School Community

A high school principal in Sisters will replace Carol Loughner at the helm of Glencoe High School in Hillsboro next school year. Loughner is retiring in June.

Bob Macauley began his career in 1981 as a middle school teacher in Kuna, Idaho before moving to Gaston where he taught middle school language arts, high school physical education and was the athletic director.

In 1992, Macauley moved to Sisters where he spent six years as a humanities instructor at Sisters Middle School before moving into administration as an assistant principal at Sisters High School. In 2002, he was named principal at the school.

As principal, Macauley oversaw the development of a teacher collaboration program and established systems for proficiency learning, among other programs.

W.L. Henry Elementary principal Travis Reiman will move to the district office as the new director of English as a Second Language and Migrant Services, replacing Edward Tabet, who resigned.

Reiman is finishing his first year as principal at the school. Prior to that he was dean of students at the school for two years.

Reiman began his career at North Eugene Alternative High School as an instructional assistant and has worked as a teacher and professional development specialist in schools in northwest Oregon, as well as in the states of Jalisco and Hidalgo in Mexico.

He has also worked as an adjunct professor at Marylhurst University offering language and language development classes to students in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program. Additionally, Reiman, who is bilingual, has served as an English as a Second Language teacher and case manager at the middle school level.

- In a new paper, UC Berkeley  researchers John Aubrey Douglass, Richard Edelstein, and Cecile Hoareau outline a proposal for a San Francisco/Bay Area Higher Education Hub. During the 2009-10 academic year, they note, international students in the US brought more than $18.8 billion in net income into the national economy.  We suggest a strategy for the San Francisco/Bay Area, which, if applied to the rest of the country, would make revenues grow to more than $37 billion making it one of the fastest-growing exports in the national economy, and with many other economic benefits to support innovation and new start-ups.

The US retains a huge market advantage for attracting foreign students, the authors explain. Within the US, the San Francisco/Bay Area is particularly attractive and could prevail as an extraordinary global talent magnet, if only policymakers and higher education leaders better understood this and formulated strategies to tap the global demand for higher education.

Ultimately, all globalism is local. We propose that the San Francisco/Bay Area, a region with a group of stellar universities and colleges, should re-imagine itself as a Knowledge Hub part of an effort to meet national and regional economic needs, as well as the thirst of a growing world population for high-quality tertiary education.

Other parts of the world have already developed their version of the higher education hub idea, as it is explained in the paper. The major difference in our proposed Californian version is that foreign competitors seek to largely attract foreign universities to help build enrollment and program capacity at home, and are funded almost solely by significant government subsidies; our model builds capacity, but is focused on attracting the worlds talent and generating additional income to our existing public and private colleges and universities.

The authors project that the Bay Area could double its current international enrollment from 30,000 to 60,000 students in ten years or less, generating a total direct economic impact of over $1.8 billion, and more in indirect economic activity, along with a positive impact on local labor markets and start-ups. But this will also require expanding regional enrollment capacity as part of a strategy to ensure access to native students, and as part of a scheme to attract a new generation of faculty and researchers to the Bay Area and California. International students would need to pay for the full cost of their education, helping to subsidize domestic students and college and university programs.

The result would be a San Francisco/Bay Area Higher Education Hub a self-reinforcing knowledge ecosystem that is internationally attractive, socially beneficial and economically viable. In developing the idea of our regional version of the hub idea, we offer a path for analyzing its feasibility, including a recipe that requires higher education institutions to work with an engaged private sector and local government to help create enrollment capacity, programs, a financial model, marketing, and possibly shared facilities.

This bottom-up initiative will require most Bay Area colleges and universities, including UC Berkeley and Stanford University, to cooperate. These two institutions will provide an anchor of legitimacy and help in developing the branding of the hub concept. Berkeley and Stanford would have an incentive to cooperate because of the direct and indirect economic returns of the SF/Bay Area higher education hub income leveraged from the increased international attractiveness of the region, use of shared facilities, reputational impact of taking on a leadership role in the region, etc.

It is about the money, they conclude. But it is also about establishing closer ties with the surrounding business, economic, and cultural community, enhancing the quality and reputation of our universities and colleges, building enrollment capacity for native students, integrating international perspectives into the activities and learning of students and faculty, and broadening the opportunity for international collaborations. It is about solidifying the Bay Area as a global talent magnet, one that is even more culturally diverse, even more innovative, that continues to attract talent from throughout the world.

For access to the study, see: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=381

It has been nearly a half century since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decisions striking down state-sponsored prayers in the public schools. On Tuesday evening at the court, a scholarly lecture about one of those decisions kicked off what is likely to be a good deal of nostalgia and renewed debate about the cases.

In 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, the court invalidated a New York law requiring daily recitations of a prayer composed by the state Board of Regents. In 1963, in Abington School District v. Schempp, the court struck down practices that were much more prevalent in other states: school-led recitations of Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer. For years, critics have accused the high court of nothing less than causing the decline of American public education.

Douglas Laycock, a professor of law and religious studies at the University of Virginia, focused on the Schempp case, for which the Supreme Court is widely viewed as more directly and forcefully confronting the long U.S. tradition of school-led prayers than it had the year before in Engel.

“Ending school-sponsored religious exercises was an idea whose time had come,” said Laycock, who was delivering the last in a Supreme Court Historical Society series this spring about the people behind the court’s religion cases. Laycock, a preeminent scholar on church-state issues, was introduced at the May 10 event in the courtroom by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

While there were several lawsuits in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s challenging public school religious exercises around the country, the story of the Schempp family of Abington, Pa., is the most compelling, Laycock said.

Edward Schempp and his wife, Sidney, were Unitarians who encouraged their children to think for themselves. The Schempps did not believe in the Holy Trinity or in an anthropomorphic God as conveyed in the King James Bible, the version used by many Protestant denominations and used in the public schools since the 19th Century, when educator Horace Mann of Massachusetts introduced the idea of reading Bible verses without comment to children in the “common schools.”

Edward Schempp objected to the daily Bible verses and Lord’s Prayer delivered by students in the Abington schools. He didn’t think many verses of the Bible were appropriate for reading to schoolchildren without further instruction or context. “But he wasn’t sufficiently motivated to do anything about it,” said Laycock.

Enter the Schempps’ oldest son, Ellery, who in November 1956 started a personal protest against the religious exercises, one he had given much thoughtful consideration. Ellery, a junior at Abington High School at the time, “put a borrowed Koran on his desk, opened it to a random page, and kept it open while the morning prayers were delivered,” Laycock said.

Ellery faced consequences at school, but he was eventually allowed to leave his homeroom class during the daily devotionals. But he personally contacted the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union to see whether it would be interested in challenging the 1913 Pennsylvania law mandating the daily religious exercises.

“Abington v. Schempp was not a test case stirred up by lawyers looking for a client,” Laycock noted.

After internal debate and vetting of the Schempp family for the difficulties they would likely face as plaintiffs, the ACLU sued the school district based on the First Amendment’s establishment and free-exercise of religion clauses.

Because the suit challenged the constitutionality of a state statute, prevailing federal law at the time called for a special three-judge federal district court to consider it, with a direct appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court the next stop. The three-judge court sided with the Schempps in 1959. The case likely would have been the first school prayer case to be decided by the Supreme Court, but Pennsylvania amended its law to allow students to opt out of the religious exercises, which resulted in a fresh round of arguments in the three-judge court before those judges again struck down the law in 1962.

In the meantime, the challenge to New York’s law had reached the high court, and in the spring of 1962, the court voted 6-1 to strike it down as a violation of the establishment clause.

The Abington school district’s appeal of the Schempp case, as well as a challenge to religious exercises in the Baltimore schools by the atheist Madelyn Murray, reached the court that spring, and the justices agreed to take them up as well.

On June 17, 1963, the court voted 8-1 that daily Bible readings and the Lord’s Prayer in the public schools violated the establishment clause.

Laycock noted that it would have been customary for the Supreme Court to release its 1963 decision under the caption of the Baltimore case, Murray v. Curlett, since that appeal had reached the court ahead of the Schempp case. But Justice Tom Clark, who wrote the main opinion, probably found several good reasons to chose to put the Schempp case first.

For one thing, the Schempp case had had a full trial and a better-developed record than the Baltimore case, and Clark’s opinion focused more on the facts of the Pennsylvania case. But considering that the court’s 1962 Engel decision had already come in for monumental public criticism, there were other considerations.

“The Schempps were an intact nuclear family that went to church every week,” Laycock said. Madelyn Murray was an outspoken atheist, an unwed mother, had a foul mouth, and had applied for Soviet citizenship, he said.

“Probably the court knew only some of this, but it knew enough,” he said.

Laycock said that many of the personal case details in his lecture came from the book Ellery’s Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition and Sparked the Battle over School Prayer, by Stephen D. Solomon . I can also heartily recommend Solomon’s book.

Solomon, an associate professor at New York University who interviewed Schempp family members and others involved in the case, notes in the book that while the school prayer decisions were met with protests and widespread non-compliance, at least the Abington school district promptly obeyed the court’s mandate.

Over the next five decades, controversies over religious expression in public schools would abound. The Supreme Court would strike down clergy-led prayers at graduation ceremonies , student-led prayers over the intercom at high school football games , but uphold requiring equal treatment of student Bible clubs in secondary schools .

Other cases have never been decided by the justices but continue to percolate: Bible distribution in schools, prayers by valedictorians or other student speakers at graduation, religious themes in student classwork, and school-led recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, with the words “under God.”

Laycock noted that because he had graduated from Abington High School during the course of the litigation over school prayer, Ellery Schempp was substituted as a plaintiff in the suit by his younger siblings. Despite efforts by an administrator at the high school to discredit him in his college recommendations, Ellery was accepted at Tufts University, where he became active in civil rights and a supporter of John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He earned a doctorate in physics from Brown University, and, among other things in his career, helped develop medical imaging technology for General Electric. Now in his 70s, he is retired and lives in the Boston area.

In 2002, Ellery Schempp was inducted into Abington High School’s hall of fame for his achievements in science. But among Schempp’s other accomplishments, the school noted the following: “Initiated school prayer suit against Abington which was eventually decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963.”

The Oregon 529 College Savings Board on Thursday cut its management fee on its all investment funds, saving 133,000 accounts at least $500,000 a year.

TIAA-CREF Tuition Financing Inc., which manages one of the plans, also agreed to waive its fees on a conservative money market portfolio that has generated negative investment returns for more than a year.

TIAA-CREF’s Kerry Alexander, program director for Oregon’s plan, said the insurer will make the same fee-waiver offer to its three other state 529 plans with a standalone money market investment option. Those plans are Connecticut Higher Education 529 College Savings Program, the Minnesota College Savings Plan and Georgia’s Path2College 529 Plan.

The Oregonian reported last week that the money market fund had posted a negative 0.3 percent return since March 2010. Other large money-fund managers have waived fees on mutual funds to ensure investors don’t lose money in them.

The overall reduction in Oregon’s management fee comes on top of fee reductions by underlying mutual funds in the direct-sold Oregon College Savings Plan managed by TIAA-CREF. Two portfolios — its international equity index and inflation-linked bond — saw total fee reductions of 33 and 14 percent.

Investors in the broker-sold MFS Oregon 529 Plan also will see fees reduced.

Oregon Treasurer Ted Wheeler proposed the fee reduction this week based on the network’s jump in total investments from $746 million in early 2009 to nearly $1.4 billion at the end of March.

Currently, investors pay from $4.40 to $12 for every $1,000 invested in most Oregon College Savings Plan funds and even more in the broker-sold MFS Oregon 529 Plan.

About $1 of those annual fees go to the Oregon Treasury to manage and market the plans; the rest goes to plan sponsors TIAA-CREF Tuition Financing Inc. and MFS Investment Management.

Under Thursday’s board action,  would fall to 50 cents per $1,000 as early as June 1, according to plan director Michael Parker.

The plan’s underlying mutual funds shaved the fees they collect so that investors will now pay from $3.80 to $10.80 per $1,000 invested each year.

TIAA-CREF will waive the management fee it collects on the Money Market Portfolio to ensure investors don’t lose what they’ve put into it. It will evaluate the fund performance each month and adjust its fees accordingly to ensure returns don’t turn negative, officials said.

As of March 31, only 2,800 accounts have invested about $15 million in the portfolio, which is down 20 percent from a year ago.

The state board stopped short of dropping its own 0.05 percent management fee on the fund. Wheeler pushed to waive it, saying investors in the fund didn’t expect to lose money. He also noted that Wall Street heavyweights Charles Schwab Corp. and MFS had waived fees on their money market funds.

But board members Lynn Hennion and Jennifer Cooperman said they worried about the precedent a waiver would set should other portfolios lose money in the future. They said the plan offered at least two other conservative investment options that were performing well. Hennion said investors should take responsibility for their own choices, and Cooperman noted that money market funds can lose money.  

Plan director Michael Parker said the state would contact Money Market fund investors and let them know about the plan’s other conservative options.

The Obama administration is reminding school administrators nationwide of their obligation under federal law to enroll children regardless of citizenship or immigration status.

“Recently, we have become aware of student enrollment practices that may chill or discourage the participation, or lead to the exclusion, of students based on their or their parents’ or guardians’ actual or perceived citizenship or immigration status,” says the “dear colleague” letter released on May 6.

The letter cites Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, among other factors, by public schools. It also cites Plyler v. Doe, the 1982 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that held a state may not deny access to a basic public education to any child, whether that child is present in the country legally or not.

The letter is signed by Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education; Charles P. Rose, the Education Department’s general counsel; and Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Justice.

The letter and accompanying materials suggest that some elementary and secondary schools are discouraging the enrollment of undocumented immigrant children by asking about their immigration status, denying enrollment to those with foreign birth certificates, or denying enrollment to children whose parents decline to provide their Social Security numbers or race and ethnicity information.

The Education and Justice departments stress in a fact sheet and a question-and-answer document that schools may require proof that a child lives within school district boundaries. This may include lease agreements, utility bills, or other documents, but schools may not ask parents about a child’s immigration status to establish residency.

Schools may also ask for birth certificates to establish that a child falls within minimum and maximum age requirements, but they may not bar enrollment because a child has a foreign birth certificate, the guidance says.

Schools may ask for children’s Social Security numbers to be used as student identifiers. But they should inform parents of the purpose and that disclosure of such numbers is voluntary. Schools may not deny enrollment if parents refuse to provide a child’s Social Security number, the documents say.

The “dear colleague” letter says that schools “may wish to review the documents your district requires for school enrollment to ensure that the requested documents do not have a chilling effect on a student’s enrollment in school.”