DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

SAFE AND DRUG FREE SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES

ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

The meeting came to order at 8:30 a.m. in the Barnard Auditorium of 400
Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, DC. David Long, Chairman, presiding.

PRESENT:

MARGARET SPELLINGS SECRETARY

DAVID LONG CHAIRMAN

DEBORAH PRICE MEMBER

KIM DUDE MEMBER

FREDERICK ELLIS MEMBER

J. ROBERT FLORES MEMBER

MIKE HERRMANN MEMBER

MONTEAN JACKSON MEMBER

RUSSELL JONES MEMBER

SHEPPARD KELLAM MEMBER

SUSAN KEYS MEMBER

TOMMY LEDBETTER MEMBER

MICHAEL PIMENTEL MEMBER

DENNIS ROMERO MEMBER

BELINDA SIMS MEMBER

MARY ANN SOLBERG MEMBER

HOPE TAFT MEMBER

HOWELL WECHSLER MEMBER

CATHERINE DAVIS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

MARIELA SHIRLEY SURROGATE FOR DR. RALPH HINGSON

A-G-E-N-D-A

Opening Statement 3

Discussion of Advisory Committee Members 5

Remarks from Secretary Margaret Spellings 91

Discussion of Members 126

Closing Comments 141

Adjourn 144

P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S

8:34 a.m.

MR. LONG: Well, good morning, everyone. We\'re now ready for a second
day and if we could just take a moment to go over the agenda for the
day.

We will have discussion and in that discussion we\'ll be, of course,
trying to synthesize all of the information, the multitude of
information that we received yesterday plus your years of experience in
the field to come up with some ideas and some suggestions relative to
changes and, of course, persistently dangerous and we\'d like those, if
we could, really clear cut and again, if we can be quite creative and
quite candid, it would be very helpful.

Another thing that I want to mention is that at 10:15, the Secretary
will be with us for approximately 30 minutes. So, from 10:15 until 10:45
and I\'m going to say this and then if we can really try to adhere to
it, I think it would be helpful for all of us and there\'s a couple of
elements that enter into this.

We\'d like to be here and at work and assembled when the security comes
at 10:15 rather on a break. So, if she\'s going to be here at 10:15 and
be here for approximately 30 minutes, that means 10:45. So, that\'s
quite a long time. So, what I\'d like to suggest is that in our
discussion as individuals just come and go as you wish to take that
break so that when the Secretary\'s here at 10:15, we\'re all set and
going full bore.

Then right after the Secretary leaves, we\'ll take a few minutes, like
15 or 20, depending on the task at hand to see where we go from here.
Because we\'ll be having this discussion, then enter the Secretary, and
it might change the course of the ship a little bit and then we can
adjust depending on what ‑- what she has to say.

Now, that takes us up to around 11:00, 11:05, 11:10 and I wanted to stop
there for a second because I\'ve had three or four of you tell me that
you need to leave because you have flights from about 12:30 to 1:00 and
rather than \-- and we were scheduled to end at 11:30 and rather than
have four or five people that have to exit for the airport, if we could
collectively say let\'s end around 11:10, then everyone can stay. Then
everyone can head for the airports. So, that we\'re nice and tight as we
end the meeting.

Does that make sense? I\'m seeing a lot of head nods. Okay. Thank you.

Any other comments as we start? Debbie, anything that you wish to \--

MS. PRICE: No.

MR. LONG: Okay. All set. Okay. With that then, let\'s commence the
discussion and again, let\'s take a look at \-- Catherine\'s going to
have a good job today to really try to get all these things down, but to
come up with ideas and then we\'ll get them down and we\'ll go back to
them so that we can make sense of ideas to change or suggestions for the
Secretary relative to persistently dangerous.

Some of them, quite frankly, were pretty clear cut from yesterday. So, I
think we\'ll hit some of them right on the head immediately.

So, let me just start it out by saying \-- I\'ll take the easy one. The
one that there was tremendous consensus on was the name. That was one
that I think was mentioned by every panel and quite frankly, I think by
every person on every panel. So, that would ‑- that\'s a type of thing
that I\'m talking about and suggesting.

It isn\'t \-- and then I want to model this. It isn\'t necessary for us
to come up with a specific name today. So, that the concept is to change
the name and then we can put \-- there are bullets under because it is
condescending. It becomes a hurdle for efficiency out in the field and
on and on. So, we know what those bullets are.

And we had several suggestions for that name change and as I said, the
concept will be to change the name, number one, and then we will, I
would imagine \-- I say imagine because it will depend as we end the
meeting when we set up our next conference call. So, if we have number
one to change the name and we know some of the bullets that I just
mentioned, you can be thinking between now and that conference which
might be in a week or ten days or whatever we decide at the end so that
then you will have had time to think about specific name change and then
we can insert that into the concept.

Does that make sense? Okay.

MS. PRICE: One thing, you know, as we did after the state grants
meeting, we put together an interim report to the Secretary.

I do think it would be helpful for us to get our \-- you know, the
nutshell of our thoughts and suggestions into the Secretary. Because I
know that, you know, 2008 is re-authorization for No Child Left Behind
and I know that the Department is looking at, you know, what they\'re
considering to put forward for that. Obviously, it\'s a long process,
but it would be good if we could, you know, develop an informal report
so to speak, interim report, but informal report from our ‑- you know,
what we know now about, you know, what we have heard and what our
thoughts are regarding unsafe school choice and persistently dangerous.

So, I think that would be a real benefit and if we could do that, we can
follow-up if need be with another conference call to mull some of that
stuff through and work through e-mails again.

But, I do think that would be really helpful and, you know, we still
would be working towards a final report in June, but, you know, come
next June, I mean potential for No Child Left Behind to be going through
a re-authorization could be there. I kind of doubt it, but I mean it
could be there. So, I think that would be really helpful for us to get
whatever our thoughts are in the next early \--

MR. LONG: Let\'s make this quite free-wheeling and again, let\'s be
clear about. If we can agree that one of the items that, and then we can
leave that, is name change. Then we\'ll go on to other areas.

I\'m sorry. Shepp and then Hope.

MR. KELLAM: I want to make a proposition. From a public health
perspective, it\'s ill conceived the idea of \-- and I think many of the
panelists thought that that was the case that we\'re spending an
enormous amount of attention and time and resources on the wrong end of
the problem and I\'d like to make an argument for a conceptual framework
change.

Number one, what you\'d say if we\'re oriented toward prevention and
fixing things, that we want to know early on how the kids are adapting
to school. Not how well the prevalence of serious felonious behavior is
at the end, but rather what\'s the condition of the kids as they enter
school.

So, an information system that does that gives us an opportunity to see
how things are going from the beginning and what we\'ve done in public
health and in the research field and prevention is if you want a
classroom rate, you take the aggregate ratings by the teacher of how the
kids are doing and if two-thirds of the classroom are having difficulty
sitting still paying attention following learning how to be a student,
that\'s a classroom that\'s got difficulty. One-third of the kids later
on in that classroom are going to be the kids we identify and get
schools labeled as unsafe. So, if we turn it around and say okay, let\'s
take a public health perspective and say okay, let\'s do our assessment
early on. Let\'s find out how Charlie\'s doing, Sally and Henry early on
and let\'s look at how the classroom is doing because a lot of the
problem is teachers who are not given the tools to organize and
socialize kids.

Now, in the Society for Prevention Research, there\'s a report on how we
need to integrate how well the kids are adapting with the education and
achievement data so that we have a real opportunity to see how kids are
developing before the fact and that takes away the \-- you know, the
deflation, the humiliation, the whole \-- everything that suffers if you
say okay, what\'s the prevalence of, you know, cancer or something in a
community. It\'s a bad name, but if you say okay, what\'s the condition
that leads to it early on, you\'ve got opportunities, major
opportunities to prevent the problem.

And we know that the kids in first grade and thereabouts are highly
malleable. I mean they can be taught. They haven\'t had the experience
of failure to learn to read. They are at the critical point and we need
to keep track and follow these kids over time. That means a unique
identifier which the schools already have with kids. Everybody knows how
to \-- you know, you got to track report cards over grade levels for
Charlie and it helps us understand how to relate this to the data
systems that are being generated at grade for the whole No Kids Left
Behind.

So, I\'m arguing for a reorientation. Phase one was very important.
Major trial. Good things were intended. Phase two might be a major
effort to move forward to a prevention and remedy and successful
adaptation of kids.

MS. PRICE: I think you make some really good points, Shepp, but let me
just throw a cog in the mix.

You know, yesterday, when I asked the panel \-- the state
representatives if they thought it was particularly helpful, I wasn\'t
particularly surprised by their answers.

MR. KELLAM: Right.

MS. PRICE: Because all four of those states had acted on this in one
manner or another. There are many states that are floundering when it
comes to this and I think your point of getting in early on and making
changes is really important and that is for those young children now and
the future.

But, what about those kids today that are in an unsafe school or that
are victims of violence and whatever and we can\'t lose sight of the
core of what is there in persistently dangerous and unsafe school
choice. Is choice for if the parents believe that their children are in
a negative environment, an improper, you know, violent environment, that
they can have the option to put their kid in another school.

So, I think that we can\'t lose sight of that aspect, that element. I
think that\'s very important for those kids that are today in high
school or middle school or whichever, but they\'re beyond the early
range that you\'re looking at. You know, providing an option of choice
and figuring out how to get to that choice option for them today.

You know, maybe the two get married together somehow, but I don\'t think
you can eliminate. Pick one over the other.

MR. KELLAM: Okay. If I could just throw in a word about that. This is
not a one-shot deal of assessing kids in first grade in the fall. It
happens that that\'s an enormously powerful predictor into the mid-life.
I mean we\'ve got lots of data suggesting that how kids appear and
respond to first grade is a major predictor of how they\'re going to be
at age 40 and teacher ratings are incredibly predictive, but you don\'t
do it at one point. You do it periodically like we do with grades and
achievements in general.

And so, what you\'ve got is a tracking system that tells you \-- I can
tell you this. If you had no problems in a high school and you could see
a shift in where the kids are coming from into that high school, it
would be the kids coming in from middle school who are going to bring
the difficulties.

In other words, the kids flow over age and I can tell you at 75 the
distance between first grade and middle school is a week I mean in the
life span of us. You know, by the time you get around to realizing
what\'s going on, kids are carrying forth a long tracks, you know, that
are really generated in the first few days, first few weeks.

So, it\'s not an either or. It\'s a marriage. It\'s understanding how
life course of kids is our business and socializing them is the way to
get at self-esteem and that when you don\'t, you pay a price.

MS. KEYS: Can I just add? I really think what Deborah and Shepp are
suggesting is that we need to come forward probably with recommendations
that cover both ends of the spectrum and I think, you know, the longer
vision is how do we want to shift the momentum in this country towards a
prevention agenda so that in the long term we diminish the problems that
we\'re facing now and yet at the same time, we need to have a plan that
remedies the situation that exists.

Just, you know, a comment from yesterday. I really liked the idea of not
necessarily identifying schools by a label, but just deciding that a
system would provide extra resources and technical assistance and
support to, you know, an X percent of schools that were struggling by,
you know, some way that would be identified. So, that the focus is
really what is it we\'re trying to accomplish and we\'re trying to
accomplish healthy, safe school environments where kids can be
successfully achieving and I think our recommendations need to support
strategies that help schools move in that direction not merely respond
to the problem after it occurs. So, and I \-- you know, I\'m happy to
discuss more of that, but I want to give others a chance.

MS. PRICE: And just one thing Tommy just mentioned to me. A lot of what
Shepp is talking about is really probably an element more in Title 1.
You know, because that is all of what is encompassing in
elementary/secondary education and there\'s a lot of focus there in
Title 1 separate from Safe and Drug Free School Title which doesn\'t
mean we can\'t give, you know, insight and direction, but where that is
housed probably would be more in Title 1.

MR. KELLAM: Well, I \-- I don\'t know. I mean I\'ll shut up \--

MR. LONG: Before we \-- you brought up a point that as we\'re starting
on this discussion and I mentioned it yesterday, remembering we\'re
listening to the panel. We\'re talking about persistently dangerous and
what we heard and that\'s why at the end I said remember the four people
sitting there from four states represented over 12 million students and
as Deb indicated, it wasn\'t a great surprise, but the answer was no,
no, no, no.

Now, if we\'re going to \-- as we address this, we want to bear in mind
that we have the vast majority of the folks across this country talking
about persistently dangerous and choice and you heard them say it state
after state we already offer choice. We were hearing numbers of zero,
seven, 12. So, in this discussion, sometime it\'s going to have to be is
the recommendation going to be there already is choice. Get it off the
table. I mean those things have to enter into our \-- we heard it loud
and clear yesterday. So, at least think about some of the things that
the people said yesterday.

MS. TAFT: Some of the things I heard yesterday was that there really was
no scientific backing or research for this persistently dangerous
program which to me kind of flies in the face of what all the other
parts of Title 4 are about which is to make sure that there are
scientifically evidenced-based programs in the school.

So, to me it sets a bad example at the national level for what you\'re
trying to have implemented at the local level and, you know, in the same
umbrella safe and drug free schools.

And I also heard and was captivated by the idea of making it into a
positive program instead of a negative program and knowing how well and
how hard and sought after the Blue Ribbon School designation is. It
seems to me that you could lay out those things that make a safe
schools. All those things you want schools to do in the guidelines for
an award program such as the Blue Ribbon Program or some other program
you might come up with and through that way, encourage schools to move
forward along the track.

Right now, we\'re telling them they\'re no good, but we don\'t give them
a single bit of a hit of how they might improve and knowing from
discipline situations, if you wanted to do a discipline in a positive
way, you have to tell the child how to correct their behavior or they
have no guidelines for what to do differently which is basically what
this program is doing now. It\'s saying you\'re bad. You\'re wrong, but
I\'m not going to help you get better.

And I think that if we could change it to a positive system, we could
get a long \-- get a lot farther and make people happier and with
implementing the change that is what we really want to see happen
because you really want schools to be safe. You don\'t want them to be
unsafe environments.

Which leads to the next point that I\'d like to make. It seems to me in
the choice issue where you\'re giving victims the right to move to
another school which in one level is absolutely correct because you need
to get a child out of an unsafe situation, but in another level, does
nothing to improve the situation in the school that has the problem and
what you\'re really doing is rewarding the bad behavior of the bully or
the one or two other individuals in that school who are giving the
school a bad rap and so, it seems to me it might be more effective to
require that the person who\'s causing the trouble be move to an
alternative situation so that that person gets help than requiring the
victim to move so that the bully thinks that they have succeeded and
will go about bullying the next person in line in the school and not
doing anything to really help the climate of that school.

So, those are my recommendations.

MS. PRICE: I think the idea of taking action towards the perpetrator. I
always hate that word because it sounds like they murdered somebody, but
towards the person who has the negative behavior is \-- because in a
sense, the victim is kind of being punished by \-- they may really like
their school. This is where they want to be and so, they have a ‑- you
know, to get away from him, you move them and that just \-- but, the
hitch is in the school districts that are tiny that have one high
school, one middle school, one elementary school because that\'s what we
\-- in my office, we talk about. I mean, you know, those are the
problematic school districts where you don\'t \-- you know, there\'s not
a lot of choice because there\'s not a lot of physical options.

So, just, you know, if we could think about that a little bit, I think
that would be helpful.

MS. TAFT: Maybe other states could do and maybe they do, but Ohio has a
real system of alternative schools where districts have banded together
to form the critical mass of students that are necessary and so, if that
was a system that was encouraged other places, then those small
districts who had no options would have an option.

MR. JONES: Yes, I like what I\'m hearing and I think there\'s some
consistent feedback.

Just several recommendations. First of all, I think that, you know, if,
in fact, this is a model program, there needs to be attention given to
kind of a critical analysis of just the methodology, the research
methodology. I think there are some very fundamental flaws. I think
there are numerous threats to both internal and external validity.

So, for example, we don\'t know the extent to which the assessments that
are being carried out are consistent and then we don\'t know the extent
to which any intervention strategies that have been engaged are, in
fact, producing results. So, again, just methodologically, I think that
the level of rigor certainly isn\'t up to par and this is not to throw
the baby out with the bath water because I think some very basic steps
can be taken to enhance, you know, what\'s there presently.

And then related to that kind of philosophically and I\'m very pleased
to hear that there\'s going to be a change in name, but I think change
in name is \-- we need to go further than that.

I think that just philosophically looking more at a strength-based model
where we\'re focusing in on the strengths that kids have rather than
deficiencies and that also applies to the school. Looking at the
strengths of the school rather than looking at, you know, the negatives
and building on those strengths. There\'s certainly a lot of research
that certainly supports a strength-based approach as opposed to what\'s
often referred to as a deficit model or a deficit approach and I think
that\'s what\'s taking place.

Related to that, putting on my clinical hat if I might, I think that I
didn\'t hear a lot about assisting the perpetrators if you will as well
as the victims. I would prefer to refer to those individuals that are
impacted by a perpetrator rather than a victim a survivor. Victim,
there\'s a number of negative connotations that go along with that. So,
anyway, survivors. These kids are surviving. They\'re moving through a
difficult situation and building on strengths that they have.

But, again, just in terms of the intervention, I heard nothing
concerning how well these children are doing subsequent to these \-- you
know, these insults and I also heard nothing in terms of what our
relative predictors of why the perpetrators are engaging in the kind of
behaviors that they are and I think what that really brings to I think
the elephant in the room is the fact that trauma is indeed universal. I
think that that\'s the missing piece and I think that, you know, we need
to look at that.

We know, for example, that there are numerous studies that have shown
that violence is highly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder.
We know that violence is also positively correlated with just a number
of very, very negative outcomes and I\'ve heard no discussion concerning
that.

Many of these children that are indeed or adolescents that are engaging
in violent behavior indeed come from families of violence. The
prevalence of domestic violence. The fact that they\'ve been violated
themselves. We know that children, for example, who engage in sexual
abuse have been abused themselves. So, again, looking at the very
important role as a very important precursor, a prime mover to put in
Skinnerian terms if you will, but to look at that very important
ingredient and again, not only on the part of the perpetrator, but also
those that are \-- those survivors.

We know, for example, that children that are bullied, children that are
beaten up or even children that are simply \-- they observe this
phenomena do, in fact, develop levels of post-traumatic stress disorder
symptoms, distress, et cetera.

So, again, I think that\'s the real missing piece and I think that needs
to be looked at and integrated into this whole conceptual model. Again,
focus on those that impact and as well as those that have been impacted.

MS. SHIRLEY: I\'d like to follow up on a couple of areas. Number one
related to the name change and then secondly echoing a lot of what Shepp
and Hope were referring to.

One of the things that struck me yesterday was essentially the low base
rate for some of the behaviors or the process that different states went
through in terms of labeling schools as persistently dangerous. The
Texas example was less than 1 percent. If you looked at Colorado\'s
examples, they ranged between 15 and 17 percent.

I think all of the panel members also stressed not only the need to
change the name, but flexibility in terms of definitional criteria. So,
I think when we evaluate potential name changes, a lot of that may be
driven by what criteria do you really need them to track.

I think it\'s important to not only focus on some of the negative
behaviors, but to broaden the spectrum and to look at positive behaviors
not only of the child, but also of the school system. By focusing on
positive things that the schools are doing in terms of graduation rates,
improvement in test scores and so forth, you may actually gain more than
simply emphasizing some of the negative behaviors.

Also, in terms of the definitional criteria, perhaps at the Federal
level, you could indicate specific examples that should be included, you
know, or some sort of minimal standard and reverting back to my DSM sort
of standard where, you know, there are certain minimum criteria that
individuals need to meet in order to be diagnosed with a mental illness.

Perhaps the Federal system could provide states with some guidance
around those minimal criteria, but allow states to then utilize other
criteria that they may need to designate based on those specific
circumstances.

Once that list is perhaps generated, I think another consideration might
be advice to states in terms of the kinds of algorithms that they might
then utilize to make decisions about unsafe schools or poor
environmental climates for learning for the students.

One of the other things that struck me is, and I sort of kept coming
back to this last name, the example that Jerry Barber presented of the
one school. There was a slide where he had a list of all of the examples
of offenses that students performed and the reporting numbers by school
as well as then the documentation in the school records and if schools
are going to track not only the negative behaviors but also the positive
behaviors, perhaps then areas where there are wide discrepancies might
provide room for not only general training of teachers, but booster
sessions, you know, or some sort of remediation program in deficit areas
on a more frequent ongoing basis.

And why I was struck by his example is that there seemed to be a very
strong consistency in terms of definitions or the interpretation for
sexual offense as well as possession, but not use of a weapon. But, then
when you look at some of the other examples of other disruptive
incidents or what is judge to be intimidation, harassment, menacing or
bullying, there are again significant \-- it\'s open to interpretation
by the observer.

So, I guess my recommendation would be to not only assess multiple
behaviors, but also to use multiple informants in that process and not
only teachers and students and by evaluating the students, you\'re also
getting peer assessment, but perhaps also the community.

MS. DUDE: I agree with a lot that\'s been said and I certainly think
that the name change is a given, but I think another thing that\'s a
given is the whole criteria on how we came to decide a school was
persistently dangerous.

I want to reiterate what I said yesterday. I\'m a very strong believer
that the number of people caught has little to do with the number of
people who are breaking policies. It has very little to do with that and
as a matter of fact, one thing that I am a believer of is that the law
is often a prevention tool. The police or judicial folks are a
prevention tool and that often the more people caught, the fewer people
who \-- and the more often we hear about the number of people caught,
the less people are going to break the law and the less students are
going to break the law and so, I think just inherent in this is a
logical flaw that the more students written up, the more likely that
school is to be persistently dangerous. I just don\'t think there is a
necessary cause and effect between those two things and so, I think that
whole criteria should be taken out.

I certainly think the name should be changed. I like the idea of
rewarding, you know, the positive. I think people either live up to your
expectations or they live down to your expectations and so, I think if
we have high expectations of what a safe school is, schools will strive
to do that and I think that \-- I would also recommend that we do \--
that we have some sort of survey that students can tell us, can inform
us as to how safe they think the school is.

As well as, I think there should be a survey. I certainly got the
impression from folks yesterday that they didn\'t believe in a
consistent survey that every school does across the country. I don\'t
really see the problem in having ten or 15 or 20 core questions and then
schools can add some additional questions if they want to, but I think
we should want to know how safe do they feel.

I think we should know what \-- you know, if they are, in fact, using
drugs or carrying a weapon or then we could also maybe find out how safe
they are at home to get at some of the things that Russell was talking
about. I think there are a lot of things we need to be informed about as
far as what our students are thinking and feeling and doing, but I think
that incident data is not telling us that and we\'re kind of \-- this
thing \-- this persistently dangerous schools seems to be putting all
their eggs in the incident basket as opposed to looking at the true big
picture of how safe our schools are, how our students feel and maybe we
even survey our teachers and find out how safe they feel and so, it just
seems like the goal is right, but the road map to get to that end
result, we have the wrong map I think.

MR. ELLIS: Yes, I think there have been a lot of good comments this
morning.

I want to make a couple of points that I tried to make yesterday. At
least, I believe that this law was fairly simple and was intended to
address a couple of issues.

One of which is that the education community, education culture
historically has not done a good job at data collection and data sharing
particularly with parents and I repeat again that my sense is that the
education community to a large extent has a very paternalistic attitude
in terms of sharing crime, discipline data, disorder data with parents
and I think that\'s one of the main driving forces behind this
legislation. That it was to force schools to address disorder, to share
this data with consumers if you will and to give parents a choice to
move to a safe school without having to move physically which is an
option that many of us have.

We choose where we live to a large extent if we have kids based on our
perception of the school. Not everyone can do that.

So, while think those were the intentions, I don\'t think there\'s any
doubt that it has not accomplished many if any of those things.

Obviously, we heard a lot of evidence that the data collection still
today really stinks. It really \-- look at the audit from New York. The
other ones. Even though there are requirements, there\'s state laws that
\-- you know, No Child Left Behind is not new. It\'s been around, but
states are still getting bad data from schools that still exist.

The sharing of it, we heard examples of principals reluctant to share
data with the state and the Feds. They said right here, you know, we
would keep this at the school. I would never send it to the state or the
Feds and if parents ask for it, then I give it to them.

I\'m sorry. I still have a big problem with that. I think this kind of
data needs to be transparent. I think parents have a right to know it.
They shouldn\'t have to come knocking on your door to get this data.

So, I think the data collection and sharing is a big piece of what this
legislation is intended to do and I think that is a good one.

The designation clearly, you know, without further comment that needs to
go in its entirety and the USCO components, you know, my sense is again
that they were well intended, but I\'m not sure that they are fulfilling
their intended purpose. Obviously, much of that is driven by the few
numbers of schools that have been designated as persistently dangerous.
So, therefore, yes, there should be no surprise that there are a few
people who choose transfers.

You know, so, I\'m not sure about that. My sense is that that\'s not
particularly helpful particularly when there\'s no funding available and
there are very few options and I agree with the comments that the victim
should never \-- should always have the option of staying put.

Offenders \-- if they\'re a victim of a violent incident, you know, the
first choice should be that the perpetrator leave the school not the
victim. Why victimize them twice?

I think the other thing that we heard very clearly yesterday was the
need to measure the climate and culture of the school and I\'m firm
believer in that. I think the climate and culture of the school can be
measured. I think we could include it on some of the other surveys that
we already do of student behavior and whatnot, but I think it\'s a key
component of how that school sees itself, how the community sees it and
I think those instruments are very helpful in getting a handle on
what\'s going at that school.

The climate and culture and connectivity of students is so important and
we need to come up with some mechanism and some tool and I think we
could do that.

The other point that I want to \-- we spent a lot of time talking about
prevention and prevention is \-- I agree that it\'s absolutely the
ultimate goal. No question about it. If we could, you know, if we can
have some guarantee that we could prevent 100 percent of bad stuff from
happening, that\'s where we should throw our money, but the reality is
we can\'t prevent everything.

And if we think about \-- I like to use the analogy of a three-legged
stool where prevention is one leg, but deterrence is another leg and
enforcement and consequences are a third and in order to control a
school environment, you really need all three. For those people that you
can\'t prevent, then you need to deter and those that aren\'t going to
be deterred, then they need to have the ability to apprehend them and
force them to make them face some consequences and we can\'t lose sight
of that.

But, having said that, I agree that prevention is always the ultimate,
the ultimate goal in preventing disorder.

So, anyway, having said all that, my recommendations are some
standardization of some of the data elements. I think we can do that. I
think we should include some kind of culture/climate survey maybe in the
current instruments that we use. Not necessarily doing every student,
but I know that there\'s ‑- the scientists, the researchers can give us
the randomization in terms of the numbers because there are costs with
doing these things. They are expensive to do and I think that we need to
keep that in mind, but I would imagine we could do a sampling and get a
pretty good feel of the culture and climate of the school.

Require publication of all data in both an aggregate and a
dis-aggregated fashion. Not just for those schools that are designated
something. Again, parents can make their designations. You know, our
parents are not stupid. They can look at crime and disorder data and
make their own determinations of which schools are safe or unsafe.

And the USCO component again, particularly when people are victims of
violent offenses, I just think that the victim ought to have a right to
stay put and that should be a priority and paramount.

MR. PIMENTEL: Well, most of the points that I wanted to discuss were
discussed very eloquently by Fred, but I do want to reenforce something
that I\'m hearing reoccurring about the victim being victimized twice or
the survivors, Russell, being victimized twice.

In our community, our victims have that option and I think we need to
reenforce that this is their option to move or to go to a different
school. Individuals react differently to different trauma sources and
for one person, one student, that student and the parents ultimately
need to make that decision as to how they\'re going to deal with that
trauma and for them, is the healing to the trauma going to be better
adapted by their move or by their stay and allow that victim and their
parents to make that decision.

The offender will always have no choice in the matter and I think
that\'s real important to get discussed.

MS. SOLBERG: Well, I agree with many of the things that have been said
this morning. I especially like Hope\'s positive let\'s have
consistently safe schools. That, I believe, is the way to go. But, I\'d
like to get a little more basic here and back up. Yesterday, we heard
constantly that we didn\'t collect data or if we did, it varied from
state to state. That we don\'t even have definitions of what an unsafe
school is.

So, I recommend first of all if we are going to deal with the problem
then we need to know the nature and extent of that problem and I don\'t
feel that we\'ve defined the problem or that we know the extent of it.

So, I would like to go back to the core measures that I mentioned
yesterday. I mean it is really important, I believe, to the Federal
Government to have some core measures that go across agencies. I means
SAMHSA is represented here today. You have Safe Schools Healthy
Students. Justice just came in. You have so many programs that deal with
our schools, the safety of our schools.

The perpetrators, and I agree with you I don\'t like that word either,
but there are so many programs across the Federal Government and across
state governments and we don\'t build synergy within these programs
because we don\'t collect the data, number one, and we don\'t share that
data.

Think about if Justice, in Education, in SAMHSA, all collected
information on safe schools and the nature and extent of drug abuse and
the other issues that Safe and Drug Free Schools deal with, think of the
power we would have not only to refine our programs, to define our
programs, but something else that was mentioned so often, I wrote it
down at least 25 times in here, and that was a dollar sign.

You know, everybody talked about money, unfunded mandate. We don\'t have
the money to do this. Isn\'t it wonderful that we define the school as
unsafe, but then what do we do with it.

Well, if we had the data, if we had the numbers, we would have the power
to attract the money and to attract the solutions and I think that
we\'re way out ahead of ourselves. We need basic information about the
nature and extent so that we can use that information to inform
decisions. Not only decisions around this table, but decisions in every
school district in this country, in every county government, in every
state government and in the Federal Government. Because when you make
decisions without the information, your decisions are often not as
effective as they could be.

Thank you.

MR. LONG: I want to make sure that and I love this because there\'s so
much interaction. I have Tommy, Dennis, Hope, Russell. Did I leave
anyone? I want to make sure that my \-- did I skip over you? Did you
have your hand up earlier? Okay. Why don\'t we \-- I knew I missed
someone and I don\'t want to miss someone as large as you are. So, I
want to go right to you \--

MR. WECHSLER: David, you also missed Howell on the phone.

MR. LONG: Okay. I\'m sorry.

MR. WECHSLER: So, add me in at the end of the line please.

MR. LONG: Okay.

MR. HERRMANN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just want to \-- Mary Ann,
you\'re right on target about the data.

The other thing that I would say as a state person who works
collaboratively with SAMHSA projects and Justice projects, it\'s very,
very frustrating to be asked to collect this piece of information for
Education and this piece of information for CSAB or whoever and a lot of
times, they\'re very similar, but they\'re not exactly the same.

And, you know, it\'s very difficult to do surveys in Tennessee. I know
it\'s difficult to do surveys anywhere. I mean schools just do not like
surveys. So, we need to keep survey data to a minimum. We need to be
sure that what we\'re asking is going to address the needs of everybody
that has a stake here. So, I think you\'re right on target about being
uniform.

I think that stepping back just a little bit from the USCO issue,
there\'s a lot of power \-- potential power in the whole UMIRS
requirement that\'s already built into the NCLBs. So, I think if we
could ever nail that down and give people sort of a final answer about
this is what you need to do to address the UMIRS requirement, I think we
could go a long way toward keeping everybody happy.

Now, in terms of the USCO piece of NCLB, I wanted to speak to the fact
that there are really two elements to that. You know, one is the whole
persistently dangerous school definition. The other is the victims of
violent crime piece.

In my mind, a significant part of the challenge with USCO is the more
complicated you make the data collection, the more you try and sort of
reach out, the more prone you are to local interpretation and all sorts
of other problems.

I want to sort of throw out the idea that you retain the victim of
violent crime piece and that that becomes kind of the central part of
the USCO element. Because I mean while definitions differ somewhat
across states, I think every state has defined violent crime. I think
that\'s something that\'s pretty concrete. I think it\'s something
that\'s pretty difficult to misinterpret locally. So, I think that\'s a
good solid element.

This whole issue of base rate is something that, you know, every year
when we pull in our data for the persistently dangerous schools
determinations, we invariably have some elementary school out in the
middle of nowhere that, you know, comes in the top four or five on the
rates simply because they have a low number of students. You know, maybe
they caught a large number of students with knives at school that year
or something and, you know, the school obviously is not persistently
dangerous, but because the rate is so low, you get into those sorts of
issues.

So, again, I think to really leave the USCO piece focusing on the most
serious incident is important.

I really think the concept of recognizing a school of being positive is
an extremely important thing. We have come a long way in the last ten
years in terms of our knowledge about how to really comprehensively look
at this issue. It\'s not something that translates well into statistics,
but it is something that I think would translate very well into some
sort of a recognition-type program. So, I\'m a strong believer in that.

Thank you.

MR. LEDBETTER: Very quickly, the thing I don\'t necessarily disagree
with anything that anyone has said. I think that everyone is pretty much
on target with the recommendations and I think we all heard some of the
same messages yesterday.

I believe that being from public education I have a little bit of an
understanding of the different programs that are out there in public
education, but some of the programs are a little bit fragmented in that
they don\'t necessarily mesh with each other.

Shepp, you were talking about programs to deal with the early elementary
grades. You know, that\'s Title 1. There\'s a program there in Title 1
to do that.

Deborah mentioned that there was hitches in some of these things with
what do you do with the victim as opposed to the perpetrator when
you\'re talking about the choice to change schools. The IDEA. That\'s
one that no one likes to talk about, but IDEA can sometimes \-- that
whole law can get in the way.

You know, and then you couple that with the fact that it becomes a
funding issue. If you have a student who is perpetrator that is
identified by IDEA, then you have \-- the system has a funding issue if
you\'re going to send that child to a different setting because you\'re
changing their setting and you\'re talking about least restrictive
environments and so forth and there are some problems between the
different programs and I guess that\'s the point that I\'m trying to
make here when I say that a lot of the different programs that are out
there are a little bit fragmented in that they don\'t all mesh together
perfectly.

With that said, persistently dangerous, I think everyone is in agreement
that that term is not necessarily a term that we like, but when we look
at that term, the message yesterday was very clear that from one state
to another, the school that is identified as persistently dangerous in
one state is not identified as persistently dangerous in another state
because of the difference in the definition of persistently dangerous
from state to state. That\'s a problem I think that everyone here is
probably in agreement with that.

But, the thing that struck me the most yesterday was the four state
coordinators when they mentioned that the schools that are identified as
persistently dangerous are not really the schools that are persistently
dangerous. They know the schools that are persistently dangerous and
those are not the schools that are being identified that way.

If that\'s the case, then we\'ve got some real problems with the
legislation the way it is.

Now, one of the problems that I have heard since day one, since day one,
the problems that I\'ve heard \-- the biggest problem that I\'ve heard
is there\'s not enough money. We heard that against yesterday that
there\'s no funds to intervene. There\'s no funds to do things with.

We\'ve heard from day one that there\'s a problem with accountability.
Accountability has been \-- I mean, from the very first meeting that we
had, it was pretty well laid out to us that accountability is one of the
problems.

What\'s the solution? You know, we know what some of the problems are
and if the problems are common from the state grants program to this
program, I mean if the problems are common all the way through, then we
have to start looking at solutions.

Now, I\'m going to just throw this out there and maybe we need to start
thinking about it. At our last panel discussion, I was of the opinion
that the state grants program ‑- we needed to force those state grants
programs to go out and try to find some matching money and so forth to
increase the money.

The funding for this program I don\'t want to say it\'s drying up, but
it\'s shrinking. Why is it shrinking? Maybe it\'s because there\'s not
as much accountability as we need.

Those four state coordinators yesterday to a person they said that their
staffs were so small, they said that they had so many different programs
they had to administer that there was no way that they could adequately
account for every LEA that was out there within their state. The reports
are coming in, but do they have the manpower to go out and actually
visit those LEAs and to look at them and make some determinations as to
whether or not they\'re getting their money\'s worth or that they\'re
actually doing and following the guidelines that they\'re suppose to be
following.

I think that if you take all the money and redistrict the money or
redistribute the money in a way that \-- and I\'m talking about the
Federal grants portion of it, the state grants portion of it, the
governor\'s money, all of it. If you took all of that money and sent all
of that money to the states and made every LEA apply for grants to get
any of that money, the states know where the problems are. They know
where the problems are. They told us they knew the schools that were
persistently dangerous. Then there would be some money to do some things
in those schools with.

I don\'t disagree that all of the information needs to be made public. I
don\'t disagree with that. I don\'t disagree with anything that anyone
has said.

But, I feel like that if \-- the two biggest problems that I keep
hearing is a lack of money and the accountability of the money. That
we\'re not getting what the program was intended for.

And yesterday, I heard those state coordinators say that there was no
way basically that they could do all that. There was no way they could
do it.

I know within Alabama and Alabama\'s a small state, I know within
Alabama we have about a hundred different LEAs. One person out of the
State Department cannot visit 100 LEAs in a year and look at their
programs. They can\'t do it. All they can do is look at the reports that
come in.

And that\'s basically what\'s happening in New Jersey and in Texas and
in California and in Colorado. They\'re taking those programs. They\'re
looking at the reports that come in and that\'s it.

Now, if they were able to take a larger lump sum of money and administer
programs where the needs were the greatest based on the grants that they
issue, then they could go to those areas and they could \-- we could
have better accountability and if we have better accountability, maybe
Congress would give more money to this program. I think that it\'s all
linked back into the accountability. One way or another, it\'s all tied
back to the accountability. Then the accountability is tied to the
money.

So, I\'d just like to see us \-- you know and I\'m just throwing that
out there because we\'re not looking at a final solution to all of it
today, but I\'d like for you just to ponder that thought while we move
through this process. Because everything I\'ve heard from day one has
been tied to those two things, the accountability and the money or the
lack thereof and every year, it seems to be less money. So, I just
wanted to share that.

MR. ROMERO: Thank you. I too agree that this is just a wonderful
opportunity. Where else can you have this kind of venture where we could
really address such a vitally important issue and maybe disagree, but at
least appreciate each other\'s position. So, that in itself is something
for all of us to be mindful of.

I certainly am grateful and humble to be sitting around the room here
and hear the passion and the interest from many of you.

Though I agree with almost everything that\'s being said, Fred who is
closest to me I have to say that there were two things that I disagreed
that I want to sort of throw out for thought.

First of all, I don\'t think if we are truly looking to address the
issue of safety, we cannot negate and we cannot put aside the issue of
substance abuse of alcoholism, of drugs. I heard this today. I\'m sorry.
I heard this yesterday and it surprised me to hear one of the panelists
say that though alcohol and drugs are not the primary issue, and I\'m
paraphrasing with respect to safety, it\'s more an issue of academic
excellence and performance.

I respectfully disagree with that. Drugs and alcohol play an integral
part in performance, in safety. Sometimes it\'s not the actual sense of
safety. It\'s the perception and that\'s the piece that we need to be
mindful of. It may be as it\'s been said several times that it maybe
just two or three or five kids in a very large school, but it\'s not
their incidence or their behaviors that are \-- that create the awful
negative response. It\'s the perception.

And so, we need to simultaneously not only address the actual issues,
but also the perception that is, therefore, generated in these schools.

Schools have children. Children have parents. Parents live in a
community. We cannot address issues unless we also include the parents
and the community. It\'s vitally important that we include the parents
in the \-- and I am really glad to hear Fred say from standpoint of
transparency, but also from standpoint of empowering the parents.
Parents should have that information.

I did not know that I could go to my school and ask for my \-- find out
how this school is doing as I review the place for my kids to seek their
educational experience.

So, I think parents need to be involved.

If we really think about prevention, prevention is about \-- has to be
about collaboration. Prevention cannot operate in a silo and so, one of
the things from the standpoint of the Federal Government and HHS, I\'ve
been defining prevention as a collaboration \-- make as a full
collaboration and we need to collaborate and I think Mary Ann Solberg
said it quite well. We have wonderful systems in the Federal Government
that we just are not talking to each other enough.

We have data. We\'re gathering data. We need to figure out how to
interpret that data so that it\'s universal and we can all speak to it.
We need to work on that and it\'s up to us to really look at ways to
better collaborate. We do have wonderful systems in place, wonderful
initiatives.

SAMHSA, you know, and I brought with me the efforts of Safe Schools
Healthy Students. Materials for all of us to look at this.

I\'m also committed as I said a long time ago to providing an in-service
to all of you on the strategic prevention framework, the SPF, as another
initiative to help empower the communities to address their self-defined
issues that are occurring in the community.

Because we cannot be providing top down mandates. It needs to be
empowered and it needs to be generated and identified at the community
level. In this case, at the school level.

So, those are some of my comments. I also do think that we need to reach
an agreement at some level of what language we\'re going to use when we
talk about safe and drug free schools, when we talk about persistently
dangerous schools, when we talk about choices and options. We need to
have very common understanding of the language that we\'re using because
we are talking using very different terminology and I think that this is
also part of the cause of confusion I think at some levels.

So, those are my thoughts. Please don\'t shoot me.

Are we okay?

MR. ELLIS: I\'m still wondering what we disagreed on.

MR. ROMERO: Oh, well \-- oh, actually, thank you. Actually, what we
disagreed on the three pillars, the three stools. You said although
prevention is the way to go and we can never really prevent 100 percent
of everything and so, we need to have these three silos.

Actually, if we put our minds to it, we can prevent everything. I\'m not
going to go with what the fourth one is.

MS. PRICE: I just wanted to say something about, because Mary Ann and
both Dennis mentioned it, the Safe Schools Healthy Students Program
which is actually a partnership of three agencies. It reflects something
that is not often found in the Federal Government, but Justice,
Department of Education and HHS fund the program, run the program,
design the program, looking at ways to improve the program. It is an
outstanding program that comprehensively addresses issues primarily in
younger students.

But, if you were to take some of what Shepp has been saying and roll it
into a program, there is a program that gives really significant dollars
to school districts to implement a program and, you know, I would
encourage anyone to look into kind of the structure and anything that
Dennis brought, but it is an outstanding program.

MR. ROMERO: If we have some time, I know that Susan Keys she plays a key
role in this effort. So, oh, yes, that\'s right. So, they can certainly
speak to that, but that\'s a wonderful effort that, you know, does not
have the level of maybe attention or spotlighting. I\'m not sure what
the right word is, but the data is very strong. It speaks well about
creating a safe environment and a productive environment and addressing
the issues of drugs as well and so, yes, it is a good partner and
you\'re right, Deborah.

MR. LONG: If I could just for the sake of everyone\'s edification here,
the order Hope, Russell and Howell, are you still with us there?

MR. WECHSLER: Of course.

MR. LONG: Okay. I just wanted to let you know that we hadn\'t forgotten.
So, it will be Hope, Russell, Howell, Shepp and then Montean. I\'m
sorry. Go ahead.

MS. TAFT: I\'d like to bring people\'s attention to a couple of things
that the last couple of speakers have talked about. One is the survey
that was passed out yesterday that showed the relationship between
funding and alcohol and drug use that was given out by the California
speaker. Another is a survey that I happen to have in my satchel that is
the national summary from the Pride Surveys of 2005/2006 which strongly
shows the correlation between alcohol and drug use and violence and all
other kinds of negative behaviors and that\'s being passed around right
now.

Another is a book that was on your desk yesterday that I passed out
which is the from NIAAA which talks about the developmental aspects of
alcohol use which I think plays into what we\'re talking about now.

One of the things that I\'m a little concerned about is because I was
told yesterday that the bill \-- that this particular part of the bill
was put in after the Columbine shooting and it was a reaction to that
and a way to try to keep schools safe and yet, after the recent events
that our country suffered, there was an article in a local newspaper
that gave the ten years of school shootings and looking at this, it made
me realize that just looking at the end result of the violent acts that
are reported in the persistently dangerous criteria do not really get at
the issues that caused the shootings in these many, many schools. If you
look at it, it\'s all this gray area. It\'s a lot of schools.

And that maybe we should be encouraging people to look farther up stream
instead of looking at the end result and look at the things that lead up
to those violent behaviors such as school climate, bullying and a lot of
the national surveys had questions that deal with that if we would just
use them or let people use them or encourage people to use them.

So, the climate and culture of school I think is really, really
important not only to this issue, but to what kids learn and the
achievements they get.

Another recommendation that I\'d like to suggest is that there be a
longer lead time or lag time, I don\'t care what you call it, between
the time that a bill is passed and various provisions to be in place in
the states. Because I heard yesterday that the states were required to
have their definitions and their persistently dangerous program in place
by September \'03, but Department didn\'t get their non-regulatory
guidelines out until May \'04. So, it led me to believe that there was a
disconnect between what might be desired at the Federal level and what
was happening at the state level since the state already had to have
their stuff in place before they had any kind of real guidance from the
Federal level.

So, if there was a longer lead time between the passage and the
implementation, it would allow the U.S. Department more time to get
their ideas out of how it should really be in operation.

MS. TAFT: The only problem is when a bill\'s passed whether the
Department\'s had opportunity to make regulations on it or not. States
are still responsible.

MS. PRICE: Right.

MS. TAFT: But, you know, if a bill is passed in \'01 and this part is
suppose to be implemented in \'03, then maybe it should be made
implemented in \'04 so that the Department has more time to \-- I mean
and that\'s \-- you know, that\'s a recommendation that the Department
can make.

MS. PRICE: Yes, for \-- I think to \-- yes, I think that\'s right. I
think that\'s right.

MR. JONES: Great. Fred, you got a great memory. Thanks.

MS. PRICE: Okay. Russell is next.

MR. JONES: Thanks a lot. I\'m just going to echo what many other people
have said, but, you know, I don\'t know if \-- which of these
recommendations are going to actually be responded to most quickly, but
hopefully, the more we say it the more it will be heard and I just want
to echo the eloquently spoken recommendations by Mary Ann in terms of
the need for objective assessment of definitions and the need for
consistent reliable psychometrically sound longitudinal assessment.

You know, boy, we don\'t know what we don\'t know and if we haven\'t
measured. You know, if we don\'t \-- first of all, if we don\'t define
what it is, you know, we want to change, boy, there\'s no way we\'re
going to know whether or not it was changed. So, again, that\'s just
very basic fundamental stuff that I think needs to be taken into
account.

Just a couple of other things. You know, we talked about \-- you know,
we always talk about money. Tom, I think you made reference to this, but
we talk about there\'s not enough money for this and that and, you know,
but, you know, how about the partnering. I mean I just think that there
is so many smart people, wonderful initiatives that are already on the
ground that we have not bought into. Well, I guess we have at some
level, but again with this particular initiative, the job isn\'t getting
done.

And I just really want to recommend as many other people have done the
need to seek out partners. Smart, bright, competent people with
conceptual models, methodological rigor and getting the job done across
a number of dimensions.

I continue to advocate for, as several other folks do, the need for
trauma. The need for their to be attention given to that and one network
that\'s already on the ground is the National Child Traumatic Stress
Network. There\'s a data core, consistent interventions. First of all,
there are data core, consistent psychometrically sound instruments.
There is a core of evidence- based as well as evidence-informed
treatment strategies that we know about that have demonstrated great
changes in violent behavior, great changes in traumatized children,
adolescents and adults. That information is there. Those folks are on
the ground.

Partnering with those folks, I think is just very important. You know,
the term that I used last time is gamble. We\'re not doing enough of
that. We\'re not drawing on the strengths and the expertise of other
partners.

And then just one other thing, I think it\'s important that what we do
has a very important cultural competence component to it. That we take
into account the beliefs, the racial backgrounds and a number of other
factors that impact individuals.

The whole notion of ownership, boy, it\'s so important. The parents
playing a greater role in this. Being brought to the table. Being a part
of the process early on. So important.

So, again, that\'s my recommendations.

MR. LONG: Howell, if you\'re there with us.

MR. WECHSLER: I am there. Can you hear me?

MR. LONG: Yes, we can.

MR. WECHSLER: Great.

MR. LONG: Please go ahead.

MR. WECHSLER: I am very glad that we\'re not longer putting all our \--
or at least the consensus seems to be not to put all our eggs in the
violent crime data. I think even outside of the school setting, crime
data is very commonly misreported and misinterpreted.

I would like to draw attention of panel members to the two slides that I
saw yesterday that I was most impressed by and I think were most
provocative for finding solutions.

The first was from Annie of the Vera Institute in which she focused on
based on her discussions with people in the field what were the factors
that constitute an unsafe school. She identified five specific factors.
One of them was serious violence. I think one out of five is appropriate
proportion of how much of the mix should be taken up by that.

The other factors included bullying, lack of emotional connectiveness to
school, inconsistent disciplinary practices. Clearly, these are things
that would be measured by the types of surveys that have been discussed.

I\'d like to point out that there might be a utility as well to
conducting surveys of staff and parents as well as of students.

The fifth area is disordered common areas that might be measured by
surveys, that might also be measured by relatively quick visits to
schools for observation.

What I think is very important is for the Office of Safe and Drug Free
Schools to work with its partners at the state and local programs to
develop very powerful guidance on what are the best practices for
measuring each of these five factors, what are the best practices for
developing and implementing those kinds of surveys.

The second slide that I thought was most powerful came from Meredith of
California when she talked about moving towards high priority school
safety sites and maybe we recognize that there are many, many schools,
in fact, most schools probably that can be doing more and perhaps it\'s
best to focus where we can and whether it\'s each LEA or state. By
looking at the data on those five factors, to identify its highest
priority school safety sites.

And then the other thing that is very important for the Office of Safe
and Drug Free Schools to have is strong guidance on best practices for
improving each of those five school climate factors.

MR. LONG: Do you have anything else, Howell? Not being able to see you,
I couldn\'t tell for sure if \--

MR. WECHSLER: I\'m sorry. I\'m signing off. Roger and out.

MR. LONG: Okay. Thank you so much. Next is Shepp and then Montean.

MR. KELLAM: I\'m sitting here having difficulties. I think that the
discussion we\'re having is enormously important and everything that has
been said has an important credence to it.

So, what\'s the problem, Sheppard?

I think the biggest problem for me is two things. One is that we know a
lot from research that is not available to our group here.

When Fred says you can\'t prevent everything and lists two other poles
of a stool, the other two poles are part of prevention strategies. All
three poles, Fred, were prevention strategies. Deterrence is, in fact, a
major prevention strategy. So, there\'s some misunderstanding about what
we\'re talking about prevention as to what it is.

A second issue is so what do you expect from a prevention program? How
about a 30 to 50 percent reduction in illicit drug abuse disorder from
interventions in first grade in terms of young adult outcomes among the
highest risk kids? How about a reduction of 25 to 50 percent in
antisocial personality disorder and violence and imprisonment?

Hello, Fred. Are those of interest? Those numbers? Okay.

What I\'m saying to you is that, in fact, you may not get 100 percent
reduction by prevention anymore from a flu vaccine than you would from
an early intervention in classroom behavior management.

On the other hand, you got to start with the idea that you\'re going to
build the impact from early and continuing and crisis intervention as a
continuum. So, Deborah and I were talking about a marriage. An
attractive idea as a matter of fact for a variety of reasons, but
anyway, I think the really important thing is to understand how we\'re
not talking about either or, but we\'re talking about interventions
early on that have continued to be interventions throughout the life
course and that\'s what we are trying to integrate and to try to make
happen.

Dennis is bringing up the Safe Schools Healthy Student is an enormously
powerful idea. That was going to be a model for integrating education,
justice, drugs and health and the like and Safe and Drug Free Schools
is, in fact, a similar kind of model integrating and why is that
sensible? Because the early risk factors that lead to all those outcomes
are one in the same. They come from common developmental antecedents.

So, we need to have a grasp of the nature of this whole problem not in
silos, but as they integrate and feed kids into Tommy\'s schools or into
David\'s high schools and the school district. Because, in fact, we need
an integrate strategy, conceptual framework that\'s integrated.

And I think that when we raise the question when Paul was talking
yesterday in his panel, the panel you were on, about integrating the
data systems from a public health research point of view, it is
literally out of the question to have multiple large population-based
data systems that are separate, independent and have no connection
across them.

It immediately becomes useless because the education and achievement
issues, the Department issues and the other issues even integrating the
unique identifier, the grade structure information systems in the
average school district with the No Kid Gets Left Behind statewide
assessment systems, those systems must be integrated and that\'s part
and parcel of integrating response capability so that, in fact, you can
intervene early on and continually and in crises with different
strategies which together bring together major impact and so, part of
the problem is bringing all this research and all these perspectives
from Education, Justice, you know, SAMHSA and the like into one place
and our job is, I think, to somehow figure out how to make this lesson
transparent to people.

And the thing I hate worse about this branding schools is, number one,
it doesn\'t \-- it\'s not attached to solutions and number two, it\'s a
lousy data system and there are reasons when the data are no good. It\'s
not an accident and whether you can fix that is highly dubious and if
you did, what would be the outcome in terms of solutions.

So, we\'re talking about major change and a shared vision that brings
things together in the model of education, health, drug abuse and the
like and \-- and justice. So, anyway.

MR. LONG: Thank you, Shepp. Montean.

MS. JACKSON: Let\'s see. Some of the recommendations that I heard that
came out of the panel discussion yesterday and from our last panel
presentations was it was obvious that there was a lot of data that was
being collected by the local LEAs that seemed to not be rolling forward
and rolling up to the SEA and perhaps all the way to the Federal
Government.

So, one of the things I kind of really have been tossing around for some
time is that again the data that\'s been collected. We had some
wonderful presenters last \-- at our last face-to-face meeting that
talked about reports and things that had been developed that perhaps we
needed to \-- again, we needed to get something from the Federal
Government of that core data set. As many people have stated, that is
information that you\'re needing to have us move forward, that is
already in place, that\'s already been collected by the local LEAs and
that we have some foundation \-- a uniform foundation established of
what those things might look like and what is the additional information
that has not been supplied in the past to get supplied now.

The other thing persistently dangerous schools. I\'m troubled by the
fact that we have out there that it takes two to three years to take a
look and I understand the definition of persistently dangerous, but at
the same time, being able to look at your school systems and look at
your discipline data as well as other factors that sometimes may not
actually be mentioned in the discipline data. For instance, the reasons
for a particular violent behavior and is that attached to any type of
substance abuse behavior as well. So, there may be some cross
information between particular violation by a student that we need to
examine and have a little bit more information than it just being
labeled as one item.

So, looking at the schools in your local area annually and taking into
account what\'s going on within your community and within your schools.

Again, something I also heard mentioned is that we need to have these
surveys. Well, once again, I think many of our LEAs are already doing
climate surveys and they are surveying staff and they are surveying
faculty and they are surveying students as well as parents in the larger
community and so, again, speaking on behalf of a community that does
this, I think some of these mechanisms are in place.

Let\'s see. Also, the other thing that I also think about is often some
type \-- some of our students have offenses or there are issues that go
on outside of the schools that end up coming into the schools and
impacting the schools and again, possibly we place a school in a
category of receiving the title of persistently dangerous school when
there are actually activities or issues that are going on in the
community.

So, again, for some of our LEAs, I think they might be receiving this
title really kind of inappropriately and that\'s one of the issues that
I\'m having with persistently dangerous schools.

And also, we heard that a little bit yesterday about the number of
students that may come into a school that aren\'t even a part of that
school and that may be committing a violent act on school property or
within an LEA. So, again, I think we need a little bit \-- we need
guidance on how to collect that data on what things are happening in the
schools and it\'s the students that belong to that school and what
students perhaps aren\'t even a part of that particular school system.

So, the common language, I think we need to standardize common language
across all school districts as to what constitutes an unsafe school. I
think there needs to be common language what constitutes a safe school.

MR. LONG: Thank you, Montean. Fred.

MR. ELLIS: Yes, I wanted to respond to some of Shepp\'s comments.

I think most of the I guess misunderstanding or confusion on your part
has to do with semantics. When I\'m talking about a three-legged stool
and the three different issues that I think are important, obviously,
deterrents in the sense that it will prevent something. I mean I\'m
certainly capable of understanding that deterrents prevents an act.

But, I think my point was or is meant to be that we spend a lot of time
and effort on prevention programs, character development, changing,
manipulating. I think you used the term malleable for young people to
turn them into good folks and again, I think those are great ideas and I
think that is \-- the ultimate goal is make all of our students that
come into our buildings at a young age make them into good citizens.

But, my point is that that\'s not always going to be successful despite
some people\'s \-- some people\'s beliefs. Again, I\'m a realist. I\'m a
pragmatist and that\'s just not going to work. There are other
influences outside of school in a community that affect young people.

So, my point is that we also need to think about when schools try to
come up with program, initiative, efforts to change behavior that we
don\'t just focus on prevention, character development kinds of things.
That we think about what benefit does it have for teachers in between
class change to step out into the hallway. Research has shown that that
has a tremendous impact on the culture and climate in exchanges that
occur in hallways.

Is it prevention? Yes, but it\'s also deterrents. For those kids who are
thinking about doing something bad that your behavior modification
techniques haven\'t worked on and they maybe have a little evil in their
heart and want to do something in our hallways, the fact that somebody
is there deters them from doing it. Yes, it prevents them, but it also
is a deterrent and there are a lot of mechanisms, techniques and
initiatives, programs that speak to deterrents, that speak to
enforcement and that speak to consequences and that is my point in terms
of making those three. I sometimes think that we forget about those
other two.

MR. LONG: Could we do this and then \-- so, we can \-- the Secretary
will be here in about 12 or 13 minutes. We have been here almost two
hours now and let me retract what I had said earlier. If we could take
about I\'m going to say five minutes. So, it is now 10:02. At 10:07,
everyone must be back in their seats. So, if you just want to stand up
and scratch or if you wish to use the facilities, five minutes please
and then we\'ll get right back to you, Shepp.

(Whereupon, at 10:02 a.m. off the record until 10:09 a.m.)

MR. LONG: A very good job. If we could all come back and reconvene now
please.

Okay. As we reconvene, I just want to mention in just a few minutes the
Secretary will be coming in and I\'ll get right to you, Shepp. I didn\'t
want you to think I had forgotten.

The Secretary will be coming in. I\'ll make introductions. There\'s
going to be some pictures taken. She will then talk to us for maybe
five, six, seven minutes or for however long she wants to talk to us and
then we\'ll enter into a discussion.

So, I just wanted you to know how that would be framed and with that, I
will then turn back to Shepp.

MR. KELLAM: Well, Fred and I got into a really interesting aspect of
this and I was talking to Mike. What are we about? You know, and what I
think we\'re about, what we agreed was that this is a group in search of
a shared vision and so, we start from incredibly diverse places and
we\'re trying to put together some picture that makes sense, that brings
into relationship all the perspectives that we bring.

From a public health point of view, I have to say a couple of words
about prevention.

One of the largest prevention programs in the world is the police force.
It is, in fact, in the business of preventing events. I mean to a
minimal extent in the business of capturing and crisis responding and so
on. It\'s in the same sense that we need to be oriented toward
prevention as a major effort.

A teacher stepping into the hall is the cheapest, most efficient
prevention program if you\'re trying to make the hall a peaceful place.
The lunchroom without faculty is a disaster. Putting a few people there
is a prevention program.

When it gets more complex, it gets more costly and it gets complicated
to figure out if it works.

The story we always tell in Hopkins School of Public Health is that if
you take malaria and you say well, what\'s prevention? Well, you could
drain the swamps. You could put screens on the windows. You could give
people a vaccine or you know or you could treat the damn stuff with
quinine afterward. Three out of those four were prevention.

The fact that only the white guys got the screen by the way in Panama is
an important piece of history. Because in some sense, the allocation of
resources is a huge factor when we come down to prevention in school
districts and communities.

But, anyway, I just wanted to make the point that I think that we should
be oriented toward prevention and we should understand that crisis
response is, in fact, what you do when you failed to do prevention and
prevention is indeed what it says. To prevent something from happening
or to promote something good from there or happy.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Sorry to interrupt. Pardon me for interrupting.

MR. KELLAM: Hey, how are you, Secretary?

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Good. Okay.

MR. LONG: First of all, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to
introduce Secretary Spellings to a group that has been hard at work,
Madam Secretary. Safe and Drug Free Schools Advisory Committee.

So, thank you so much for joining us.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: I\'m delighted to be here today and thank you for
your chairmanship and thank you, everybody, for your service.

I know it took us awhile to get you all organized and underway, but I
think it\'s a very high quality, high class, good looking group. Hey,
Fred. And you have lots to do and I\'ve been talking about how the
latest school safety incidents have been kind of a teachable moment, a
good reminder moment and so, I think it\'s a great time for you all to
be convened and underway.

Obviously, you have a charge. You\'ve been at work on the charge that
you were given and that comports with the statute with No Child Left
Behind. I know you\'ve been talking about a lot of those issues like the
persistently dangerous schools and such, but I know you\'re also aware
that in the aftermath of the school safety incidents, the President
asked Al Gonzales and myself to convene a summit of educators, law
enforcement officials, community-based organizations and the like a few
weeks ago. What? Two or three weeks ago? Not very long. Not very long
ago. We got the thing together in, you know, kind of record time for
Federal bureaucratic standards and it was a very worthwhile meeting.

One of the things that came out of it as people raised questions and
issues was kind of an understanding that there needed to be a forum, a
place for issues, policy issues to come and be vetted and discussed and
raised and I stuck my hand up and said, you know, hey, we have this
group and they\'re high quality and high class and I intend to ask them
some of the questions that are being raised here in this forum.

To wit, and I assume that Debbie and the staff, Bill, have shared this
stuff with you, but there were specific issues that they wanted you all
to take a look at beyond the usual order of business that you were
doing.

The first of which is dissemination of best practices and information.
There certainly was a climate or a feeling in the room as people got up
and said well, we\'re doing this or we\'re doing that, you know, gosh, I
wish I had known that or why didn\'t we think of that and that\'s just
the kind of thing that we\'re always going to have to work on.

As you know, we have a constantly changing cast of characters in the
school community and the law enforcement community and families and so
forth and so, there\'s never a bad time to kind of refresh dissemination
of information and good practice and so, what are the best most
effective ways to do that?

There was a specific question from someone in a public school or private
school, maybe parochial school about a feeling that better coordination
and connection could be made with that community both from the law
enforcement side and from the school side. That they tended to be sort
of floating around out there, but I think obviously in the aftermath of
Pennsylvania, everyone agreed that we needed to make double dog sure
that those schools were part of any community planning as well.

The second thing and Fred was on a panel that I led and this is
complicated and I know you all have talked about this before, but the
whole issue of data sharing and information between law enforcement and
educators, mental health professionals and Shepp, I know you\'ve got a
lot of expertise on that.

Kind of a frustration in the room that \-- and I don\'t know if this is
factually accurate or not. I would ask you to opine on that. That we\'re
lacking that. We can do a better job. There\'s a lot of slippage. Is
that true? Is it not? Is that a community problem? Is that a state
legislative problem? Is that our problem? What\'s at issue there? So,
I\'d ask you to take a look at those.

And certainly, of course, you being mindful all the while of student
privacy issues and that sort of thing, but I think the mood in the
audience for what it\'s worth was that we had tilted more in favor of
privacy than kind of overall community safety. I don\'t know if that\'s
true or not, but that was certainly kind of the mood of the group. So,
I\'d ask you to consider that.

The other thing is, and kind of back on our distribution, communication,
dissemination, how can we make sure that staff continue to be aware of
warning signs. I think this is as much a product of having constant
turnover in schools and, you know, we just need to continue to work at
that. That teachers and other educators feel like they aren\'t armed
with the latest, greatest information on, you know, how do we know when
we have a problem.

Let\'s see and then I know Linda Mohammed who was here yesterday and she
might be here. There she is and so, obviously, she has spoken for
herself. So, I won\'t necessarily put a finer point, but that we need to
be mindful of differences between settings and types of schools. Kind of
urban America versus rural America and the needs of families. The
uniqueness of various communities as we think about all of these issues,
as we think about records, as we think about distribution, as we think
about outreach. Kind of being mindful of each individual audience.

So, you know, you probably have discussed some of those things. I don\'t
know if those are issues that you\'re hearing as people find out that
you\'re on this group, but that all seems sensible to me.

Let\'s see. I want you all to be aware of some of the things that we\'re
doing here and have done since and I know you probably are. I hope you
are, but first of all, continue to work closely with other agencies and
I do think that there is \-- and maybe this is yet another policy issue.
You know, do we have the right calibration between the involvement of
Secret Service, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice,
the Department of Homeland Security as we allocate resources and
expertise even here at the Federal level and I don\'t know that we\'ve
ever tackled that really and Bob, you may know about if we\'ve \-- if
we\'ve addressed some of those issues.

But, you know, to the maximum extent possible, I think we have pretty
good cooperation and collaboration with those other departments and we
are working to get the DVDs and crisis planning guides updated and out
the door.

I am sending this week a letter to every relevant mostly education
organization. Of course, Attorney General Gonzales will do likewise for
the law enforcement community, a reminder, an op ed if you will, for
every house or organ that would say hey, here are the resources that are
available. Please put this word out. We ask you to do all you can do
with the AFT or with the NEA or wherever you are to help foster more
understanding of all of this.

You all are doing the webcast on the 15th. I don\'t know. You might \--
you or Bill might speak to that. Is everybody aware of that?

MS. PRICE: No, we haven\'t made an announcement of it, but we will be
doing a webcast basically an hour long on those elements particularly
regarding an emergency crisis plan. Kind of condensing it down into a
one-hour training time and it\'ll be repeated over and over and over and
over and over again.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: And then just lastly kind of a fun fact to know and
tell. We have gotten on an 1-800-USA-LEARN, our 800 number that we offer
here at the Department of Education, kind of a five-fold increase in the
number of calls on this topic since the, you know, fairly recently week.
So, there is hunger for information out there and that\'s just one
indicator of kind of the urgency and how much this is on folks\' mind
out there.

So, that\'s my gem or riff. I\'d be glad to engage in any discussion
that you all would like to.

MR. LONG: Well, thank you very much for the comments. We have been hard
at work here for the \--

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: That\'s why we picked you.

MR. LONG: \-- last few days and we have been discussing this morning.
Yesterday, we heard three different panels and we\'re working on
persistently dangerous now and then this morning, the group, the
committee, has been talking \-- discussing ways perhaps we can help the
Federal Government make this even better.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Good.

MR. LONG: So, I would \-- I\'m just going to throw out one or two that
we\'ve talked about and then I\'d like to open it up so that you can
have a dialogue with these committee members from across the United
States.

The first thing that was discussed and recommended was a name change.
Meaning persistently dangerous is a name that is from what the panels
have said and what our discussion has been that it\'s a hurdle. It is
hurtful.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Um-hum.

MR. LONG: It sends the wrong message. We talked about from the \--
coming up with a name that we could enunciate the positive instead of
highlighting the negative. So, I\'m just going to throw that one out as
a first one and then I would entertain anybody on the committee that
wishes to talk to the Secretary about some of the things that we\'re
suggesting.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: I first want to say that whatever you have to say
about this and I know you know this. I mean we are headed into
re-authorization next year. The President has very recently on two
vigorous occasions stated his willingness to be very aggressive in
pushing the re-authorization of No Child Left Behind. Obviously, this is
part and parcel of that. So, you know, be quick so it can be useful.

MR. LONG: Yes, Russell.

MR. JONES: Yes, Secretary Margaret, I just wanted to thank you for your
wonderful efforts following the Katrina effort. The six seminars that
were carried out in the different states. I heard wonderful feedback
from folks around the country and indeed folks in New Orleans of that
wonderful contribution and I just wanted to publicly thank you for that.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Thank you, Russell.

MS. TAFT: Madam Secretary, I think that a lot of the recommendations
that we\'ve been talking about before you came fit right into the issues
that you brought up with us.

There was a feeling that we really need to focus on the culture and the
climates of schools \--

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Um-hum.

MS. TAFT: \-- so that we can identify problem areas before they reach
the persistently dangerous classification which would fit in with what
you all are talking about.

We also talked about making sure that outside that often come into the
school buildings and cause the problems and that, therefore, there needs
to be better connection with the community and community partners and
members and that there should be better data sharing, core data sets
between Federal agencies as well as a build-up from the local level so
that there is data that can be used by many departments, many levels and
that we need to look at all the factors of violence which would include
staff training for awareness, warning signs and those kind of issues
that were brought up in the conference that you had recently and so, I
think we are on a fairly good ramp with you.

One of the issues that was brought yesterday that I hope that we don\'t
forget is that it\'s not only student behavior that we need to look at.
It\'s also adult behavior and that the adults in the schools set the
tone for the school and that if we only look at student behavior and
don\'t do anything about adult behavior, we\'re missing half of the
equation of what could and would and should make a safe school.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Can I ask one quick question about the data sharing
piece? How complicated is that? I mean do you all have specific
recommendations other than observing we can and should do better?

I mean is it so complicated with respect to state and local laws and
policies that we just \-- I mean is this a rhetorical issue or can we
offer specific policy solutions on the data side that might \--

MS. TAFT: From what I\'ve heard, the National Network of Safe and Drug
Free Schools coordinators would like to work with the Department and
amongst themselves to come up with a data set that all the states and
the local LEAs could work with.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Okay.

MS. TAFT: And then I\'ve also heard that there is a Federal level
initiative to create a core data set that all the various Departments
that sit around this table can live with and so, it seems to me that you
should be able to marry those two and come up with a single core data
set that would be easy to get and be helpful to everyone.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: You might need a little subcommittee it sounds
like.

MS. KEYS: Madam Secretary, I\'m with the Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Service Administration and with regard to your question, I think
we already have several large national data sets that collect
information on a regular basis. The CDC has the YRBS. SAMHSA has the
household survey and I think you could look at those and there are
probably some others and possibly amend those surveys with questions
that we\'ve raised \--

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Um-hum.

MS. KEYS: \-- to collect that data and probably better coordination
across our agencies with how that data gets shared and used and filtered
back into the communities.

I did want to add just one thing related to the submit. SAMHSA was there
and returned and met as a group to support efforts of schools. This is a
book that we had helped support the development of and SAMHSA\'s made a
decision to send every superintendent in the United States a copy of
this book and I brought one for you.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Great. Excellent. Thank you, SAMHSA.

MR. HERRMANN: Madam Secretary, Commissioner Seavers would hold me
accountable if I didn\'t acknowledge Tennessee\'s thanks to the
Department. It\'s been about a year since we had our own incidents in
Tennessee and we really appreciate the support that we go from the
Department at that time. So, I want to thank you for that and thank you
for the opportunity to a part of this.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Thanks, Mike.

MR. HERRMANN: In terms of the dissemination of best practices, I know
that states have a number of bits of infrastructure that could certainly
help with that and we certainly stand ready to do that.

And just a specific recommendation about the information sharing. You
know, a lot of times I think information doesn\'t get shared. There\'s a
lot of myths that have kind of grown around FERPA and things like that
and a lot of times we are able to share information, but people sort of
assume that they can\'t. So, I think some clarification of that and
really providing just some basic guidance to folks would be helpful.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Good. Thank you for that.

MR. ROMERO: Madam Secretary, good morning. I\'m Dennis Romero. I\'m the
Acting Director for the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention at SAMHSA
and one of the things, I\'m privileged to be with this advisory
committee.

And one of the issues that I think that we\'re grappling with is the
choice option issue within the persistently dangerous schools and I
think we are having some really good discussions about bringing some
attention to the victim, to the student who is receiving the \-- I guess
was the receiver of the negative behaviors.

One of the things that I brought up early on yesterday morning was also
focusing on trauma related to these incidents and not only for the
victim and I think we\'re sort of in agreement to think as a group that
we also need to pay attention to the one who does the negative
behaviors. I don\'t want to use the word perpetrator. I, too, agree with
Deborah that perpetrator just doesn\'t sound \-- it sounds a little too
harsh. But, we need to be focusing on that.

In my ongoing piece of making sure that we bring both the community and
the parents around the table. I think an effort that from a prevention
standpoint that is quite successful is the strategic prevention
framework and that is something that maybe of value in terms of
galvanizing and bringing the different stakeholders in the community
that impact the schools. Because ultimately, the child goes back to the
community. I think we need to pay attention to that.

Through SAMHSA, we have an excellent initiative that\'s been \-- I
brought it up and it\'s been shared a bit this morning and that is the
Safe Schools Healthy Students Initiative that\'s been in collaboration
with Department of Ed and Justice and that\'s something that I think we
really need to look at and look at ways that we can better collaborate
from a Federal standpoint.

And I\'ve said this around the country that prevention is about
collaborations and so, here we have a wonderful opportunity to better
collaborate to really get ourselves on the same page with respect to the
language that we use, the theater that we\'re using and to share that
information and get that information out to the parents and the families
and the community as a whole. So.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Thank you.

MR. ROMERO: You\'re welcome.

MR. LONG: Robert.

MR. FLORES: Good morning. First I want to say thanks because the
Department of Ed has been a great partner with us on the Coordinating
Council and Deborah in particular has been extremely helpful.

We\'ve worked with Bill as well on an issue which may not be as sexy
quite frankly which is truancy for a substantial amount of time and we
see that quite frankly at the Department as a major way to identify kids
who are struggling early.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Um-hum.

MR. FLORES: And then with kids who are five and six years old, I mean
kids who don\'t go to kindergarten or first grade are not truant. There
parents or their care givers are failing to get them to school. Because
at that age, children like to go to school. I mean that\'s a place where
fun and games and friends are. So, we\'ve done that.

The other issue in terms of collaboration, for the past couple of years,
the Department of Ed has helped us with the YouthCourt Program and that
really has been \-- it\'s grown since the beginning of about 2001 from
about 500 to over 1100 programs around the country that are
community-based and supported and they\'re paid for out of the pockets
of folks in the community who really see a benefit and the interesting
thing about that is it really brings a lot of volunteers. It brings a
lot of public support and now that they\'re being run in tandem with
schools, I think it\'s just another way for the Department of Ed to take
a look at early intervention as a real way of identifying students and
then finding alternatives for them.

The one thing that I would say that we have the benefit of at the
Coordinating Council is that we have some additional departmental
members and I would urge you to consider that. The Department of Labor
has a significant amount of money every year for job training whether
you\'re looking at vocational programs or things which typically
educators may not see themselves as having access to and so, for them,
it\'s not really very important because they don\'t really control the
money. They don\'t touch the money, but I think that there are really
good ways for them to begin to feel that they can really make a
difference in terms of how those dollars are spent working at the state
level with their governor\'s offices. We have the First Lady of Ohio
here with us.

Same thing with respect to public housing. We know we have a lot of
educational programs that are based in and around public housing.

And then the Department of Agriculture which runs the land grant
colleges/university system and has those resources plus 4H, one of the
things that, I just came from our Federal Advisory Committee, that
we\'re looking at is the need to make sure that we\'re not missing an
opportunity with \-- in partnership with schools to do those things
which we can do better at a school setting and not everything can be
done better because of the need for rigorous academics and the other
things that Leave No Child Behind is really kind of championing.

But, there are some things that really can be done well. So, we\'re
looking at how do we keep some of those school buildings open longer \--

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Um-hum.

MR. FLORES: \-- use Justice dollars to do that as opposed to Education
dollars and then how can we bring in some much larger community support?
So, I would just perhaps suggest that you may want to extend an
invitation to some other Cabinet Secretaries because I think they have a
lot to add and they have got some great programs.

And then again just to thank the Department of Ed because we have
actually been in substantial partnership for the past couple of years
and we have really benefitted from that relationship. So thanks.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Thank you. I will do that. Good suggestion.

MR. LONG: Shepp.

MR. KELLAM: It is a great pleasure to see you. Thank you for being here
with us and supporting what we\'re doing.

I think from my point of view, you wouldn\'t be surprised to know that I
think one of the major issues is bringing research to practice and there
are two dimensions of that that I think that we need to think about. One
of which you alluded to earlier.

The first one is the whole question of as Dennis is saying how do you
make partnerships between research groups in school districts with that
adequate community base being represented in that partnership?

In order to do research in the next century, we\'re going to need to be
doing research within the context of the real world and not in the
laboratories removed and I think that\'s a growing and maybe even the
majority view of among research groups these days. You can\'t do trials
of new programs, develop new programs without being inside the mission
of the local community, what it wants to aspire to and so forth and so,
the question is how do you fund this transition? How do you structure
it?

NIH has paid for all of our research over the years. My program officer
is sitting right over there from NIDA, Belinda Sims. Notice the eyebrow
going up. Anyway.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Here he goes again.

MR. KELLAM: Yes. So, I think that one of the things we need to do is to
form partnerships with the SAMHSA, Bill Modzeleski and so on. So that
we, in fact, are planning and thinking and with private foundations
joining in of how you fund this transition.

You take a research staff which is 100 percent occupied doing research
and then you want to move from in our case, for example, 12 schools to
113 schools in Baltimore let alone moving to Peoria, Illinois with the
program and so, how do you do this with the proper multi-levels of
mentoring and monitoring and what does that look like? It\'s a new
structure of science, a new structure of practice.

And that raises what you raised earlier and namely, what kind of
information system would allow us to monitor progress? We\'ve got a
gazillion information databases and we invent them like they\'re easy
and cheap and they\'re not. They\'re very complicated and the latest one
is the one we\'ve been addressing at this meeting. You know, information
systems that nobody wants to report data in. You know, this is a
terrible dangerous \--

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Model.

MR. KELLAM: \-- school. Yes. So, I think that we\'ve got the No Kid Gets
Left Behind Information System. We\'ve got the regular school record
which is an important developmental record of how the kid\'s doing in a
particular set of parameters. We could, in fact, be inventing a new
thermometer of kids\' development which brings together information
about behavior, about community conditions, about what\'s working and
what\'s not both at the individual level, at the classroom level and at
the school building and the district level and somehow then dealing with
the confidentially issues and the local community surveillance and
ownership issues as we go along.

But, I think that we need to integrate public health and public
education and Justice information systems so that, in fact, we can bring
to bear what\'s needed in particular circumstances.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: And are you optimistic that something like that
could both technically and kind of culturally for lack of a better word
be done? I mean my head practically spins off when you say something
that hairy \--

MR. KELLAM: Yes.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: \-- to think about doing given, you know, all of
the various issues.

MR. KELLAM: I think \--

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Is it possible?

MR. KELLAM: \-- I think it\'s not only possible. I think people are
ready for it.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Really.

MR. KELLAM: I think the whole \-- well, I\'m not a politician, right,
but I look around and people \--

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Well, I am and \--

MR. KELLAM: I think people are un-restful and, you know, looking for
some kind of coming together.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Yes.

MR. KELLAM: And I think that we can do it. I think that the information
systems we have can be protected, but I think that if a child\'s reading
scores are not going up properly there could be a couple of responses
not just one.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Yes. Um-hum.

MR. KELLAM: And that that could be important in measuring the
effectiveness of teachers at the classroom aggregate level.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Yes.

MR. KELLAM: So, part of what we\'re doing in rolling out the new
programs, whether it\'s ours or Gill Bach and somebody else\'s, you
know, I mean is to look at the mentoring that\'s required to maintain
fidelity and the training ascribed, but also the monitoring of fidelity
which can be used not punitively, but to bring into the mentoring. So,
that seeing how well teachers are teaching can be integrated into the
process of mentoring and not just give you aggregate scores periodically
which they can do.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Right.

MR. KELLAM: But, I think it\'s not only possible. I think it has to be
founded as Dennis is pointing out in partnerships, local level
partnerships with multiple safeguards about misuse. Anyway.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: If you all can, you know, at a minimum obviously,
there\'s \-- you know, what you\'ve just said is just massive in terms
of kind of looking out and how you do it and where you\'d you start and
what all the pieces of data are and where they all are and whatnot. I
mean could you at least frame out for me, you know, kind of the right
parties that would need to be at a conversation around taking that kind
of suggestion to the next level?

MR. KELLAM: Yes.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Both at the Federal level and the various
stakeholders locally.

MR. KELLAM: It\'s not a small task.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: No.

MR. KELLAM: But, I think it\'s an important one.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Yes.

MR. KELLAM: Actually, the Society for Prevention Research had a little
report out on how there should be, in fact, a record \-- since
back-to-school records which we glibly name, but the record would
include parameters of child development, adult and adolescent
development and so on. So that the record, in fact, is more
comprehensive and indicates not only immunizations, but, in fact, the
behavioral and the \--

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Right.

MR. KELLAM: \-- achievement aspects of it and so forth and I think that
\-- well, yes.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Okay. And if there are state models or people who
have done this better than others, say that, too.

MR. LONG: Well, that was the longest yes, I\'ve ever heard, Shepp.

MR. FLORES: Secretary Spellings, the Department has been at work on
something we call JXML which is Juvenile XML Language. We need it
because the probation departments, the courts, the police departments
right now share all sorts of data regarding kids, but there are a lot of
issues from privacy to control. That\'s been underway now for three
years and I\'m happy to kind of give Deborah Price a briefing on that.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Good.

MR. FLORES: Because that actually has buy now from a number of different
groups including some significant police interests and it kind of
shadows what\'s being done on the adult side in law enforcement to bring
all these different data sets and make them able to be accessed across
different types of software. So, perhaps we should go ahead and share
that with you and you can figure out what or whether or not it provides
some kind of basis for you to pick up on.

MR. LONG: I just want to mention one thing and then, Susan, we\'ll get
right over to you. I mentioned early on about changing the name and the
whole concept behind that is to accentuate the positive and to that end,
several have mentioned to look at \-- we have the National Blue Ribbon
Schools.

To do the same thing with safety and to elevate the idea of safety and
to have a parallel program like the National Blue Ribbon which
recognizes the academic. Do the same thing for safety so that we can
pull that positive aspect up.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Hum. Interesting.

MR. LONG: And, Susan, you were \--

MS. KEYS: I just wanted to comment that one of our state schools Healthy
Student Grantees in Hartford, Connecticut has done at the city level I
think something that you\'re interested in where they have created an
integrated data use set. So, that might be something that you\'d like to
look more closely at and one of the things that we have under discussion
for the revision to the Safe Schools Healthy Students RFA is to have
grantees use part of their funding to create at the local level the type
of data collection use infrastructure that they need in order to be able
to funnel back to us the types of data that we\'re interested in.

So, that is a change that we\'re discussing for that revision.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Good. Learn something everyday.

MR. LONG: Hope.

MS. TAFT: And, Madam Secretary, another example you might look at is in
Ohio where our Partnership for Success communities have used a single
survey to come up with risk and protector factors in asset development
that the community wants to work on and have gotten buy-in from all the
funders within that community to focus on the same set of data.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Good.

MS. TAFT: It has become very effective. Very powerful. So, if you could
get that to happen at all levels it would be tremendous.

SECRETARY SPELLINGS: Yes, I\'ve got to go do other stuff I\'m sorry to
say because we could certainly sit here and gnash on this for lots
longer, but anyway, thank you very much again for your time and
willingness to do this. I guess when you said yes, you didn\'t know that
it would morph into this even more vigorous assignments, but I\'m very
grateful to you and I think, you know, it\'s important service for our
country right now and we ought to \-- you know, one of the silver
linings I think from these horrible incidents is that we can use this
to, you know, do more good and make sure that the communities are fully
and completely knowledgeable, prepared and ready to recover if necessary
God forbid.

So, anyway, thanks again for your work. I\'ll be monitoring closely and
back at you.

MR. LONG: Madam Secretary, thank you so much for being with us.

As I mentioned earlier in the day when we started as soon as Secretary
Spellings was done, we said that we would try to synthesize this
information and to see if there was any course change based on the
things that the Secretary brought up or as we entered into and how time
flies. That was a 35-minute discussion. So, that was excellent.

I \-- and I think someone said it. What we said in the discussion and
what we heard from the Secretary and I\'m asking you, it seems to me
that we are on the same page. So, I don\'t see a tremendous amount of
course change, but I don\'t want to just make that observation by
myself.

Debbie, do you have some observations on that? Where should we go next
as we bring this meeting to a close?

MS. PRICE: Well, I\'m going to go back to what I said earlier this
morning about I think \-- I do think we need to bring forward another
kind of informal interim, whatever we call it, report considering what
you\'ve \-- you know, where we are today.

I do think in light \-- you know, we\'ve talked specifically today about
unsafe school \-- and yesterday, unsafe school choice and persistently
dangerous, but I think that even that conversation that we had on those
specific issues give us a \-- you know, we have that combined with our
state grants and just even this conversation today looking at sort of a
more overall, you know, sum on what it means for schools to be safe,
healthy and secure.

And so, my suggestion would be and it would probably mean maybe, you
know, plug in another conference call in the middle between this and our
next one, but in the next couple of weeks, you know, summarize our
points today, summarize those recommendations that we think are \-- you
know, have risen to the surface and have support on the committee. Maybe
not everybody. We might have multiple pieces to bring forward, but that
we think would be significant to be considered as they\'re looking at
issues regarding re-authorization.

I think some of that will include, you know, we always call them
findings, but elements of what we heard that are truths. So, for
example, in the persistently dangerous, you know, not that it\'s a
recommendation, but the fact that, you know, states consistently said
that the terminology was negative, you know, that it identified schools
that weren\'t \-- that those specific states didn\'t see those schools
as dangerous, but they knew where the dangerous schools were. That some
of those \-- you know, I\'m just doing it off the top of my head, but
there are elements of these things that we know are true and I think
sometimes those elements of truth can be as powerful as a
recommendation.

So, to give, you know, both those elements as well as recommendations
and kind of as then also some thoughts kind of in the overall kind of
subject matter.

I\'m sorry. I\'m just \-- yes.

MS. TAFT: Is it okay? Are you finished? I didn\'t mean to interrupt you.

Something that I hope gets mentioned somewhere and I don\'t know the
proper way to do it, but I know that we\'re working very hard on
improving the concepts of persistently dangerous schools which is part
of Safe and Drug Free Schools which is part of Title 4, but if there is
no marker in the administration budget for Title 4, then there is a good
chance that the whole program will disappear and all of our work will be
for naught.

So, I would like to encourage the Department to look at some kind of
funding marker that will keep the program alive so that the
recommendations for improvement that we are making have a chance to go
into effect.

MR. LONG: Shepp and Michael.

MR. KELLAM: Yes, I think that those few minutes were really very
important for our work.

For example, I would argue and there was some harmony on the issue that
we shouldn\'t, in fact, support a separate data system for labeling
schools as dangerous. That, in fact, the existing school records and
child assessment systems now statewide and within the school building,
within the district should, in fact, be integrated with criteria which
allow schools to be identified based on aggregate numbers of kids and
certain kinds of behavior or certain kinds of poor academic achievement
or the like and that we ought to really recommend that we attempt to
work toward a common integrated data system that does allow academic
behavioral justice issues to be brought into one place and the school
record is a seminal, very important tool to build from.

I could tell you anecdotes. I used to give a course a Hopkins School of
Public Health on public health information systems and I illustrated
public health information systems for children by describing school
records and the school computerized information system that tracks kids
over time, over progression, years and so on and I was castigated by our
department who took the view ‑- you know, it was a long story, but the
point of view was that that\'s not a public health information system.
School records are not public health. That\'s nonsense.

School records, in fact, are public health. It measures one of the most
salient parameters of a kid\'s growth and development and that\'s what
we\'re talking about.

If we could build an integrated information system as we were talking
about, A, I think it\'s possible. I think that, Bob, you were talking
about similar kinds of enterprises. Safe and Drug Free Schools is
predicated on that kind of an integration. That we could build an
information system that would give you far more information about the
quality of the school and even the negative parts. But, have
facilitating and, you know, intervention components that could follow
from a single integrated information system.

So, I think we should take a bull by the horns and follow her lead in
that regard.

MR. LONG: Thank you, Shepp. Michael.

MR. PIMENTEL: This has been a whirlwind couple of days and I\'m really,
really very proud to be part of the group and I\'m just hoping that what
I\'m about to communicate comes across in the spirit in which I intend
it.

And that is to say that I\'m hearing shrinking budgets across the board
for everyone and back home in our little police department in San
Antonio, we go through shrinking budgets as well.

I\'ve been blessed with a command group of officers where we sat down at
our table and we had to make a determination as to what are our values.
What are the core values of the San Antonio ISD Police Department and it
came down to one thing and that was the safety of our children and our
schools.

So, even though our budget was reduced tremendously under our local tax
base, we did not take one penny away from making sure that our children
are safe in those schools. We had to adjust in areas of our patrol, CID,
detectives, other units, but not from the hallways of our schools and
so, what I\'m asking, Ms. Price, is somehow we can get across to these
elected officials that serve our country that our greatest asset and our
greatest core value is our children and to quit taking money away from
Title 4.

MR. HERRMANN: I couldn\'t say it any better, but thank you. Thank you so
much.

You know, clearly, I think there is a role for the state grants program
and I hear that again and again from being really the backbone of the
UMIRS system to really creating the infrastructure that allows for the
transfer of the same concepts that are put forward in Safe Schools
Healthy Students Initiative.

You know, there has to be an infrastructure at the local level that
allows that to be replicated and to continue and if nothing else comes
out of the two days, I hope we can get that kind of commitment or
agreement.

MR. LONG: Montean.

MS. JACKSON: I\'ll be real brief as we\'re looking to close.

I would like to also make a recommendation that we tap into the National
Association of Student Assistance Programs. Again, many of our local
LEAs have student assistance programs that have been collecting data for
some time and again, as we\'re looking to see what types of \-- and
we\'re looking at the whole child, what types of wraparound services and
support, partnering \-- partnerships and collaborative efforts that are
being currently achieved successfully in many of our states and our
community. I think it\'s very important to tap into their data that
they\'ve been collecting for some time and take a look at the numbers
and we\'re not just looking at one part, but we\'re looking at all
children whether I\'m the offender or whether I\'ve been victimized by
someone. We\'re actually providing those types of services.

So, I\'d like to encourage some taking a look at that.

Thank you.

MR. LONG: One, two, three.

MR. ROMERO: I want to commend you. I think you\'re right on target. I
think the issue, one, is collaboration. We really need to look at ways
to better collaborate and really galvanize both. From the Federal
standpoint, the unique areas of expertise that different sectors of the
Federal Government have to offer. That\'s number one.

And I think the second thing is not to lose sight of the issue of the
bullying piece throughout this whole discussion and the impact on the
trauma and the choice options. Those have to be interwoven in this whole
discussion I think.

MS. TAFT: Just to piggyback on that, in Ohio, some of the schools have
what they call core teams which integrate student assistants, employee
assistants and community partners and they can tell you how many \-- how
great the reduction has been in referrals to the principal\'s office for
various kinds of reprimands as well as what an increase it\'s had in
academic achievement. So, that\'s a model that we might want to look and
weave into this somewhere as best practice.

MR. LONG: Thank you, Hope. Belinda.

MS. SIMS: I just wanted to point out that when the Secretary was going
over the things that came out of the conference they just had, you know,
it was pretty clear that these are not going to be additional things for
us to consider, but these are really issues that we\'ve been considering
and that we really take a moment to think about for all of the meetings
that we\'ve had to date, the consistency and the overlap in the issues
and make sure that as we try to summarize our recommendations that
we\'re really coordinating across everything. So, we don\'t just look at
state grants apart from the USCO part of it, apart from the data. That
we go back and continue to integrate these issues as we\'ve been doing
in our discussions.

One of the things that I wanted to bring up that was mentioned by the
Secretary was around the issue of best practices and how do we get the
best practices out into communities and it\'s been said by others here,
but the implementation issues are really huge I think in the communities
at the LEA level as they\'re trying to roll out the programs.

So, we\'ve identified a number of best practices, evidence-based
programs that can be utilized. But, if we don\'t also attend to what are
the best practices for how we implement and monitor the implementation
of programs and get that information out to communities, provide them
with those evidence-based models for implementing programs regardless of
what the programs are, then we will continue I think to fall short on
seeing the outcomes that we want to see.

And also, in terms of what we\'ve heard or at least what I\'ve heard in
the day and a half meeting this time around the USCO, is that given the
way it\'s been characterized and there is a lot of stigma associated
with this program and I\'ve been asking myself well, is changing the
name really going to mean anything at this point? You know, have we lost
the trust, you know, in what this program could have provided?

So, I think there\'s going to have to be some base building and
grassroots building of whatever comes out of our recommendations from
this. Can\'t just say we\'ve changed the name. Let\'s move on, but
we\'re going to have to go out and do some better connections with the
communities that are going to have to implement the new non-regulatory
guidelines.

And then the other part of that is that as I heard all the
presentations, you know, the information that is being collected, it\'s
a shame that it\'s been put under this negative cloud. Because this is
the kind of information that schools should be utilizing to guide the
programs that they\'re implementing through the state grants part of the
No Child Left Behind or whatever, you know.

Because if you\'re in a school and guns are being brought into school or
drugs are being used on campus, then this should be information that is
being utilized by all the different parts of the Safe Schools, not Safe
Schools, Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities Programming and in
coordination with their Safe Schools Healthy Students money and in
coordination with their Drug Free Communities money and in coordination
with every other bit of money that they\'re able to leverage for the
services that they provide. All of this information should be utilized
and it shouldn\'t be, you know, couched or qualified in all the
different ways that we\'ve heard about here and under reported in the
ways that we\'ve heard about here because it\'s information that can be
used for positive outcomes.

MR. LONG: As we bring this to a close, I\'d like to ask some practical
questions. I\'m always concerned when we leave a meeting like this that
we make sure that we know when we\'re going to talk, what we\'re going
to talk about and Debbie, you mentioned in the next two weeks. So, I\'m
just trying to get some practicality to all this now.

So, we can then expect in the next 14 days that we will have a
conference call. I would presume we could set it up the same way,
Catherine, we did it the last time when we either chose a date or put
two or three and then everyone put down what would be the best for them
and then we attempt to clear our calendars to get there.

So, that in the next \-- is that a yes, that in the next two weeks we
will? Okay.

The second aspect of the practicality is the fact that we heard a
tremendous amount of information here and as was mentioned a couple of
times, Debbie, you just mentioned again about 15 minutes ago on the
planes as we head back across this country that we put those down in
bullet form. We start to formulate this in our minds. So that when we
have this conference call, that we can start to pull things together.

And the last aspect of this practicality question is did I hear you say
that this would be to the end of an interim report on persistently
dangerous as we did with the state grant program? Is that \-- I wanted
to make sure that I was hearing that correctly.

MS. PRICE: Yes, I think we should bring forward those as we\'ve been
discussing specific to the issue, but I think that some of those points
are comprehensive for the program as a whole and that should be an
aspect of it as well.

MR. LONG: Got ya.

MS. PRICE: So, basically, two structures within.

MR. LONG: Telescopic and more general.

MS. PRICE: Yes.

MR. LONG: Yes.

MS. PRICE: Yes.

MR. LONG: Okay. And in closing, I would like to say this to you. I\'ve
sat here for a day and a half. As we\'ve all said on many occasions,
we\'ve heard a multitude of information. Good information.

But, I want to say to you the quality of questions and getting to know
some of you and the input that you gave and I mean this as a close.
Thank you for what you do for the children and then thank God for what
you do for the children of the United States. It\'s a pleasure to be
with you. Have a safe trip.

MS. TAFT: Whoa. Whoa.

MR. LONG: And before I hit the gavel, Hope has one last thing to say.

MS. TAFT: Well, I just want some clarification. Are we going to have
sort of a summary of the 20-some odd recommendations that I wrote down
before the conference call so we have some idea of what we\'re
discussing?

MR. LONG: I\'m sorry. Yes, that will be put together by Catherine and at
break, she indicated that some time between 4:00 and 5:00 today she
would have that done.

No, she will \-- that will take some time because of all the
information, but the answer is yes, she\'ll get that back out to us.
That will be helpful in that conference call. So, thanks for the
question.

MS. TAFT: And then the January meeting, is that going to have a focus
group like this one did. I know at one time we talked about focusing in
on data, I mean whatever it is, those types of programs, evidence-based
programs and if so, do we need to have recommendations for speakers to
you by anytime?

MS. PRICE: Well, I think \--

MS. TAFT: And also, I\'m not going to be at the January meeting. So.

MS. PRICE: I think that, you know, while we\'ve had the very best of
intentions in laying out the calendar, you know, basically for a year,
we may have some variation and we may see that we need to have another
actual kind of day and a half meeting and stuff. So, I think that\'s a
dialogue that we\'ve have as a committee and make some determinations
about the subject matter and panels and all of that for the January
meeting.

I think the short-term goal is to get this next interim report developed
and then get to the meat of, you know, what we\'re doing in January,
what the focus is, do we want to make a change about the calendar, do we
want to have another kind of something in there. So, we can have that
determination.

MS. TAFT: And will there be enough time between the last phone call and
the development of the interim document that we\'re going to be giving
to Secretary Spellings? Enough time for us to respond because \--

MS. PRICE: Yes.

MS. TAFT: \-- last time there wasn\'t really a lot of time and some of
us \--

MS. PRICE: Well, but, we \-- yes.

MS. TAFT: \-- had suggestions that didn\'t make it in.

MS. PRICE: And we were under a mandated kind of from this \-- we always
call it the seventh floor, but from the Secretary\'s office of needing
information by X. So, we just were on a short time frame and, you know,
consolidating a lot of the information is the longest aspect of it and
once we have it together, I mean it will go out, but we really were
under a tight time frame last time. So, we\'ll do the best we can and I
\-- seems to be scooting people. But \--

MR. LONG: Those of you that have to leave please feel free to leave.
Thank you. Be safe.

MS. PRICE: I do just want to say one thing and I know that as
significant as the State Grants Program is, it is not all of Title 4. It
is a piece of Title 4 and so you \-- you know \-- and not that \-- you
know, it is the formula grant, but I think we do a disservice to the
program as a whole if we don\'t realize the significance of the
discretionary grant programs that are tied to Title 4. They are very
important and very significant and make a huge difference and, you know,
as we talked today, Safe Schools Healthy Students is one of those
pieces.

So, you know, we need to be clear when we\'re talking about funds for
Title 4. There\'s a lot of elements there. We should be specific as to
what we\'re addressing. So.

MR. LONG: Okay.

MS. PRICE: And I think everybody\'s gone. Thank you.

(Whereupon, the meeting was concluded at 11:12 a.m.)