Hayden gets his dream present

He has wanted a Nerf LongShot for so long...and now he has it. Pets, beware!

Homeschooling to blame for insanity?

This is from WSJ

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB120042158992891777.html

Scapegoating Home-Schoolers
By JAMES TARANTO
January 15, 2008

Four girls in the District of Columbia were allegedly murdered last year, and a New York Times1 news story suggests the root cause is . . . home schooling? Here's how the report begins:

Ten states and the District of Columbia, where Banita M. Jacks was charged on Thursday with four counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her four daughters, have no regulations regarding home schooling, not even the requirement that families notify the authorities that they are educating their children at home.
The lack of supervision of the home-schooling process, some experts say, may have made it easier last year for Ms. Jacks to withdraw her children from school and the prying eyes of teachers, social workers and other professionals who otherwise might have detected signs of abuse and neglect of the girls.
Instead, the children, ages 5 to 17, slipped through the cracks in multiple systems, including social services, education and law enforcement. Their decomposed bodies were discovered earlier this week by United States marshals serving eviction papers on the troubled family.
The absence of any home-schooling regulations in Washington is largely the result of advocacy and litigation by the Home School Legal Defense Association.
The report goes on to concede that "for sure, the fact that Ms. Jacks's children last attended school in March in no way accounts for their deaths." The home-schooling link looks even more tenuous when you look at the Washington Post2 account of the case. On Sunday, the Post reports, Mayor Adrian Fenty fired six child-welfare workers, saying they "just didn't do their job." It turns out that the girls' absence from school was noted at the time:

The girls were killed sometime in late spring or summer, authorities believe. But they were alive when a school social worker, with growing alarm, tried to get child welfare workers to look in on the family. . . .
"From what I could see, the home did not appear clean," the social worker, Kathy Lopes, said in a call to police April 30. "The children did not appear clean, and it seems that the mother is suffering from some mental illness and she is holding all of the children in the home hostage."
Lopes first visited the Jacks home April 27, after Brittany Jacks, 16, missed 33 days of school and no one answered a phone at the house.
"The parent was home. She wouldn't open the door, but we saw young children inside the house," Lopes said to a hotline worker at the city's Child and Family Services Agency. "Her oldest daughter, who is our student, was at home. She wouldn't let us see her."
The operator took the information and reminded Lopes, who was clearly distraught that she could not talk to Brittany, that Jacks did not have to let her inside the home. . . .
Although a social worker made at least two visits to Jacks's home, in the 4200 block of Sixth Street SE, no one answered the door to the rowhouse either time. Less than three weeks later, Child and Family Services staff members closed the case after receiving an unconfirmed report that the family had moved to Maryland.
The Post also has a timeline3 of Jacks's contacts with various city agencies--five of them in all. It does appear as if Lopes, the school social worker, was the only bureaucrat who took any real interest in the girls' well-being. But this was true even under the district's laissez-faire regime for home schooling, and it's hard to see how the sort of regulations the Times reporter implicitly advocates would have helped.

For the sake of argument, though, let's assume that stricter home-schooling regulations would have some beneficial impact in terms of protecting children from abuse. This would come at the cost of burdening thousands of legitimate home-schooling families, the overwhelming majority of which are not abusive, by intruding into their very homes.

Whether this trade-off would be worth it is a legitimate topic for debate. But it's worth noting that the Times usually has little patience for those who value safety over privacy, as, for example, in the case of wiretapping terrorists. Are home schoolers more of a menace than al Qaeda?

What I fail to see is how homeschooling, or government oversight is to blame. The government knew that the kids were gone, but they couldn’t get into the home because…it is none of their business. The social workers could have received or petitioned for a court order but they didn’t. I don’t like to hear about child abuse either, but homeschooling isn’t to blame.

Flickr: Photos from groesser

http://www.flickr.com/photos/10245563@N07/
This is the Groesser Family photo page. Older photos as Multiply is now our home.

Playground fun

7th Birthday

Entry for October 14, 2007

Found the place where we lived while in the phoenix area.

http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&q=Phoenix&om=1&layer=c&cbll=33.354334,-11...

Cool

Entry for October 03, 2007

I can't believe how incompetent our school district is.

http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/couriernews/news/585069,3_1_EL03_A1U46_S1....

Parents: U46 wasting cash on interim chief

October 3, 2007

BY ERIN CALANDRIELLO Staff Writer

ELGIN -- Some parents in Elgin School District U46 say the district should have saved itself some money by naming one of its own administrators to fill in for Superintendent Connie Neale while she is on medical leave.

Hiring retired school executive Mary Jayne Broncato last week as interim superintendent is a waste of taxpayers' money, they charge.

But according to the district, there was no U46 employee who was second in line for the superintendent's position.

"If the president of the United States falls ill, the vice president steps in for the period of time required. If a pastor at a church falls ill, the assistant pastor steps in," parent Cindy Carvey said at Monday night's school board meeting. "Please explain to me why our assistant superintendent (Lalo Ponce) did not step in when our superintendent announced she was going on disability. Isn't our assistant superintendent familiar with the district?"

Ponce is the district's assistant superintendent of administrative services, dealing with issues ranging from class size and teacher hires to school building information.

District spokesman Tony Sanders, however, said that "there never has been one second in command" in U46.

He pointed to an organizational chart that shows 10 people directly below Neale, but no one administrator serves as just an assistant superintendent.

Besides Sanders and Ponce, those "cabinet" members are Barb Bonner, the district's chief academic officer; Pat Broncato, chief legal officer, who also is Mary Jayne Broncato's son; Deb Dimke, executive director of educational programs; Tom Donausky, executive director of secondary education; Karen Fox, special projects assistant; Jeff King, executive director of operational services; John Prince, chief financial officer; and Tina Radomsky, executive director of elementary education.

Organization questioned

Carvey was joined by several other parents at the meeting who questioned that setup.

"How can this be?" Carvey asked. "What kind of company or organization functions this way?"

Neale's 10 cabinet members in 2006-07 each earned anywhere from $130,386 to $181,419, which includes their pensions, according to U46 documents. A total of $1.4 million was spent on the cabinet alone in 2006-07. However, none of them took over Neale's position.

"Instead, the taxpayers are again being burdened with the wasteful spending of $1,100 a day for a contractor, who coincidentally is related to U46's chief legal officer (Pat Broncato)," Carvey said in reference to Mary Jayne Broncato's contract costs per day.

She could accumulate $132,000 over the course of 120 days, the maximum time she can work under state law because she is a retired state superintendent.

Carvey said she's not impressed by the interim superintendent's résumé.

"I read this individual's qualifications were that she had worked with the district in the past and was familiar with the district. This individual has never been a superintendent of a district anywhere close to the size of U46," Carvey said in reference to Broncato's former position as superintendent of Joliet School District 86.

In 2006, District 86 had population of a little more than 10,000 pupils, according to district data. U46 is the second largest district in the state with more than 40,000 students.

However, after she left District 86, Broncato spent 12 years working in high-level positions within the Illinois State Board of Education, including a stint as interim state superintendent.

U46's total superintendent pay this school year could be more than $550,000: Broncato's potential $132,000 salary for 2007-08 and Neale's $263,000 salary and benefits this year.

With this in mind, Carvey asked, "With the issues that our district faces -- large class sizes, split classes and programs being cut -- why would the board take more money away from our kids by hiring a contractor?"