Holy Family School

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. – Teachers who were fired and ultimately rehired in a dispute that focused national debate over education reform have returned to their Rhode Island classrooms amid hopes that changes they agreed to will help improve student performance at their persistently troubled high school.

The changes at Central Falls High School — where just 7 percent of 11th graders tested last year were proficient in math — include a longer school day, more rigorous teacher evaluations and flexible schedules to provide more classes for struggling students. Teachers were also required to participate in more days of professional development.

Education Commissioner Deborah Gist acknowledged the obstacles facing students in Rhode Island’s smallest and poorest city.

“They’re movable,” Gist said. “We can push past them, we can climb over them, we can climb under them.”

Before school started on Wednesday, juniors attended a math “boot camp” to help them prepare for October’s tests and school leaders visited the homes of incoming freshmen. The administration is also reaching out to recent dropouts and others who have been out of school, said Superintendent Fran Gallo.

“We want children back, and we’ll find paths for them, multiple pathways, whatever it might take to work for our students, we’re committed to,” Gallo said. “I think that kind of public commitment has never been clearly defined, clearly hasn’t been put out there in a transparent way.”

Several students this week said the mass firings were unnecessary and that teachers were unfairly scapegoated for problems beyond their control. Central Falls, a cramped city just a square mile in size, has budget problems so severe that this summer it was placed under the supervision of a state-appointed receiver.

More children live in poverty in Central Falls than anywhere else in Rhode Island. Just under half of the city’s residents identify as Hispanic, and many say they do not speak English at home.

“Some kids want to come here and actually go to school and work and everything,” said junior Angela Collazo, 16. “But some kids don’t.” She added that students would have benefited more from extra tutoring than having new teachers.

The firings last February came after the state identified the high school as one of Rhode Island’s worst and ordered improvements. When reforms talks between Gallo and the teachers’ union broke down, the entire staff was issued termination notices — one of four reform options outlined in federal guidelines.

Under that model, no more than half the teachers could be rehired.

Teachers and students protested the firings, though the plan was applauded by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. President Barack Obama, in a March education speech, singled out Central Falls as an example of accountability for poor performance.

“If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show any sign of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,” Obama said. “And that’s what happened in Rhode Island last week.”

The teachers got their jobs back in May after agreeing to similar terms they had previously resisted.

There’s plenty of work to be done, both to raise performance and soothe lingering bruised feelings.

Though the union and administration struck a unified tone in announcing the new agreement, many teachers remain apprehensive and need to rebuild trust lost during the acrimonious dispute, said Jane Sessums, president of the local teachers’ union. Fewer than 10 decided not to return.

“Partly it’s the way they were treated and everything that happened last year,” Sessums said of the overall mood of the teachers. “Their job security, that trust factor, that’s really important in any teacher-administrator relationship. I don’t know if they felt as if there was a lot of collaborating going forward up to this point.”

Susan Vollucci, a visual arts teacher, said she is hopeful the changes would lead to progress, but said time will tell.

“If we could keep the kids for four years, from 9th grade to 12th grade, they would all pass the test. We don’t,” Vollucci said. “They come here, then they go to the Dominican Republic, they go to Woonsocket, they go to Providence, and they bounce around, so we can never gather the skills on a consistent year-to-year basis.”

Richard Kinslow, an English teacher at Central Falls for 21 years, said the entire episode was unsettling. He said he felt insulted and embarrassed by the negative attention, lampooned in the media and fodder for critical blogs.

But he proudly shows off a recent postcard from a student who graduated a decade ago as a reminder of the good work he believes he does.

“It was hurtful,” Kinslow said, “but it’s time to move on.”

A school district in South Hadley, Massachusetts, is hoping a specialized software application will help stop tragedies like the one that befell Phoebe Prince, an Irish-born teen who committed suicide in January after an alleged bullying campaign by fellow students.

In the wake of her death, the Massachusetts state legislature passed a law mandating that schools create formal anti-bullying plans, as well as provide an anonymous way of reporting bullying incidents.

The law inspired South Hadley native Edward Wall to develop a software application that allows observers of suspected bullying to make online reports to school administrators, anonymously if desired.

“It seemed like something like this was needed,” said Wall, who is himself a graduate of the high school. His company, Earshot Technologies, is donating the software to the school but he hopes to market it to others.

When a report of bullying, victimization or suspected illegal activity is made, the system alerts school administrators by a text message and e-mail. If the administrator deems the report valid, it can be “activated” for a fixed time frame, such as one week.

Active reports show up on dashboards provided to other lower-level officials, such as teachers or coaches, who have significant interactions with the student in question. These officials must closely observe the student and submit a report once the observation period ends. Those reports are included in a master file along with the original complaint.

The system is getting some finishing touches and should be operational at the high school by October, said principal Dan Smith.

At a minimum, all the parties involved will be called in for an initial discussion of the report, Smith said.

“There will never be a complaint that comes in where we don’t do at least that much,” he said. That initial meeting will determine whether a full investigation is warranted.

After some discussions, the school has decided not to allow anonymous reports to be filed online, at least for now, he said. A paper-based anonymous reporting system is in place “to meet the intent of the law,” he said.

School officials are concerned that people in other locations, looking to cause mischief, could obtain the names of students and use the Earshot system to file false reports, he said. “We would end up chasing our tails on things like that.”

Overall, such systems pose challenges for schools along with any benefits, said Eric Goldman, an associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law and director of its High Tech Law Institute.

For one, schools must be prepared to supply the labor power to deal with all reports, or else face potential liabilities if they do not, he said. “If you ask, then you better be prepared to respond.”

But bullying investigations are thorny issues overall, he added. For example, the accused could turn out to be innocent and subsequently claim their civil rights had been violated.

“The decision of the principal to act or not to act is fraught with liability in either direction,” Goldman said.

It remains to be seen how much use the Earshot system will get. The Prince tragedy has seemed to have a chilling effect on would-be bullies at the school, where classes resumed this week, according to Smith.

“We’ve gotten off to a very respectful and proper start,” he said.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris’s e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com

SAN JUAN, Texas – When Ruth Garcia’s twins are born in two months, they’ll have all the rights of U.S. citizens. They and their six brothers and sisters will be able to vote, apply for federal student loans and even run for president.

Garcia is an illegal immigrant who crossed into the country about 14 years ago, and the citizenship granted to her children and millions others like them is at the center of a divisive national debate.

Republicans are pushing for congressional hearings to consider changing the nation’s 14th Amendment to deny such children the automatic citizenship the Constitution guarantees. They say women like Garcia are taking advantage of a constitutional amendment meant to guarantee the rights of freed slaves, and paint a picture of pregnant women rushing across the border to give birth.

A closer examination of the issue shows that the trend is not as dramatic as some immigration opponents have claimed.

Most illegal immigrants are born to parents like Garcia who have made the United States their home for years.

Out of 340,000 babies born to illegal immigrants in the United States in 2008, 85 percent of the parents had been in the country for more than a year, and more than half for at least five years, according to recent study from the Pew Hispanic Center.

And immigration experts say it’s extraordinarily rare for immigrants to come to the U.S. just so they can have babies and get citizenship. In most cases, they come to the U.S. for economic reasons and better hospitals, and end up staying and raising families.

Garcia crossed into the U.S. illegally about 14 years ago, before her children were born, and her husband has since been deported. She earns a living by selling tamales to other immigrants who live in fear of being deported from the slapdash, impoverished colonias that dot the Texas-Mexico border.

“I think that children aren’t at fault for having been born here,” Garcia said. “My children always have lived here. They’ve never gone to another country.”

Under current immigration law, Garcia and others like her don’t get U.S. citizenship even though their children are Americans.

With an estimated 11.1 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, the issue strikes a chord with many voters — people like retired Air Force nurse and pediatric nurse practitioner Susan Struck, 66, of Double Adobe, Ariz.

“People come over … and they have babies with U.S. birth certificates, then they go back over the border with that Social Security number, with that birth certificate,” and have access to public services, she said at a recent event near the border organized by conservative tea party activists.

Several prominent Republican leaders share Struck’s beliefs on the issue. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina has been a vocal advocate for changing the Constitution, and he helped the issue gain momentum heading into the midterm elections.

“Women have traveled from across the world for the purpose of adding a U.S. passport holder to their family, as far away as China, Turkey and as close as Mexico,” said Jon Feere, legal analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for strict immigration laws.

Still, changing the Constitution is highly unlikely, legal scholars say. Measures have been introduced in each two-year congressional session since 2005, but none has made it out of committee. Constitutional changes require approval by two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress, an impossibility now because Democrats have the majority in both houses and most oppose such a measure. Even if that changes after November and legislation is passed, an amendment would still need to be ratified by three-fourths of the states.

To be sure, some pregnant Mexican women do come to the United States. In border cities like Nogales, women have been coming to the U.S. for decades to give birth, although the primary reason is better medical care, Santa Cruz County sheriff Tony Estrada said. Billboards advertising birthing services in Arizona line streets across the border in Nogales, Mexico.

Tucson Medical Center, 115 miles southeast of Phoenix, offers packages designed to provide inclusive care to new mothers. The program draws some residents of the northern Mexican state of Sonora who can afford its upfront costs and already have U.S. visas, spokesman Michael Letson said.

Princeton University demographer Douglas Massey said in 30 years studying Mexican immigration, he’s never interviewed a migrant who said they came to the United States just to get citizenship for their children.

“Mexicans do not come to have babies in the United States,” said Massey, who blames the tightening of the border in the 1990s for cutting off normal migration of men who used to come to work for a year or two and then go home. “They end up having babies in the United States because men can no longer circulate freely back and forth from homes in Mexico to jobs in the United States and husbands and wives quite understandably want to be together.”

More common, he and other experts says, are a families stuck with one child who is legal and others who aren’t — like Beatriz Gomez, a 35-year-old illegal immigrant who came to Phoenix 11 years ago on a now-expired tourist visa from Arriaga in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Her 12-year-old daughter was born in Mexico and is here illegally, but her two youngest children, ages 8 and 5, were born in the U.S. and are citizens.

“It’s sad,” Gomez said of her oldest daughter, who was only 1 when the family came to the United States. “She studies hard, and she won’t be able to go to a university like the other two.”

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Associated Press Writers Amanda Lee Myers in Phoenix, Jonathan J. Cooper in Hereford, Ariz., and Paul J. Weber in San Juan contributed to this report.

SISSETON, S.D. – An 18-year-old high school student stockpiled bomb-making materials in his bedroom and wrote about wanting to blow up his school, target individuals he hated, rape women and “become the world’s most infamous sociopath,” authorities said.

Joseph Thomas Hansen, of Claire City, was arrested Aug. 23 after someone tipped off a police school resource officer that Hansen had talked about an attack, authorities said.

“Thanks to an alert citizen and a school resource officer, they were able to prevent a very serious and potentially dangerous situation,” state Attorney General Marty Jackley said by phone Wednesday.

Hansen pleaded not guilty Tuesday to selling, transporting or possessing an explosive device and possessing substances with the intent to make a destructive device, and is due back in court Sept. 14. If convicted of all charges, he could face up to 25 years in prison, Jackley said.

Hansen remained jailed Wednesday in lieu of $500,000 bond and was unavailable to comment. A man who answered the phone at the family’s home who identified himself as Hansen’s father, Roland Hansen, referred questions to his son’s attorney, Scott Bratland. Bratland did not immediately return phone messages seeking comment.

During a search of Hansen’s room, investigators found a list Hansen wrote of things he wanted to do, including blow up Sisseton High School — where he was set to begin his senior year the day after his arrest — torture and rape women and “become the world’s most infamous sociopath,” according to an affidavit filed Monday.

He listed 39 people he hated and the reasons why, and he researched the 1999 Columbine school massacre in Littleton, Colo., in which two student gunmen killed 12 classmates and a teacher and wounded 26 others before committing suicide, investigators said.

Detectives also found drawings of swastikas, documents outlining two attempts to make napalm, instructional materials on how to make bombs, four guns and a video showing two explosive devices detonating, according to the affidavit.

Two people whose names were redacted in the affidavit told Roberts County Sheriff’s investigators that Hansen told them he “had enough fireworks to blow up Sisseton and that the first day of school would be a short one,” the court documents state.

During an initial interview with police, Hansen said he was fascinated by mass murder, read books on the subject and wanted to know what makes killers tick, authorities said. He also expressed an interest in the Marine Corps, demolitions and becoming a criminal profiler, according to the court documents.

Claire City has only 85 residents and there are only about 2,500 people living in the area around Sisseton, which is in northeast South Dakota, near the state’s borders with North Dakota and Minnesota.

Kirk Snaza, a youth director at the Christian Outreach Center in Sisseton, said he drove a school bus for a while and occasionally picked up Hansen, who he described as a quiet loner.

Amanda Ostby, a 24-year-old hairdresser at Little Shop for Hair in Claire City, said she was shocked by the arrest.

“He was a nice kid, well mannered,” said Ostby. “He was a super nice kid so it’s pretty unbelievable.”

“They are a very, very nice family.”

Sisseton School Superintendent Stephen Schulte said counselors have been made available to students.

“We’re dealing with this the best we can,” he said by phone Wednesday.