headquarters in New York on Tuesday and was opened Wednesday. It bore a Postal Service time stamp showing that it had been mailed at a Blacksburg post office at 9:01 a.m. Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho first opened fire.

"I saw his picture on TV and when I did I just got chills," said Kristy Venning, a junior from Franklin County, Va. "There's really no words. It shows he put so much thought into this and I think it's sick."

The package helped explain one of the biggest mysteries about the massacre: where the gunman was and what he did during that two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire, at a high-rise dorm, and the second attack, at a classroom building.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, a South Korean immigrant whose parents work at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

Earlier in the day, authorities disclosed that more than a year before the massacre, Cho was accused of sending unwanted messages to two women and was taken to a psychiatric hospital on a magistrate's orders and was pronounced a danger to himself. But he was released with orders to undergo outpatient treatment.

The disclosure added to the rapidly growing list of warning signs that appeared well before the student opened fire. Among other things, Cho's twisted, violence-filled writings and sullen, vacant-eyed demeanor had disturbed professors and students so much that he was removed from one English class and was repeatedly urged to get counseling.

Some of the pictures in the video package show him smiling; others show him frowning and snarling. Some depict him brandishing two weapons at a time, one in each hand. He wears a khaki-colored military-style vest, fingerless gloves, a black T-shirt, a backpack and a backward, black baseball cap. Another photo shows him swinging a hammer two-fisted. Another shows an angry-looking Cho holding a gun to his temple.

He refers to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" — a reference to the teenage killers in the Columbine High School massacre.

NBC News President Steve Capus said the package arrived in Tuesday afternoon's mail, but was not opened until Wednesday morning. It was sent by overnight delivery and apparently had the wrong ZIP code, NBC said.

An alert postal employee brought the package to NBC's attention after noticing the Blacksburg return address and a name similar to the words reportedly found scrawled in red ink on Cho's arm after the bloodbath, "Ismail Ax," NBC said.

Capus said that the network notified the FBI around noon, but held off reporting on it at the FBI's request, so that the bureau could look at it first. NBC finally broke the story just before police announced the development at 4:30 p.m.

It was clear Cho videotaped himself, Capus said, because he could be seen leaning in to shut off the camera.

State Police Spokeswoman Corinne Geller cautioned that, while the package was mailed between the two shootings, police have not inspected the footage and have yet to establish exactly when the images were made.

Cho repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt.

"You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," he says, apparently reading from his manifesto. "You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

A law enforcement official said Cho's letter also refers in the same sentence to President Bush and John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed last year to having killed child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media.

Earlier Wednesday, authorities disclosed that in November and December 2005, two women complained to campus police that they had received calls and computer messages from Cho. But the women considered the messages "annoying," not threatening, and neither pressed charges, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said.

Neither woman was among the victims in the massacre, police said.

After the second complaint about Cho's behavior, the university obtained a temporary detention order and took Cho away because an acquaintance reported he might be suicidal, authorities said. Police did not identify the acquaintance.

On Dec. 13, 2005, a magistrate ordered Cho to undergo an evaluation at Carilion St. Albans, a private psychiatric hospital. The magistrate signed the order after an initial evaluation found probable cause that Cho was a danger to himself or others as a result of mental illness.

The next day, according to court records, doctors at Carilion conducted further examination and a special justice, Paul M. Barnett, approved outpatient treatment.

A medical examination conducted Dec. 14 reported that that Cho's "affect is flat. ... He denies suicidal ideations. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder. His insight and judgment are normal."

The court papers indicate that Barnett checked a box that said Cho "presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness." Barnett did not check the box that would indicate a danger to others.

It is unclear how long Cho stayed at Carilion, though court papers indicate he was free to leave as of Dec. 14. Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said Cho had been continually enrolled at Tech and never took a leave of absence.

A spokesman for Carilion St. Albans would not comment.

Though the incidents with the two women did not result in criminal charges, police referred Cho to the university's disciplinary system, Flinchum said. But Ed Spencer, assistant vice president of student affairs, would not comment on any disciplinary proceedings, saying federal law protects students' medical privacy even after death.

Some students refused to second-guess the university.

"Who would've woken up in the morning and said, `Maybe this student who's just troubled is really going to do something this horrific?'" said Elizabeth Hart, a communications major and a spokeswoman for the student government.

One of the first Virginia Tech officials to recognize Cho's problems was award-winning poet Nikki Giovanni, who kicked him out of her introduction to creative writing class in late 2005.

Students in Giovanni's class had told their professor that Cho was taking photographs of their legs and knees under the desks with his cell phone. Female students refused to come to class. She said she considered him "mean" and "a bully."

Lucinda Roy, professor of English at Virginia Tech, said that she, too, relayed her concerns to campus police and various other college units after Cho displayed antisocial behavior in her class and handed in disturbing writing assignments.

But she said authorities "hit a wall" in terms of what they could do "with a student on campus unless he'd made a very overt threat to himself or others." Cho resisted her repeated suggestion that he undergo counseling, Roy said.

Questions lingered over whether campus police should have issued an immediate campus-wide warning of a killer on the loose and locked down the campus after the first burst of gunfire.

Police said that after the first shooting, in which two students were killed, they believed that it was a domestic dispute, and that the gunman had fled the campus. Police went looking for a young man, Karl David Thornhill, who had once shot guns at a firing range with the roommate of one of the victims. But police said Thornhill is no longer under suspicion.

___

Associated Press writers Allen G. Breed, Vicki Smith, Sue Lindsey and Justin Pope in Blacksburg, Va., Matt Barakat in Richmond, Va., Colleen Long and Tom Hays in New York, and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington, D.C. contributed to this report.

Va. gunman sent videos and photos to NBC
By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
April 18, 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Midway through his murderous rampage, the Virginia Tech gunman went to the post office and mailed NBC a package containing photos and videos of him brandishing guns and delivering a snarling, profanity-laced tirade about rich "brats" and their "hedonistic needs."

"You had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today," 23-year-old Cho Seung-Hui says in a harsh monotone. "But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."

NBC said the package contained a rambling and often incoherent 23-page written statement, 28 video clips and 43 photos. Several of the photos showed him aiming handguns at the camera.

The package arrived at NBC headquarters in New York on Tuesday and was opened Wednesday, two days after Cho killed 32 people and committed suicide in the deadliest one-man shooting rampage in modern U.S. history. It bore a Postal Service time stamp showing that it had been mailed at a Blacksburg post office at 9:01 a.m. Monday, about an hour and 45 minutes after Cho first opened fire.

That would help explain one of the biggest mysteries about the massacre: where the gunman was and what he did during that two-hour window between the first burst of gunfire, at a high-rise dorm, and the second fusillade, at a classroom building.

"Your Mercedes wasn't enough, you brats," says Cho, a South Korean immigrant whose parents work at a dry cleaners in suburban Washington. "Your golden necklaces weren't enough, you snobs. Your trust funds wasn't enough. Your vodka and cognac wasn't enough. All your debaucheries weren't enough. Those weren't enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything."

Earlier in the day, authorities disclosed that more than a year before the massacre, Cho was accused of sending unwanted messages to two women and was taken to a psychiatric hospital on a magistrate's orders and was pronounced a danger to himself. But he was released with orders to undergo outpatient treatment.

The disclosure added to the rapidly growing list of warning signs that appeared well before the student opened fire. Among other things, Cho's twisted, violence-filled writings and sullen, vacant-eyed demeanor had disturbed professors and students so much that he was removed from one English class and was repeatedly urged to get counseling.

Some of the pictures in the video package show him smiling; others show him frowning and snarling. Some depict him brandishing two weapons at a time, one in each hand. He wears a khaki-colored military-style vest, fingerless gloves, a black T-shirt, a backpack and a backward, black baseball cap. Another photo shows him swinging a hammer two-fisted. Another shows an angry-looking Cho holding a gun to his temple.

He refers to "martyrs like Eric and Dylan" — a reference to the teenage killers in the Columbine High massacre.

NBC News President Steve Capus said the package arrived in Tuesday afternoon's mail, but was not opened until Wednesday morning. It was sent by overnight delivery and apparently had the wrong ZIP code, NBC said.

An alert postal employee brought the package to NBC's attention after noticing the Blacksburg return address and a name similar to the words reportedly found scrawled in red ink on Cho's arm after the bloodbath, "Ismail Ax," NBC said.

Capus said that the network notified the FBI around noon, but held off reporting on it at the FBI's request, so that the bureau could look at it first. NBC finally broke the story just before police announced the development at 4:30 p.m.

It was clear Cho videotaped himself, Capus said, because he could be seen leaning in to shut off the camera.

State Police Spokeswoman Corinne Geller cautioned that, while the package was mailed between the two shootings, police have not inspected the footage and have yet to establish exactly when the images were made.

Cho repeatedly suggests he was picked on or otherwise hurt.

"You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience," he says, apparently reading from his manifesto. "You thought it was one pathetic boy's life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people."

A law enforcement official said Cho's letter also refers in the same sentence to President Bush and John Mark Karr, who falsely confessed last year to having killed child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak to the media.

Earlier Wednesday, authorities disclosed that in November and December 2005, two women complained to campus police that they had received calls and computer messages from Cho. But the women considered the messages "annoying," not threatening, and neither pressed charges, Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said.

Neither woman was among the victims in the massacre, police said.

After the second complaint about Cho's behavior, the university obtained a temporary detention order and took Cho away because an acquaintance reported he might be suicidal, authorities said. Police did not identify the acquaintance.

On Dec. 13, 2005, a magistrate ordered Cho to undergo an evaluation at Carilion St. Albans, a private psychiatric hospital. The magistrate signed the order after an initial evaluation found probable cause that Cho was a danger to himself or others as a result of mental illness.

The next day, according to court records, doctors at Carilion conducted further examination and a special justice, Paul M. Barnett, approved outpatient treatment.

A medical examination conducted Dec. 14 reported that that Cho's "affect is flat. ... He denies suicidal ideations. He does not acknowledge symptoms of a thought disorder. His insight and judgment are normal."

The court papers indicate that Barnett checked a box that said Cho "presents an imminent danger to himself as a result of mental illness." Barnett did not check the box that would indicate a danger to others.

It is unclear how long Cho stayed at Carilion, though court papers indicate he was free to leave as of Dec. 14. Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said Cho had been continually enrolled at Tech and never took a leave of absence.

A spokesman for Carilion St. Albans would not comment.

Though the incidents with the two women did not result in criminal charges, police referred Cho to the university's disciplinary system, Flinchum said. But Ed Spencer, assistant vice president of student affairs, would not comment on any disciplinary proceedings, saying federal law protects students' medical privacy even after death.

Some students refused to second-guess the university.

"Who would've woken up in the morning and said, `Maybe this student who's just troubled is really going to do something this horrific?'" said Elizabeth Hart, a communications major and a spokeswoman for the student government.

One of the first Virginia Tech officials to recognize Cho's problems was award-winning poet Nikki Giovanni, who kicked him out of her introduction to creative writing class in late 2005.

Students in Giovanni's class had told their professor that Cho was taking photographs of their legs and knees under the desks with his cell phone. Female students refused to come to class. She said she considered him "mean" and "a bully."

Lucinda Roy, professor of English at Virginia Tech, said that she, too, relayed her concerns to campus police and various other college units after Cho displayed antisocial behavior in her class and handed in disturbing writing assignments.

But she said authorities "hit a wall" in terms of what they could do "with a student on campus unless he'd made a very overt threat to himself or others." Cho resisted her repeated suggestion that he undergo counseling, Roy said.

Questions lingered over whether campus police should have issued an immediate campus-wide warning of a killer on the loose and locked down the campus after the first burst of gunfire.

Police said that after the first shooting, in which two students were killed, they believed that it was a domestic dispute, and that the gunman had fled the campus. Police went looking for a young man, Karl David Thornhill, who had once shot guns at a firing range with the roommate of one of the victims. But police said Thornhill is no longer under suspicion.

Va. Tech gunman had mental problems: police
By Andrea Hopkins and Patricia Zengerle
April 18, 2007 12 noon

BLACKSBURG, Virginia (Reuters) - The gunman who went on a rampage at Virginia Tech had been confronted by university police in 2005 over complaints he was bothering women students and was sent to a mental health facility because of worries he was suicidal, police said on Wednesday.

The new details added to a chilling portrait of Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old South Korean student who massacred 32 people and then took his own life at the university on Monday in the deadliest shooting spree in modern U.S. history. Fellow students and teachers have described a troubled loner whose writings for his English degree were so laced with violence and disillusionment that they alarmed some of those around him.

University Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said his officers approached Cho in late 2005 when two women students complained of "annoying" phone calls and instant messages from him.

"I'm not saying they were threats; I'm saying they were annoying. That's the way the victims characterized them, as annoying messages," Flinchum told a news conference.

After the second incident Cho's roommate told police he "might be suicidal," prompting them to issue a "temporary detention order" and send him to a mental health facility for evaluation, Flinchum said. Authorities would not say how long Cho was evaluated.

"We did not have any contact with him after December 2005 that I'm aware of at this time," Flinchum said.

Cho, who immigrated to the United States 15 years ago with his family and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., chained doors closed to prevent escape and worked his way through classrooms, shooting his victims one by one. He later killed himself. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said he would appoint W. Gerald Massengill, who headed the Virginia State Police during the September 11 attacks and the killing spree of a sniper pair in 2002, to head a panel to review the university's response to the shootings. The review had been requested by the university.

Neighbors, roommates and teachers described Cho as a withdrawn person who rarely spoke. Two students who said they were Cho's roommates said he had harassed several female students and once told them he wanted to kill himself, which prompted the roommates to report their concerns to the police. Cho used two handguns, which police confirmed he had purchased legally, and stopped only to reload. Police have stopped short of saying he was responsible for the shooting deaths of two other people two hours earlier at a dormitory but said tests showed the same gun was used in both incidents.

In His Words And His Silence, Hints Of Anger And Isolation
Cho's eruption of violence, in which 32 victims and himself were killed on the Virginia Tech campus here in a rampage of gunfire, was never directly signaled by his actions or words, several of his acquaintances said Tuesday. But those acquaintances were frequently disturbed by his isolation from the world and his barely concealed anger.
By Manny Fernandez , Marc Santora , New York Times News Service
Published on 4/18/2007

Blacksburg, Va. — Cho Seung-Hui rarely spoke to his own dormitory roommate. His teachers were so disturbed by some of his writing that they referred him to counseling. And when Cho finally and horrifyingly came to the world's attention on Monday, he did so after writing a note that bitterly lashed out at his fellow students for what he deemed their moral decline.

Cho's eruption of violence, in which 32 victims and himself were killed on the Virginia Tech campus here in a rampage of gunfire, was never directly signaled by his actions or words, several of his acquaintances said Tuesday. But those acquaintances were frequently disturbed by his isolation from the world and his barely concealed anger.

Joe Aust, who shared Room 2121 at Harper Hall with him, said he had spoken to Cho often but had received only one-word replies. Later, Aust said, Cho stopped talking to him entirely. Aust would sometimes enter the room and find Cho sitting at his desk, staring into nothingness.

“He was always really, really quiet and kind of weird, keeping to himself all the time,” said Aust, a 19-year-old sophomore, who, though finding Cho strange, had not thought him menacing.

Yet there were signs that Cho's behavior was more than just bizarre.

Lucinda Roy, who taught Cho in a poetry workshop in the fall of 2005, said that in October of that year he submitted a piece of writing that was so disturbing that she contacted the campus police, counseling services, student affairs and officials in her department. She described the writing as a “veiled threat rather than something explicit.”

University officials said he could be excused from the class unless she wanted to tutor him individually, which she agreed to do three times from October to December 2005. During those sessions, she said in an interview, he always wore sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled low.

“He seemed to be crying behind his sunglasses,” she said.

Roy said she had been so nervous about taking him on as an individual student that she worked out a code with her assistant: If she mentioned the name of a dead professor, her assistant would know it was time to call security.

In another writing class, Cho submitted two profoundly violent and profane plays. Ian MacFarlane, a classmate who now works for America Online, posted the plays on the company's Web site Tuesday, saying they had horrified the rest of the students.

“When we read Cho's plays, it was like something out of a nightmare,” MacFarlane wrote. “The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn't have even thought of.”

As a result of them, MacFarlane added, “we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter.”

In one play, called “Richard McBeef,” Cho wrote of a teenage boy who accuses his stepfather of murdering the boy's father and of trying to molest the boy himself.

“I hate him,” the boy says of the stepfather in a copy of the play on the Web site. “Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die.”

Though the level of anger was clear to those who knew Cho, there remains no indication of the precise motive for Monday's events.

“What was this kid thinking about? There are no indications,” said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

There were just the snippets of a lonely young life: prescription medicines, ominous words and two newly bought handguns, the first of which was purchased on March 13.

Cho was a 23-year-old senior, skinny and boyish-looking, his hair cut in a short, military-style fashion. He was a native of South Korea who grew up in Centreville, Va., a suburb of Washington, where his family owns a dry-cleaning business. He moved with his family to the United States at age 8, in 1992, according to federal immigration authorities, and was a legal permanent resident, not a citizen.

In the suite in Harper Hall where he lived with five other students, he was known as a loner, almost a stranger, amid a student body of 26,000. He ate his meals alone in a dining hall. Karan Grewal, 21, another student in the suite of rooms where he lived, recalled that when a candidate for student council visited the suite this year to pass out candy and ask for votes, Cho refused even to make eye contact.

On Tuesday afternoon, investigators were examining a note Cho had left behind in his dorm room, a rambling and bitter list of the moral laxity he found among what he considered the more privileged students on campus.

Cho went to bed early by college standards, about 9 p.m. He often rose early, but in recent weeks he had been rising even earlier, frequently before dawn, said Aust. Such was the case Monday.

Cho awoke before 5 a.m., then sat down to work on his computer and awakened his roommate in the process. Grewal, who shares a room in the same suite, saw Cho in the bathroom shortly after 5 a.m.

As usual, Cho did not say anything to Grewal. No good morning, no hello, Grewal said. Cho stood in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, wetting his contact lenses and applying a moisturizer. He also took a prescription medicine, though neither Aust nor Grewal knew what the medication was for. Prescription medications said to be related to the treatment of psychological problems were found among his effects, officials said.

Sources: Virginia Tech gunman left note. ‘Horrible coincidence’ of two shooters
Hartford Couranr
By Aamer Madhani, Tribune national correspondent
4:54 PM EDT, April 17, 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- The suspected gunman in the Virginia Tech shooting rampage, Cho Seung-Hui, was a troubled 23-year-old senior from South Korea who investigators believe left an invective-filled note in his dorm room, sources say.

The note included a rambling list of grievances, according to sources. They said Cho also died with the words "Ismail Ax" in red ink on one of his arms.

Cho had shown recent signs of violent, aberrant behavior, according to an investigative source, including setting a fire in a dorm room and allegedly stalking some women.

A note believed to have been written by Cho was found in his dorm room that railed against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on campus.

Cho was an English major whose creative writing was so disturbing that he was referred to the school's counseling service, the Associated Press reported.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not personally know the gunman. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."

She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was.

Cho, from Centreville, Va., a rapidly growing suburb of Washington, D.C., came to the United States in 1992, an investigative source said. He was a legal permanent resident. His family runs a dry cleaning business and he has a sister who attended Princeton University, according to the source.

Investigators believe Cho at some point had been taking medication for depression. They are examining Cho's computer for more evidence. The gunman's family lived in an off-white, two-story town house in Centreville.

"He was very quiet, always by himself," neighbor Abdul Shash said of the gunman. Shash said the gunman spent a lot of his free time playing basketball, and wouldn't respond if someone greeted him. He described the family as quiet.

Marshall Main, who lives across the street, said the family had lived in the townhouse for several years.

According to court records, Virginia Tech Police issued a speeding ticket to Cho on April 7 for going 44 mph in a 25 mph zone, and he had a court date set for May 23.

Cho was found among the 31 dead found in an engineering hall. Police said the victims laid over four classrooms and a stairwell.

"He was a loner," said Larry Hincker, a university spokesman, who added that investigators are having some difficulty unearthing information about him.

A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced, said Cho was carrying a backpack that contained receipts for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol. Ballistics tests by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms showed that one gun was used in Monday's two separate campus attacks that were two hours apart.

As a permanent legal resident of the United States, Cho was eligible to buy a handgun unless he had been convicted of any felony criminal charges, a federal immigration official said.

Police said Cho killed 30 people in a Virginia Tech engineering building Monday morning and then killed himself. Another two students were shot to death two hours earlier in a dorm room on the opposite side of the university's sprawling 2,600-acre campus, bringing the day's death toll to 33.

Students at Harper Hall, the campus dormitory where Cho lived, said they had little interaction with him and no insight into what might have motivated the attack. Officials said the same gun was used in the attack in the dorm room and the larger-scale classroom killings.

"At this time, the evidence does not conclusively identify Cho as the gunman at both locations," said Col. W. Steven Flaherty, superintendent of Virginia State Police.

All classes at Virginia Tech will be closed for the remainder of the week, said school President Charles Steger.

'Horrible coincidence' of two gunmen

Fairfax County, Va., police investigators said today that Cho was a 2003 graduate of the same high school attended by an 18-year-old who went on a shooting rampage last year at a Virginia police station, killing two officers.

Michael Kennedy, armed with an AK-47, fired more than 70 rounds in the parking lot of the Sully District police station on May 8, killing Det. Vicky Armel and Master Police Officer Michael Garbarino. Kennedy was shot to death by police.

Cho and Kennedy lived in Centreville and graduated from Westfield High School, said Officer Courtney Thibault of the Fairfax County Police Department. She said Cho graduated four years ahead of Kennedy.

Once Cho's identify was released by police in Blacksburg, Thibault said Fairfax County police launched an investigation to determine if there was any connection between the two shooters. She said they found nothing tying the two young men together.

"It's just a horrible coincidence," she said. "It's hard to believe."

Kennedy's father, Brian Kennedy, was charged earlier this month with helping his son obtain the AK-47 used in the rampage. Federal prosecutors claim he was illegally in possession of a small arsenal of weapons, including rifles, shotguns, handguns and more than 2,500 rounds of ammunition.

Campus holds convocation

The new details were revealed as the university underwent a day of mourning.

Thousands of people gathered in the basketball arena, and when it filled up, thousands more filed into the football stadium, for a memorial service for the victims. President Bush and the first lady attended.

"Laura and I have come to Blacksburg today with hearts full of sorrow," he said in six-minute remarks. "This is a day of mourning for the Virginia Tech community and it is a day of sadness for our entire nation.

Steger received a 30-second standing ovation, despite bitter complaints from parents and students that the university should have locked down the campus immediately after the first burst of gunfire. Steger expressed hope that "we will awaken from this horrible nightmare."

Many students showed up for the memorial service hours ahead of time, some in tears or carrying flowers. There was already an overflow crowd at the arena by early afternoon, and many people arriving were turned away.

Some victims' names released

Among the dead was a professor, Liviu Librescu. Students who were in Librescu's engineering class at Norris Hall told the Tribune late Monday that the professor tried to protect the students in his class when they realized a gunmen was loose in the building.

Alec Calhoun was in Librescu's solid mechanics engineering class when gunfire erupted in the room next door. He said Librescu, went to the door and pushed himself against it in case the shooter tried to come in.

Librescu, an Israeli, was born in Romania and was known internationally for his research in aeronautical engineering.

Also killed were:

- Ross Abdallah Alameddine, 20, of Saugus, Mass., according to his mother, Lynnette Alameddine.

- Christopher James Bishop, 35, according to Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany, where he helped run an exchange program.

- Ryan Clark, 22, of Martinez, Ga., biology and English major, according to Columbia County Coroner Vernon Collins.

- Jocelyn Couture-Nowak, a French instructor, according to her husband, Jerzy Nowak, the head of the horticulture department at Virginia Tech.

- Daniel Perez Cueva, 21, killed in his French class, according to his mother, Betty Cueva, of Peru.

- Kevin Granata, age unknown, engineering science and mechanics professor, according to Ishwar K. Puri, the head of the engineering science and mechanics department.

- Caitlin Hammaren, 19, of Westtown, N.Y., a sophomore majoring in international studies and French, according to Minisink Valley, N.Y., school officials who spoke with Hammaren's family.

- Jeremy Herbstritt, 27, of Bellefonte, Pa., according to Penn State University, his alma mater and his father's employer.

- Emily Jane Hilscher, a 19-year-old freshman from Woodville, according to Rappahannock County Administrator John W. McCarthy, a family friend.

- Jarrett L. Lane, 22, of Narrows, Va., according to Riffe's Funeral Service Inc. in Narrows, Va.

- Matthew J. La Porte, 20, a freshman from Dumont, N.J., according to Dumont Police Chief Brian Venezio.

- G.V. Loganathan, 51, civil and environmental engineering professor, according to his brother G.V. Palanivel.

- Daniel O'Neil, 22, according to close friend Steve Craveiro and according to Eric Cardenas of Connecticut College, where O'Neil's father, Bill, is director of major gifts.

- Juan Ramon Ortiz, a 26-year-old graduate student in engineering from Bayamon, Puerto Rico, according to his wife, Liselle Vega Cortes.

- Mary Karen Read, 19, of Annandale, Va. according to her aunt, Karen Kuppinger, of Rochester, N.Y.

- Reema J. Samaha, 18, a freshman from Centreville, Va., according to her family.

Tribune staff reporters E.A. Torriero and Rex W. Huppke, the Tribune's Washington bureau and the Associated Press contributed.

Va. Tech Gunman Writings Raised Concerns
Hartford Courant
By ADAM GELLER, AP National Writer
4:41 PM EDT, April 17, 2007

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- The gunman suspected of carrying out the Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead was described Tuesday as a sullen loner whose creative writing in English class was so disturbing that he was referred to the school's counseling service.

News reports also said that he may have been taking medication for depression, that he was becoming increasingly violent and erratic, and that he left a note in his dorm in which he railed against "rich kids," "debauchery" and "deceitful charlatans" on campus.

Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old senior majoring in English, arrived in the United States as boy from South Korea in 1992 and was raised in suburban Washington, D.C., officials said. He was living on campus in a different dorm from the one where Monday's bloodbath began. Police and university officials offered no clues as to exactly what set him off on the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history.

"He was a loner, and we're having difficulty finding information about him," school spokesman Larry Hincker said.

On Tuesday afternoon, thousands of people gathered in the basketball arena, and when it filled up, thousands more filed into the football stadium, for a memorial service for the victims. President Bush and the first lady attended. Virginia Tech President Charles Steger received a 30-second standing ovation, despite bitter complaints from parents and students that the university should have locked down the campus immediately after the first burst of gunfire. Steger expressed hope that "we will awaken from this horrible nightmare."

"As you draw closer to your families in the coming days, I ask you to reach out to those who ache for sons and daughters who are never coming home," Bush said.

A vast portrait of the victims began to emerge, among them: Christopher James Bishop, 35, who taught German at Virginia Tech and helped oversee an exchange program with a German university; Ryan "Stack" Clark, a 22-year-old student from Martinez, Ga., who was in the marching band and was working toward degrees in biology and English; Emily Jane Hilscher, a 19-year-old freshman from Woodville, Va., who was majoring in animal and poultry sciences and, naturally, loved animals; and Liviu Librescu, an Israeli engineering and math lecturer who was said to have protected his students' lives by blocking the doorway of his classroom from the approaching gunman.

Meanwhile, a chilling portrait of the gunman as a misfit began to emerge.

Professor Carolyn Rude, chairwoman of the university's English department, said she did not know Cho. But she said she spoke with Lucinda Roy, the department's director of creative writing, who had Cho in one of her classes and described him as "troubled."

"There was some concern about him," Rude said. "Sometimes, in creative writing, people reveal things and you never know if it's creative or if they're describing things, if they're imagining things or just how real it might be. But we're all alert to not ignore things like this."

She said Cho was referred to the counseling service, but she said she did not know when, or what the outcome was. Rude refused to release any of his writings or his grades, citing privacy laws. The Chicago Tribune reported on its Web site that he left a note in his dorm room that included a rambling list of grievances. Citing unidentified sources, the Tribune said he had recently shown troubling signs, including setting a fire in a dorm room and stalking some women.

ABC, citing law enforcement sources, reported that the note, several pages long, explains Cho's actions and says, "You caused me to do this."

Investigators believe Cho at some point had been taking medication for depression, the Tribune reported. Classmates said that on the first day of an introduction to British literature class last year, the 30 or so English students went around and introduced themselves. When it was Cho's turn, he didn't speak.

The professor looked at the sign-in sheet and, where everyone else had written their names, Cho had written a question mark. "Is your name, `Question mark?'" classmate Julie Poole recalled the professor asking. The young man offered little response.

Cho spent much of that class sitting in the back of the room, wearing a hat and seldom participating. In a small department, Cho distinguished himself for being anonymous. "He didn't reach out to anyone. He never talked," Poole said.

"We just really knew him as the question mark kid," Poole said.

The rampage consisted of two attacks, more than two hours apart -- first at a dormitory, where two people were killed, then inside a classroom building, where 31 people, including Cho, died after being locked inside, Virginia State Police said. Cho committed suicide; two handguns -- a 9 mm and a .22-caliber -- were found in the classroom building.

One law enforcement official said Cho's backpack contained a receipt for a March purchase of a Glock 9 mm pistol. Cho held a green card, meaning he was a legal, permanent resident, federal officials said. That meant he was eligible to buy a handgun unless he had been convicted of a felony.

Roanoke Firearms owner John Markell said his shop sold the Glock and a box of practice ammo to Cho 36 days ago for $571.

"He was a nice, clean-cut college kid. We won't sell a gun if we have any idea at all that a purchase is suspicious," Markell said. Markell said it is not unusual for college kids to make purchases at his shop as long as they are old enough.

"To find out the gun came from my shop is just terrible," Markell said.

Investigators stopped short of saying Cho carried out both attacks. But ballistics tests show one gun was used in both, Virginia State Police said.

And two law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information had not been announced, said Cho's fingerprints were found on both guns. The serial numbers on the two weapons had been filed off, the officials said.

Col. Steve Flaherty, superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said it was reasonable to assume that Cho was the shooter in both attacks but that the link was not yet definitive. "There's no evidence of any accomplice at either event, but we're exploring the possibility," he said.

Officials said Cho graduated from Westfield High School in Chantilly, Va., in 2003. His family lived in an off-white, two-story townhouse in Centreville, Va.

Two of those killed in the shooting rampage, Reema Samaha and Erin Peterson, graduated from Westfield High in 2006, school officials said. But there was no immediate word from authorities on whether Cho knew the two young women and singled them out.

"He was very quiet, always by himself," neighbor Abdul Shash said. Shash said Cho spent a lot of his free time playing basketball and would not respond if someone greeted him. He described the family as quiet.

South Korea expressed its condolences, and said it hoped that the tragedy would not "stir up racial prejudice or confrontation." "We are in shock beyond description," said Cho Byung-se, a Foreign Ministry official handling North American affairs.

Classes were canceled for the rest of the week. Norris Hall, the classroom building, will be closed for the rest of the semester. Many students were leaving town quickly, lugging pillows, sleeping bags and backpacks down the sidewalks.

Jessie Ferguson, 19, a freshman from Arlington, left Newman Hall and headed for her car with tears streaming down her red cheeks.

"I'm still kind of shaky," she said. "I had to pump myself up just to kind of come out of the building. I was going to come out, but it took a little bit of 'OK, it's going to be all right. There's lots of cops around.'"

Although she wanted to be with friends, she wanted her family more. "I just don't want to be on campus," she said.

Until Monday, the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history was in Killeen, Texas, in 1991, when George Hennard plowed his pickup truck into a Luby's Cafeteria and shot 23 people to death, then himself.

Previously, the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history was a rampage that took place in 1966 at the University of Texas at Austin, where Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower and opened fire with a rifle from the 28th-floor observation deck. He killed 16 people before he was shot to death by police.

Mall shooter's suicide note: Now I'll be famous
Dec. 6, 2007

OMAHA, Nebraska (CNN) -- A 19-year-old gunman who police said killed eight people and then himself at a Nebraska mall left a suicide note predicting the shootings would make him famous, his landlord said.

Five other people were injured, and two of them were in critical condition, hospital officials said.

The shootings inside the Von Maur department store at the popular Westroads Mall in Omaha sent panicked holiday shoppers fleeing for cover.

"It was just so loud, and then it was silence," said witness Jennifer Kramer, who hid behind a clothing rack. "I was scared to death he'd be walking around looking for someone else."

Police identified the gunman as Robert A. Hawkins of Bellvue, Nebraska.

Chief Thomas Warren of the Omaha Police Department called the shooting "premeditated," but said it "appears to be very random and without provocation."

Debora Maruca Kovac, Hawkins' landlord, said she found the suicide note after getting a phone call from Hawkins about 1 p.m., just minutes before the shootings. Video Watch landlord describe phone call from shooter »

"He basically said how sorry he was for everything," Maruca Kovac said of the note. "He didn't want to be a burden to people and that he was a piece of s--- all of his life and that now he'd be famous."

She said Hawkins was a friend of her sons and "reminded me of a lost puppy that nobody wanted." He came to live with her about a year and a half ago, telling her he could not stay with his own family because of "some issues with his stepmother."

She described Hawkins as well-behaved, although "he had a lot of emotional problems, obviously."

Maruca Kovac told the Omaha World-Herald that Hawkins showed her an SKS semiautomatic Russian military rifle the night before the rampage, but she wasn't alarmed.

The shootings began about 1:42 p.m. (2:42 p.m. ET).

Seven people were found dead at the scene by officers who arrived six minutes later; two others, a male and a female, died after being transported to Creighton University Medical Center, said Fire Chief Robert Dahlquist.

A Creighton spokeswoman said a second female underwent surgery and was in critical condition Wednesday afternoon.

Three other people were taken to the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

One, a 61-year-old man who sustained a chest wound after being shot in the armpit, had surgery and remained in critical condition in the intensive care unit Wednesday night, said hospital spokeswoman Maggie O'Brien.

The other two -- a 34-year-old man who was shot in the arm, and a 55-year-old man who fell and struck a clothing rack as he was trying to escape -- were treated and released, she said.

Warren said Hawkins was armed with an SKS assault rifle. His body, and the weapon, were found on the store's third floor, he said.

Maruca Kovac told CNN that Hawkins left the house Wednesday about 11 a.m., and called the house about two hours later, sounding upset.

"He just said he wanted to thank me for everything I'd done for him ... and he was sorry," Maruca Kovac said. He told her he had gotten fired from his job at a McDonald's restaurant, she said.

"I said, 'Come home and we'll talk about it,' " she recounted. "He said, 'It's too late.' He said he'd left a note explaining everything."

Kramer told CNN she heard at least 25 shots. Video Watch witnesses describe the ordeal »

"I looked at my mom and said, 'We need to get out of here. Those are gunshots,' " Kramer said. "I just grabbed my mom and we ran to the back of the men's department and hid in some pants racks."

"He just kept firing," she said. She said she called 911 on her cell phone, whispering into it out of fear of being heard. A dispatcher told her other calls had been received and help was on the way, but she said it seemed to take "a long time" for them to arrive.

She said as she was being escorted out by police, she saw a man lying injured by the escalator where she had been previously.

Mall employee Charissa Tatoon said a man by an escalator near her was heard saying he was calling 911. See a map of where the shooting took place »

"Immediately after that, the shooter shot down from the third floor and shot him on the second floor," she said.

"All of us were slightly confused because we didn't know what it was," Tatoon said. "Immediately after that, there was a series of maybe 20 to 25 more shots up on the third floor."

Warren, the police chief, said the victims included five females and three males, not including Hawkins. The shooting appeared to be contained in the Von Maur store, he said.

"We believe there was one shooter, and one shooter only," he said. Video Watch police talk about the shooting »

Maruca Kovac said Hawkins' mental state seemed to be improving but he had been through a rough patch recently.

"When he first came to live with us, he was in the fetal position and chewed his fingernails all the time," she said. But she said she thought he was improving, as he had gotten a job, a haircut and a girlfriend.

However, she said Hawkins and his girlfriend had broken up in the last couple of weeks, and he had taken it hard. Then he got fired from McDonald's on Wednesday.

She said late Wednesday that authorities were searching her house for evidence.

"My kids are devastated," she said. "We're all in shock."

A school district spokeswoman said he attended Papillion-La Vista High School until he withdrew in March 2006. The World-Herald said he later earned his GED.

President Bush had visited Omaha on Wednesday before the shooting.

"The president is deeply saddened by the shootings in Omaha," White House press secretary Dana Perino said. "His thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families."

The shooting was at least the fourth at a mall or shopping center so far this year, following incidents in Salt Lake City, Utah; Kansas City, Missouri; and Douglasville, Georgia.

Gun rampage US teen 'wanted fame'
I-BBC
6 Dec 2007

A teenager who shot dead eight people in a US shopping centre before killing himself wrote in a suicide note that he wanted to be famous.
Robert Hawkins, 19, from Bellevue, Nebraska, opened fire at the Westroads Mall in Omaha on Wednesday.

A woman who took him in after he left home said he left a note saying he was sorry for everything and did not want to be a burden to anybody.

Police have confirmed the existence of the note, but not its contents.

Hawkins struck as the centre was crowded with Christmas shoppers, and witnesses spoke of people screaming and scrambling to find safe shelter.

Five people were wounded, two of them critically.

In a statement, President George W Bush - who visited Omaha earlier in the day for a fundraiser - said he was "deeply saddened" by the shootings.

Hiding

The shooting took place inside the upmarket Von Maur department store at the Westroads Mall.

Police were called at about 1400 local time (2000 GMT), after receiving a call from inside, said Sgt Teresa Negron.

Witnesses said the gunman fired down on shoppers from a balcony on the third floor of the Von Maur store, using what police said was an SKS rifle to shoot at random.

By the time police arrived at the scene six minutes later, the shooting was over, she said.

Jeff Schaffart was shot in the arm as he spent his lunch break shopping with his wife, Reuters news agency reported. He said he hid in a Von Maur women's bathroom, using his tie as a tourniquet to slow the bleeding.

"I was obviously very fortunate. Not a lot of people were so fortunate today," said Mr Schaffart.

Chuck Wright was working at the mall when he heard a "pop pop" sound.

"A lady that I work with on the same floor, she happened to walk over to the [central atrium] and she was standing there and a gentleman walked up, and the shooter reached over the top on the third floor and shot the guy in the head."

Another woman also described seeing the gunman on the attack.

"I went around and then I saw the guy in the children's department," she said.

"Big tall guy, real tall and he just stood there with his arm like this, his hand straight up in the air, shooting. And then I turned and ran."

Witnesses spoke of trying to hide as they waited for police

Seven people were found dead at the scene, and another two died after being taken to a local hospital.

In an e-mail to the BBC, one Omaha resident, called Julie, said that she had been in a restaurant next door to Von Maur department store when the shooting began.

"Someone came in to the restaurant and advised that someone was shooting in the mall and to get out. Everyone started to run out of the small doors in Panera [the restaurant], so we were able to get out very quickly.

"I heard screaming and loud shots being fired somewhere close by. I got out of the mall before the local police department arrived."

'Lost puppy'

Hawkins is said to have suffered from depression in the past, and recently lost his job at McDonald's and broke up with his girlfriend.

He was living with a friend's family in Bellevue, an Omaha suburb.

His friend's mother, Debora Maruca Kovac, told the Associated Press news agency that when he first came to live with them, "he was introverted, a troubled young man who was like a lost pound puppy that nobody wanted".

She said he phoned her about 1300 on Wednesday, telling her that he had left a note for her in his bedroom. She tried to get him to explain.

"He said, 'It's too late'," and then hung up, she told CNN.

In the note, she said, Hawkins had written that "he was sorry for everything, that he didn't want to be a burden to anybody, he loved his family, he loved all of his friends".

The note went on to say he wanted to be famous, she said.

Omaha Police Chief Thomas Warren said the shooting appeared to be "very random and without provocation".

"We do have a [suicide] note. I can't describe the contents of that note, but it does appear this incident was premeditated," he added.

The incident is the latest in a series of mass shootings in the US, which have reignited the debate in the US about gun ownership.

The Supreme Court will consider Americans' right to bear arms early next year for the first time in nearly 70 years.

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

US MASS SHOOTINGS IN 2007
Oct: Asa H Coon, 14, shoots four people, injuring them, at his school in Cleveland, Ohio, before killing himself.
April: Cho Seung-hui , 23, shoots 32 people dead on campus of Virginia Tech university, Virginia, then kills himself.
Feb: Sulejman Talovic, 18, shoots dead five people and injures four at a mall in Salt Lake City, Utah, before being killed by police.

Full story with pictures here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7130504.stm

The Red and the Black
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2-15-08)

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) is a novel by Stendhal, published in 1830. The title has been translated into English variously as Scarlet and Black, Red and Black, and The Red and the Black. It is set in 1830, and relates a young man's attempts to rise above his plebeian birth through a combination of talent, hard work, deception and hypocrisy, only to find himself betrayed by his own passions.

Like Stendhal's later novel The Charterhouse of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme), Le Rouge et le Noir is a Bildungsroman. The protagonist, Julien Sorel, is a driven and intelligent man, but equally fails to understand much about the ways of the world he sets out to conquer. He harbours many romantic illusions, and becomes little more than a pawn in the political machinations of the influential and ruthless people who surround him. Stendhal uses his flawed hero to satirize French society of the time, particularly the hypocrisy and materialism of its aristocracy and the Roman Catholic Church, and to foretell a radical change in French society that will remove both of those forces from their positions of power.

The most common and most likely explanation of the title is that red and black are the contrasting colors of the army uniform of the times and of the robes of priests, respectively. Julien Sorel observes early on in the novel that, under the Bourbon restoration it is impossible for a man of his class to distinguish himself in the army (as he might have done under Napoleon); now, only a career in the Church offers social advancement and glory. Alternative explanations are possible, however: for example, red might stand for love and black for death and mourning; or the colours might refer to those of a roulette wheel, and may indicate the unexpected changes in the hero's career.

The novel ends with Stendhal's standard closing quote, "To the Happy Few." This is often interpreted as a dedication to the few who could understand his writing, or a sardonic reference to the happy few who are born into prosperity (the latter interpretation is supported by the likely source of the quotation, Canto 11 of Byron's Don Juan, a frequent reference in the novel, which refers to 'the thousand happy few' who enjoy high society)...

Prof. charged in 3 fatal shootings on Ala. campus
YAHOO
By KRISTIN M. HALL, Associated Press Writer
Feb. 13, 2010

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – A biology professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who authorities say opened fire at a faculty meeting is facing a murder charge after the shooting spree that left three dead and three wounded.

Amy Bishop, 42, was charged Friday night with one count of capital murder, which means she could face the death penalty if convicted. Three of Bishop's fellow biology professors were killed and three other university employees were wounded. No students were harmed in the shooting, which happened in a community known for its space and technology industries.

The husband of one of the victims said he was told those at the meeting were discussing tenure for Bishop, who had been an assistant professor since 2003. Authorities have not discussed a motive.

UAH student Andrew Cole was in Bishop's anatomy class Friday morning and said she seemed perfectly normal.

"She's understanding, and was concerned about students," he said. "I would have never thought it was her."

Bishop, a neurobiologist who studied at Harvard University, was taken Friday night in handcuffs from a police precinct to the county jail and could be heard saying, "It didn't happen. There's no way. ... They are still alive."

Police said they were also interviewing a man as "a person of interest."

University spokesman Ray Garner said the three killed were Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson.

Three others were wounded, two critically, in the gunfire, which Davis' husband, Sammie Lee Davis, said occurred at a meeting over a tenure issue. The wounded were identified as department members Luis Cruz-Vera, who was listed in fair condition, and Joseph Leahy, in critical condition in intensive care, and staffer Stephanie Monticello, also in critical condition in intensive care.

Sammie Lee Davis said his wife was a researcher who had tenure at the university.

In a brief phone interview, he said he was told his wife was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of another faculty member who got angry and started shooting. He said his wife had mentioned the suspect before, describing the woman as "not being able to deal with reality" and "not as good as she thought she was."

Bishop and her husband placed third in a statewide university business plan competition in July 2007, presenting a portable cell incubator they had invented. They won $25,000 to help start a company to market the device.

Biology major Julia Hollis was among the students who gathered to support each other and try to make sense of the news.

"When someone told me it was a staff person and it was faculty I was in complete denial," said Hollis, 23, who had taken classes with two of the instructors who were killed. "It took me a bit for it to sink in."

Students offered varying assessments of Bishop.

Andrea Bennett, a sophomore majoring in nursing, described Bishop as being "very weird" and "a really big nerd."

"She's well-known on campus, but I wouldn't say she's a good teacher. I've heard a lot of complaints," Bennett said. "She's a genius, but she really just can't explain things."

Bennett, an athlete at UAH, said her coach told her team Bishop had been denied tenure and that may have led to the shooting.

Amanda Tucker, a junior nursing major from Alabaster, Ala., had Bishop for anatomy class about a year ago. Tucker said a group of students complained to a dean about Bishop's performance in the classroom.

"When it came down to tests, and people asked her what was the best way to study, she'd just tell you, `Read the book.' When the test came, there were just ridiculous questions. No one even knew what she was asking," said Tucker.

But Nick Lawton, 25, described Bishop as funny and accommodating with students.

"She lectured from the textbook, mostly stuck to the subject matter at hand," Nick Lawton said. "She seemed like a nice enough professor."

Sophomore Erin Johnson told The Huntsville Times a biology faculty meeting was under way when she heard screams coming from a conference room.

University police secured the building and students were cleared from it. There was still a heavy police presence on campus Friday night, with police tape cordoning off the main entrance to the university.

The Huntsville campus has about 7,500 students in northern Alabama, not far from the Tennessee line. The university is known for its scientific and engineering programs and often works closely with NASA.

The space agency has a research center on the school's campus, where many scientists and engineers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center perform Earth and space science research and development.

The university will remain closed next week and all athletic events were canceled to give students and staff time to grieve. Counselors were available to speak with students.

It's the second shooting in a week on an area campus. On Feb. 5, a 14-year-old student was killed in a middle school hallway in nearby Madison, allegedly by a fellow student.

Mass shootings are rarely carried out by women, said Dr. Park Dietz, who is president of Threat Assessment Group Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based violence prevention firm.

A notable exception was a 1985 rampage at a Springfield, Pa., mall in which three people were killed. In June 1986, Sylvia Seegrist was deemed guilty but mentally ill on three counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder in the shooting spree.

Dietz, who interviewed Seegrist after her arrest, said it was possible the suspect in Friday's shooting had a long-standing grudge against colleagues or superiors and felt complaints had not been dealt with fairly.

Gregg McCrary, a retired FBI agent and private criminal profiler based in Fredericksburg, Va., said there is no typical outline of a mass shooter but noted they often share a sense of paranoia, depression or a feeling that they are not appreciated.