Doonesbury.

Brigid Schulte:

Gabby Cirenza wanted to be a referee for Halloween. The outfit she liked had a micro-mini black skirt and a form-fitting black and white-striped spandex top held together with black laces running up the flesh-exposing sides. She looked admiringly at the thigh-high black go-go boots that could be…

Amanda Gardner:

Two leading U.S. psychiatric organizations on Tuesday released a guide intended to help parents deal with the torrent of often confusing and frightening information on treatments for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
In addition to providing information on medications, the ADHD Parents Medication Guide, co-sponsored by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the American Psychiatric Association, also offers insights into non-drug treatment options such as behavioral therapies and school services.
“When I needed information, few people had heard of ADHD and little information was available to help parents,” Soleil Gregg, a parent of two children who grew up with ADHD in the 1970s and ’80s, said during a teleconference to unveil the guide. “Now families are faced with just the opposite problem. There’s an overwhelming and confusing array of information and misinformation on the Internet, on television and in the print media.”
Experts estimate that almost 2 million children in the United States — or about 3 percent to 5 percent of young children in the country — have ADHD.

Rob Stein:

A special panel of federal advisers today is considering whether the government should restrict the use of over-the-counter cough and cold medicines in children because of doubts about the effectiveness of the popular products and rising concerns about their safety.
The 22-member joint committee is debating whether to recommend a number of steps to the Food and Drug Administration, including banning some of the remedies, issuing strong new warnings about their use or more specific guidance about how to use them safely. The FDA is not bound by the committee’s recommendations, which will be made later today, but the agency usually follows the advice of its advisory panels.

HealthDay News:

More than 30 percent of American children take some kind of dietary supplement, mostly multivitamins and multiminerals, a U.S. National Institutes of Health study finds.
The study analyzed data on more than 10,000 youngsters from the 1999 to 2002 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The study found that 31.8 percent of children 18 and younger had used dietary supplements in the previous 30 days. This included 11.9 percent of those younger than 1 year, 38.4 percent of those ages 1-3, 40.6 percent of those ages 4-8, 28.9 percent of those ages 9-13, and 25.7 percent of those ages 14-18.
Among American adults, 57 percent of women and 47 percent of men take dietary supplements.

Po Bronson:

Mrgan is a 10-year-old fifth-grader in Roxbury, New Jersey. She’s fair-skinned, petite, with freckles across her nose and wavy, light-brown hair. Her father is a police sergeant on duty until 3 a.m. Her mother, Heather, works part time, devoting herself to shuffling Morgan and her brother to their many activities. Morgan plays soccer, but her first love is competitive swimming, with year-round workouts that have broadened her shoulders. She’s also a violinist in the school orchestra, with practices and lessons each week. Every night, Morgan sits down to homework before watching Flip This House or another show with her mother. Morgan has always appeared to be an enthusiastic, well-balanced child.
But once Morgan spent a year in the classroom of a demanding teacher, she could no longer unwind at night. Despite a reasonable bedtime of 9:30 p.m., she would lay awake in frustration until 11:30, sometimes midnight, clutching her leopard-fur pillow. On her fairy-dust purple bedroom walls were taped index cards, each with a vocabulary word Morgan was having trouble with. Unable to sleep, she turned back to her studies, determined not to let her grades suffer. Instead, she saw herself fall apart emotionally. During the day, she was noticeably crabby and prone to crying easily. Occasionally, Morgan nearly fell asleep in class.

Diane Loupe:

Children’s television show host Fred Rogers understood something that, apparently, Atlanta Public Schools doesn’t.
Rogers, the late host of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” said “Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning. … They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play.”
But the Atlanta public school system doesn’t include playgrounds or playground equipment when it builds elementary schools. Though school system officials told The Sunday Paper that their “no-playground” practice is only that—a practice and not a stated policy—it’s a practice that is taking its toll on children, parents and teachers.
In the city of Atlanta, about 42 percent of property taxes are allocated for the school system. Some of that tax money will go to maintain and fix playground equipment once it’s provided—but it’s parents, not the school system, who have to provide it.
A group of parents in East Atlanta is doing exactly that. On August 10 at 9 p.m., when patrons of the Earl pay an $8 entry fee to hear indie-rockers Deerhunter, the Spooks and Chopper, they will be helping to finance a playground at Burgess-Peterson Academy, an Atlanta public school.

Stacy Finz:

Despite a new law designed to ban the sale of junk food at California schools, the kiosk at Santa Clara High is stocked with chocolate-chip cookies, the lunch window at Novato High serves up potato chips, and the concession stand at Albany High is doing a booming business in Cheetos.
But don’t call the food police. All three districts are in compliance with the state law that requires snacks and individual entrees sold on campus to contain fewer calories and less fat and sugar.
It seems that while kids were preparing to go back to school this fall, food manufacturers were busy re-creating their products – shrinking portions, eliminating trans fats and baking instead of frying – to make them meet the requirements of the Food Nutrition Standards Bill by July 1.
The statute is intended to improve students’ diets by nudging them into eating a well-rounded healthful lunch. But so far, that goal has proved elusive. Some campuses, such as Piedmont Middle School, appear to be ignoring the regulations altogether. And others let kids make a meal of revamped snack foods.

Deborah Ziff:

For about seven minutes after the bell sounds the end of the school day at Thoreau elementary, chaos rules.
Children tumble out of the school in gleeful disorder and parents arrive to pick them up by car, foot or bike – all while traffic whizzes past on busy Nakoma Road.
At Thoreau, some parents park directly across from the school where they must make the treacherous journey across Nakoma, often with little ones in tow, without a crosswalk nearby.
“It’s very frightening,” said Thoreau Principal Elizabeth Fritz, “because the drivers of the cars aren’t as careful as one would hope.”

Sarah Viren:

A couple weeks back I wrote a story about the drug Salvia divinorum, a legal hallucinogen that is sold over the Internet and at area smoke shops. The DEA and some states are considering banning it, but only a few have (Texas lawmakers tried, but didn’t succeed last session).
So far schools say they haven’t seen teenagers with Salvia and police said they are unaware of it, which makes some folks less than eager to go through the effort of banning it. Their argument: it’s not doing any visible harm. And, indeed, many I talked with said the effects of the plant are so strong that those who try it once never want to take it again. I heard recently, though, from two parent in the Katy area who said it’s becoming popular among some teens out there. Neither wanted to be quoted, but said I could post parts of theirs emails and their stories on this blog. Here they are:

Benedict Carey:

The number of American children and adolescents treated for bipolar disorder increased 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, researchers report today in the most comprehensive study of the controversial diagnosis.
Experts say the number has almost certainly risen further since 2003.
Many experts theorize that the jump reflects that doctors are more aggressively applying the diagnosis to children, and not that the incidence of the disorder has increased.
But the magnitude of the increase surprises many psychiatrists. They say it is likely to intensify the debate over the validity of the diagnosis, which has shaken child psychiatry.

Tom Held:

As children make their way back to classrooms, schools and municipalities in Wisconsin will start spending $4 million in federal transportation grants to encourage and help more of them make that trek by foot or bicycle.
Milwaukee Public Schools will spend the largest planning grant, $242,000, to teach 6,000 grade school and middle school students how to walk or bike to school safely.
That such an educational program is deemed necessary suggests how much society has changed from a time in the late 1960s when more than half of the students in the country walked or biked to school. That percentage has dropped to 15%, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
The decline in walking or biking to school has been cited as a cause behind a different trend: the growing number of children who are overweight or obese. A national study found that 18.8% of children ages 6 to 11 were obese in 2003′-04, roughly triple the percentage found two decades earlier.
Looking to reverse the trends, Congress allocated $612 million for the national Safe Routes to Schools program, spread across the 2005-’09 fiscal years.

Jill Tucker:

Hoping to unlock some of the mysteries of post-traumatic stress disorder in children, a Stanford University researcher looked inside their heads.
What Dr. Victor Carrion found was startling: Children with PTSD and exposure to severe trauma had smaller brains.
Carrion found a nearly 9 percent reduction in the size of the hippocampus, a horseshoe-shaped sheet of neurons that deals with memory and emotions.
The study, released earlier this year, was just a first step toward understanding the physical effects of trauma and why some children have a greater ability to ward off physical and mental reactions.

Benjamin Brewer, MD:

With school about to start, kids are coming in for their physicals — and for medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
I’m seeing more kids each year with symptoms of ADHD. Some just have the attention problems and others are hyperactive, too.
New treatments can be given once a day. They are relatively easy for kids to take at home and don’t require the involvement of the school nurse during the day, as shorter-acting older medicines do.
The medicines are even easier for doctors to prescribe. A trial of medication is the quickest and easiest thing to try for kids with symptoms, given the limited impact a doctor can have on complex family dynamics.
It may be too easy an option considering the rising sales of these heavily marketed medications. Ads for attention-deficit medications are everywhere in the popular press where a parent might see them, including People, Good Housekeeping and Family Circle magazines at our house.

Robert Farago:

Passenger vehicles’ passive safety has improved dramatically over the last four decades. Yet millions of children continue to ride to and from school in buses little changed from those used when the Who wrote “Magic Bus.” The family of a boy injured in a Kentucky bus crash may finally change that. Lawyers representing Cody Shively, a 12-year old boy who suffered brain and eye injuries in a bus accident, are suing the vehicles’ manufacturers (Navistar International Corporation, Navistar International Transportation Corporation, International Truck and Engine Corporation and IC Corporation) and the Grant County School Board. Lawyer Stanley Chesley has a not-so-secret weapon: on-board video of the children during the crash, and he’s not afraid to use it.

Mike Stobbe:

Fewer than half of American children who live close to school regularly walk or bike to classes, according to a new study that highlights a dramatic shift toward car commuting.
Children in the South did the least amount of walking or cycling, partly because of safety concerns, experts say.
The issue is considered important because it is linked to escalating rates of childhood obesity. And many schools have been cutting back on recess and physical education, said Sarah Martin, the study’s lead author.

AP:

Text messages were sent back and forth on the cell phone of a 17-year-old driver moments before her sport-utility vehicle slammed head-on into a truck, killing her and four other recent high school graduates on June 28, the police said today.
A text message was sent from the phone of the S.U.V. driver, Bailey E. Goodman, at 10:05:02 p.m., according to Sheriff Philip C. Povero of Ontario County, adding that a friend here sent a text message to Ms. Goodman’s phone asking, “What are you doing?”
“The message was received on the cell phone at 10:06:29,” Sheriff Povero said.
A call reporting the accident to the authorities from a passenger in a car the S.U.V. had passed just before the crash was made at 10:07, according to The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.
“The records indicate her phone was in use,” he said. “We will never be able to clearly state that she was the one doing the text messaging.”

Dana Spiotta:

MY parents were not hippies. We were a deeply conventional, middle-class American family, but my clean-cut mother and father tried to embrace, in a haphazard and innocent way, the values of the counterculture — at least enough to send me, their moody 14-year-old daughter, alone on a four-week bike trip through Greece.
My parents always approached my sister and me with an open-mindedness that was part idealism and part indulgence. So even when we were tiny, they let us stay up with the adults. We drifted off to sleep on various laps amid the murmur of late-night conversation. We attended an experimental school that, in sixth grade, gave us the option of studying math or doing book reports. (To this day, I don’t really understand fractions.) We were the only ones in our suburban neighborhood who ate brown bread and made yogurt.
My housewife mother was never without makeup and high heels, but she wanted to be sure I was raised with the hard-won feminist insistence on limitless possibility. So we listened to Marlo Thomas’s record “Free to Be You and Me,” her effort to instill women’s lib in the coming generation.
Later, we sang along to Carole King and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” My sister and I would perform the entire rock opera during car rides on our summer vacations.
Those vacations consisted exclusively of visits to our relatives, often at a rented house at the Jersey Shore. There I would tag along after my older sister and my older cousins as they discussed boyfriends and rock ’n’ roll. They wore gauze blouses and tousled Stevie Nicks perms.
And then my cousins became teenagers and they began to go on bike trips, with others their own age, to exotic places like France or the Netherlands. And whichever cousin went off would come back transformed: fit, tan, smoking clove cigarettes, carrying tooled-leather items and wearing a seen-it-all continental daze that never appeared in suburbia.

About Dana Spiotta

Nancy Keates:

From lobotomies with ice picks to early antidepressants that caused brain hemorrhaging, Americans have a complicated and ever-changing approach to treating mental illness. Now, spurred by the growing disenchantment with antidepressants, an increasing number of people are seeking treatment for depression, anxiety and eating disorders from naturopaths, acupuncturists and even chiropractors. At the same time, more traditional psychiatrists are incorporating massage and meditation in their practices.
The treatments go beyond needles and spinal manipulation. They include Emotional Freedom Techniques — tapping on the body’s “energy meridians” as the patient thinks about upsetting incidents — and craniosacral therapy, which involves a gentle rocking of the head, neck, spine and pelvis. In cranial electrotherapy stimulation, a AA-battery-powered device sends mild electrical currents to the brain. (The procedure has its roots in ancient Greek medicine, when electric eels were used.) Clinicians are also prescribing supplements like omega-3 fatty acids, found in fish oil, or amino acids like L-theanine, found in green tea.
Sarah Spring had been in therapy with a psychiatrist and on the antidepressant Wellbutrin for four years to work through a childhood trauma, but felt she wasn’t making any progress. So she went to a naturopath — a practitioner trained in holistic therapy and alternative treatments like herbal medicine and nutrition. (They attend a four-year naturopathic school — a bachelor’s degree is a prerequisite — but only 15 states license naturopaths.) After two sessions of Emotional Freedom Techniques, the tapping treatment that is meant to clear emotions and restore balance, Ms. Spring says she doesn’t get the same shortness of breath and accelerated heart rate she used to. “It’s remarkable,” says the Portland, Ore., marketing manager, who just started to decrease her dose of Wellbutrin.

Brad Stone:

Parents and child safety experts concerned about the online activities of teenagers have been particularly nervous about a Web site called Stickam, which allows its 600,000 registered users, age 14 and older, to participate in unfiltered live video chats using their Web cameras.
But those Internet safety advocates might be even more anxious if they knew of Stickam’s close ties to a large online pornography business.
On its Web site and in press reports, Stickam says that it is owned by Advanced Video Communications, or AVC, a three-year-old Los Angeles company that sells video conferencing and e-commerce services to businesses in Japan and other Asian countries.
But according to Alex Becker, a former vice president at Stickam, and internal company documents, Advanced Video Communications is managed and owned by Wataru Takahashi, a Japanese businessman who also owns and operates DTI Services, a vast network of Web sites offering live sex shows over Web cameras. Mr. Becker alleges that Stickam shares office space, employees and computer systems with the pornographic Web sites.

Issmat I Kassem, Von Sigler and Malak A Esseili:

The role of computer keyboards used by students of a metropolitan university as reservoirs of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci was determined. Putative methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant staphylococci isolates were identified from keyboard swabs following a combination of biochemical and genetic analyses. Of 24 keyboards surveyed, 17 were contaminated with staphylococci that grew in the presence of oxacillin (2 mg l-1). Methicillin (oxacillin)-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), -S. epidermidis (MRSE) and -S. hominis (MRSH) were present on two, five and two keyboards, respectively, while all three staphylococci co-contaminated one keyboard. Furthermore, these were found to be part of a greater community of oxacillin-resistant bacteria. Combined with the broad user base common to public computers, the presence of antibiotic-resistant staphylococci on keyboard surfaces might impact the transmission and prevalence of pathogens throughout the community.

Martha Mendoza:

– The federal government will spend more than $1 billion this year on nutrition education – fresh carrot and celery snacks, videos of dancing fruit, hundreds of hours of lively lessons about how great you will feel if you eat well.
But an Associated Press review of scientific studies examining 57 such programs found mostly failure. Just four showed any real success in changing the way kids eat – or any promise as weapons against the growing epidemic of childhood obesity.

MPR:

Police in this upscale college town say they’re fighting an unusual heroin epidemic among high school kids.
More than 150 kids are hooked on the drug, Northfield Police Chief Gary Smith said Tuesday. He decided to publicize the problem with a news conference, where he said that as many as 250 current and former Northfield High School students could be involved – some feeding heroin habits of as much as $800 a day.
The epidemic has increased crime and caused consternation in Northfield, one of the most educated and affluent cities in Minnesota, and home to both Carleton and St. Olaf colleges.
“This is affecting our ability to deal with other community concerns,” Smith said. “We find ourselves more often reacting to crimes than preventing them.”
Smith said investigators first caught wind of the problem when crime started spiking, including a doubling in burglaries and tripling in thefts from autos from 2005 to 2006. It led them to the informal heroin ring at the high school of about 1,300 students.

Madison Parents School Safety Site:

The heading of this post from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s “School Zone” blog reads “MPS data shows spike in violence-related suspensions; 45% of high school students suspended at least once this school year.” But there’s a buried (or at least competing) lede of good news here: first, that the Milwaukee Public Schools’ school board has a dedicated Safety Committee (MMSD does not); second, that the committee has made it a priority to compile, present to the board, and make available to the public current information on suspension statistics and trends; and third, that the district acknowledges publicly that it is “aware we need to do a better job summarizing district incidents and actions.”

Madison Parent’s School Safety Site:

Today’s “Watchdog” section of Isthmus has a quick report (at the link, scroll down to the third item, titled “Dangerous work, take 2″) on recent incidents of violence in Madison schools against school staffers. In two of the incidents where staffers were injured, police declined to file criminal charges, citing the lack of criminal intent on the part of the student offenders. According to the item, one of these incidents occurred in early May at LaFollette High School. I was disappointed to find no mention of this (or other school-based incidents) in the latest newsletter from the Madison Police Department East District (whose boundaries includes LaFollette).

Related: Milwaukee Teachers are “Shell Shocked”.

Stephanie Rosenbloom:

WHEN Britney Spears shaved off her signature blond locks, Alexis Gursky, 9, found herself wondering not why Ms. Spears picked up a razor in the first place, but why she did not do more with the hair she shaved off.
“I just thought it was a little weird to just do it and not to give it to people who have cancer,” said Alexis, a third grader in Manhattan.
And while scores of people were petitioning Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California to keep Paris Hilton from having to report to jail on June 5, Jessie Urvater, 8, could not muster any sympathy.
“I don’t like Paris,” said Jessie, of Manhattan, who was quick to point out that hotel heiresses are not above the law. “I think she should go to jail.”

She finds comfort in letters from hundreds of strangers, a campaign begun by Mill Valley sisters

Ilene Lelchuk:

Sitting in her living room amid stacks of handwritten letters from all over the nation and the world, 14-year-old Olivia Gardner of Novato said she no longer feels alone.
A victim of extreme bullying that spanned two years and three schools, Olivia said she has been pulled from the depths of depression by a letter-writing campaign started by two sisters at Tamalpais High in Marin County after they read in The Chronicle in March about Olivia’s ordeal.
At least 1,000 strangers have sent her letters and e-mails of support, and there’s talk of a book deal, Web sites and letter campaigns for other children who are bullied, and the three girls have received countless interview requests.
Whether Olivia likes it or not, she helped bring attention to the widespread and tenacious problem of bullying in school hallways, on cell phones and in cyberspace.

Channel3000.com:

The number of HIV-AIDS cases is on the rise in Dane County, according to local health officials.
Dane County public health officials said that gay men and blacks are two segments of the population where they are seeing significant increases in HIV and AIDS cases, WISC-TV reported.
“Some people may think it’s not that big of a deal anymore,” said Cheryl Robinson, a public health program manager.
Robinson said that this idea is wrong.
In 2006, 64 new cases were reported to public health — 28 were among gay men and 13 were among blacks. The age group of 25 to 44 year olds made up 51 percent of the cases reported, according to health officials.

Shari Roan:

ONCE a year or so, Roy Tialavea is summoned from his classes at Oceanside High School to report to the athletic director’s office bathroom. He receives a urine specimen cup and heads for a stall.
The 17-year-old is unruffled. Random drug testing has been going on for two years at the school. He’s used to it. “I don’t use drugs so I don’t have to worry about getting caught,” he says.
His mother, Robyn, thinks her son steers clear of drugs and alcohol. But, she says, no parent can know for sure what a teenager is up to.
“If he doesn’t like testing, I really don’t care,” she says. “I think it’s a wonderful tool. It creates the fear that they could be tested.”
Call it the 2007 version of “just say no.”

Eugene Kane:

When considering violence in Milwaukee Public Schools, I find myself recalling a School Board meeting years ago where the discussion centered on rising suspension rates.
One mother demanded that School Board members explain why her 15-year-old African-American son kept getting kicked out of school for misbehaving.
“I can’t do anything with him at home,” she complained.
After the meeting, I interviewed the mother away from the microphones. That’s where she told me why she thought her son kept getting expelled.
“They afraid of him,” she said of the teachers. “He’s 15, but he’s 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs 240 pounds.”
That hammered home for me the fact some “kids” at MPS aren’t really kids at all but are not yet fully developed young people with enough physical strength to intimidate the outnumbered adults.
My latest visit to a Milwaukee public school was just a few weeks ago, during which I observed a mini-meltdown in the hallway by a student who had become enraged at another student.
As he was dragged away, the boy struck a door with his fist, nearly shattering the glass.

Sarah Carr:

Violent crimes committed on school grounds would be subjected to stiffer penalties under a bill circulated in the Legislature on Wednesday.
The bill was one of two drafted by a West Allis lawmaker aiming to curb school violence committed by outsiders who cause or aid disruptions in schools.
The other bill calls for jail time or fines for those who trespass on school grounds with the purpose of causing a disturbance.
“Outsiders and non-students can turn a pushing match into a gang brawl,” said Rep. Tony Staskunas (D-West Allis), who drafted the bills.
He began drafting the bills after outsiders were called to participate in a fight at Bradley Tech High School this winter. He said a Journal Sentinel investigation on school violence provided perfect timing for him to circulate the bills for co-sponsorship on Wednesday. Among other things, the investigation found that at least 127 school staff members were physically assaulted in the schools in the first half of the school year. It also found that the district’s 11 largest high schools called police about twice a day on average over the last six months.

Under the No Child Left Behind law, the definition varies from state to state. In Wisconsin, that means some troubled schools escape the law’s scrutiny.
Sarah Carr:

At Todd County High School in South Dakota last school year, 16 calls to police helped earn the school an unsavory distinction in the eyes of the state and federal government: The rural school was slapped with the label “persistently dangerous.”
Under the 6-year-old No Child Left Behind Act, each state must define a “persistently dangerous” school and allow parents to transfer their children out of them.
But at Milwaukee’s Fritsche Middle School, 187 calls to police over a recent six-month period did not make the school persistently dangerous under Wisconsin’s definition.
Neither did 263 calls at Bay View High School, or 299 at Custer.

Madison Schools’ police call data for Fall, 2006.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial:

More and more kids are arriving at school in Milwaukee with a bellyful of anger, which they vent by lashing out at teachers, other staffers and fellow students. Intensifying violence is bedeviling the Milwaukee Public Schools, distracting the system from its main mission: education.
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Journal Sentinel reporter Sarah Carr vividly portrayed this thorny, complex problem in a four-part series of articles that concludes today. The community must not tolerate this trend, which, by hampering education, stunts the future of the children, the city, the metro area and the state. And the community must do whatever it takes – yes, if necessary, spending more money or making schools more regimented – to restore a sense of safety to MPS.
The uptick in violence likely stems from the deteriorating plight of the poor, the causes of which lie largely outside the schools. So the ultimate solutions lie largely in that direction, too. But MPS can’t wait until society gets its act together. It must take measures to tamp down the violence.
Society at large must:

Sarah Carr:

Before anyone could stop them, two boys stood on tables during a crowded lunch at Milwaukee’s Bradley Tech High School this winter, flashing gang signs and chanting gang slogans.
Many of the students, who had been eating, chatting and milling about in the school’s open atrium, cheered them on.
Quickly, the commotion grew.
The boys who caused the disruption were new to Tech. A few days before, they had been expelled from a suburban high school for fighting, said Tech Principal Ed Kovochich.
Shortly thereafter, they would be forced out of Tech, too – bounced to another MPS high school.
“The dance of the lemons,” as Kovochich described it.
Teachers, administrators and social workers say the most violent or disruptive children are regularly moved from school to school.

Sarah Carr:

When another student slammed a fruit cup on a cafeteria lunch table last fall, the young girl’s rage began to build.
It grew in the cafeteria, as the 15-year-old lashed out at her fellow students, angry that some of the spilled fruit landed on her pants.
It grew in the main office of Ronald Reagan High School on Milwaukee’s south side, where school staff had taken her to regroup.
In the office, a steady stream of profanities flowed from her mouth. Sensing a growing threat of violence, the school principal, Julia D’Amato, approached. Again and again, D’Amato told her:
“You have to calm down.”
“You have to calm down.”
But she was just getting started.
When authorities arrested the student for punching the principal twice, knocking her out, the incident became front-page news, a horrific example of random violence in the schools.

Sarah Carr:

An 18-year-old punches his school’s football coach and grabs his genitals. • Two middle-school age sisters jump a police officer called to calm a disturbance. • A grandmother charges a group of students at an elementary school, and then strikes the principal. • A boy tries to sell a gun to his friend in elementary school.
Violence in Milwaukee Public Schools has intensified, and calls to police have become daily occurrences in some of the city’s schools.
Teachers and staff trained to bring knowledge to children in a safe setting are instead struggling to keep the hostility of the streets from seeping into classrooms and hallways.
A Journal Sentinel investigation found:

• Dozens of teachers, administrators and staff are getting attacked. In the first semester of this school year alone, at least 127 MPS employees reported being physically assaulted by students or outsiders coming to campus.
• Elementary school teachers are falling victim to physical or verbal assaults nearly as much as those in high schools. Close to half the teachers assaulted this year work at elementary or K-8 schools.
• Far more Milwaukee students were expelled for bringing firearms to school last year than in all of the Chicago Public Schools, a district more than four times the size of MPS. In Chicago, unlike Milwaukee, high school students walk through weapons scanners every day, and handguns have virtually disappeared from the schools.
• The number of students expelled and suspended for drugs, violence and weaponshas nearly doubled in the past five years, and many are simply transferred to other schools. Total MPS expulsions have tripled in the past 15 years.
• Police are called routinely to break up fights or deal with other disturbances. Staff at each of the district’s 11 large high schools called police about twice a school day on average in the past six months.

Regan McMahon:

In March 2005, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine published my article exploring how the over-the-top youth sports culture was affecting kids and families. Titled “How Much Is Too Much?” it generated tremendous reader response, and two months later I signed a deal with Gotham Books to investigate the issue on a national scale. The results of that research, conducted in the academic year 2005-2006, appear in my book, “Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in a World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports.”
In the book, I look at the way youth sports have changed in the past 20 years and how those changes have altered the nature of childhood in America and patterns of family life. Many households are putting demanding sports schedules above bonding rituals such as eating dinner together, taking family vacations, spending holidays with relatives and relaxing at home on weekends. Lots of kids are stressed out, and some are getting burned out. I wondered if, for this generation, success at sports was coming at too high a cost. And I came up with suggestions of how parents can bring balance back into their children’s lives.

Jonathan Welsh:

Yesterday, a school bus collided with a truck in Brampton, Ontario, critically injuring a 10-year-old boy and seriously harming another child. It was the latest in a series of dramatic crashes that have heightened many parents’ fears about the safety of the yellow buses their kids ride on every day.
In Atlanta last month, an accident involving a motor coach killed six college-baseball-team members, and in Huntsville, Ala., in November, a school-bus crash killed four teenage girls.
Some parents, such as Gwen MacMillan, a Leawood, Kan., mother of three, opt to drive their kids themselves rather than entrust them to a school bus. “I really don’t understand why the buses don’t have seat belts, because it seems like they would make them safer,” says Ms. MacMillan, echoing many parents’ concerns.
Yet accident data and interviews with transportation experts suggest school buses are actually far safer than other forms of school transport, including the family car. Indeed, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, school buses are by far the safest passenger vehicles on the road.
School-bus makers have made several upgrades in the past few years to address everything from driver visibility to handing, maneuverability and comfort. Space-age adhesives replace spot welds and rivets in certain body and chassis parts, and some new buses have Global Positioning Systems and computerized controls that function like the “black box” recorders found in aircraft. Many of the new models represent the first significant changes to school-bus design since the most recent federal safety standard for school buses took effect in 1977.

Alan Borsuk:

Police and Milwaukee Public Schools officials on Monday were investigating allegations that a teacher at Pulaski High School, 2500 W. Oklahoma Ave., saw a gun in the possession of a student in school and did not notify authorities in a timely manner.
An unloaded gun was found Thursday in the 18-year-old student’s locker after a second teacher notified security aides at the school, sources familiar with the incident said.
Following a second incident on the same day the gun was found, MPS administrators said they were investigating a teacher who appeared to be out of her classroom while a fight occurred between two students, with many others watching. A student videotaped the fight, apparently on a cell phone, and the video was posted on the YouTube site on the Internet.

Susan Troller:

What if parents could vaccinate their adolescent daughters against the siren song of the mall? Is there any way to get them to just say no to the power of brand name clothing, accessories and cosmetics?
And what should be done about the barrage of marketing messages telling them they can never be too rich, or too thin, and that they must be hot, hot, hot as they shop, shop, shop, even if they’re only 10 years old?

Joanne Jacobs:

In Indianapolis, a new principal tries to take back the city’s worst middle school, a place of disorder, violence and rock-bottom expectations. He transfers 17-year-old seventh- and eighth-graders to alternative schools, suspended students for fighting and tries to enforce a dress code.

Dane County Human Services [PDF]: via a West High Freshman parent who mentions that while West is a good school, it is important that parents are ready for an eye opening year of “scary challenges” in terms of alcohol, sex, drugs and violent crime. (Not to mention schoolwork!). Alliant Energy Center 6:45 to 8:45p.m.

Stacy Weiner:

Ten-year-old girls can slide their low-cut jeans over “eye-candy” panties. French maid costumes, garter belt included, are available in preteen sizes. Barbie now comes in a “bling-bling” style, replete with halter top and go-go boots. And it’s not unusual for girls under 12 to sing, “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?”
American girls, say experts, are increasingly being fed a cultural catnip of products and images that promote looking and acting sexy.
“Throughout U.S. culture, and particularly in mainstream media, women and girls are depicted in a sexualizing manner,” declares the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, in a report issued Monday. The report authors, who reviewed dozens of studies, say such images are found in virtually every medium, from TV shows to magazines and from music videos to the Internet.

Elizabeth Fernandez:

The phone rang. Linda O’Connor let it ring. And ring and ring and ring. She knew.
She was sitting in the family room on her blue sofa, as she always did, waiting for Kyle to return to their Pleasanton home. Kyle, 16, had never given her cause to worry, but over the last few weeks, since the start of her son’s Christmas vacation, she had felt a disquiet she could neither define nor shake.
She went upstairs and woke her husband, Steve.
“There is something wrong,” she whispered. “You better get dressed.”

India McCanse:

Violence in our schools is preventable, but we don’t seem to understand how to do that. Our first response is to blame the Milwaukee Public Schools: If something goes wrong, it’s the fault of the school system.
I wonder how many of us who hold MPS responsible have visited a school and seen for ourselves how difficult life there can be.
What we don’t see from the outside are talented and devoted teachers and staff who make it their duty every day to educate and support our kids. What we don’t know is how many disadvantaged youth have no hope for the future, give up and become part of the problem. And what we don’t feel is the anxiety of thousands of parents for the safety and well-being of their children in a public school.

Alan Borsuk:

Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said Thursday that his budget proposal for next year will call for more students to be placed in alternative schools, with the goal of reducing the number of students who are doing poorly – and who frequently are the source of problems – in the main body of high schools and middle schools.

Related Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editorial.

Jane Brody:

Whether you left school at 16 or have a doctorate; whether your annual income is in four figures or six; whether you are black, white, Hispanic, Asian or American Indian, chances are there have been many medical encounters that left you with less than optimal understanding about how you can improve or protect your health.
National studies have found that “health literacy” is remarkably low, with more than 90 million Americans unable to adequately understand basic health information. The studies show that this obstacle “affects people of all ages, races, income and education levels,” Dr. Richard H. Carmona, the United States surgeon general, wrote in the August issue of The Journal of General Internal Medicine, which was devoted to health literacy.

Gena Kittner:blk.

Throwing a punch on high school grounds here will get you arrested, removed from school and in some cases could land you in jail.
After two significant fights at Sun Prairie High School in December, one involving as many as six students, the city’s high school has changed the way it deals with violence at school.
The message came Jan. 4 and 5 over the school’s public address system: If a student is involved in a violent act or there is a substantiated threat of physical violence, he or she will be arrested and removed from the school by Sun Prairie police, Principal Paul Keats said.
Previously, fighting students could be cited by police, but not necessarily removed from the building, he said.

Julia Angwin:

In a bid to appease government critics, News Corp.’s popular Web site MySpace.com is planning to offer free parental notification software — a move that risks alienating its young users.
Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn’t enable parents to read their child’s e-mail or see the child’s profile page and children would be alerted that their information was being shared. The program would continue to send updates about changes in the child’s name, age and location, even when the child logs on from other computers.

Edward Kenney:

Senior Jernai Turner dug into a plateful of hearty beef macaroni for lunch last week in the Brandywine High School cafeteria.
Not a bad lunch. But for Turner and her fellow diners, bacon and eggs might have been more appropriate: Lunchtime at the school starts at 10:30 a.m.
The early start time is common at schools in Delaware and elsewhere, as scheduling large numbers of students into a cafeteria with limited seating dictates spreading the lunch shifts out.
But, Jernai said, “Sometimes, you don’t have the appetite, and you don’t eat. It is too early. I think lunch should start around 11:30.”
It could be much worse: Lunch is served beginning at 8:20 a.m. at Central High School in Philadelphia and at 9:05 a.m. at Bayside High School in Virginia Beach, Va.

Jessica Blanchard:

It was a lunch that would horrify a dietitian: a bag of Tropical Skittles, a Jones soda, two Little Debbie marshmallow treats, a deep-fried pizza stick and a bottle of sweetened iced tea.
The high-calorie, sugar-packed treats are standard fare for Cleveland High School freshman Tikisha Spires, who travels off campus for lunch each day.
It’s certainly not what the Seattle School Board had in mind two years ago when it adopted a rigorous nutrition policy and canceled a lucrative vending contract with Coca-Cola. Chips and cookies were replaced in vending machines with granola bars and trail mix; sugary drinks are no longer sold in schools. Cleveland fell into line with other schools, offering healthier foods in its cafeteria and vending machines.
Teens such as Tikisha fell into line, too — out the door to find their junk food off campus.

Valerie Strauss:

Today, a vision-laboratory-in-a-bus assembled by Turkel pulls up to schools in low-income neighborhoods, not only providing vision tests for children but also ensuring that glasses, when needed, are made to specifications and delivered within days — all for free.
The results, school principals say, are remarkable: Many of the kids — and in some schools it can be as much as half of the student population — who wear the glasses show improvement in attendance, focus and achievement. Their behavior often improves, too.