Cross Country
How Big a Slice of That Pie, Anyway?
After more than 13 years of litigation, New York's highest court ruled in Albany that the state has been shortchanging New York City's 1.1 million schoolchildren and ordered it to increase funding by at least $1.93 billion a year. That was well short of the almost $5 billion sought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which filed the lawsuit in 1993 on behalf of parents and community groups. The Legislature and the governor-elect, Eliot Spitzer, will now have to decide the final amount.
School funding has traditionally been shared between states and localities, but legal challenges in 45 states over the past few years have forced changes. Several states are also wrestling with the question of how much responsibility they have for bridging funding gaps between rich and poor school districts.
A School Bus Tragedy in Alabama
Stunned students at Lee High School in Huntsville, Ala., were in mourning last week after a horrific school bus crash that killed four female students and seriously injured a dozen others. The bus careened roughly 30 feet off the Interstate 565 overpass and landed nose first on the street below, just after being sideswiped by a Toyota Celica. A 17-year-old Lee High student was driving the car; a grand jury will decide if charges of vehicular manslaughter are warranted.
The incident reignited a debate about school bus safety, especially since the bus lacked seat belts. Roughly 23.5 million students travel to school by bus each year; one recent study shows that some 17,000 go to the emergency room for bus-related injuries. "Those injuries are unnecessary," says Alan Ross of the National Coalition for School Bus Safety, which encourages more areas to follow the lead of New York, California, Florida, and New Jersey in requiring belts onboard. Others counter that a low death rate-only 20 students die in bus accidents each year-and design precautions like high, padded seat backs make the benefits of belts marginal.
Shocked, Shocked in the Windy City
Politics in Chicago has never had what you'd call a spotless reputation, a fact not lost on U.S. District Judge David Coar as he sentenced a former high-ranking aide to Mayor Richard Daley to 46 months in prison for covering up illegal patronage hiring. "I don't give a hoot whether this has been going on for 200 years--it still stinks," Coar said. Prosecutors say the aide, Robert Sorich, and other officials rigged the hiring process to give political supporters city jobs. Other defendants cooperated with prosecutors, but Sorich was unrepentant. The case was part of a larger investigation that has already led to 41 convictions, and charges against even higher officials in City Hall may be coming, though the mayor himself has not been accused of wrongdoing.
A Bit of Good News in Amish Country
There were some small reasons for thanks last week in Nickel Mines, Pa., where local officials revealed that three of the five girls injured in the shocking school shooting October 2 were back in school, one of them full time. Charles Carl Roberts, a local milk-truck driver, killed five girls, ages 7 to 13, in the West Nickel Mines Amish School before taking his own life. All the boys in the one-room schoolhouse had been allowed to leave.
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