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...

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

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.

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.


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.



In the matter of the Virginia Tech disaster...

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. 

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 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)...