UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

\+ + + + +

SAFE AND DRUG FREE SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES

ADVISORY COMMITTEE MEETING

\+ + + + +

Tuesday,

January 16, 2007

\+ + + + +

The meeting was held in the Bernard Auditorium of 400 Maryland Avenue,
S.W., Washington, D.C., at 9:00 a.m., David Long, Chairman, presiding.

[MEMBERS PRESENT]{.underline}:

DAVID LONG, CHAIRMAN

DEBORAH PRICE

KIM DUDE

FREDERICK ELLIS

MIKE HERRMANN

RALPH HINGSON

MONTEAN JACKSON

RUSSELL JONES

SUSAN KEYS

TOMMY LEDBETTER

SETH NORMAN

MICHAEL PIMENTEL

DENNIS ROMERO

BELINDA SIMS

HOWELL WECHSLER

# ALSO PRESENT

CATHERINE DAVIS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND DESIGNATED FEDERAL OFFICER

I-N-D-E-X

AGENDA ITEM PAGE

Opening Statements and Announcements 3

Panel I: Non-public schools

Overview of Departmental Guidance 3

Joe McTighe 10

Patrick Bassett 14

Jack Clark 19

Michael Caruso 24

Questions and Answers 31

Panel II: Trauma

Dr. Steven Marans 51

Dr. Marleen Wong 58

Dr. Lisa Jaycox 64

Questions and Answers 70

Panel III: Rural and Urban Schools

Liz Redmon 85

Doug Swanson 91

Melissa Thompson 97

Lynn Krehbiel-Breneman 101

Questions and Answers 107

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

8:06 a.m.

CHAIRMAN LONG: We\'ll be starting right away and we\'ll be staying right
on schedule with the various panels and so forth that we have. First of
all, I\'d like to introduce the panel and then as soon as I do that,
I\'m going to have Maureen Dowling give us an overview as we head into
this first panel.

The panelists on my left, depending on where you\'re sitting back there
in the crowd, but on my left, Joe McTighe, and he\'s the Executive
Director of the Council for American Private Education, Joe, welcome.
And next to Joe is Patrick Bassett and Patrick is President of the
National Association of Independent Schools, Patrick, welcome. And next
to Patrick is Jack Clark, and Jack is Director of Technology in
Non-Public School Services for the Colonial Intermediate Unit in
Pennsylvania, Jack, welcome, glad you\'re here. And on his left is
Michael Caruso, who is Assistant Superintendent for Secondary Schools
and Government Relations for the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, Michael,
welcome. And with that, I\'d like to introduce Maureen Dowling, who will
give us an overview \-- and by the way, Maureen is the Education Program
Specialist for the Office of Non-Public Education and Maureen will be
giving us an overview as we head into this first panel. Maureen.

DR. DOWLING: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Again, my name is
Maureen Dowling. I work in the Office of Non-Public Education in the
Office of Innovation and Improvement here at the US Department of
Education. I want to thank the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools and
the Advisory Committee for inviting me here this morning discuss with
you the equitable participation of private school students and teachers
in federal education programs. And of course, the focus today is on the
Title IV, Part A, Safe and Drug Free Schools.

In your packets for those, if you\'d like to follow along, on Tab 3,
we\'ve included a copy of the PowerPoint. Following that, we have
department guidance on the equitable participation of private school
students and teachers and then we thought it might be helpful to include
some statutory language from the Title IX, Uniform Provisions. The Title
IX, Uniform Provisions govern the equitable participation of private
school students and teachers in the Title IV, Safe and Drug Free Schools
Program. So Tab 3 and I\'ll go ahead and get started.

If I had to sum up in six points the equitable participation provisions,
it would include these points. First and foremost, since 1965 with the
passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the law has
provided for the equitable participation of private school students and
teachers in federal education programs. So the equitable participation
is not new under the No Child Left Behind Act, which it has reauthorized
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Second, critical is that the law requires timely and meaningful
consultation between the local educational agency, the LEA, and private
school officials. And I\'ll elaborate on these points as I go on this
morning. The third point, in general, expenditures are to be equal based
on a per-pupil allocation. So what the LEA is expending in a particular
program for a public school student and a private school student, it
would be an equal per-pupil allocation.

Also, number four, that the services that are going to be offered under
these various federal education programs within the parameters of the
program, the services then are to meet the needs of the particular
population to be served, whether it\'s the public school teachers,
private school teachers, public school students, private school
students.

Five, the LEA, as the recipient of those federal education funds, always
is to remain in control of the funds. And I sell my colleagues in the
private sector, \"You\'re not going to receive dollars to your school
for these federal education programs. You\'re going to receive benefits,
services, materials and equipment\". And finally, the benefits,
materials, the services, they are to be secular neutral and
non-ideological in nature.

Those are the six packed points that cover the major areas regarding the
equitable participation of private school students and teachers in
federal education programs. Now even though the focus is on Title IV,
Safe and Drug Free Schools, one of the items in your packet is this red,
white and blue booklet and I thought it would be helpful to let you know
that in addition to the Title IV program, there are about 11 other major
programs that require the equitable participation of private school
students and their teachers, and these programs include, beginning with
Title I, improving basic programs operated by LEAs, Reading First, Even
Start, Migrant Education, and then under Title II, Preparing and
Training, Recruiting Highly Qualified Teachers and Principals, the
Mathematics and Science Partnership Program, and Enhancing Education
through Technology.

Also under Title III, the English Language Acquisition, Language
Enhancement and Academic Achievement Program. Under Title IV, we have
the Safe and Drug Free Schools Program. And you\'ll note within the Safe
and Drug Free School Programs we have the state grants, which are the
formula grants which require the equitable participation. But there are
also a number of discretionary grants under the Title IV Safe and Drug
Free Schools Program. Those listed here, including Safe Schools Healthy
Students Initiative, Grants to Reduce Alcohol Abuse, Emergency Response
and Crisis Management Grants, Mentoring Programs, Grants for School
Basic Student Drug Testing and programs for Native Hawaiians, all of
those discretionary grant programs also require the equitable
participation of private school students and teachers. Those
discretionary grants are also covered by the Title IX, Uniform
Provisions and by the guidance that we\'ve included in your packets this
morning.

Also under Title IV is the 21^st^ Century Community Learning Centers and
then under Title V we have two programs, Innovative Programs and Gifted
and Talented Programs. So just so that you have an understanding that
it\'s not just this one program that has required it and that this has
been the case since 1965. Clearly, though, programs have been added to
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act over the years.

When I go out into the field to present to local educational agency
federal program directors and private school officials, I tell them if
they leave the room and they\'ve forgotten that they were even there
that day, they don\'t remember titles and numbers and who was that
woman, the one thing you want to remember is consultation. Is it the
rock, the foundation of effective programs. And within the law and then
backed up in guidance and regulatory language what is required is timely
consultation and meaningful consultation.

So what do we mean by meaningful? Well, it\'s to be meaningful so that
in the end, what is developed is a very effective program that maximizes
those federal education dollars and is effective so at the end of this
school year we can look at that program and assess it and say, \"You
know, it did what we hoped it would do\". So what needs to be discussed
during that consultation process between the LEA officials and private
school officials?

One, we need to know how are we going to identify those private school
students\' needs? And then what services will we offer because generally
within any program there are a host of services to offer and programs as
well as materials and equipment. How and where those services will be
provided for the private school students? And again, because we\'re
basing this on the needs of the students, we\'re going to want to know
what will the outcome be and we\'re going to want to discuss how will we
assess this program?

And I mention to people when I go out into the field, if you\'ve been
doing this program for the past five years, and you\'re sensing well, we
do it because it\'s just what we\'ve been doing for years and we get it
and it\'s free from the Federal Department of Education, if it\'s not
having the effect you want, that\'s critical to address that. So we need
to assess it to make sure we\'re expending these funds for effective
programs.

Also what mechanisms will be used to provide the services and who is
going to provide those services? Under some programs where there might
be employees of the district involved, a district also has an option to,
perhaps employ or contract with a third party provider that they might
believe, you know, this third party provider has the skills and
experience to do this as opposed to perhaps using our own employees. So
that\'s an option that needs to be discussed, who is going to provide
the services?

Also what\'s critical to the discussion is the amount of funding that\'s
available. Clearly, when a discussion takes place, it\'s important for
the private school officials to know whether we\'re talking about
\$500.00 that the LEA can expend on a program for their students, as
opposed to \$15,000.00. That\'s going to take the discussion to a whole
different level. So the law requires that what is discussed during the
consultation is the amount of funding that\'s available. And what will
be the size and scope of the services that the LEA will provide, and
key, critical is how does the LEA make decisions about these programs
throughout the year? As a private school principal, how will I know when
the equipment or that materials will show up at my school or do I need
to go and pick them up somewhere? Or when will that program begin
that\'s going to be directed towards our middle school students in the
prevention of drug use \-- of drugs, excuse me?

Also, and this aspect is new under the No Child Left Behind Act, is in
the discussion between the LEA officials and private school officials,
it may be that the private school people bring to the table a third
party provider. Perhaps they\'ve gone to a conference and they\'ve gone
through the exhibit hall and they\'ve met these third party providers
who do very effective programs, so they might bring that to the
consultation table to say, \"You know, we\'ve heard of someone who does
a wonderful program here on crisis management, or on conflict resolution
and we\'ve heard they\'re very effective and we even know some other
private schools that are using them\". And they can bring that
suggestion to the district to ask, \"Could you use the funds that have
been generated by our students and in a sense hire this third party
provider?\"

But the law allows that if there\'s disagreement on that point on using
a third party provider, that the private schools may ask the school
district to put in writing why they will not use a third party provider
in the provision of services. Critical and something that again, based
on my experience as I travel around the country, some local educational
agencies do this very, very well, the consultation, and they make sure
that the consultation takes place before any decisions are made that\'s
going to impact the participation of private school students. Some
districts, and you might hear about this morning, have developed a time
line in consultation with private school officials that says, \"All
right, in February expect this letter and in March expect that we\'re
going to have a general consultation meeting, and then before you leave
for your summer vacation, we\'re going to make sure that we\'ve
discussed the programs that will be implemented for the following school
year\".

But sometimes what happens, and this is more so with what I\'ve found
particularly with the discretionary grant programs, because as you may
be aware, when it comes to some of the discretionary grants, other
entities, not just local educational agencies, may also apply for a
grant and I remember about a year ago, might have been two years ago,
receiving a phone call from a community based organization. It was one
of the mentoring grants and they said, \"You know, we\'re getting ready
to submit our grant in a couple days and we heard about, do we have to
talk to private school people\"? \"Oh, yes, you do, let me tell you what
part of the law that\'s in\". \"Well, if we do that, that\'s going to
ruin our grant.\"

I said, \"Well, no, that\'s what the law requires\". It\'s very
challenging, as you know, just in life, in general, when you don\'t do
something up front and then you have to go and fix it later and there\'s
frustration. So to the extent that districts do this well and they do it
in advance, we have that maximum participation of private school
students and part of the reason for this is, perhaps the district knows
very well what is needed by way of safe and drug free schools for the
middle schools it operates but let\'s just say for purposes of
discussion there are some private schools and they might be K through 8
and their middle schools are included in their K to 8 program. But
perhaps those private schools middle \-- their middle school students,
what might be needed for them might be different from what is needed for
the public school students in a particular area. So it\'s critical that
the LEA would have that information. So then as the LEA or this other
entity develops its grant, it can say, \"Oh, we want to make sure we
accommodate this need\". As I mentioned to LEA people, the goal should
be we don\'t look at public, private, we look at here are the children,
how do we serve the needs within these limits and within the limited
amount of funding that we have available? And again, all those items
under consultation apply to the discretionary grant programs also.

Expenditures, this is addressed in the law and I\'ve quoted for you
there, noted, the actual language but generally, as these funds go to
the states based on number of children enrolled in schools, number of
children from low income families, then what happens as it gets down to
the district level, the district is looking at the number of private
school children enrolled in private schools and develops a per pupil
allocation and then multiplies \$5.00 is the per pupil allocation and we
have 10 children in this private school, well, we have \$50.00 to expend
on behalf of these students. And so we\'re going to consult with the
private school officials, what are the needs.

In some areas, and you might hear this this morning, some private
schools join together and ask the school district to pool the funds that
have been generated on behalf of their students to then expend on those
students. So as opposed to a little school here generating \$1,000.00
and a little school here generating 2,000, again for services, not to
receive those funds, it can be more effective if the District says, \"On
behalf of these 10 schools we\'re going to pool the funds that you\'ve
generated under Title IV so that we can then provide a really robust
program\". And sometimes that happens where you might have a group of
Catholic schools or a group of Lutheran schools but it doesn\'t have to
be one singular faith in that regard. And just as I noted all those
programs at the very beginning, Title I, Part A, which we\'re not going
to discuss today, which I call it the monster of all programs, is very
challenging to understand, how expenditures are generated for that are
different. Just as a little side note, I always have to make sure I say
that so there\'s no confusion, but for all those other 11 programs,
it\'s a per pupil allocation.

Well, how do we know that in the end we\'ve actually provided equitable
services? What are some of the guiding principles? This is taken from
the regulations. As you\'ll notice as we go through \-- have gone
through the slides, I\'ve cited the actual statutory language, but here
I\'m citing some of the regulatory language that generally has the
district assessed and addressed those needs of the private school
students and teachers? So have they consulted with the private school
officials in a timely and meaningful way? And then have they provided
benefits and services that meet the needs?

Sometimes what can happen is a district has clearly examined their
students\' needs, knows these are the three top needs, we\'ve examined
the needs. We\'re going to develop programs to really meet those needs
and then in consultation with private school officials, they might say,
\"These are three programs, would you like to participate\". Well, that
does not meet the requirement of the law because the law requires that
first we need to identify the needs of those private school students and
teachers. We cannot just offer them services in a sense, \"This is what
you can have, take it or leave it\". It has to be, \"Now that we\'ve
assessed those services, this is what we\'ve developed\". And there are
many times when the programs that have \-- that the district develops
for its public school students and teachers are also very appropriate
for private school students and teachers. But again, the starting point
is always what are those needs because we don\'t want to implement a
program that doesn\'t meet real needs because it\'s not going to be
effective in the end.

Also that the district is to spend an equal per-pupil amount, that\'s
one of the ways we define that they\'ve provided equitable services, and
that the opportunity for private school students and teachers to
participate is comparable to that of public school students and
teachers. Thus, this relates to time lines. If at the beginning of the
school year a program in the public school system begins operating in
September, then we would anticipate that the programs for the private
school students would start in September unless through consultation it
was decided that it would be better if it started in October for
whatever particular reason.

As mentioned, again, not only does the LEA always remain in control of
the funds and the funds are the local educational agency\'s funds, not
the private school funds, what we also remind private school officials
is that because the Department, the Federal Department of Education
holds states accountable and then states have to hold their local
educational agencies accountable for implementing these programs, that
then results in the LEA always making the final decision about these
programs because when our monitoring teams go out, we\'re not going to
ask private school officials, \"Have you implemented this program
correctly, are you making sure you\'re evaluating it\"? Those questions
we\'re going to direct to the local educational agency because they are
accountable, they are the fiduciary agent. They always make the final
decision.

Now, on that note, what we anticipate is I like to ask the counselors
here in the Office of the General Counselor, my colleagues who are
lawyers, well, \"What if there\'s discussion about that decision?\" They
say, \"Well, we would expect that any decisions that are made that
there\'s a rationale behind them and it\'s a reasonable rationale\".
There might not always be agreement between the public and private
school officials, but that in the end if a decision has been made, and
let\'s say there is disagreement, we can inquire and at the Department
level what response we would get would be a rationale that was
legitimate and reasonable.

Also, the services are to be, and the materials and equipment programs,
secular, neutral and non-ideological in delivering those services to
private school students and teachers. In general, the allowable
activities, whether it\'s a formula grant or one of these discretionary
grants, whatever the allowable activity might be or activities in most
cases, those would also be available to private school students and
teachers. And those allowable activities are going to be addressed
during that consultation process. One final note about this and mind
you, I usually get anywhere from one to three hours on this topic, but
some local educational agencies have developed what is called a
non-public school working group and they bring on board representatives,
perhaps one representative for all the Catholic schools, one for maybe
independent schools and it might be anywhere from 10 to 20 people on
this non-public school advisory board and some districts do that and
particularly when they\'re discussing discretionary grants which you
have a tight time frame and they\'ve got to complete that grant and
they\'ve got to submit that grant. Those types of groups can be helpful
where the lead entity for a particular group of private schools can
gather information and say they\'re developing a grant, a discretionary
grant. We need to know what are the needs of private school students.
And that\'s just one what you might call a best or an effective practice
that I\'ve found through my travels as I\'ve been out there.

Finally, this information is our contact information for the Office of
Non-Public Education. We\'re the liaison office. One in four schools is
a private school. A little over 5 million students are private school
students and we bring their concerns and interest to the department and
then we also assist them in accessing through the local educational
agencies these benefits and services that are available to them. So I
think there\'s going to be questions at the end and I will end here.
Thank you very much.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Maureen. I don\'t know if that\'s
on. The light is on, I\'ll just talk loudly. Thank you and we will now
be moving to the panel and you are exactly right, the format is this; we
will be having questions at the end. So we\'ll go from \-- we\'ll start
on my left with Joe and then if we could go from Joe to Patrick to Jack
to Michael, and then when we are done with the presentations, and then
that might also include any questions, Maureen, that might be directed
to you from out committee.

So again, thank you so much for being here. And with that, I\'ll turn it
over to Joe McTighe.

MR. McTIGHE: Thank you for inviting us this morning. I was thinking on
the metro on the trip down that when one considers all of the
circumstances under which testimony is given in this town, the chances
are pretty good that any given piece of testimony is either to defend
oneself or explain oneself or otherwise keep oneself out of jail but
I\'m happy to assure you that this testimony has nothing to do with any
of that. In fact, this is all about a very pleasant and I think
non-controversial topic and a topic around which there is general and
broad and bipartisan agreement, namely the need to protect children from
harm, but first some background on CAPE.

The Council for American Private Education is a coalition of 16 national
organizations and 30 state affiliates representing private elementary
and secondary schools. One in four of the nation\'s schools is a private
school and 11 percent of all students attend them. That translates into
28,000 schools and about 6 million students pre-K through 12.
Approximately 80 percent of those students are enrolled in schools
represented by CAPE member organizations.

Our nation is blessed by a rich diversity of schools, some rooted in
religious tradition, some that provide intensive academic experience and
some that are specialized for particular populations. Whether public or
private, these diverse schools constitute the American educational
experience and share a worthy goal, the education of our country\'s
children.

Together public and private schools work to insure an educated
citizenry. Together they strive to help students reach their potential
and contribute to the common good and moreover, all the children in
these schools, public and private, are part of the American family;
indeed, part of the human family and thereby, entitled to certain rights
and protections. CAPE member organizations, which are listed on the
slide you\'ve just been viewing, are themselves, diverse. The CAPE \-- I
just want to make sure \-- I need a little mirror here to see what\'s
going on behind me but I\'ll have to trust in technology from this point
forward.

The CAPE board and the state network representatives deliberate
extensively. They listen to one another carefully and they endeavor to
reach agreement on important public policy issues. One of CAPE\'s core
purposes is to cooperate with the public sector to improve the quality
of education for all of the nation\'s children, regardless of the
schools they attend. And quite naturally, we are advocates for the
equitable opportunity of private school students and teachers to
participate in appropriate programs at the state and federal level.
Given this perspective, we welcome the occasion to offer the following
comments relating to student health and safety.

CAPE member organizations do not agree on every point of public policy
but they do agree on this point; when it comes to insuring the health
and safety of children, the government should treat all students alike.
Now, at a certain level there\'s a common sense element to all of this.
All students are citizens and all citizens are entitled to certain
protections. Police officers, fire fighters or first aide providers do
not put certain students in a second class treatment category on account
of the type of school they happen to attend. If a fire breaks out at a
public school, they are there. If one breaks out at a private school,
they are there. They are there because their mission is to protect the
public and children in private schools are part of the public.

The same even-handed treatment is also generally practiced at the
federal level. The response in the wake of the 2005 Gulf Coast
hurricanes serves as an example. The Bush Administration and the
Education Department made it clear that help was going to be provided to
everybody in need. When the hurricanes struck, they did not draw
distinctions between public and private schools. The storms flattened
and flooded all effected buildings with the same ferocity and they
uprooted communities indiscriminately.

The President and members of Congress on both sides of the aisle
concluded that government assistance should not draw distinctions
either. Children who needed help, got help no matter what school they
attended. And schools that needed emergency disaster relief got the
relief no matter what type of school they were.

So whether the crisis is a hurricane, a pandemic flu, or a strike by
terrorists, public and private schools are all in it together. They all
have the same goal, to ease the pain of those in need and to insure that
students receive a decent education with minimum interruption. To
achieve these goals, all government disaster relief and crisis
management activities should extend to all schools.

Let me turn to the particular reason for this morning\'s focus on
private schools. During a Q and A session at the White House Conference
on school safety last October, a questioner, after noting that a private
school had been the scenes of the shootings of students in Pennsylvania
the previous week, asked how private schools might be included in
government plans and programs to help protect students.

Secretary Spellings responded by saying she intended to ask the
Committee, quote, \"To take a look at that issue on how we can be more
coordinated\". The next day, during a conference call with education
leaders, the Secretary reiterated her intention to ask this Advisory
Committee to include the topic of private schools in their discussions
on school safety. The fact that this committee is so quickly addressing
this issue is testimony to the Secretary\'s, the Department\'s and the
Committee\'s commitment to serving all students.

In her report to President Bush at the conclusion of the School Safety
Conference, Secretary Spelling said, quote, \"We know also that these
sorts of incidents can occur in inner city America and in Amish
communities, private schools and public schools. Really every single
community has to be alert\", unquote. We couldn\'t agree more and we are
eager to work with the committee and with Department staff to carry out
the Secretary\'s obvious commitment to protect the nation\'s students no
matter what type of school they attend.

But despite good intentions, there are some obvious obstacles to
extending government disaster preparedness activities to private
schools, especially at the state and local levels. Quite understandably,
there is a natural network of coordination between government officials
and public schools when it comes to establishing channels of emergency
communication and connecting with community emergency responders during
a crisis situation. But that same natural nexus does not always extent
to private schools. I believe the Federal Government, and this covers
all appropriate agencies, including Education, Homeland Security and
others, would do well to encourage, if not mandate, the establishment of
state and local crisis communication networks that encompass all
schools. Along these lines, we propose having the Education Department
sponsor a special meeting or series of meetings on the issue involving
key government and private school officials; having the Education
Department develop and issue brief, a DVD instructional kit, a resource
guide, and other resources on the topic of private school inclusion in
crisis planning, including the topic in workshops and other gatherings
sponsored by the Department and other agencies, identifying and
disseminating model school level disaster plans, especially suited for
private schools; identifying and disseminating model private
school/public school government agency partnerships relating to crisis
planning and finding other ways and incentives to encourage state and
local government officials to include private schools in emergency
planning activities and finally, finding effective ways to advise
private schools of the resources available to promote school safety.

You should know that we, in the private school community area also
taking crisis planning very seriously. At CAPE we have taken significant
steps to make a private \-- to make the private school community aware
of crisis planning resources. We have devoted a page on our website to
the topic, a page that provides convenient links to government resources
relating to disaster planning, pandemic flu, natural disasters and
promising practices for coping with the crisis.

In addition, we have devoted considerable space in our monthly
publication to reporting on events and promoting Department resources
related to the topic. Clearly, however, much more needs to be done both
by the private school community and by government agencies. Permit me to
identify one concern that highlights the need for additional focus on
this issue. I will be brief, knowing that the topic is going to be
covered by my colleague, Pat Bassett from the National Association of
Independent Schools.

Three federal departments; Commerce, Education and Homeland Security
have launched a program entitled America Is Safer When Our Schools Are
Safer, a new program to protect our children. The initiative involves
the distribution of NOAA all-hazard public alert radios to schools, but
despite its inclusive title, the program has actually been designed to
protect only some students, namely those in public schools. My
understanding, however, is that efforts are underway to include private
schools in the radio distribution and I applaud those efforts and
encourage their quick success but the underlying issue is that when the
program was in initiated, the safety of an entire group of students,
namely those in private schools, was overlooked. We cannot allow some
students to be thought of as second-class citizens when it comes to
issues of health and safety. All children should be protected by a
program designed to provide schools with early warnings that allow quick
and appropriate action during threatening events. When a crisis starts,
minutes and sometimes seconds can make the difference. That thinking is
what inspired the decision to equip public schools with NOAA radios and
the same thinking should have prompted the inclusion of private schools
from the start.

Finally, allow me briefly to mention another matter, the Emergency
Response and Crisis Management Grants Programs, which I know will be
covered by my colleague Mike Caruso from the Archdiocese of Washington
in his testimony. I urge Department officials to find ways to guarantee
that applicants for grants relating to school safety describe and carry
out their obligations to insure equitable participation by private
school children and teachers. The law requires equitable services and
the Department, when approving grants, in fact, before approving grants,
should insure that the requirements of the law are carried out.

In closing, I want to thank in the presence of the Committee, the
Department, Assistant Secretary Price, and members of her staff for the
outreach to the private school community on matters of school safety.
Tara Hill provided private school leaders an excellent overview of
school safety programs at a CAPE meeting last February and she joined
colleagues in offering an informative panel presentation on crisis
planning at the Department\'s Private School Leadership Conference in
the fall. And Deputy Secretary Price met with private school
representatives in December to discuss various matters. We very much
appreciate the time that the Office has devoted to the safety of
students in all schools public and private. I mentioned at the start
that my overall topic, protecting children from harm, is
non-controversial. Indeed there is nothing controversial about keeping
students out of harm\'s way and helping those in need. Doing so is
simply a matter of basic human decency, not controversy. Helping one
another is what we do as a nation, as a community, as a family. We reach
out to our brothers and sisters without distinction. Their needs become
our needs. The controversy would be to turn away.

I urge you not to turn away from the students in private schools when
carrying out federal programs relating to school safety and I urge you
to encourage state and local authorities to include our students in
schools in their plans for preventing and reacting to a crisis. Again,
thank you for establishing this forum, for inviting us to participate
and for considering our comments and suggestions. CHAIRMAN LONG: Joe,
thank you very much for your comments. We appreciate that. Next, we\'ll
turn to Patrick Bassett, who is President, as I indicated earlier, of
the National Association of Independent Schools. Patrick?

MR. BASSETT: Good morning. In school, you\'re supposed to say good
morning back.

ALL PARTICIPANTS: Good morning.

MR. BASSETT: Thank you. By the way, when we need quiet, we raise our
hand in school. That only works in elementary school, not middle school
or high school. This is my 37^th^ year of working with schools. I
started as a teacher and a coach and a dorm parent in an all-boy\'s
boarding school Virginia and then after about 10 years of that, I had
two daughters and a female basset hound and I moved to become the head
of an all-girls\' school so my world changed dramatically. Eventually, I
became the head of a coeducational school in Connecticut. Now, this is
my sixth year in this role as the President of the National Association
of Independent Schools. We represent about 1250 college prep schools
throughout the United States and another 50 or so throughout the world
and about 500,000 students. I might add that I grew up and went to
public elementary, junior high and high schools, very good schools in a
suburb of Rochester, New York and they were safe and drug free schools
back in those days. I\'d like to comment first on the notion of school
safety.

Independent schools, in particular, private schools in general, have
been blessed, at least to date with relatively safe history of absence
of acts of violence. The first thing I want to talk about with safe
schools is the enemy within, those folks we know, our own staff and
students who have the potential for bringing violence into our schools.
There are several factors that I believe have protected private schools
and I share them with Advisory Panel because I think they have
implications for all schools. Obviously, one factor is that our schools
have narrow missions. We cover the entire gambit of school age
population, but each individual school defines what segment of the
school age population it chooses to serve. So we have schools whose
mission it is to serve just the gifted. Most of our school serve average
to above average college-bound kids, but we also have schools that \--
whose mission it is to serve under-served and under-privileged kids in
the inner city, students with learning disabilities or what we call
learning differences. So key element for the safety in our schools, key
factor is that we have narrowly defined missions and as a consequence,
there\'s a match between the student, the family and the school. The
kids want to be in that school, they know they need to be in that school
and that makes a huge difference in terms of a sense of belonging. I
might add that when you feel you belong in a school, this is your
school, not only do you succeed academically but you\'re part of a
larger ethos for the school to be safe.

For those of you who are parents just of young children, I would have to
tell you this, to disabuse you of your most fervent hope; that in fact,
your influence will not waiver as your child becomes an adolescent.
Truth be known, for everyone who has been a parent of an adolescent, you
know this, the peer group defines one\'s behavior, once you separate,
individuate and separate from your parents and that\'s what happens
during adolescence. So choosing a school, public or private, where
there\'s a sense of belonging is absolutely critical.

The second factor is that our kids in private schools, are involved in
supervised after school activities. I can\'t tell you how important this
is as a factor for school safety and child well-being. It turns out, if
you\'re involved in after school activities that are salutary,
healthful, organized, you do not do antisocial behaviors, you do not do
behaviors; sex, drugs and rock and roll that actually happen quite
freely in the unsupervised world for most kids.

Thirdly, is our school size. It\'s related to the other two factors. The
average private school, I believe, Joe is 200 or so students; is that
right? The average independent school is more like four to 500 hundred.
These are manageable numbers. The great movement in America from the
\`50s in the public domain has been consolidation. We have massively
large public schools. It is a hugely irrational idea to have 1,000
middle schoolers, junior high kids or 1500 junior high kids together.

Here\'s why; the adults do not know the kids. They don\'t know all the
kids, they don\'t know their families. So what works in the private
model I would recommend and of course, Bill Gates is funding this to the
tunes of multiple millions of dollars in the public domain, find ways to
regroup even in large public systems into smaller manageable schools,
schools within schools.

By the way, the relationship between all these ideas is this; in a large
public school system you have to be an NFL or NBA prospect to actually
make the team. This is why so few kids participate in sports. They
don\'t have the option of participating. How about a small private
school? If you can fog a mirror, we\'re recruiting you to play on the
team, right? So here\'s the deal, everyone is on a team. It could be
chess team, the debate team, basketball team. Virtually, the ethos
expects you, the adults recruit you, you\'re on a team and it produces
many, many benefits, not the least of which is the one we\'re talking
about today, a sense of belonging in a safe school because the kids own
the school. The culture they adopt is the school\'s culture, framed not
just by the kids, but by the adults.

A third factor, a fourth factor is the fact that we\'ve actually
developed crisis plans. We have security consciousness. Many independent
schools, private schools have long feared attack, especially, for
example, the Jewish day schools. If you want to see the best protected
and safest schools in America, go to a Jewish day school because they
have for so long, been fearful of the kinds of attacks we\'ve seen.

And lastly on this particular point of school safety, I believe that
there is a high touch, high tech future for grade schools in America in
the 21^st^ Century, and if you know what high touch, high tech looks
like, you\'ll know that it is the future programically and academically
for schools both \-- not either or, both and, high touch, high tech.
Well, the same is true for safety and security. What I think you\'ll
find more schools moving for \-- towards and perhaps the panel will
think about it and research and recommend it, our security systems that
aren\'t policed literally by armed and uniformed guards. This is
inhospitable and invasive and intrusive and it creates a mentality that
is anathema to what school is supposed to be.

Instead, the future will be high touch teachers trained to observe
changes in behaviors or the unexpected arrival of adults that you don\'t
know. High tech will help in many, many new directions, including smart
cards, and neural networks in schools that will help track everyone who
is on campus and provide for a future that is more secure.

My second theme this morning was actually brilliantly covered by my
colleague and that is the program, the NOAA radio program. The only
thing I would add to Joe\'s incisive remarks would be this; we\'re
curious on how this could happen. How does the legislative and
regulatory process work so that 10 percent of the school age population
would be ignored in something as basic as providing for services under
emergency conditions because when the hurricane came to New Orleans, it
didn\'t segregate by public versus private. And when the next disaster
strikes there won\'t be that kind of distinction made.

So we\'re actually encouraged that because we\'ve made a lot of noise as
the private sector, we\'re moving in the right direction but we\'re
fearful that this could happen at all. So that sense of concern, I
really did want to represent.

Third, I\'d like to say something about the Stafford/FEMA Hurricane
Relief Programming. Of course, prior to 2006, independent and private
schools were ineligible to receive reimbursements from FEMA because we
were expected to make any applications through the Small Business
Administration, SBA in the event of a disaster. And of course, the
consequence for that was that this interrupted services towards this 10
percent of the population, dramatically in the cases in which disaster
struck.

Thankfully, in 2006, legislation was passed and signed into law amending
the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act and restoring
federal aid for the repair, restoration and replacement of private,
non-profit educational facilities. So really what I wanted to place into
testimony is I thank you and an expression of our gratitude to the work
of those of you who have made this possible.

I might add that NAIS and our private school colleagues educated
thousands of Katrina students, displaced students and it represented
really the best of what the private school universe is about. Probably
85 percent of the schools charged no tuition whatsoever. Those that did
charge tuition were some of the Houston schools that had to take in
hundreds of students and add faculty. So for me it\'s a model of what
this panel is really about, the notion that given the power of the
government and the eleemosynary and charitable inclination of the not
for profit world and schools, we can do powerful things quickly when
called upon.

And then the last thing I\'d like to share some thoughts about is really
not as much on the agenda today but worthy of some contemplation and
that is the notion of drug free schools and I know the committee is
intently interested in and committed to that future. Actually,
statistically, it\'s clear to everyone the students in America are much
more at risk from drugs and alcohol, tobacco products and incidentally,
premature experimentation with sexuality, much more at risk than for any
of the other crises and emergencies that we\'re paying attention to
today. And so I\'d like to suggest that private schools are by no means
immune from this disaster that\'s hit American schools. The increased
incidents of the use of alcohol and drugs and early experimentation with
human sexuality. We do believe, as I\'ve tried to reflect in everything
I\'ve said this morning, that there\'s a public purpose to private
education. We believe that for 300 years private schools in American
have been a laboratory driven by the market. We know what the public
expects from their schools because they pay a lot of money to send their
children to private schools, so what is working would be a good question
for any group or panel to examine. And so actually what\'s promising is
an experiment that I just want to bring to the panel\'s attention.

It\'s a programming called Social Norming. And here\'s the idea behind
it. We\'re actually as a culture, very misinformed about the use of
drugs and alcohol. For example, if you ask the typical American what
percentage of adults have a drink every day, let\'s just test this
little hypothesis I have here, would \-- well, some of you actually are
experts around the panel, so I\'m going to ask you not to respond. But
for the rest of the panel or anyone in the public who\'s joining us,
what percentage of Americans do you think have a drink every day?
Someone take a guess.

Mr. Chairman, what would you guess?

CHAIRMAN LONG: Forty-seven percent.

MR. BASSETT: Forty-seven percent. Let me have three points so we can
triangulate this at little bit. Forty-seven percent, someone take
another guess. Sixty-five percent and give me a third guess, adults,
yes, adults, 80 percent. Exactly, this is the common perception and
it\'s largely because the people in this room belong to the
socioeconomic class actually that does have a drink, including myself,
every day, but in American only 11 percent of Americans have a drink
every day. So we wildly overestimate that. It reminds me of a story.
Kentucky, you know, we have a kindergarten class in one of our
independent schools in Kentucky and the headmaster overheard this
conversation in the playground. There were two boys and a girl, and the
girl said, before school stared, \"Well, let\'s play family\". And she
said, \"I\'ll be the mom, this boy, you be the dad,\" and then the third
child, the other boy said, \"Well, that\'s not fair, whom can I be, who
can I be\", and the little girl thought for a minute and she said,
\"Well, you can be the grandpa\". And then he thought for a minute and
said, \"Well, that won\'t work, we don\'t have any bourbon\".

So, what I\'m saying \-- but the antidote is the expectation is that
everyone drinks, but the reality is not everyone drinks, a very small
minority drink every day. Here\'s the point about social norming, every
teenager in every American school, public and private thinks that
everyone drinks, thinks that everyone experiments with drugs,
particularly marijuana, and thinks that everyone is having sex. So the
social norm thing, the normative thing to do apparently in every
teenager\'s mind is to experiment with alcohol, drugs and premature
sexuality.

It turns out when you actually do the polling, here\'s what you find and
this is also true in America\'s universities; that not everyone, in fact
the minority behavior in schools is to experiment with alcohol and
drugs, that minority behavior is to experiment with alcohol, drugs and
human sexuality. And in American universities, the minority behavior is
to drink to get drunk. And yet, if you ask your own kids in college,
they\'ll tell you everyone is drinking to get drunk, you know, starting
on Wednesday night. So once you actually do the research and publish the
results, guess what? Teenagers and even college kids decide, you know
what, it\'s normal not to do that. And so what I\'m really trying to do
is use an antidote to illustrate that larger point of the public purpose
of education. We have the freedom and the will to experiment with safety
mechanisms, with crisis planning, with alcohol and drug programming and
we think we owe it back to the larger society to be experimental schools
and share with you what seems promising. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Patrick. We appreciate that and
we\'ll next move to Jack Clark, Jack.

MR. CLARK: Thank you, David, members of the Committee, honored guests. I
want to express my appreciation for the opportunity to present here this
morning. I\'m going to give a little bit of a different type of
presentation, although I do echo what my peers are presenting, but I\'d
like to present a little bit more of a success story of what can be done
depending upon structure and depending upon how the programs are
handled. I represent a consortium of non-public schools that are
administered by intermediate units in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania has a structure of regional educational service agencies
called intermediate units. There are 29 intermediate units to service
the 501 public school districts and numbers of non-public schools and
they service those in terms of special education services, professional
development, consultation with curriculum and a number of other areas.
My responsibility is to administer a state-wide program called the Act
89 Auxiliary Services Program that provides remedial services,
counseling, psychological services, a number of different things for the
non-public schools. And we also serve as the LEA for the non-public
schools for the federal programs. Now, this makes it very interesting in
that we don\'t suffer the problems that are caused by having the empty
seats on the bus type syndrome where a large public school district puts
a program in place and they have a very small group of non-public school
children and it\'s tough to find something that meets their needs when
you\'re dealing with such a small number. For instance, in my particular
intermediate unit, Unit 20, which is in the upper right-hand corner
there, we have about 85,000 public school students and 13 school
districts. With the non-public school structure we serve, there\'s about
9.000 students, so the numbers are small in relation.

When we looked at these particular programs, one of the things we did a
number of years back when I was still working for the parochial school
system was to put together a consortium of intermediate units. Due to
the fact of the expansive amount of paperwork you\'re all familiar with
for federal programs, we felt it would be worthwhile if one of the
intermediate units of a group of four if us did, Safe and Drug Free
Schools, another one did the Title II Professional Development and so
forth. So we teamed up and this has made things extremely effective. And
that highlighted green area on the map, that\'s the consortium that\'s
administered by my intermediate unit to do Safe and Drug Free Schools
Programs for the non-public schools and about 50 public school
districts. There are 11 non-public high schools, approximately 70
elementary and middle schools and countless early childhood and
pre-school programs that come under this group. So it makes a sizeable
group and we have probably the best functioning advisory committee in
the state, with law enforcement represented, social service. We have
legal people, we have parents, we actually have students who come to our
advisory counsel meetings. Right now they\'re reviewing the budget,
reviewing programs that are effective, working on our application to
make sure that we do have proven programs that are being put into place
that are scientifically based. So this has made things exceptional and
one of the products of our committee has been a crisis response manual.

This started back in about 1985 when some of the schools had programs in
place dealing with substance abuse and they had a manual, \"This is how
we deal with problems,\" and we were putting student assistance programs
in place. Then eventually the Safe and Drug Free Schools Program came
across and we created this advisory panel and they thought, \"Well, this
is a great idea, let\'s just take this substance abuse manual that we
have for schools and expand it into a number of other areas. So it was
an outgrowth of earlier substance abuse manual and it was developed by
practitioners in the field.

We set up committees for the different chapters and brought in all the
experts and this particular project is reviewed and updated annually.
And the manual itself is available on the website. I have a web address
there where you can find this under auxiliary services. Click on the
crisis manual and you\'ll be able to find that.

The reason I want to go through this rather quickly is because to talk
about

\-- I want to focus on the crisis response itself and the issues we have
in working with the public school district. When we developed our
manual, we developed a standard process for each different section; a
purpose, what triggers the intervention process and procedure so that
you could follow a common approach to all issues and people would be
comfortable in responding and things would start to be internalized much
easier, similar to the all hazards planning approach that\'s now
fostered.

We also listed a number of additional resources in the crisis manual.
Our first section, of course, dealt with alcohol, tobacco and other
drugs, different topics and dos and don\'ts for parents. There\'s a
wealth of resources there. The purpose of the manual was not to set
policy but to implement procedures and to be able to point out where
local policies needed to be implemented to support your procedures. The
definition of in loco parentis, the responsibility of the schools we
have in Pennsylvania, examples of policies, also our single county
agency contact sheet, all different types of help and resources.

Our second section dealt with child abuse, suspected child abuse by
school employees. We have copies of the Child Protective Services law in
there as a resource. We then got into death in the school community,
provided sample letters to parents, how to respond and deal with this
death, whether you\'re dealing with students, whether you\'re dealing
with parents who are very close to the school or actual staff members.

A suicide section because that\'s been one of the major issues
unfortunately that we deal with, with children this age group. How to
handle not just the aftermath of a successful suicides but when you do
attempts and we\'re actually even implementing University of Columbia\'s
Teen Screen Program now, very successful in the non-public schools to
provide some information for parents for children who may be at risk so
there are a lot of resources in this.

We have a section on medical emergencies, how to handle medical
emergencies, helpful procedures to put in place and to local school and
different charts, resources and so forth. Actually, it gets rather
extensive and that\'s what\'s nice about having some representatives
from the medical community on your advisory counsel. This is one of the
areas that when we\'re talking about communicable diseases, we already
did have something in place there but it\'s a section that typically has
to be expanded much as is being done in the public schools, just to have
a pandemic plan response so you can show your local community you\'re
addressing issues in that area.

Natural disasters, dealing with different types of natural disasters
that may occur. Up in our area, we recently had some serious flooding in
the eastern area. We are susceptible to small earthquakes in different
sections there. We have mine subsidence and a number of other problems
there. Also going along with our natural disasters anything you could
imagine we try and put on the list.

Weapons and violence had been an area where we drew from the resources
from DARE office and law enforcement and legal people who were on our
committee and our local state police and task forces have been very
helpful in putting these procedures in place. We are one of the areas
where we have had shootings. It was nice to have these procedures in
place. They\'re predating Columbine and so forth but about six years
back we did have a shooting up at Newman High School in Williamsport and
luckily we had a policy in place that helped us to keep things on track.

Other topics there dealing with gangs. Copies of our Gun Free Schools
Act, a list of members who are trained in first aid. We get into custody
issues, another hot topic with the public as well as the private
schools, dealing with missing children, procedures for handling issues
with missing children and tracking them on field trips and an official
chapter we have that\'s not listed in your handouts is Meagan\'s Law
which is a Pennsylvania law for tracking sexual predators.

With our crisis manual, it was so successful and we did have it in place
there for many of the parochial schools. It was shared with the other
private schools across the state. The Pennsylvania Department of
Education found out about it and liked it and actually gave us a grant
to distribute the template. It was basically a template in Microsoft
Word format so that a school building administrator could take this and
tailor it and it helps. You know, why re-invent the wheel but it helps
point to major issues that should be covered.

So we distributed this on a CD a number of years back to all the public
school districts in the state and we developed a website which was
listed on that third slide at IU 20 from which to download the manual,
and it\'s been used extensively. We\'ve had downloads from countries all
across the world. An outgrowth of the manual was the flip charts for
classroom teachers for quick references. It\'s nice, there are little
flip charts instead of looking through the whole manual. The procedures
that the administrators have, they can look up what happens when we\'re
dealing with an intruder and quick reference, who do I call, how do I
handle these things. The schools have done this, one of the public
school districts adopted this same procedure, so we\'ve been sharing
that and it\'s gone quite well.

We\'ve gotten involvement on our advisory committee in working with the
development of our manual and by the way, I have a copy of the template
just to show you the size of it. I can bring this out and leave this
with the committee but you can review this and it has a lot of helpful
resources. Much of this is \-- some of this, I guess relevant
specifically to Pennsylvania but it\'s a step-by-step procedure that
local building administrators can use in putting their plans into place.

Following the development of this and all the recent concerns that
we\'ve had with respect to crisis management, we began to work in
training our administrative teams from the non-public schools and the
incident command structure as well as the national incident management
system so that they would know how to interface with the first
responders when they came into their building. Not only would they know
how to interface with the first responders but they would be able to
support one another because they would understand the structure that was
in place at a particular school building.

In our area the public school districts have absolutely adapted the plan
format that we have in place. They\'ve also been trained in the incident
command structure and in NIMS. Many of them, as I told you, are
developing flip charts for their teachers and flow charts for the
administrators so they can respond quickly and help each other out.

Our current priorities, both in the public schools and the
representatives of the private schools are sitting elbow to elbow with
the public school districts in developing comprehensive all hazards
planning. They are learning the common language structure from the NIMS.
They\'re working with the first responders. They\'re conducting tabletop
exercises and practice drills that go well beyond your severe weather
drills.

The major areas that seem to be focused on right now are how to respond
in terms of natural disasters, how to deal with school security and
violence, and of course pandemic planning. In Pennsylvania, our
government support has come to the schools from resources we were able
to pull down from the FEMA website, also from the Department of
Education, the resources there and the Pennsylvania Management Agency
website. We\'ve been getting our training in the instant command
structure, NIMS, at least in my particular intermediate unit where I\'m
located from the Director of Emergency Services training at the local
community college and he\'s worked both with the non-public schools as
well as the public school districts. The state police are doing
workshops on vulnerability assessments for the schools and assisting in
consultation but they are stretched rather thinly. The issue that we\'re
all dealing with is the lack of support in some areas. Our State
Department of Health finally picked up the phone to talk to the
Department of Education when they were informed by the Governor that
they didn\'t the authority to close the schools down by themselves. This
is only under that authority of the Secretary of Education. So they
finally started to talk to one another.

They went and established PODs, the Points of Distension throughout the
state without any consultation or input from the local emergency
management agencies, without any input from the Regional Anti-Terrorism
Task Force and without any input from the schools. Many of these sites
that they selected or some of the sites they selected were school
buildings that were actually under construction and things that would be
impractical. Yet they had school districts that were willing to work
with them if they had picked up the phone ahead of time and said,
\"Sure, we have a nice spot and we\'d like to include this right here\".
So there\'s a lack of coordination on a rather large scale.

We find the county support has been missing and we really have to
coordinate with the county. Our superintendents and many of you are very
familiar with the issue, we\'re \-- the superintendents are accountable
to the parents for the health, safety and welfare of the children as
well as the staff. And it\'s hard to answer questions to parents about
why you don\'t have a plan to put into place when you\'re trying to pass
things off to the county. They don\'t want to hear that. They don\'t
send the children off to the county every day. They send them off to the
school district and you had better be prepared. So what has happened in
our particular area, the schools are driving the disaster preparedness
planning. The schools have taken what they\'ve learned from the ICS
trainings and NIMS training, taken their plans, made them NIMS compliant
and conducted the research to develop response plans to put into place.
And now they\'re at the stage where they\'re going to be taking these
plans to the county and asking the county to support them and to be
compliant with plans that they have prepared according to the national
standards. And I don\'t think this is an unusual situation that you
would find across the country.

School districts have to be responsive to parents, have to put plans
into place whether the support is there from the local government or
not. As I said, the schools are concerned about the safety of the
students and staff. The answer is not forthcoming. Our next step is to
coordinate the completed plans, review and update them regularly and to
put procedures into place to help children. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Jack. To answer one of the things,
just a statement you made, yes, it is almost the same everywhere and
that\'s why we\'re listening, that\'s why this will be a good discussion
afterwards. Michael, if we could turn to you, Michael Caruso.

MR. CARUSO: Thank you, good morning. I\'m going to try to breeze through
my testimony and not hit all the points that are in my written
testimony. Does everyone have the testimony? And I don\'t have the
PowerPoint unfortunately this morning but distinguished Advisory
Committee members, honorable federal public servants and honored guests,
I\'m very, very pleased to have this opportunity to present remarks and
participate in the follow-up panel discussion and I do want us to get to
that because I think the synergy and discussion that can happen there is
sometimes the most fruitful.

Concerning issues related to crisis planning and school safety as they
relate to Catholic schools, I handed around an overview of the Catholic
schools of the archdiocese of Washington that I represent. There are
34,000 students in our system of schools, 76 of them are archdioceses
schools with two archdioceses high schools. Most of the archdioceses
schools are elementary and middle schools and the remaining schools are
\-- about a quarter of them are independently operated Catholic high
school and middle schools.

We\'re in six different jurisdictions including the District of Columbia
and five Maryland county surrounding Washington, DC. The geographic area
for the archdioceses is 2100 square miles. I\'ve worked in the education
profession for the last 25 years serving the archdioceses of Washington
since 2003 and my role, I\'m not a security chief, although I play one
about every six weeks. My role really is to link the Catholic schools
with essential resources and my involvement though with the Council of
Governments Security Chief\'s Group and then the National Group that\'s
met every year for the last three years that I\'ve been a part, has
really been to sensitize me to the fact that the external threats are
very real to all of our schools.

The same essential factors that influence public schools have influenced
Catholic and non-public schools\' approach to rethink school safety and
crisis preparedness strategies and procedures and there\'s a
constellation of factors that you\'re all aware of. It started with
Columbine, 9-11, the global war on terrorism, the war in Iraq and most
recently the potential for a flue pandemic. These are all key big
factors that are driving all of us and it\'s raised the consciousness
level in non-public, private schools the same way as it has in public
schools. I\'m a parent of two young children, one six and one nine, and
this has really become an important part of my life both professionally
and personally as I suspect it is for all of you.

Logic dictates that there be a heightened sensitivity to the
vulnerability of all children no matter where they go to school. We are
most concerned. We do have internal threats, just like everyone else and
they were alluded to, but we are most concerned about the external
threats and the common misperception is that non-public schools and
private schools don\'t think they have a problem or they don\'t worry
about school safety and nothing could be further from the truth.

Now, some people like us and all of you worry about it a lot more than
some others especially in the suburbs who believe that somehow it\'s not
going to happen there, but most of the schools do worry about it,
especially the school leaders and parents increasingly worry about it.

No school \-- to paraphrase the poet John Donne \-- is an island unto
itself. And Catholic schools, while we pride ourselves in the safety and
security of our internal environments, we really are concerned and we
worry about the potential for a flu pandemic the way everyone else does
and we worry about the proliferation of gangs and natural disasters and
in another 9-11 and unfortunately it\'s likely to happen.

And what we need to do and we know is to plan accordingly and we know
that good planning and good coordination go a long way to anticipating
these complexities and addressing them. Now, I\'m just going to \-- I
don\'t want to whine about it, but it is a reality, after 9-11 there was
a burst of public funding to public schools and other public entities as
there should have been. Those funds, for the most part, did not reach
non-public and private schools. The additional funds, you\'re familiar
with how they were \-- how they were provided and they were provided for
very important things. It makes practical sense to do everything
possible to insure that the non-public schools receive equitable and
meaningful support for school health and safety because our students to
go school across these venues.

I\'ve provided a couple of examples of promising practices. They\'re not
the only promising practices but they are a couple of examples. One is a
children\'s health alert network. The information is in your packets. It
essentially is a program in which the Montgomery County Government
Health Department received a federal grant about three years ago and the
Catholic schools, 30 of them in Montgomery County report attendance
essentially every day, most of them still participate in that as do
public schools. And what it is intended to do, the information goes to
Johns Hopkins is if there\'s any kind of dramatic change in attendance,
it can render a signal that there may be a health problem. It\'s really
a bio-terrorism initiative and health initiative.

The problem with that initiative is, there was a burst of funding.
We\'re all continuing to participate but there\'s been no follow-up
funding. In Price George\'s County, this is just one example, we\'re
working with the special forces unit in which we provided all of our
school floor plans in case there was a major incident in which those
SWAT teams would need to get into the schools, they would know where to
go.

Again, this is an initiative that\'s kind of done in isolation. It\'s
important. It\'s not being done in the other five jurisdictions and it
probably should be but that particular partnership doesn\'t exist there
exactly the same way, and yet if it were connected with a comprehensive
approach, it could really be a good model.

What I want to just shoot to are impediments to enhancing school safety
and emergency preparedness and my focus is really around the whole area
of Title IV. But a key challenge, a couple of key challenges faced by
non-public schools is that, number one, they\'re not permitted to apply
directly for federal funds. We\'re not LEAs. So we\'re really, you know,
at the mercy and at the invitation of the public schools and we have
really, really good relationships with them but we can\'t be the lead.
And there\'s some interesting things going on in Pennsylvania, as there
are in New York where there are pass-throughs, voluntary pass-throughs
that are occur that enable non-public schools to access money more
readily and therefore, supports.

But the consequences that nearly all the efforts to enhance the
non-public schools readiness has been without the benefit of the
technical assistance training and implementation support that the public
schools have realized.

Another challenge that I want to mention that impacts Catholic schools
is kind of a broader contextual issue that I\'ve observed and that has
to do with the fact that there\'s a separation between the school safety
offices in the public school systems and the Title IV offices. As most
of you probably know, there is not really a lot of coordination between
those Title IV programs, per se, and the security offices. Now, that\'s
not necessarily a criticism, it\'s just an observation and we are
impacted by that separation. Those groups meet separately. So in the
end, important programs such as Title IV that require non-public
participation, have not been fully implemented within the spirit of the
law and let me just mention a couple of reasons I think why. But before
I do, I just want to mention that I believe, as this whole panel does,
I\'m sure, that Title IV is a vital service for school safety and crisis
planning in the United States. It\'s just astonishing to me that this
isn\'t really abundantly clear to the Congress and to others in the
Administration.

Although it\'s not the only funding source to supplement school safety
and crisis, preparedness needs, the programs and services supported
under this program are really vital. The Office of Safe and Drug Free
Schools has a very modest budget relatively speaking and with limited
staff done amazing things and created a national crisis blueprint,
management blueprint for all hazards approach to school emergencies.
Even the Title IV programs provided to public schools invariably benefit
the non-public schools.

Our students interact with one another, peer mentoring, suicide
prevention, alcohol, drug prevention, gang awareness programs are among
the many programs that are literally seen. And here\'s the point, we
can\'t ignore the fact or minimize the fact that our nation is now faced
with extraordinary threats to its national health, safety and security
at home and abroad. All of us in education are challenged to think
differently about the programs and services we provide and the
priorities we\'re making with the limited resources under our
stewardship.

Now, many non-public schools are seeking to use the Title IV for
emergency preparedness. To get back to that other impediment where you
have your school safety offices over here and your Title IV program
offices over here and that \-- the non-emergency preparedness programs
that are going on. Those are very important programs, but at a time
really when the efficacy of the Title IV program is being questioned by
the Congress and the Administration, this Advisory Committee has an
opportunity to recommend new ways of focusing the Title IV funds to
address current and anticipated realities that address the health and
safety of school communities across America. For many Catholic schools
the Title IV funds and the supports are the only supplemental supports
to enhance our capabilities and align ourselves with the emerging
standards of efficiency that the public schools are really ahead of the
curve on.

As this Advisory Committee prepares to make recommendations to the
Secretary of Education, I hope that you\'ll keep in mind that the public
schools can\'t afford not to include non-public schools much, much more
deliberately and systematically. Let\'s face it, children from the same
schools often attend a combination of public and non-public school.
Spouses and friends work across those venues. An isolated and
disenfranchised non-public private school communities are a risk to
everyone. They weaken the chain of protection within and across our
nation\'s school communities.

I\'ve mentioned two impediments here or concerns that I have with regard
to number one, the categorical or formula based funding flows to the
LEAs, the public schools through the states and we need to insure that
equitable participation for non-public programs is assured.

Let me just kind of allude to what Maureen Dowling mentioned in terms of
how that Title IV funding occurs. Essentially bottom line, some of you
or many of you may know how it works, but basically what you have is the
LEA public schools will send the non-public schools a sheet that
indicates, \"Do you want to participate in all these 11 programs, one of
them is Title IV, yes or no\"? Usually it's not accompanied by our
approximate equitable proportion of funds.

So if I\'m DeMatha High School in suburban Maryland, I don\'t know that
there\'s possibly \$10,000.00 of equitable proportion of funds. No one
has told me, okay? Six hundred and fifty thousand dollars is provided by
\-- to the state, to Prince George\'s County, which is the jurisdiction
in which that particular high school is located, for instance. DeMatha
and the rest of our 30 archdioceses schools in Prince George\'s County
still don\'t know what our equitable proportion is. We think that it\'s
probably around \$10.00 a head and we\'re still waiting for that
funding. But without knowing the dollar amount, we can\'t consult
meaningfully. So what happens?

Usually, there\'s a unilateral offer of services to our non-public
schools. At the participation, the non-public participation meeting last
spring, basically what happens, and this happens in a number of
jurisdictions, is the menu of peer mediation, alcohol awareness, court
programs that expose adolescents to what it means when you get
incarcerated, all those good programs are described to us and we are
offered those services. That is not equitable participation and it
doesn\'t meet our most compelling need right now. And our most
compelling need right now is for crisis preparedness. So I\'ve mentioned
a couple of our key concerns with respect to those and I\'ve posited
some questions for the LEAs.

And somehow this needs to get in terms of implementation guide just to
the LEAs. For the Title IV discretionary grant program for emergency
preparedness, equitable participation for non-public programs must be
assured. Despite the deliberate efforts by the Office of Safe and Drug
Free Schools and they\'ve done a number of things that are really
important, there still appears to be a lot of gray area concerning
implementation of this. I\'ve also posited a number of questions that
the committee can take up with the staff, the Office of Safe and Drug
Free School staff in terms of looking at the protocols that are used at
the front end of applications and also at the tail end of applications
in terms of the implementation.

The bottom line is that there needs to be systematic tracking of those
that indicate non-public school participation to assure that it actually
happens for either the categorical or competitive grant programs. Having
good positive advisory committees at the state level and at the LEA
level is another way, is a way that that can happen. Now, in the
Washington area we have very positive conditions. We have excellent
relationships with our public school systems. Our superintendents in the
Catholic school systems attend the meetings with the public school
superintendents. I attend meetings with my colleagues, the school
security chiefs. These are all excellent conditions but \-- and those
relationships grew out of all that\'s happened in the last six years,
but we need to do more than follow the lead of the public school
systems. We follow the lead of the public school systems for delays and
closures of schools, for instance, but we need to do more than that. The
government officials \-- and we do that because the government possesses
more intelligence than we do. So we assume when the public schools
close, they have garnered all the possible information concerning health
and safety and they are using more complete information to make those
decisions.

Last Friday, the Washington Region\'s top elected officials for Maryland
and the District of Columbia and Virginia, the new governor, Governor
O\'Malley, Mayor Fenty and Governor Kane convened a summit on security,
pledging to cooperate on homeland security issues. The focus of their
effort was on cross-jurisdictional communications, public awareness,
critical infrastructures, protection planning, intelligence sharing, et
cetera, et cetera.

The National Capital Region is to receive 411 million of the 747 million
in urban area security initiative money that\'s being directed to
provide support to the six high-risk urban areas. It really may be time
for a series of regional school summits on homeland security to prepare
all schools in America to act as a seamless education community in the
event of one or more catastrophic or otherwise horrific incidents as my
colleague Joe McTighe alluded to.

It\'s time that our public and non-public school education leaders were
provided with the supports to plan appropriately for a national and
regional emergency that could threaten the stability of the education
system nationally as well as locally. And I mean, just looking at the
Washington area, I mean, we\'re a decision making center obviously for
the nation. And the same really is true for the other regions of the
country.

I\'ve mentioned our Catholic school goals and I won\'t go over all of
them, but basically, they mirror the goals of the public schools and
I\'ve taken the template of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools\'
competitive grant program and we\'ve developed a blueprint that we\'re
shopping around to the Title IV LEA offices.

The important thing to note now is that we\'re ready to act and yet
we\'re waiting for the LEAs to respond and I believe in some cases they
will respond. Our purpose is to formalize our school safety and
emergency planning activities as the public schools have and to align
ourselves with those standards of proficiency that the public schools,
as I\'ve mentioned, really have the curve on. We recognize the need to
work with community partners but to achieve this, we need the technical
assistance and the training for our central office as well as our school
staff and students, as well as enhanced communications for parents.

Of immediate concern, and I have to mention this because it kind of
brings it all back, is the need for federal support to develop guidance
around the whole issue of a potential infectious disease outbreak. And
we\'ve been told in a number of briefings that it could be as short a
time as three to four weeks if something really happened, before a
pandemic would hit. We tend to think of it like it\'s going to be six
months or six years from now but there is real genuine concern and we
read about it every day and I\'m showing your intelligence that there
are various kinds of things happening that indicate that the potential
for this could happen.

And even if it were done on a much more isolated smaller scale the
repercussions could be devastating. We\'re talking about what it would
mean to close our schools for three to six to nine months. We\'re
talking about the economic impact on our schools. The same impact could
occur on local jurisdictional budgets as well. And we\'re trying to plan
for how we would go about withstanding that. We would welcome \-- let me
just say this, make this as an overture, we would welcome the
Archdioceses of Washington and I would suspect with other partnering
non-public school organizations, an alternative funding opportunity for
an innovative partnership collaboration based on best practices,
national standards and data driven decision making. We want to focus on
global pandemic and other catastrophic incident preparation. If funding,
we will work, we are prepared to work with the Federal Government, the
state governments, the jurisdictions in this region.

This Advisory Committee really should consider proposing to the
Secretary as a proposal, not only for the Washington Capital Region but
strategically throughout the nation collaborative, innovative
initiatives and moving on it with dispatch, not a year from now where we
put it out to bid. I\'m not talking about \$50 million. I\'m talking
about \$3 million say, to jump start a number of innovative initiatives
to parallel and mirror the really good best practices that have been
occurring through the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools Competitive
Grant Programs.

Let me conclude by thanking Secretary Spellings, this committee for the
opportunity to present and be part of the panel discussion. I want to
engage with the panel. I also want to acknowledge the really, really
good work and fine efforts of the professional staff in the Office of
Safe and Drug Free Schools, Bill Modzeleski, along with Assistant Deputy
Secretary Deborah Price. I\'m going to miss Tara Hill and Sara Strizzi
and a number of other people. An amazing staff, they really do amazing
things on a very relatively modest budget. There\'s no finer or
committed staff in the Federal Government or the private sector and I
hope that my remarks and my written remarks which are more detailed,
will be helpful as you develop recommendations to the Secretary to
insure that all children and the staff who work with them every day can
keep all children safe in America. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Michael, thank you very much. We\'ve been here almost two
hours. I\'m going to ask that we take a five-minute break and in the
meantime, Maureen, if you could then come up to join the four panelists
as we enter the question and answer.

MS. PRICE: Can I just identify who these are, do you mind? Let me
mention one thing; we\'ve got some international guests that have come
in and are observing us today. Rita, could you stand and just identify
where they\'re from because at the break time you \-- just generally.

FEMALE PARTICIPANT: Generally, they\'re from seven countries.
(Inaudible) Yeah, just very briefly.

MALE PARTICIPANT: This is a program sponsored by the International
Visitor Leadership Program of US Department of State. We have eight
guests from eight different countries involved in politics and education
who are looking at civics education in the US.

MS. PRICE: And the countries?

MR. SKOUGSTAD: The countries are Burma, Egypt, Romania, Peru, Colombia,
Turkey and Malaysia.

MS. PRICE: Thank you, just so that if during the break you wanted to
chat with them.

(Applause)

(A brief recess was taken at 9:44 a.m.)

(On the record at 9:52 a.m.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: I think, Maureen, yes, you\'ve found a place there. Now
for those of you that are panel members, this now is a very freewheeling
question, answer discussion so that we can start to synthesize some of
the information to see what the committee wishes to do with it. So with
that, if we could please start with committee questions and away we\'ll
go.

MS. PRICE: I don\'t necessarily have a question but I wanted to give a
little bit more information about the NOAA radios, just because as the
Advisory Committee is looking at a variety of things it would be helpful
for them to know kind of the background and the current status of that
as well.

While you mentioned Hurricane Katrina and the response with the public
and private schools, it really was outstanding. Private schools were
taking in public school students. Public schools were taking in private
school students and they looked at them as a community in need as a
whole. And that was an outstanding example. The NOAA radios, while I
described it, may not have been the outstanding example that Hurricane
Katrina is but let me give a little bit of background.

The NOAA radios are all hazard radios that are being provided to schools
but they\'re not being provided from the Department of Education.
They\'re being provided \-- NOAA is part of Commerce. Homeland Security
actually is the entity that is doing this and so they are the ones who
have taken on this responsibility. The role of Education has been to
help them identify the communication tool to reach those goals in
communities that they\'re trying to reach.

And clearly they want Department of Education involved because you know,
we \-- it\'s schools, it\'s our subject matter, but last year there was
an earmark, so a particular amount of money put in the Appropriations
Bill to provide \-- and it was a smaller amount of money, it was
actually the year before last, to provide NOAA radios to some schools
and it was a pilot project. It was a small amount of money. So Homeland
Security \-- I always pronounce it wrong, UASI (phonetic) which
identifies those communities that have the highest risk in the country.
And so the decision was made to give radios to public schools in those
school districts.

Then the earmark increased and it was a much larger amount of money and
so they thought that they would try to distribute the radios to as a
many schools as possible, thinking they could get some, but because they
were able to contract such a particularly low price for the radios, they
were able to distribute \-- Homeland was able to distribute those radios
to all K through 12 public schools in the country and still had some
money left over.

Now, their \-- you know, everything moves in a department by a decision
memo that is then approved by that particular Secretary and their
decision memo, that had been as far as it goes. Since then, they have
determined that they will be getting NOAA radios to all non-public
schools, K through 12 in the country in addition to daycare facilities
and many institutions of higher education. That decision memo is
currently at the Department of Homeland Security going \-- moving
forward and there are some legal things they had to figure out about
getting \-- particularly daycare facilities is kind of cumbersome but do
they have the authority to give the dollars at XY and Z. And so, you
know, no one is saying no but they had to work those elements out.

Those are \-- that decision memo is going forward and no reason to
believe that there will be anything but a positive response to that, but
that is Homeland Security\'s authority to say yes or no, not ours. So I
can\'t pre-empt them or usurp their authority in that. But those are
expected to go out this spring. So \-- but you know, should private
schools have been incorporated in the early thing, you know, we can see
now that there are reasons to incorporate both but nonetheless, the
nature of the beast being what it was, this is the circumstances that we
had, but they will be going out to those school districts and can be a
valuable tool down the road. So I just kind of wanted to give an update
about that process and let you know.

MR. McTIGHE: If I could just offer a comment, and we appreciate all that
the Department has done in trying to expedite the remedy for this what
we consider a problem.

MS. PRICE: Well, I should say that that decision to go forward with the
public schools has been \-- I mean, nothing in the Federal Government
happens quickly. That was all discussed prior to all of these other
conversations.

MR. McTIGHE: Right, I understand. The background, even to go back a
little bit further, the original appropriation, which was an earmark in
the DHS appropriation, specified for the distribution of NOAA radios to
schools across the country. Now, you have to know a little bit about
legislative lingo to realize that when Congress wants to deal only with
public schools, they say public schools or they say LEAs or they say
school districts, some peculiarly public school descriptor.

When they say schools, they mean all schools. They mean public schools,
they mean private schools. So somewhere between that appropriation
earmark and the implementation of the program, which took place, as you
described, at DHS, the decision was made to focus on public schools
rather than schools in general, including the initial decision which was
to focus on schools in the most at risk urban areas. That could have
been public schools and private schools in the most at risk. In the
urban areas at risk includes everybody.

So that was one of our concerns, that from the get-go this program was
designed for public schools. And here\'s a \-- I just want to quote from
a letter that I received when we initially raised a fuss about this
program. We got a letter back from the Department of Homeland Security
and you know, she described the whole, you know, series that you
described, the 2005 appropriation, the 2006 expansion, et cetera. But
here\'s an interesting quote; \"When the current distribution is
complete, DHS will work closely with the Department of Education and
Commerce to consider possible distribution to additional categories of
schools through this joint initiative, if there is remaining funding\".
So listen to the hierarchy.

Okay, we\'re going to take care of public schools first, okay, and
we\'re going to take care of public schools in urban areas that are at
risk first. Then we\'re going to take care of all public schools and
then if there\'s money left over, we will consider protecting the
well-being of kids in private schools. That\'s our concern about this
program, the hierarchy of consideration. If that applied to any
majority, minority group and you were to say, \"We\'re going to take
care of the majority in providing this level on service and then if we
have money left over, we\'ll consider providing the same services to the
minority\". Do you get the point? And that\'s exactly our response. I
mean, we\'re trying to avoid that kind of thinking from happening again.

MR. CARUSO: Kind of the broader point is \-- and I come back to
pandemic, because pandemic, if there\'s anything I know that alcohol and
drugs and certain things are impacting us immediately, but the
likelihood of a catastrophic national or regional issue, you know, it\'s
more likely that a pandemic or health-related emergency could be
impacting across then there\'s no argument on it. If my kid goes to a
public school, neighborhood school, and then another child goes to a
Catholic school or another private school, and one school is doing all
the right things in terms of health practices and then the other school
somehow it just didn\'t get all of that information. You\'re not really
fortifying and making and minimizing and isolating the virus. So I think
the more important thing is there are some looming national issues
related to health and safety where this is just an example of. We don\'t
need the same level of funding but we need to make sure that we\'re
applying those safeguards and those protections across venues and we\'re
applying them and providing the support so it\'s not an unfunded
mandate.

So that when we\'re shoring up and fortifying various things, whether
it\'s being concerned about intruders and looking at your zone of
protection or looking at your health zone of protection in your
practices that those practices are being improved and enhanced across
public and non-public/private school lines.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Other questions or comments from the committee, yes,
Mike?

MR. HERRMANN: First off, I just want to thank the committee,
particularly Michael and Jack for raising the issues about crisis
preparedness. Those issues, I think this committee has, perhaps, not
heard as much about as some of the drug and violence issues but I do
think it\'s an important thing to think about in terms of the overall
Title IV picture.

As a person associated with state government who has responsibilities
for insuring that these private school issues get addressed. You know, I
heard the recommendations in terms of steps that the US Department could
take. Do you have recommendations or thoughts in terms of things that
should be happening at the State Department of Education level?

MR. CARUSO: Well, I guess one observation I would make is that you
can\'t kind of blame the LEA completely for the way they act sometimes.
I think it\'s \-- you know, the Department of Ed can provide guidance,
provides the guidance to the states and to the LEAs to some extent, but
the states need \-- and in our case it\'s the District of Columbia and
the State of Maryland, need to be more \-- need to be more mindful of
the fact that they need to be providing guidance, that those LEAs need
to be breaking out those, you know, \$650,000.00 for Prince George\'s
County and five hundred some thousand dollars for Montgomery County and
those LEAs need to know when \-- that they need to be breaking those out
and they need the guidance from the state. And it\'s not just a federal
matter, it\'s the feds talking to the state because I suspect, for
instance in a couple of jurisdictions, the Title IV program officers who
are really good people doing programs for the populations they\'re doing
them for, eluded to the adolescent survey, such and such adolescent
survey and when I said, \"Who did you do the adolescent survey with\",
to drive those programs, those mentoring programs and alcohol programs,
they did them with the public school students, not the
non-public/private school students. Now, students are students but
they\'re not the same students. And if you survey your public school
teachers and staff, you\'re going to get a different response from
non-public school teachers and staff, okay?

The supports that exist for the public schools don\'t exist for the
non-public schools. The same initiatives aren\'t happening. Therefore,
you know, we \-- hence we have decided in the Archdioceses of Washington
we need to get ready for major, all hazards approach, major incidents
that could happen, including an isolated or broad based evacuation of
the Washington metropolitan area if a major incident occurs. You have to
worry about the here and now, but those kinds of things could happen
here more than anywhere else, but coming back to it, the state needs to
provide and exercise more guidance, so the LEAs tend to be looking to
well, in my last audit they said that adolescent survey was fine. They
said the assessment that we did based on that was fine. Well, a
unilateral provision of services you know, is not enough. So I don\'t
mean to be a whistle blower, per se, it\'s just a reality. You know, so
the states have a responsibility.

I don\'t know if anyone else has any thoughts about the states.

MR. CLARK: Yeah, I\'d like to make just a couple quick comments; on the
state level both for the non-public and the public schools, in
Pennsylvania it seems to be somewhat out of the hands of the Department
of Education. The decisions are being made by the Department of Homeland
Security and the Department of Health, just without consultation.
Consultation is finally starting to pull into place but they have to
work together as a team and this is something that has to occur there.

I think Pennsylvania has a model of using educational service agencies.
There\'s 23 states with educational service agency systems. Thirteen of
them have what we call a Type I ESA put into place by the legislature
like we have in Pennsylvania, that really can pull together some of
these programs and administer them on behalf of the non-public schools
regionally. That would be much more effective in designing programs to
meet their needs and assisting in coordinating with what they\'re doing
and what the public schools are doing.

Not only do we do that with our agency but we also meet with our public
school superintendents on this particular topic on emergency planning
and helping them to develop plans that the county is not doing for them,
that the state is not doing for them. So I encourage making use of that
type of a structure where it can be.

Mr. BASSETT: Just a word about how kids and adults learn; you know, if
we gave you a book and we did a presentation for you on how to prepare
for a dirty bomb, let\'s say, you know, it\'s very academic and it\'s
the way schools work but NOAA would absorb anything that would be
useful. But if we asked \-- if there were an event, we\'re going to do a
simulation, do a statewide simulation in October of 2007, and I know my
parents and my school were going to expect us to participate, and we\'ve
have to evacuate that day and we\'d have to use the local medical
emergency facilities and we\'d have to be able to provide educational
services to our kids for the next day. Let\'s do a two-day simulation.

That\'s actually how schools one, would get their act in gear to be
prepared and two, we\'d actually have some professionals who could see
how well we did and how poorly we did is more likely and we\'d get
better preparation because people learn by doing. They don\'t learn by
listening, they don\'t learn by studying. All the resources on the web,
nice to have and important to do but it doesn\'t even come close to
comparing by actually doing something. So the state could play a large
role in actually seeding some simulations, let\'s say.

Actually, you could do it. You could do it two ways. You could do a real
simulation or you could do a virtual simulation, on second life, for
example.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Very good, thank you. Susan.

MS. KEYS: It seems from Mr. Caruso\'s presentation that the need for
this consultation that we heard about is something that\'s important
regardless of whether it\'s related to crisis preparedness or
emergencies, it\'s just general program funding. And we talked about how
the state could be important but I guess I\'m wondering if you have
recommendations for what the role of the Federal Government could be
because in some cases, I know one of our major grant programs that the
Department of Health and Human Services shares with Office of Safe and
Drug Free Schools is Safe Schools, Healthy Students. And those grant
funds go straight to the local education agency, not through the state.

So what do we need to do to better equip non-public and private schools
to engage in this consultation role or to educate the local education
agency about the importance of that role, so if you have some thoughts
on that, of what we might recommend.

MR. McTIGHE: I think we have to distinguish between discretionary grants
and regular grants or universal grants, if you will. With respect to
universal grants, the model I would hold up in terms of educating LEAs
about their responsibilities and educating the private school community,
too, about, you know, what they might be entitled to under a particular
grant program. Because, frankly, the private school community has a lot
to learn, too, and people within the private school community are not,
you know, fully aware of all that\'s available to them under various
title programs.

The model I would hold up is a model that was just promulgated actually,
between the Departments of Office of Non-Public Education and the Title
I Office. It\'s a manual relating to the implementation of Title I.
It\'s Q and A documents. It\'s model consultative calendars and agendas
and the like. It\'s really a hands-on document that people can just take
and duplicate and adapt to use in terms of, you know, involving the
private school community.

There\'s no reason why that kind of thing couldn\'t be developed for the
other federal programs as well. With respect to the discretionary grant
programs, I think the key there is the implementation of the approval
process itself. So that if there are stipulations in the law that
require, for example, consultation, outreach inclusion of private school
folks, then when that application is reviewed by the Department, it\'s
\-- there have to be real clear guidelines as to whether or not it\'s
going to be approved without some verification or some mention of the
kinds of consultation that was supposed to take place.

We participated, for example, recently in a Blue Ribbon Schools Grants
program that awards Blue Ribbon School status to a whole variety of
schools and public and private. And there are some stipulations that the
schools have to observe if they\'re going to be approved for the
program. Stipulations as refined as a nine-digit zip code, for example,
on the application. If you don\'t have the nine-digit zip code on the
application, your application is put in the discard pile.

And the same is \-- even more so should be the case with an application
from a school district that is supposed to adhere to consultation and
critical services requirements. If they don\'t mention it, if they
don\'t explain how they\'re going to carry that out, that application
goes in the discard pile and school districts will quickly learn what
the requirements of the law are because you know, they\'ll learn from
experience, I guess is the \--

MR. CLARK: And along that same line, although Pennsylvania doesn\'t have
this issue, because the advisory counsels for the non-public schools,
the Safe and Drug Free Schools design their programs to meet their
specific needs. Some of the other programs, like Title I, we have a
sign-off procedure that\'s all done on line. When the school districts
submit their applications for Title I, if they don\'t have a sign-off of
a non-public school to show that they have been consulted on all the
different items that are under the law, you know, prior to decisions
being made, there\'s a checklist there, if that consultation isn\'t
there, it\'s not a veto but it does put a flag up for the State
Department of Education reviewer who is accepting that application and
they pick up the telephone and find out what\'s going on.

So it\'s a very successful type of a process that could be implemented
rather easily with these applications.

MR. CARUSO: I mean, I guess whether it has to do with the formula or the
competitive grants, maybe a policy \-- Title IV policy implementation
brief like essential expectations checklist, not some document that\'s
going to take two years to go through the approval process, but
something that\'s distilled, that\'s based on what we\'ve just discussed
and is an extension of what Dr. Dowling indicated is one possibility.
Another one is to look to Title IIA which is the program for
professional development which much more routinely, that\'s one of the
other 11 programs, much more routinely that same jurisdiction that I
eluded to asks us do you want \-- our various schools, \"Do you want to
participate in Title IIA, Professional Development monies for teachers
and staff\"? They say, yes, that\'s an immediate indication of that\'s
\-- they\'re among the number of schools that need to have an equitable
allotment generated and that determines how this \-- whether it\'s going
to be five dollars per student or whether it\'s going to be nine dollars
per student, because the more schools involved, the less money per head
that is going to be generated.

There is a model looking to Title IIA. I think that with Title IV it
just kind of emerged with the schools \-- my sense of it, the school
districts have really good people. These are really smart doctors of
education who are implementing programs based on best practices and
believe that there \-- that, you know, they have a basis for the
decision to continue these programs. So when you mention to them, you
know, \"Have you thought about emergency preparedness\", I mean, our
school security chiefs for the most part don\'t know anything about
what\'s going on with the Title IV program because they don\'t really
have to do largely with that day to day bailiwick when it comes to
emergency preparedness.

So it\'s an embedded, you know, culture for Title \-- you know, for
program officers at the LEA level and it winds up impacting us because
these people aren\'t used to having requests for a focus on all the
kinds of things we\'re talking about.

MR. BASSETT: I would respond to what should the Federal Government do or
what could the Federal Government do by asking how big do you want to
think? In other words, let\'s take \-- let\'s go down that road of avian
flu pandemic or dirty bomb, when we are going to have literally,
potentially millions of kids at home and their parents at home because
they can\'t go to work because their kids are home. So how will we
sustain education for nine weeks or six months or whatever it actually
might take? And the only way you\'re going to sustain education in that
scenario is through Internet exchanges, teachers and kids and every
family and very household inter-connected. So the future of that is
actually on our doorstep and I don\'t know how much the government is
interested or willing to invest but you could play an extraordinarily
useful role in incubating, funding the incubation of a culture, an
educational culture where that\'s going to be able to happen overnight.
And if you haven\'t seen one computer per child stuff on the Internet,
just Google it, one computer per child.

Of course, this is the MIT initiative for \$100.00 computers and
they\'re there. Why wouldn\'t the government fund some pilot programs so
you knew that every family in the DC area had a computer or if they
didn\'t have one, got that \$100.00 computer. By the way, if you start
exploring what that one computer per child movement is doing, the MIT
computer, absolutely astonishing.

Check out Mini Tam Tam on the one computer per child. It\'s so far
beyond anything we\'ve seen in terms of capabilities. So my point would
be if you want to invest, invest in wiki curriculum. Everyone on the
panel, I\'m sure, knows what Wikipedia is, open source alternative to
highly expensive published encyclopedias. Well, wiki curriculum is the
next step, which is open source curriculum.

So when all of our parents are at home instead of at work, and they have
to connect with their teachers, with their kid\'s teachers, there\'s
lesson plans for every kid at every level, that\'s open source, state of
the art, best accessible lesson plans. So we need to really jump start
that kind of stuff and the Federal Government could play a role in that.

MR. JONES: Yeah, I was just going to quickly follow up. To what extent
are trauma type information on that particular website?

MR. BASSETT: Trauma, you mean trauma for the children?

MR. JONES: Yes, right, yes, just the information about the impacts of
trauma and how \--

MR. BASSETT: Yeah, exactly, you can find anything on Wikipedia and if
you went for a trauma and you didn\'t find anything, you\'d start it and
that would, in fact, begin the beginning of a whole community of the
world contributing until we got the best of the world\'s knowledge on
how to help your child in a trauma situation.

MR. JONES: So specifically, what would a recommendation be to the
Department of Education to enhance?

MR. BASSETT: Well, I think you should be contributing to Wikipedia
because that increasingly will be the source that we\'ll go to. It\'s
current. It\'s daily updated and it\'s what we need to have. I think you
should be contributing to wiki curriculum by funding, you know, the
early adapters out there who are already contributing so we\'ll have a
worldwide first class curriculum for the third grader stuck at home.

And by the way, the reason you would want to do this is that there are a
lot of kids who can\'t go to school, a lot of American kids are not
served because they can\'t go to school, they have some kind of
disability. And so there would be a reason to do this even if weren\'t
fearful of the pandemic that\'s coming.

MR. JONES: Yeah, you know, I think that ties into the point about \-- I
forget who made it on social \-- in fact, you made it, right, I mean,
just in terms of what we don\'t know about the impact of trauma on
children and that may be a mechanism whereby that information could be
shared.

I just wanted to share a comment. I\'ve heard a number of very
interesting things, very interesting initiatives that you folks are
doing with limited funding. It sounds very good. In fact, Jack, your
manual sounds just outstanding. I\'m going to be meeting in Richmond
next week. We\'re updating our crisis management plan and I\'d like to
get a copy of that and take some of that information on.

But I\'m wondering, the extent to which I heard a number of things in
addition to funding, just communication, I thought a couple of things
came up that were quite right on, and I\'m just wondering, to what
extent how \-- to what extent can the Department assist in two things;
one greater communication between the Departments of Health and the
Department of Education and then secondly, this whole notion of these
regional school summits that I think, Michael, you brought up. Just
communicating with the key partners, we know that there\'s great
information out there and lot of people doing great things, but the
breakdown of communication often leads to very poor results.

MR. CARUSO: Yeah, and when I think about those, I think about carefully
crafted summits that would have input. I mean, I would think that this
group would be a key advisory group to construct what they look like
which would include the kinds of inter-departmental involvement and
activities that would go on at those summits. So you know, you\'ve got
the Department of Education; you\'ve got the Department of Homeland
Security, the Department of Commerce, HHS. Those in particular are key
departments that would be

\-- have to be involved in the structure of this.

And I know that sounds like a very complicated thing but it\'s
absolutely essential because if anything were to happen all of them
would be involved in the response. So you know, I always think of it in
terms of scenario based things. So instead of it just being an
information delivery conveying activity where people get around and have
panels that would be interesting, there would be scenarios involved, I
would think involved in that.

And it\'s something that we need to do sooner than later and it may be
that that\'s the microcosm of what then is proposed be done within all
these communities, the kinds of follow-up activities that are done
within a close proximity to those summits that within 60 days these
certain activities will be happening throughout the country. But I
guess, back to your point, it\'s inter-departmental, it has to involve
at the federal level and then at the state level you\'ve got a similar
constellation of departments, and then at the local level. I mean, in
Montgomery County, we have a Department of Homeland Security that was
spawned as a result of 9-11, which is a model.

The other thing I want to just mention is again, in the event of a major
incident that would close the public schools in any one of these
jurisdictions, our Catholic schools would close. We follow them. We
would assume that if it\'s significant enough to close the public close,
it would be significant enough to close ours. So it would force \-- you
know, and we\'re impacted by those factors.

DR. DOWLING: Susan, I just wanted to jump back to one other item on what
can the Federal Government to in its role. I\'m glad I didn\'t have to
follow \-- I love you thinking here, but the Department program offices
monitor the states to insure that the programs are being implemented as
required by law and in that monitoring they\'ll also do site visits to
local educational agencies to insure that what the law requires is being
implemented at that local level and that states are overseeing what the
LEAs are doing.

And as related to equitable participation, one area that might be
worthwhile to examine is do the monitoring protocols across the
Department address equitable participation? I\'ve had the benefit of
participating only in Title I, so I\'m aware of the ones we use for
Title I which are very intricate, very detailed. As monitoring teams
walk away, they know for certainty whether Title I has been implemented
for students in private schools. So that may be an area that may be
worth addressing, across programs.

MR. CARUSO: And the checklist that I mentioned that would have more
force and effect coming out of the Department may be the non-public
office in terms of Title IV with \-- in concert with the Office of Safe
and Drug Free Schools would have certain questions like does the LEA let
the non-public/private school know the total Title IV allocation for the
jurisdiction in which they are located and/or the formula, usually the
approximate per pupil allocation that will be used as the basis for
services when they ask the non-public school or school system to respond
in writing whether they wish to participate in the Title IV.

That\'s a mouthful but it is in the testimony. Does the LEA adopt a same
service approach to Title IV which we know some of them do, it\'s a
unilateral provision of services, it\'s not in concert with the law.
Surveying public schools children without offering to complete an
assessment of the non-public school needs under Title IV is a more
positive way to flip it around to say do they assess non-public school
needs rather than just using the survey they used to survey public
school students.

And I have a similar few questions that could be posited and embedded in
the monitoring protocol and the application protocol. I think that\'s
what Maureen is saying, but the important thing is that the guidance
needs to come out. Even if it\'s non-regulatory and advisory, it\'s sort
of an extension of what we\'ve learned by having these discussions and
even Dr. Dowling, Maureen Dowling\'s comments really have really become
richer based on her experience, I think in the LEAs and at the state
level.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Just some comments, not trying to address all these but
this has been very interesting. I alluded to this at break, very
interesting for me to hear. Most of what I\'m hearing does not exist
where I work, so that\'s why I found it interesting. The reason that it
doesn\'t because we have a very close collaborative relationship with
all the agencies and I\'m talking about a rather large \-- it\'s
Riverside County, California. We have 405,000 students that reside in
the county and I heard someone mention square miles. We have 7,200
square miles, so it\'s a large educational entity. And yet, we have very
little of the things that I\'m hearing described by you as problems. And
the reason that I think we don\'t have too many is because what I
mentioned earlier, we have a very close collaboration and by that I mean
as it relates to we now have a Homeland Security Department in the
county. And we work very closely together with 52 agencies.

We meet constantly and we have a communication system all set up for the
405,000 students. We try to \-- if something comes up, we can get to
them in approximately 30 seconds. If they are not there, their parents
will be notified either on their home phone. If that hits twice, it goes
to their cell phone for 2.1 million residents. So there\'s a lot of
communication tools that are set up.

When we talk about the plans and the workshops that we conduct as an
intermediate agency and that\'s why I was glad to hear Jack talk about
some of the things that he did. We do as a county educational service
agency, we do these things. So Susan, when you were asking about the
Federal Government or Mike, when you\'re talking about the state, they
are very helpful to us in offering umbrellas and general plans and then
we see it as our task to do. So we simply go do it.

And the other part of that, there\'s no private schools from California
sitting on the panel because I don\'t think they would be saying that at
least in our area because everything that we do, I didn\'t know there
was a difference. They just all come. So when we have a meeting,
they\'re there. When we have a \-- we\'re working on a plan for these,
they are a part of those students and they are a part of the plan. So a
lot of these things, that\'s what I said, I find interesting, but
realizing that there are differences across this great country, and that
we have to address those, some other things that I didn\'t hear very
much, I just had a meeting last week with the County Sheriff and the
head of Public Health and we\'re setting on March Air Force Base.

We\'ve established a training center together and we will train all bus
drivers, all teachers, all administrators, all classified. We have about
50,000 of them in the county and we will systematically train all of
them. If there\'s something that happens on a bus, there will be
simulations of the bus. We\'re going to build a village. We, as a County
Office of Education, will supply that village because we\'ll build it
out of relocatables.

They\'re going to supply the training from the Sheriff\'s Department and
the Fire Department and what I\'m saying is, we aren\'t coming to the
Federal Government to ask for any money. We\'re going to do that. So the
County Office of Education, Fire, Sheriff and we aren\'t asking for any
grants and we aren\'t asking for any \-- we\'re just going to go do it.
We figure it will cost four or \$5 million to get it up and running.

Now, when I say just do it, we also spent a lot of time developing a
very close relationship, as I know you do, with the business community,
so they will be literally pouring millions of dollars into this effort.
So there\'s all different ways to skin a cat and as we \-- that\'s why
we have these discussions, because there are places and there are states
and there are sections of a state, Jack, I really enjoyed hearing what
you were doing in Pennsylvania.

So as we continue talking about this, I think that as we work together,
we can come up with a solution on many of these things. One other thing
I just remembered, Patrick, you brought up a good point about what
happens when all those children are home. We just got our own TV channel
along that same line because out of this collaborative effort the
Sheriff\'s Department asked that same question. So we\'ve got a TV
channel we work with. We\'ve got five different channels \-- or not
channels but stations across the county. We have a collaborative effort
for that so we are now developing with the teachers and we\'re putting
DVD lesson plans and we\'re going systematically through all the courses
in case that happens so that we have shelves of \-- so there are ways,
but you\'re right, we really have to think about all of those
possibilities.

MR. JONES: Yeah, David, that sounds right on, what\'s happening out in
California and I\'m wondering, you know, the answer isn\'t always money.
You know, even though I was \--

CHAIRMAN LONG: One correction, not California, Riverside County,
California.

MR. JONES: Oh, sorry. I\'m sure there\'s a difference. But, yeah, we
know money is important. I was in LAX the other day and I was talking
with a banker. He said, money not only talks but it walks. Anyway, money
is not always the answer. Sometimes it\'s just kind of reconstructing
what we do in working together in different agencies, organizations, et
cetera.

But I\'m wondering the extent to which the good things that are being
done there could be communicated to others. That model, I mean, it
sounds like an effective model. I\'m just wondering the extent to which
that template could be passed on to you know, members of the panel and
others to see the extent to which \--

CHAIRMAN LONG: And I\'m not suggesting that we do it. I\'m just \-- I
was responding to some of the things that I heard that I know that we
do. I\'m sure that there are things all across this country that
they\'re just wonderful models, and I know the Department has done a
good job of pulling those together and I think that\'s a good takeout
from my personal point. I was just trying to answer some of those
questions but I think the Department really has \-- and they could
project some of those models across this country.

MR. JONES: Yeah, you know, just for example, I\'m wondering to what
extent are the best practices in terms of calling upon the private
sector to do some of the many good things that, you know, that need to
be done and the extent to which that\'s being done.

MR. CLARK: David, I just wanted to make one more comment. When we talked
about the role of what the Federal Government could do, the Department
of Education and so forth. We\'re on the verge of the reauthorization
and we know the Safe and Drug Free Schools Program has been slipping a
little bit in terms of its funding. I think I\'d like this committee to
make some suggestions either to the Department or the Department to work
with the legislators on structuring the program so that what you put in
the program is able to be measured in terms to show a success.

We\'ve been discussing something that\'s been extremely important to us
that work with the non-public schools but the same types of situations
apply to all the public schools but how do you measure that your Safe
and Drug Free Schools program has put these programs in place to be able
to have people address issues such as terrorism or pandemic planning? It
really can\'t be measured.

And I testified before the Democratic members of one of the House
committees a number of years back on education funding and I just
remember a question that came from one of the representatives from
Chicago. He said, \"You know, I had a drive-by shooting in my District
last week. You\'re telling if I put more money into Safe and Drug Free
Schools I wouldn\'t have to deal with stuff like that?\" I mean, it
shows a disjointer from what we\'re trying to accomplish here, which is
very much long-term and very serious type of issues that are being
addressed that if perhaps this could be written into the legislation
when it\'s re-enacted with the reauthorization, we would be able to
show, yes, we are helping all these schools in developing their crisis
response plans, being more integrated with the Departments of Health and
Homeland Security, being able to provide for the health, safety and
welfare of the children in these types of crisis. We really can\'t
measure those types of things, yet, Congress is looking for measurable
types of items and they look right back at what\'s in the legislation
and if you say what you\'re going to do and you can\'t relate that.

And I think it\'s a charge that would be well worth undertaking from the
this particular committee to identify a few of those items and work with
the committees that are put together for the reauthorization to put
something into place, because this is an extremely valuable program and
it\'s \-- this is an extremely important exchange in my mind to be able
to look at these issues and what\'s the state of the art there.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Other comments from members of the committee or questions
or any closing comments from any of the panel members?

MR. CARUSO: Just one idea based on what was just said, is the
competitive discretionary grants, and again, I\'m probably going to get
\-- Bill is going to kill me on this, but I don\'t know \-- I know the
year before last there were 93 grantees. What were there, about 50 or 60
this year? The discretionary grant, the crisis management grants.
Anyway, of all of those, the last three or four years, there have to be,
you know, a dozen that are absolutely stellar and would be models and
have excellent evaluation plans and have the measuring what they do. And
it may be based on the new prior and emerging priorities that there
could be some kind of even a review, competition or maybe a review to
identify those that would be highlighted and gleaned and you could glean
from them to develop, you know, the state of the art. They really
represent the state of the art.

MR. MODZELESKI: First of all, let me pass out that I want to thank
Michael for really being at the heart of helping us for the past couple
of years in much of the training that we do in emergency management and
crisis management, emergency response, crisis management. We\'re
changing the name, by the way, to confuse you even more. We\'re going to
make it simple but we\'re going to continue to confuse you and Michael
has been a cornerstone and I think realizes after not only coming to the
ERCM trainings but also bringing the grantees in and I remember I think
it was last year when we were over in Arlington, Alexandria, we did a
training and Tara and Sarah were up there on the stage talking about the
need for non-public participation in schools and there was an absolute
uproar from the people in the \-- who received the grants saying, \"Why
do we have to do this\"? I mean, so as part of our education process,
and what I\'m passing around is something after that which we instituted
last year, we instituted this year, which is a requirement and Michael
you could pass this over. You know what it is. Basically, it\'s the \--
it is the \-- what we put in our ERCM application which really requires
prior to the receipt of the funds that the public, the LEAs sit down
with the non-privates and work out these issues. So it is something that
we\'ve done with the ERCM grants. I would love to tell you that it\'s
working 100 percent of the time in 100 percent of the applications.

I think we\'re doing a better job at it. I think the schools are getting
a better understanding of what needs to be done but I also want to say
picking up on Russell\'s comment is that money not only talks but it
walks, is that what you have happening in the districts around the
country is a decreasing pie, not an increasing pie. So there\'s a
struggle among the LEAs about okay, we had \$8.00 per student, that was
the high, about 8.50. We\'re now down to about \$40.00 per student, so
programs are not only being cut at the say non-public but what you have
is this case where local school districts, local school districts are
having to cut dollars, they\'re having to cut staff, so it makes our job
working with non-publics all the more difficult. I\'m not saying it\'s
impossible. I\'m just telling you that money is an issue here.

We need to figure out how we\'re going to work that out. But there are
some models out there. You know, we\'ve funded about 400 school
districts now since the beginning or the inception of the emergency
planning grant and actually, there\'s at least one this afternoon that
is going to testify and I know Marleen is sitting behind me and will
also talk. Marleen has done some training and maybe you could comment on
the training that we put into this thing. But there are some models out
there and part of what we have a contractor do is identify those models
and pull those models out.

What has been more difficult than just identifying models is identifying
models that have a good non-public participation. And I also want to
point out is that in many ways, what Mike has done here with the
Archdiocese in Washington DC also could serve as a model. Fred chaired
for many years, and is still chairing what\'s called the COG here in
Washington, that\'s the Council of Governments, whereby all of the
jurisdictions in and around Washington DC meet. There\'s a subgroup
dealing with school safety and so we do share information. We do share
communications. I mean, so it is an excellent model, not probably 100
percent. It\'s not where any of us would want to be but I think it\'s
moving in the right direction. It\'s one of those things for whether
it\'s UASI sites or other jurisdictions where we might be able to build
on it, say here\'s the beginning of something that\'s really working, is
that we\'ve got the non-public sitting at the table and again, it\'s not
perfect, but nevertheless, Michael could pick up the phone and probably
talk to anybody, Fred in Alexandria or Arlington or Washington, DC or
Prince George or whatever it is.

I mean, that\'s where we want to really on it, so I assure you is that
we are moving in that direction. We\'ll continue to look at some models
and try to get them out there for not only public schools but for the
non-public schools.

MR. ELLIS: I just wanted to make one comment and maybe bounce it off the
panel and see if this has any sound of truth to it. One of the
frustrations from the LEA perspective is, I think you eluded to it
earlier, is the

\-- and Bill certainly hit on it, is the money issue. There\'s not a
whole lot of money through the Department of Ed\'s Safe and Drug Free
Schools. That\'s drying up. And we often want to spend money doing
things such as the Emergency Preparedness and trying to harden schools
using technology as every, you know, federal agency, whether it\'s FEMA
or DHS, FBI, everyone knows in their mind how to harden the school but
the school itself it seems. Everyone has some theory on how to do it.

But anyway, the recommendations are fast and furious whether it\'s to
access technology, video surveillance, visitor control kinds of things,
all these different hardware issues that cost a lot of money. The fact
of the matter is the Department of Ed grants don\'t have that kind of
money. And I thought it was interesting and Mike, you eluded to the
Department of Homeland Securities UASI grant coming to the National
Capital Region for about \$411 million. It\'s my experience that the
education community will probably get zero of those dollars from DHS.

So my frustration is the Bill Shop (phonetic) and the Department of Ed
does as good a job as possible spreading the small amount of, relatively
small amount of money that they have across the country, particularly
for schools to do plan development, to practice, exercise plan
development and collaboration, those kinds of things, paperwork if you
allow me to use that term, but a critical piece nonetheless. It\'s very
important.

But for buying stuff, hardware, whether it\'s NOAA radios, which quite
frankly, in all seriousness, if a private school didn\'t have a NOAA
radio before the distribution, shame on them. At 18.95 at Radio Shack,
everyone of you should have had one.

Having said that, you could probably use some help with, you know, video
surveillance, door access, those kinds of things. So that\'s my feeling.
I just wanted to kind of \-- I see your heads nodding but I\'d like to
at least hear some feedback on whether or not there\'s any truth to my
personal vendetta.

MR. CARUSO: Well, UASI funding, I know this particular advisory group
has a charge specific to you know, I guess Office of Safe and Drug Free
Schools, so I don\'t know if it\'s permitted to look at that broader. I
mentioned that UASI funding because it was so \-- I mean, it just came
out. If you can, I think it\'s worthy of looking at it. I\'ve got two
\-- you know, several articles that were written on it and the reports
are out right now.

You know, it makes no sense, I mean, it doesn\'t make any sense to the
public schools and it doesn\'t make any sense to us that the \-- that
education in schools are kind of embedded in with the number of 50
categories and we\'re embedded in Category 16, embedded in it.

I can guarantee you, if something happens and it probably will,
unfortunately, suddenly there\'s going to be an epiphany and somebody is
going to decide, yes, schools are worthy of being a category. Somebody
needs to note that it is worthy, that schools are worthy, where most of
the school age kids, you know, in America are at these settings of
focusing on it much more deliberately and some of those funds for
priority initiatives and we know what the priorities are, you know,
ought to be \-- you know, they ought to be beneficiaries of that.

And when they\'re beneficiaries, it\'s a matter of public health and
safety. It\'s not a matter of we\'re paving our school \-- public and
non-public school campuses with this money.

MR. ELLIS: Yeah, and that\'s kind of my thought that, perhaps \-- you
know, the money is not going to come to the Department of Ed through
Bill Shop. It\'s just not but could the Department of Education do
something more to push back on the rest of the federal bureaucracy to
make more money available through DHS or other entities for the kinds of
things that Mike\'s talked about?

MR. CLARK: Just related to that allocation comment, we found from our
experience of training the non-public school, as well as the public
school district administrators in the NIMS system communications, so
they could be integrated with the first responders, we found that
there\'s a lack of communication that goes on there. We don\'t see any
of the mercy management planning in the schools but even the first
responders really need a little bit of a push to communicate with us.
Our group that\'s been doing the training has started their outreach now
to the first responders because they think, well, when there\'s a crisis
they\'re going to come in and they\'re going to take over the schools.
And you ask them, \"Well, are you going to manage 200 kids, how are you
going to handle those kids\"? Well, then we get back to the concept of
unified command and working together and it just brings things back to
reality.

But these discussions are really just starting now and the communication
needs to be pushed up. They need to get some pushes from Homeland
Security and so forth to be able to talk to us to work cooperative with
the group that are trying to work with them.

MR. JONES: Yes. Okay, we\'re running out of time but I had a question.
You know, we\'ve talked a lot about from the top down. We talked about
the forced multipliers, the Federal Government Homeland Security,
Departments of Health, et cetera, but I\'m just wondering from the
panel, to what extent are families engaged in your different emergency
management procedures? You know, one thing that we found in our clinic
is that if there\'s an emergency that \-- if there\'s traumatic
experience that occurs, the extent to which families are involved,
that\'s really going to determine the outcome to a great \-- you know,
to a great extent and I\'m just wondering to what extent are families
involved in your emergency plans and how were you able to bring that
about?

MR. McTIGHE: I kind of got a chuckle from your question involving
families in the plans. The prior question is, how many schools actually
have emergency management plans? And in the private school community,
you\'ve heard from some systems, like the Archdiocese of Washington,
where they\'re fairly well-organized, fairly well networked. But the
private school community is 29,000 schools. A lot of these schools are
isolated schools and they\'re for the most part, relatively small
schools, so they involve the minimum of staff, a principal, a classroom
teacher for each classroom and that\'s it. There\'s not a lot of support
beyond that.

So my first question would be, how many of those schools have emergency
management plans and the answer is, sadly, probably not an awful lot. So
I think we\'ve got to deal with an even more fundamental question, much
less involving parents in the development of emergency plans. The fact
is how many schools actually have plans? And this is so fundamental,
this issue, that I think we have to, you know, just stop thinking in
terms of the public school model which is elaborate and which is you
know, well-staffed and you know, not as well-funded as anybody would
want it to be but better funded than any of our systems are and look at
a much more stripped down reality.

And so I think there\'s an awful lot of work that still has to be done.

MR. JONES: Is that a funding problem or a priority problem,
restructuring and I\'m sure they\'re all?

MR. McTIGHE: I think it\'s both. I think it\'s getting the message out
but beyond just the funding there\'s also the ethos question. There\'s
also the awareness question and you know, even the comment about shame
on the schools that don\'t have NOAA radios, you\'re right but the
reality is that, you know, without some sort of connection with programs
like that, they\'re not even thinking along those lines, unfortunately.
So we have much more fundamental education that has to take place.

MR. CLARK: And Russell, with our plans when we put the master plan
together, we did make use of the parents on our advisory committee
extensively to be able to give us input on that. And when these plans
are taken on a building level, and filled in and they put their local
contact information, they do also work with representatives from their
local parent groups and that\'s important from the point of view of
establishing some credibility response and being able to share with your
school community that you do have a plan without sharing all the details
of the plan which would compromise its integrity.

They are able to say, \"Yes, we do have a plan and we did have Mr. Smith
and Ms. Jones and so forth on the committee that helped us develop this
and they\'re comfortable with it, but we can\'t share all the detail
because some of these are security issues\".

MR. CARUSO: And that was one of the questions that was on an assessment
that we did at all of our schools. All of our schools have crisis plans,
emergency management plans. And one of the questions we put on had to do
with parental knowledge of the plans as well as staff knowledge of the
plans. So it\'s kind of the next step is being sure everybody \-- not
only is \-- are people familiar with the plan and can practice it but
they know what their role is and they know how they would act in case of
certain kinds of emergencies.

MR. JONES: Well, one of the problems that we have in Virginia, we have
plans but people don\'t practice plans. You know, and I\'m just
wondering the extent to what do you do to get people to practice a plan?
It\'s great to have it, but \--

MR. CARUSO: I think what Patrick said and I think that not that we want
to mandate, you know, something, but it may be that what we need to do
is voluntarily have assurances of some sort across different
populations, including parents and there\'s an assurance that it goes
home and that \-- you know, there\'s models that could possibly be
developed to make sure. And some of them are based on our own plan, but
as we come to understand the kinds of public health practices that need
to be occurring in the home as well as in the school, it may be that
there\'s a need for an assurance where everybody has to send home an
assurance form to parents that they\'ve read this and they understand X,
Y and Z.

And it doesn\'t guarantee it, but it goes a long way toward insuring
that we\'ve moving toward where we need to be on certain practices.

CHAIRMAN LONG: As we bring this to a close, I\'d like to one last time,
thank you, Michael and Jack and Patrick and Maureen and Joe. We really
appreciate the information and we appreciate the dialogue. So let\'s
thank the panel.

(Applause)

CHAIRMAN LONG: And with that, we will now break for lunch.

(Whereupon at 10:54 a.m. a luncheon recess was taken.)

A-F-T-E-R-N-O-O-N S-E-S-S-I-O-N

11:36 a.m.

CHAIRMAN LONG: We are now ready to start with our second panel for the
day which deals with trauma and the panel members, I\'ll start on my
left there, let\'s see, Steve \-- Dr. Steven, I want to ask, Marans?

DR. MARANS: Marans, okay, I did not want to mispronounce, Dr. Steven
Marans, Professor of Child Psychiatry at Yale University and Director of
the National Center for Children Exposed to Violence, welcome Steve. And
next to Steve is Dr. Marleen Wong, Director of Crisis Counseling
Intervention Services for the Los Angeles Unified School District,
welcome Marleen.

And thirdly, Dr. Lisa Jaycox, Senior Behavioral Scientist at RAND
Corporation and a Clinical Psychologist. And as we have in the past, we
will have presentations from each. And I understand that Lisa and
Marleen will be sharing like a 10-minute video after your presentation.
The only other thing I want to announce on this, it will \-- and as you
know, you were sitting in the audience, I do believe when we had the
first panel, and then the questions, comments from panel members and the
discussion which is always very helpful.

In this one, I just want to let all three of you know, all can ask
questions but Russell Jones. Russell cannot ask any questions on this
one.

MR. JONES: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Okay, with that, Steven.

DR. MARANS: Well, since it\'s beat up on Russell Jones day, everything I
say has been pre-approved by Russell and if you don\'t like it, then
talk to him, please. First of all, it\'s a pleasure to be here and this
morning we were hearing the word \"collaboration\" a lot and often when
we talk about collaboration, we\'re talking about how do we connect the
dots, how do we connect the dots between services that have an impact on
kids and families and communities and I\'m the opener for my colleagues
and my job is to give an overview on some of the issues of trauma and
the reason for actually beginning with an overview and thinking about
conceptualizations and phenomenology is because that really should be
the basis on which we think about plans, intervention strategies and how
do we begin to connect the dots.

One of the things that I always find impressive when the likes of us do
presentations to non-mental health folks and we actually see this in
operational situations after emergencies and crises, where too often for
our minds, to my mind in particular, I can speak for myself right now,
but too often we think about mental health professionals as the
counselors who come in and deal with the clinical issues following
overwhelming events. And too often mental health professionals think in
those ways, too. I think you\'ll see from the discussion and hopefully
as we get into it, that as we look at the phenomena of trauma we see
that the demands that trauma creates are far broader than the specific
area in which mental health professionals are traditionally trained and
in the same way that the roles for providers, first responders,
teachers, school administrators, other social service agencies have key
ingredients and elements to helping children, families and communities
in the entire nation recover from what we talked about as traumatic
events.

Now, I take a real \-- I\'m on thin ice with what I\'m about to do.
Sometimes people walk out of meetings when they\'re told they\'re going
to do an exercise. I usually do, but this is going to be a brief one and
it\'s a way to get us into the spirit of trauma. I promise you, you will
not be too overwhelmed. What I\'d like you to do is just for a moment,
pick a time somewhere between when you were seven and 12 years old or 13
years old and pick a time when you can remember waking up from a
nightmare. You can do this with your eyes open or closed. I will insist
that you reopen your eyes, even if it is after lunch.

Okay, so if we have a couple of hours, we would be unpacking this
together, but I\'m going to do some of it for you. So you remember
waking up and can anybody just shout out some of the first things that
they felt when they woke up? There\'s Dr. Jones being fancy, anybody
else? Okay, I\'m going to get it started, racing heart, increases
respiration, eyes darting around. Yes, being terrified, but when we talk
about terror, let\'s break it down.

Pit in your stomach, and then you\'ve got that big decision, right? And
you want to scream out because you want somebody to come and rescue you,
but you sometimes find yourself speechless, without words. And then you
have that big decision of well, if nobody is coming to me, I\'m going to
them, right. But then you have to decide, are you going to get out of
bed because what if, you know, what got you in the dream is waiting for
you on the floor. There are these big decisions.

And then you walk down the hall and you go to parents, right? And
you\'re in front of parents and if they\'re awake, they look at you and
they see that you\'re kind of stricken and looking upset and they may
guess that you\'ve had a nightmare and they look at you and they say,
\"Have you had a nightmare\", and you kind of barely get it out,
\"Uh-huh, uh-huh\". And what did your parents tell you then? \"Well, go
back to sleep, go back to bed, it\'s only a dream\", right? I\'m doing
the short version but you\'ll see why in a moment.

So you stumble back to your room and you keep saying to yourself over
and over, \"It\'s just a dream, it\'s just a dream\", and it\'s not
working. It\'s not acting like, you know, the reassuring mantra and so
you get back to your room and you turn on the lights. You try to find a
dog to get into bed with you. You get a cuddly toy.

I had an older brother and a younger sister and sometimes I\'d climb
into bed with them and I\'d always make sure I was on the inside because
as much as I love them, I figure whatever was going to get me was going
to get them first. You turn on the radio, you keep the lights on and you
do your best to try to not go to sleep, right, because sleep is where
the terror is residing, right?

And every sound in the house, you know, you\'re startled, you jump,
you\'re waiting and you\'re just looking around every corner, every
shadow for what might get you. So let\'s think for a moment about, well,
what are the dreams about? Well, again, I\'ll do the work for you, you
know, about being chased, about monsters, anybody else, fire. I mean,
all the things, right. And if you think about it, all of the things that
we\'ve experienced in terms of these acute reactions, the search for
protection, hyper-vigilance, darting around, looking, watching out for
where the danger is lurking. Eventually, we\'re able to reassert that
there\'s a safe reality, that what was in our dream is not in our
bedroom and eventually fatigue takes over, we go back to sleep.

And if you think about the themes of the nightmares, the themes that are
powerful enough to disrupt our physiology and our sleep, they basically
come under these headings, don\'t they, if you think about it; loss of
one\'s own life, loss of life of a significant other, loss of love of
another or of one\'s self. You know, there\'s nothing worse than those
nightmares that are you know, about showing up to school and not being
ready for an exam or damage to the body, if there\'s injury that some
aspect or functioning is impaired, loss of control of impulses, affects
or thoughts. Anybody who has ever gotten so anxious knows what they mean
when they say, \"Oh, my God, I\'m losing it\", right? \"I\'m losing
it\", means, \"I\'m losing my mind, I\'m losing control of how I think
and feel and act\", and anybody who has ever had contact with somebody
who is in the throws of a psychotic break, knows that however weird and
crazy they look, what one is seeing is sheer terror, because they no
longer have the ability to organize and mobilize actions and thoughts in
a linear fashion.

And then ultimately, the idea of loss of control of a sense of agency.
You know, every day we wake up, we\'re so familiar with what we can
anticipate and we can plan and prepare and those are the ways in which
we\'re able to take action and respond to new challenges. What happens
when the world around you robs you of all of those touchstones that
allow us to prepare? What happens when suddenly the house that you\'re
used to waking up in every morning and having coffee and juice and going
to school or going to work is gone because of a hurricane and daily life
is not returning so quickly?

So why do we talk about nightmares? Well, one of the things that we talk
about nightmares for in thinking about trauma is that one of the major
differences between nightmares and trauma is that nightmares, the
dangers are emerging from our imagination and we\'re able to get relief
from them because they\'re not real. In trauma the same kind of
physiologic activation and difficulties in retaining and regaining order
and control are not so easily regained when the nightmare comes true,
where there is no escape back into sleep and away from the imaginary
images.

When the imaginary images have actually come true, there is a
convergence between the things all of us fear the most and our inability
to avoid them, to fight against them and, in fact, to have the normal
controlling capacity to deal with them as we usually do. And so we think
about psychological trauma as an overwhelming, unanticipated danger that
leads to a subjective experience of helplessness, loss of control and
terror. There\'s an immobilization of normal methods for decreasing
danger and anxiety and where there is a neurophysiologic dysregulation
that compromises our ability to mediate our feelings, our thought
processes and our behavioral responses to the stimuli before us.

Now, we know that in children \-- and I\'m going to go through these
quickly because what will be far more interesting is the discussion that
we can have after our presentations but what we often see is traumatic
repetitions and you can see that in many ways, depending on the age and
we\'ll get into that in a minute, there are different ways in which the
traumatic repetitions occur. In younger children one sees a repetitive
play. In older kids, one may see flashbacks and distress when reminded,
et cetera. We also see avoidance, numbing and regression. And if you
think about these areas, these become general and again, if you go back
to the nightmare situation where one takes all sorts of actions to try
to avoid the sense of loss of control in the situation where there has
been a real loss of control, these aspects of avoidance and numbing
ourselves to fear, et cetera, can have major implications for the way we
function and the way children function and the children function in
daily life.

Increased arousal can lead to a whole range of somatic difficulties,
sleep difficulties, eating difficulties and include the notion of
increased aggression, increased irritability and anger, hypervigilance,
exaggerated startle response and if we think back to the classroom,
decreased capacity for attention and concentration. How can you learn
when you are spending all of your energy looking over your shoulder,
avoiding every opportunity that may present itself with feeling small
and helpless again? No wonder that the kids who are most likely to be
involved in all of the behavioral difficulties are the kids who have the
greatest level and the greatest number of opportunities to feel small
and helpless. And what better way to reverse the feelings of
helplessness and being frightened than becoming that agent of fear and
becoming the object of everybody else\'s terror?

We also see, you know, some of the same things in terms of decreased
responsiveness and with the developmental regression, one thing to
remember is, is that there is an adage in our field that the last tasks
and abilities obtained are the first that are lost.

We know that there are major neuro-physiologic correlates the kind of
behavioral and affective and cognitive changes that occur and that some
of these changes that lead to the areas, symptom areas that I\'ve just
described can actually take on a permanent cast and this is especially
true when the level of trauma is chronic and the support systems
available for recovery are less available.

And there, we see that post-traumatic symptoms can become chronic, that
they can result in a variety of emotional behavior, social and
psychiatric sequellae and some of the examples of the difficulties
include depression, anxiety, attachment problems, learning problems,
eating disorders, suicidal behavior, substance abuse, violent and
abusive behavior and somatic problems, that is multiple problems
involving stomach aches, headaches, and increased vulnerability to
illness.

By the way, substance abuse is not so surprising when if
self-medication, particularly for older kids and adolescents, becomes a
tried and true measure for avoiding the sense of helplessness that
they\'re experiencing on a regular basis. Helplessness in spirit can be
wiped out if you sedate yourself enough. The reason for looking at
exposure rates and I don\'t want to go into all of the details, but
you\'ll get a sense from looking at the numbers that the kinds of
sources for trauma and particularly violent \-- trauma that\'s from
violent exposure and abuse and neglect, are really quite extraordinary.
One of the things that we look at in addition to the things that have
come up now is that in Christine Hogan\'s study in New York City,
looking at kids after 9-11, one of the things that was so striking was
the fact that of the kids who were surveyed, about 64 percent of them in
grades 4 through 12 had experience multiple episodes that had reached
traumatic proportions well prior to the attacks of 9-11. We know that
domestic violence which is an enormously pervasive problem in this
country affects up to 15, 15-1/2 million kids who are exposed up close
and personally to violence that happens between parents on an annual
basis.

One of the things that we know, again, going back to understanding
phenomenology as a way in to understanding what we can do in response is
looking at some of the factors that mediate between exposure and the
realized nightmare and the outcome. So we think about how do events,
external events, affect lives directly? Well, there\'s physical
proximity. It makes a big difference whether you\'re watching something
on TV that\'s about bodies being damaged, people being shot, killed,
maimed, et cetera, and having it happen right in front of you.

It\'s the same in terms of emotional proximity. Whether or not the
victim of any of these events is a relative, a parent, a brother, a
sister, an aunt, an uncle, is enormously different than a stranger.
Somebody called me around, just after the tsunami. This was a reporter
who was doing an interview on the impact and she was horrified that her
adolescent kids were not more concerned about the victims of the
tsunami. They were more interested in who was dating whom. Well, this is
not surprising. It\'s age appropriate. It would have been very different
if the tsunami had hit their neighborhood as we saw in Katrina and Lisa
will talk about that in a bit.

Secondary effects are of enormous importance. Again, if we go back to
that last sort of over-arching source of danger, the loss of control and
agency, the level of physical and social disruption is an enormous
predictor for outcome and level or capacity for recovery. Again, an
individual factor, none of these are too surprising. I want to just
point to one of the other major factors that is a predictor for poor
outcome which is the failure of adults and children\'s worlds to
recognize that they\'ve even been traumatized. And if you think about
it, this goes with the phenomena itself, you know, \"Get thee behind
me\". Anybody who\'s had an overwhelming event, knows that the first
thing they want to do is to say, \"Well, it\'s done, I\'m okay now\",
right. And it\'s often not until weeks after that people feel that
something is sneaking up on them and they\'re not done.

But then if you\'re a parent and you've got \-- you\'re struggling with
your own issues and you\'ve got kids who a few weeks after an event, are
causing you more trouble, keeping you up late at night, getting into
more fights, they\'re not telling you, \"Mommy and Daddy, I\'m feeling
scared about what happened\". They\'re acting it and by now parents may
not have been able to recognize and the symptoms continue.

So when we think about intervention strategies, we think about acute
responses in terms of stabilization, making contact, actually
identifying kids and families who are at greatest risk. We think about
the need for monitoring, surveillance and follow-up because so many kids
will become symptomatic well after the original event. We think about
peri-traumatic and longer term that are clinic based, home based and
school based and here, one of the most significant ingredients is
increasing the communication and recognition between parents and
children of the impact of overwhelming events and then we think about
longer term trauma-focused kind of behavioral treatments that need to be
available.

I want to just focus on one last thing and I have two minutes, one
minute, two minutes, good, is we want to think about if there is such an
enormous problem and one of the things that you\'ll see in the slides is
this is at an enormous cost. When we don\'t treat kinds who are
traumatized and they wind up our jails, we know how much that costs.
When kids are 45 percent more likely to engage in delinquent and violent
behaviors when as adolescents when they\'ve been exposed to domestic
violence without any treatment or intervention, we know the costs, so
that one of the things is how do we identify these kids? If we wait for
them in our clinical offices, we\'re never going to see them. We\'re
going to barely see the tip of the iceberg.

So part of it is who knows how to recognize kids that are having
difficulties secondary to the events that are happening in their lives?
And too often mental health professionals aren\'t thinking about who
they need to be working with. They\'re not thinking about working with
the police, first responders, EMS. They\'re not thinking about working
and stepping into the shoes of their educator colleagues and not just
going in and telling people what to do but understanding what the nature
of the contact is with the kids themselves as a way of thinking about
the range of things that need to be taken care of. Again, just going
through these quickly, too often when we have overwhelming events, we
think that the kids think the way we do. Maybe in the discussion we\'ll
have some time for examples, but typically kids are not thinking about
the events that way adults do. If we don\'t take the time to listen,
we\'re not going to know how to help them. The other is, determining
whether there\'s a continuation of cessation of a threat.

You can talk until the cows come home but if there\'s still threat in
your home, or in your neighborhood, you\'re barking up the wrong tree.
If you\'re not working with law enforcement who are informed about
children\'s development and you\'re informed about law enforcement to
work together in identifying what\'s needed, those kids and families may
be stuck with the same threat that brought you there in the first place.

Psycho-education, helping people understand what\'s happening to their
minds and bodies can serve as an anchor that can serve the basis of
introducing knowledge as opposed to simply shame in the face of feeling
small and helpless. And again, going back to this very crucial
ingredient of re-establishing order and routine in daily life is not
something that is done in the consulting room of the mental health
professionals. It\'s done in our classrooms, in our neighborhoods and
our after school programs.

We\'re not going to have time to go into all this. This is a very brief
example, if we have any time. One of the things we\'ve developed, one of
the reasons that I was asked to join you all today is that in New Haven
and in communities around the country for the last 15 years we\'ve been
working closely with law enforcement, school personnel, Child Protective
Services and the juvenile justice system in providing and learning how
to work together to identify who can come in at what angle into the
lives of children and families who have been exposed to violence and
other catastrophic circumstances and we see, you know, literally
thousands of kids every year and do a range of interventions, but one of
the most important ingredients goes back to the issue of collaboration,
and I\'m going to stop, is that before we can begin to collaborate,
before we can begin to talk about collaboration, and to think about the
multiple roles that different service providers have in the lives of
traumatized kids and families, we need to actually know about what each
other thinks, the prospective of the other, the skills, the resources
and the activities.

This old model of coming in like the calvary and saying, \"We\'re going
to tell you what to do, chief, we\'re going to tell you what to do
school principal, et cetera,\" this is over. And in part, it\'s
wonderful to be humble in any of our fields, because it opens the door
to scratching our heads, going back to phenomenology as the basis for
thinking about what it is we have to offer and how we mobilize the
resources the kids and families need at times when they are least able
to look after themselves. And last, principles of intervention, do no
harm, think about the threat, restoration of external structure, parents
and other care givers as primary mediators for kids when they are unable
to rely on themselves.

Interventions need to be age appropriate. We need to think about the
specific trauma elements that may vary enormously and how do we listen
long enough to identify what they are in order to address them. Optimal
responses require collaboration. And finally, the worst time to begin
collaboration is in the middle of a crisis. Thanks.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Steven, thank you very much. And next we\'ll move to
Marleen.

DR. WONG: Well, thank you very much, Dr. Long and to members of the
panel. Just to give an example of some of the things that Steve talked
about, which were so apt, I was at Columbine High School and worked in
that situation with Bill for a couple of years afterwards and the
importance of calm routine became so important. I was there on the day
that the kids returned to Chatfield High School because Columbine was
still a crime scene, and I was standing next to a teacher and a young
man came up to her, I mean, it was just an amazingly emotional scene.

Kids were pouring into the school. The Chatfield High School kids went
in the morning. The Columbine kids went in the afternoon. And there were
signs from all over the country, probably from some of your schools
saying, \"We\'re with you. Our prayers are with you\", and it was very
moving. And a young boy came up to the teacher who was standing next to
me, who happened to be a math teacher, and the boy said, \"Oh, Ms.
Smith, I\'m so happy to see you\".

And she sort of like stepped back. And you could tell this wasn\'t her
best student, you know. And he said, \"I can\'t tell you\", and he said
a whole bunch of things about the media and it\'s so horrible. And they
turned, you know, Columbine into joke and, \"I\'m really pissed off\",
and all this kind of stuff.

And then he said, \"Ms. Smith, I can hardly wait to get back to class
and hear you talk about math\". And she said, \"Oh, my God, that\'s
amazing\". He said, \"I don\'t want to do math; I just want to hear you
talk about it\".

(Laughter)

So calm routine is everything. I want to talk a little bit about Los
Angeles Unified School District, which is the second largest school
district in the United States. This is my 32^nd^ year in Los Angeles
Unified, and I\'ve played a variety of roles there, including the
Director of Mental Health for about eight years, and now the Director of
Crisis Counseling and Intervention. We have a student body of about
740,000 children K through 12 and with the new building program, we\'ll
have over 1,000 schools in an area of about 700 square miles. The work
that I\'m going to be talking about was really done in the last nine
years and one of our very valued research partners is here and will be
speaking next and that\'s Dr. Lisa Jaycox.

And the reason why we began to engage with research partners, UCLA and
with RAND, is because as we began to go out to many of these crisis
situations \-- and let me just say that the whole area of child trauma
and witness to violence began in LA Unified School District, in 1984
when a mentally ill man who lived across the street in a second floor
apartment building, across the street from the 49^th^ Street Elementary
School, began shooting onto the school and held the school under sniper
fire for an hour and a half at 2:30 in the afternoon as children came
out of school.

And at the end of that hour and a half, two children were killed and
several other students and staff were shot and wounded. And it was the
beginning of a long journey of learning about trauma and its impact on
learning.

So beginning with that time and nine years ago we really wanted to know
how many children actually sitting in our classrooms today, not special
ed kids, not in any special program but just sitting in our classrooms
that have been exposed to violence in the community outside the school.
We\'re not talking about child abuse, we\'re not talking about domestic
abuse. We\'re talking about crisis incidents that occur on the way to
school or on the way home because we know that the first criteria for
post-traumatic stress disorder in children is exposure to violence,
it\'s exposure to a traumatic event.

So with our partners we began this research and what we discovered along
the way are a couple of things. And one is looking at how do children
who have been exposed to violence differ from those who have not. And
what we learned is that they have decreased IQ in these particular
studies, that really the case \-- the case for trauma and education and
its association has been made. That they have lower grade point averages
than children not exposed to trauma. That they have more days of school
absence. They have decreased rates of high school graduation and in a
survey that we did of 28,000 children, especially among African American
youth, if they\'re exposed to community violence before the fifth grade
the associations with expulsion and suspension are very, very high.

So what about the achievement gap? We talk about that a lot. At least in
California where we talk about why is it that minority students seem to
lag behind quote unquote \"their Caucasian counterparts\". And one of
the things that we haven\'t really looked at is what kind of social
environments do they come from, what kind of community situations do
they confront all the time? They may have loving parents, they may have
good teachers. Why is it that despite decades of reform we still have
children who drop out or who don\'t do well? And one of the things we
haven\'t looked at is impact of their exposure to violence in the
community and the effects of trauma.

There have been some national studies that have been done just about
violence exposure and you can see here in Kilpatrick Study that was
completed in 1995 that actually a large portion of children in the
United States if we take this study, many more children in this
particular generation have been exposed to community violence than any
other previous generation. I want you, however, to hold onto the figure
of 27 percent. Twenty-seven percent in his study is exposed to no
violence.

Now, I\'m going to show you a study that we did in Los Angeles Unified
School District and you can see there that only six percent of students
in an urban area of these 28,000 students had been exposed to no
violence. Actually, many of them had multiple experiences of either
being hit, kicked, punched or threatened with a gun or a knife. And even
though these are figures from Los Angeles, I suspect that in many urban
areas and maybe even non-urban areas where there\'s high poverty and
crime, that there might be similar kinds of results.

To make this more graphic, I want to show you something that was put
together, published in the [LA Times]{.underline} and taken from
information from the Los Angeles Police Department. And it really speaks
to the kind of social ecology that children live in before they come to
school. So this is an area of the far west San Fernando Valley, those of
you who know Los Angeles know this is the area where the big earthquake
was, the Northridge Earthquake. And what this represents, those little
Monopoly sized houses that are numbered are elementary schools. And the
black dots represent unsolved murders over the past 10 years, not all
murders but unsolved murders. So you can see that children walking to
school would pass by these places and this is where a crime had occurred
that had not been solved. Now, I want you to compare this to South Los
Angeles. Are you ready? Can you imagine what this looks like in your
mind, the difference between a suburban area and an urban area. These
are not all the murders, these are just the unsolved murders. The
children who go to school in these neighborhoods come to school in a
completely different mindset and it\'s no surprise that there are higher
rates of suspension, expulsion and school dropout.

So how does this distress from violence and trauma effect students in
the classroom? Well, in keeping with what Steve has just described, they
do have an inability to concentrate. They\'re thinking about, \"How do I
get home safely?\" They do have preoccupations with the traumatic
incidents that may have occurred and in our survey the students didn\'t
have just one experience with community violence, they had multiple
experiences with community violence.

They do avoid school because getting to school is because getting to
school is a matter of danger. Also, they develop many other behavioral
and emotional problems and especially among young males, they act
themselves out of school. They become very, very aggressive. So which
students are at greatest risk for violence exposure? In our survey we
found it was children who were of ethnic minority status. They were \--
had lower socio and economic status in their family.

They were older children in middle school and high school. They had
early conduct problems and they lived in areas of high poverty and crime
and of course, they were mostly males. So why should we have a program
for traumatized students? This is a story from Martin and it\'s a story
that you probably heard from one of your students before.

\"One night several years ago, I saw men shooting at each other and
people running to hide. I was scared, I thought I was going to die. And
after this happened, I started to have nightmare. I felt scared all the
time. I couldn\'t concentrate in class like before and I thought that
something bad could happen to me and I started to get into a lot of
fights at school and with my brothers.\"

Teachers who hear this story say, \"Wow, Martin, that\'s really
terrible, I hope you\'re walking home with somebody and I\'m glad
you\'re here and you\'re safe at school\". But let\'s take a look at the
story from the perspective of post-traumatic stress disorder. \"One
night several years ago, I was men shooting at each other and I thought
I was going to die\". This is life threat. This is your child\'s
perception that his life is in danger. \"And after this happened, I
started to have nightmares\". So it\'s now in his sleep, he has
interrupted sleep.

\"I felt scared all the time\". The fear is now generalized. It\'s not
just where he saw the incident. It\'s not just where he passes by during
the day. \"And I couldn\'t concentrate in class\". He\'s cognitive
impairment now and something bad, a sense of foreboding is going to
happen to me. If you talk to some gang members they\'ll say, \"I\'m not
living long. I\'m going to live until I\'m 18, maybe I\'ll live until
I\'m 19. I don\'t have a high expectation of living\".

\"I started to get into a lot of fights and school and with my
brothers\". So what can we do about this? Well, one of the things is
really to address trauma in schools. And first is the early detection of
violence exposure and associated distress. And teaching children how to
cope better with distress and to learn social problem solving skills
also helping parents and teachers, both of whom care greatly about their
children but are remarkably poor identifiers of children who are
traumatized. Of the thousands of children that we have screened for
post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, less than five have ever
been referred for treatment.

One of the things I\'d like to talk about is CBIT, Cognitive Behavioral
Intervention for Trauma in Schools. And as part of this screening, we
wanted to know how many of these children had been exposed to violence
and you can see here, this is kind of a summary of it, that over \--
almost 90 percent, close to 90 and in some instances over 90 percent of
these children and this was survey of one year of 772 kids, over 80
percent had witnessed violence. Of those a number of them were
victimized, that is over 6 percent and over 40 percent, if you think
about that, of your friends, if it was your community, your church, your
school, over 40 percent had had direct experience with gun or knife
violence.

We also found that in terms of the screening \-- and here we have the
top part that shows the victimization, that 20 percent of the students
who were exposed to violence had clinical levels of post-traumatic
stress disorder, unidentified, and an additional 16 percent of these
children had clinical \-- depression in the clinical range.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Trauma in Schools is a program
developed by Dr. Lisa Jaycox for schools and in use by school personnel.
It\'s 10 sessions of therapy for trauma symptoms and rather than go
through all of this, I want to go also through some of the elements of
this, and that is educating students about trauma and common symptoms.

Most of the kids say, \"I feel like I\'m going crazy, I feel like I have
no control\". And so we help them to be able to deal with that element
of fear by helping them to train with their thoughts how to reduce that
anxiety and how to calm their fears so that they can begin to problem
solve, learning to face the trauma, learning, again, to re-engage with
others and building skills to get along.

I want to say that there was one school, at all the school shootings
that we\'ve dealt with, there was one school in which test scores
actually went up, they didn\'t go down and that was Columbine High
School. And that was because Columbine invested in counselors in the
school, additional staff, mental health people from the community to
come in and treat those children for the kinds of problems that they
were facing after the school shooting.

CBITS is tailored for delivery in schools. It is a short training of
about two days. It happens bell-to-bell and it can be doubled up so that
if there is a change in the schedule there can be two sessions during
the week rather than one.

CBITS was also developed in our multi-cultural district and originally
was work done with students who had been in the US three years or less
who spoke Russian, Spanish, Korean and Aremian and our work since then
has evolved over the last few years to involve mostly Latino students
and African Americans.

Here\'s just a brief overview of the randomized clinical trial that was
a study that was conducted by RAND, by Dr. Brad Stein and it shows \--
it\'s an effectiveness study of CBITS and as you can see here, there
were 769 students that were screened. A hundred and fifty-nine of those
were eligible. A hundred and twenty-six students had their parents and
they themselves consented to this treatment and 61 students received the
program immediately and 65 students received the program at a later
date. Here\'s some of our outcomes, and that is that treatment does
improve trauma symptoms. You can see here that the solid red line shows
the students who did receive treatment dropped right out of the clinical
range of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Time is a mediator, so on the dotted line, you see that overall the
children did improve a little bit but there\'s still some clinical range
of PTSD. As they receive treatment, they also even dropped lower out of
the clinical range of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and the earlier
group maintained their gains. The improvement in symptoms lasted over
time.

Here we see what parents reported as far as their children\'s
relationships within the home and their psycho-social impairment scores,
and you can see here that the children who received treatment their
impairment scores dropped so that they were doing better. Those students
who did not, the parents did not see any improvement at all in their
behaviors.

I\'m going to skip over this next and tell you that we did find that as
their trauma symptoms decreased, the grades did improve, in some cases a
full grade point higher than at the beginning of the school year. And
the children did \-- the teachers did report fewer classroom learning
problems. We did attempt to look at \-- to achieve the status of having
an evidence based program which has now been established with the
effectiveness study in [The Journal of American Medical
Association]{.underline}. I\'m going to skip \-- this is just a little
slide about improvement of attendance and improvement of grades in our
most recent group of students. But I wanted to jump to some
recommendations because I think that this is what the heart of what
we\'re talking about today is how the programs in the US Department of
Education can really make a difference in school outcomes, both in terms
of the social and emotional health of children as well as their academic
progress.

First of all, I want to go back to the idea that we are teaching the
whole child, that if we don\'t address in many cases, especially in
urban areas, the social and emotional problems of children, that we
really cannot achieve the educational outcomes that we want. Based on
the recommendation of the President\'s \-- President Bush\'s new Freedom
Commission on Mental Health, there are several recommendations. One is
bring science to school services. Many of the people who work in our
schools, the counselors, social workers, the psychologists, they were
trained what they were trained to do, five, 10, 15, 25, sometimes 30
years ago.

Science has moved forward, far, far forward at this point in time. We
need to train all of them in the effects of trauma and trauma
interventions, especially evidenced based trauma interventions. We need
to help teachers with pre-service educational and trauma in learning so
that these young teachers who are filled with ideals and enthusiasm,
they go to our urban schools and they burn out.

How many of our teachers do we lose because what their expectations are
and what they\'re taught are completely at odds with what they actually
see in front of them every day in the classroom. The second is, build a
knowledge base for the treatment of trauma. We need to know that what
our counselors are doing actually have an outcome, have an educational
outcome; not only improve the mental health status of children but also
have an impact on grades and attendance.

The third is, and this is Recommendation Number 4 in the President\'s
New Freedom Commission, expand and enhance school-based mental health
programs, organize, re-organize, reconfigure, the existing school and
community health resources and mental health resources into an
integrated whole at the school level and at the district level so that
school psychologists, school social workers, school counselors,
attendance workers, are all working together around one goal which is to
improve the academic and social and emotional status of children.

I want to thank you very much for inviting us to be here today and I
thank you for your attention.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Marleen, and now we\'ll turn to
Lisa.

DR. JAYCOX: Thank you. I\'m going to be sort of building on what Marlene
talked about and try to answer a few questions in terms of not just
CBITS but other interventions, what interventions are available for
helping students recover from traumatic experiences, what are their
characteristics how \-- what are the issues around disseminating these
programs and from there I\'m going to be drawing on some recent work,
talking with school personnel in the Gulf States in terms of how they
worked with the displaced students and their own students as schools
reopened to deal with that particular traumatic experience.

I have to just have faith that it moves when \-- yeah, okay. So first of
all, what interventions exist? We\'ve just done a couple big literature
reviews and some work related to Gulf States where we found at least 39
programs and were specifically developed for use in schools and dealt
with some sort of trauma. Some are geared towards violence exposure.
Many are geared towards sort of diverse different kinds of traumatic
experiences like our program CBITS. Others are specifically geared
towards loss or grieve, those kinds of things.

Most of them are using some kind of cognitive behavioral techniques.
Those are the best proven in clinic settings and fortunately they\'ve
been sort of pulled into the school setting and they really work in the
school setting in that they\'re sort of didactic and have small group
exercises. They really lend themselves to sort of classroom based
learning.

Unfortunately, only about five of them have been evaluated in any kind
of controlled experimental trial. Ours is one and there\'s \-- the other
ones are listed up there also. So it\'s really a developing field. We
don\'t have a lot of evidence for many of the programs but since many of
them incorporate these sort of proven techniques from other
interventions and have a lot of commonalities, there\'s some faith in
many of them.

So what are their characteristics? They tend to be brief, time limited
for students and groups. That means that they tend to be rather cost
efficient. We\'re not talking about individual long-term counseling
either with a school counselor or the mental health professional but
rather pulling groups of kids together. The short-term, 8 to 20 sessions
is generally the sort of parameters. Some of them have components for
parents and teachers.

Working in schools has sort of some real pros and some real cons. The
real pros are you really have good access to the kids. So whereas many
kids don\'t ever make it to a specialty mental health clinic, they are
in school every day. That\'s their job. They\'re there and if you\'re
able to integrate services onto the campus, then they\'re available for
those services. You don\'t need to rely on someone to give them a ride
every day. You don\'t need to worry about how motivated the parents are,
what the parents\' live stressors are, you can work with the child
regardless.

The downside is that that often means you have less access and less
involvement from the parents. So that\'s sort of a double-edged thing.
Most of the interventions that are out there focus on both symptom
reduction and skill building. So the idea is that you\'re both trying to
help them deal with the traumatic experiences that they\'ve already gone
through but also recognizing that many of these kids live in urban, high
stress environments and they will be exposed to another traumatic event.
So you\'re trying to build some skills for the future, relaxation
skills, social problem solving, ways to talk with people about their
problems, ways to get support from peers, teachers and family members.
So it tries to work on both of those.

And to date most of the programs have relied on using some kind of
clinician or mental health professional. That\'s changing a little bit.
There\'s at least one program that has some good evidence behind it in
Israel that is being run by teachers and we\'re working with MAMH
funding to redevelop CBITS so that it could be used by non-clinicians,
like school counselors and teachers.

So then we get to the question as to whether schools are using these
programs. And we do a lot of work nationally through SAMSA funding, the
National Child Traumatic Stress Network to try and support schools to
use these kinds of programs. Marleen is running that project and she is
including both RAND and UCLA in those efforts. So we\'re developing
dissemination materials and such that we\'ll give you an example of in a
few minutes.

But the fact is, we\'re working with a select few school districts
around the country and most schools are not using these kinds of
services even though they have kids who are experiencing a lot of trauma
and who are feeling both uncomfortable at school and showing signs of
impaired learning.

So the study I\'m about to talk about with \-- following Hurricane
Katrina is an example of sort of an opportunity to look at why schools
are or aren\'t using such programs because that was an example of
everyone perceiving a big need for some sort of mental health
intervention for these students who are highly effected and yet many
schools were not successful in implementing such programs.

So our goal in this study was to try and look at what schools were doing
for their displaced students. After the hurricanes hit, you know, we
have our CBITS program. It\'s available. We do a lot of training and
technical assistance around the country but we just got a few calls
after Hurricane Katrina and I believe that\'s true for other people who
have interventions, too. It was very spotty and we very quickly realized
that even though we knew about all of the mental health programs that
existed, the schools in this region did not and that there was really no
place to find it easily. It wasn\'t gathered in one place. So one aim of
the project was really actually to gather all the information on one
place and provide that information for schools in sort of a school
friendly place, so we developed a toolkit for that name. I\'ll pass them
out. We have one thing that describes that so you can see it and I have
an example here, if anyone is interested.

So we tried to pull together information that was \-- we thought would
be relevant to schools and we interviewed school personnel both public
and private in four states; Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas
trying to target the school districts that took in the most displaced
students at first and then as we continued talking to school personnel
in schools that were reopening and sending back their students, in which
case all the students were effected.

We tried to look at from the school personnel perspective what they saw
as the need for these students and what they were putting in place for
them, what worked and didn\'t work.

So first in terms of need, I\'d have to say that the sort of educator
perception of need really differed from place to place. And there\'s a
huge variety in the kinds of schools that we interviewed, so some were
college prep, private schools. Some were intercity schools that had many
high need students already and then accepted a huge number of displaced
students who were also very vulnerable students from inner city New
Orleans and had multiple needs themselves, so a whole range, but we
noticed that very quickly educators and school principals, for instance
and their superintendents were saying that they needed to get back to
academics. They did a lot around quickly enrolling students and finding
uniforms and desks for them and really served as a hub in the
communities that they served to get these families settled and
acclimated and the kids enrolled in schools. But by, you know, February
it was, \"Okay, enough of that, we need to refocus on academics and on
testing standards and meeting our goals for that.

So some schools were really getting back to academics quickly and kind
of leaving the mental health issues aside. But in one school district
for instance that screened many, many of the displaced students, they
screened everyone they could, they were finding that 40 percent of the
high school students for instance were scoring in the highest level of
need in terms of mental health services using a screener put out by the
National Child Traumatic Stress Network. So clearly the need was there
at least in some school districts but not necessarily perceived as
something that they needed to be focused on. Just to give you an idea of
what we did with the toolkit, we drafted the toolkit and then also got
feedback from it. We sent it out very quickly in January or February of
2006 and then as we re-interviewed school personnel, we were able to get
more feedback and in fact, learn about a number of programs that school
systems were developing. So if you can kind of imagine, I mean, it\'s
great to hear that school districts were motivated to do that but I can
think of one school district where there was one social worker for the
whole district and she developed her own program, curricula, from
scratch which is a huge effort and a valiant effort, but there were
many, many programs she could have taken off the shelf had she known
about them.

So there was a real lack of information. A lot of school districts were
doing their \-- what they could on their own with limited staff time and
resources and then I\'d hear from the next school district over that
they had already invented that thing and were using it. So for instance,
hearing one person say, \"Well, you just really don\'t know how to
screen the kids, though\", and we\'re trying to develop a screener and
find out about that and the next school district over, they just
screened everybody around. So that was a real issue in terms of not
hearing about communication between school districts and if you know New
Orleans and Louisiana at all, a lot of them are very small parishes with
limited resources, so not the big school districts we tend to see other
places.

Okay. In terms of interviewing the school personnel, I\'ve talked a
little bit about this already, we targeted schools and school districts
that took in a lot of displaced students with a lot of variations so
that\'s something to note as I\'m talking because not only did they vary
in terms of size and resources, they varied a lot in terms of
pre-existing mental health need within their student population and some
had very well developed school based mental health centers for instance,
funding mechanisms and funding streams and were able to really leverage
those resources. Others had one school counselor per school, the sort of
standard model without any really extra mental health support around it
and, therefore, were not able to do so much.

I\'ve already sort of mentioned this a little bit, but the schools
really did rally and put the primary emphasis on getting kids
registered, enrolled in school and they were very proud of their effort
around this. It\'s quite impressive what they did, especially when you
imagine that in many of these communities they also \-- the school
personnel who were trying to do this had their own personal damage and
displacement issues going on. If the community wasn\'t very damaged,
they still were accepting visitors into their homes and multiple people
living with them, but often had some damage. And in some communities,
you know, like in Southern Mississippi and clearly New Orleans, have
long-term issues to deal with outside of school. So one of the things
that we\'ve been talking a lot about is sort of the role that educators
are thrust into in a situation like this, to be both the caretakers for
our children, but also be enormously tax themselves on a personal level,
so we heard a lot from school personnel about you know, really putting
their all into it but not being sure how longer they could keep it up.

And hopefully that they could get some, you know, sort of respite over
the summer to sort of recover from this year of really intense stress
and work \-- both at work and at home on a personal level. We didn\'t
see a lot of implementation of the kind of trauma programs that we \--
that we talked about earlier, CBITS or other programs and I\'ll talk a
little bit about the reasons for that.

The kind of barriers that schools talked about were lack of capacity, as
you can imagine, limited funding, lack of trained staff to implement
programs, having had not quite enough resources to meet the needs of
their students before and then now all these extra displaced students.
If you can imagine having sort of a flood of students who are sort of
the most needy, most at risk for mental health problems come into the
school it really shifts the school population in the direction of having
a huge number of needy students. So that\'s what many schools faced.

The competing priorities I sort of mentioned on a personal level, but
also on a community level, there is a lot of need to focus on
rebuilding, even the school building, get new supplies and equipment and
all of that was very pressing, of course. And so it displaced some of
the issues around mental health. Other barriers are problems
communicating that\'s I\'ve already mentioned. Some staff members, you
know, didn\'t even want to talk to me about it. They sort of said,
\"It\'s enough already. We\'re tired of talking about Katrina. It\'s in
the media every day. We need to put it behind us.\" This is probably
sounding familiar based on what Steve said earlier.

That there is often a sort of impetus for people to try and put the
trauma behind them and the teachers and school personnel were doing that
too, even if the students weren\'t necessarily ready for that. And then
there was also enormous difficulty communicating with parents and
sometimes that\'s required for mental health services to get permission
to do an intervention with the child.

Phone numbers were changing, housing was unstable, phone numbers that
students were registered under changed immediately as people found
housing. So really, if you take your sort of urban difficulties
communicating with parents and triple them, it might be the situation
here. People really didn\'t have ways to communicate, especially with
the families residing in the trailer villages, because there were not
good communication lines set up with that.

So trying to sort of put this all together, it is a little hard to put
together because of the variety of different kinds of schools that we
talked with but it\'s not just enough to have resources but rather your
resources and your needs already have to sort of be in balance so some
of the school districts that had high need populations but really were
struggling to meet those needs already were not able to kind of put in
more effort for these displaced students.

Some school districts were really lucky, they had just gotten safe
students \-- Safe Schools Healthy Students funding and were able to
shift the priorities on that to focus on displaced students, that kind
of thing, but you can imagine that it would be hard to write a grant in
the midst of all of this chaos and try to apply for funding. So really
one of the things that we learned is, you know, that there are these
existing barriers that are always the case for getting mental health
services to students, but even more so during a time of disaster and
because the whole community is effected and everyone is sort of at their
limit already, don\'t have time to sit down and write a grant or develop
new materials or attend a two-day training.

So more and more we\'ve been thinking about how that training needs to
sort of be pre-positioned. There was one story that \-- from a woman,
social worker in Mississippi who had implemented some grief program
prior to the hurricane, so she had gotten trained on it and implemented
it in a few small groups for students in her school district. And
everything in the community was wiped out. This was in the very \--
right along the coast and she lost all of her materials except for this
one program that she found floating in a zip lock bag in her living
room. So that was the program she implemented.

It was, you know, fortunately applicable to the kids in terms of loss
and grief but you immediately kind of have to imagine it being \--
floating there in a zip lock back to be useable. It can\'t be something
they need to go to Chicago to get trained on.

I am talking too much, I guess. Okay, conclusions; the window of
opportunity for addressing the student mental health issues was small in
many school districts, so there was a window, although many school
districts started to do more training over the summer after the
hurricanes hit and we\'ve been involved with some of that. One thing
that was really impressive is that the schools leveraged their crisis
intervention training and their crisis intervention teams in order to be
able to respond to the hurricanes and then \-- but then really stopped
there and quickly turned back to academics and sort of set aside the
mental health issues. And information about the programs really needs to
sort of be on the shelf already with training pre-disaster.

In terms of recommendations, we clearly are at the infancy stage in
terms of evaluating these kinds of programs so there does need to be
more of that but having the programs really isn\'t enough. We need good
training and good staff development prior to a school crisis or a
community-wide disaster. And the thing that these kinds of trauma
interventions can offer besides offering specific interventions for
traumatized students is that they draw on the same kinds of concepts
that are really important for treating other problems like behavior
problems and depression and anxiety. So bringing evidence-based
treatment towards trauma would go a long way towards also getting people
ready to implement other kinds of programs that we know are proven for
use in schools. I\'ll stop there.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Lisa. Now, let me ask, when I
stepped up there, Marleen, you and Lisa were talking about a \--

DR. JAYCOX: Yeah, since we each took our time, yeah, we can skip that.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Okay. I appreciate all the flexibility. I saw the
conversation going back and forth.

DR. JAYCOX: Yeah.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Now, to an important time and that is to have comments
and questions and enter a dialogue so that we can synthesize some of
this information. So yes, Susan?

MS. KEYS: I\'d like to ask you to comment, a lot of the presentation had
to do with helping kids that have experienced trauma and you touched on
getting professionals and teachers and communities ready for some type
of large scale trauma or in this case maybe an individual who
experiences trauma. Can you comment on recommendations for building
resilience so that you can look from a preventative perspective and
hopefully have less children that are severely traumatized?

DR. MARANS: That\'s a great question. Let me give you one example around
domestic violence where we know so much about the cycle of violence. I
mentioned the delinquency but what I didn\'t say is, is that you know,
both boys and girls are 158 to 250 percent more likely to be victims and
perpetrators of inter-personal violence if they\'ve been exposed to
domestic violence. So one of the things that developed out of our
partnership with law enforcement and Domestic Violence Services and
others is the idea of taking what we know about the pattern and
psychological and safety experiences of domestic violence and kind of
develop an intervention that would interrupt it, which also means
interrupting a level of exposure. So what we did was these are some of
the most frustrating, fourth most dangerous kind of law enforcement call
for service and often it\'s not a good mix in terms of what women feel
from law enforcement \-- typically women feel from law enforcement in a
domestic violence situation. In our work, because we have learned so
much from each other, we\'ve developed an intervention strategy where
domestic violence advocates, clinicians and police officers would
respond after the acute call for service and do unannounced follow-up
visits.

Now, lots of people are horrified saying, \"Well, that\'s intrusive\".
In fact that\'s not what we found in our survey from these women and we
had a controlled study and what it demonstrated was that the women and
kids who had the outreach in which there was safety planning, mental
status review, psycho-education, et cetera, were much more likely than
their control group to get additional social services, both for
themselves, both adults and kids, and much more likely, about 50 percent
\-- 50 percent decrease in severity of violence and police calls for
service. It\'s one example about thinking collaboratively and looking at
the phenomena and then saying, \"How can we interrupt the cycle and how
can we decrease the level of exposure and increase the level of a sense
of agency and control?\" Just one example.

DR. JAYCOX: I was just going to say that some of the work in the urban
areas like the CBITS program and several of the other ones that were on
the slides, is that we know that they\'re exposed to things on a regular
basis, trauma in the community. And so it\'s not exactly prevention but
really more early intervention. We\'re not waiting until they\'re sort
of full blown PTSD and they\'re disabled, but rather trying to get
working with them when they have some symptoms and so it\'s sort of
earlier in the cycle.

And maybe Marleen, do you want to talk about the programs you were \--

DR. WONG: Yeah, I spent two weeks in Israel last month around the
holiday season and I spoke with many, many colleagues who are dealing
with exactly this issue about how do you provide universal and
preventative efforts around a situation in which 6000 Katyusha rockets
are falling every day on a very small country and you don\'t know where
the rockets are going to come and everybody is subjected to these air
raid siren type things and you just dive under a table, you jump out of
your car. You just get out of the way. And so trauma is highly likely in
a population like this and yet, it\'s not.

So what \-- in talking with them what I found is and as you look at that
spectrum of prevention sort of you know, there\'s universal
applications, there\'s selected and there\'s indicated and you look at
certain populations. And we all have them, in, you know, communities of
high poverty and crime. What they did was they took an intervention,
cognitive behavioral intervention, and they sort of front-loaded it. I
mean, they took the first few pieces of it which was education about
trauma, how do you \-- what thoughts do you have about this? Which of
those thoughts are not \-- don\'t help you to problem solve but get you
stuck where you\'re at? And then how do you develop more social skills
and cognitive skills in order to deal with that? So they took those
first like four segments of cognitive behavioral intervention and
literally taught it to all the kids in the country. Now, they don\'t
have any outcome measures but I think it\'s a very promising kind of
direction, where you see now that they\'re still \-- they\'re dealing
with some of those threats but at the same time, if you go to Israel,
life is going on. I mean, they are doing just \-- they have fear but you
know, people are out in the street at night, people are enjoying life.
The kids are out there playing. They\'re not frozen. They\'re not
looking like our inner cities where kids are being forced to stay inside
because it\'s dangerous outside.

DR. MARANS: I think it raises a really important point and one of the
differences between what we see in Israel and what we see in some of our
high crime neighborhoods and communities is the notion of social
cohesion as a major protective factor. And so we have a programmatic or
a therapeutic intervention on the one hand, but one of the most
successful interventions that is protective and part of social cohesion
have been the after school programs that we\'ve developed in our country
that have been decreased over the last several years. We know about the
connection between after school programming for high risk kids and this
is not \-- you don\'t need to be a professor of psychiatry or child
psychiatry to recognize that if you want to increase protective factors,
supervision is an important one.

If you want to make sure the kids have an opportunity for pro social
development, then give them the opportunity for pro social behavior, so
that, you know, this idea that if we go back to the phenomenology, if
one of the sine qua nons of trauma is the erosion of executive
functioning and organized gratifying behavior, et cetera, then we have
to have some support. Somebody has got to have these kids\' backs that
can help them re-establish the level of order and executive functioning
and group activities, if they can\'t have the level of support and
supervision in their homes or neighborhoods, well, we need to think
about how to up that ante on that, I think.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Mike?

MR. HERRMANN: In terms of building networks of folks at the school level
to support children in responding to these traumas, who do you think are
the most likely candidates? Are they teachers, school counselors, and
what kind of training would you need to prepare them for that role?

DR. WONG: Well, I think in this country, you know, the way that most
school districts are organized is that there\'s a superintendent of
schools and then you have a whole group of people who are a support to
the district and it\'s Health and Human Services. They might be called
Social Services, Attendance Counselors, our School Psychologist, very
important, School Social Workers but really to integrate those folks
together into some sort of support system that then begins to look and
assess what does our district really confront, what do our children
confront and how do we \-- you know, what\'s the big picture here that
we need to address. And it may be different from community to community.

You know, maybe it\'s more of a bullying situation rather than exposure
to violence but I think that we\'re also finding more evidence that
children who are bullied do reach the level of trauma and get to the
point where they don\'t want to go to school, they don\'t \-- you know,
they have all of those symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. So
but integrating those resources, because I suspect that in every state
we\'re spending you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on counseling
programs and they get splintered off but they need to be re-integrated
so that they serve the needs of the child.

DR. MARANS: Just to add to that, I think one of the common denominators
that\'s often missing is an appreciation of children\'s development. And
if you have a broader appreciation of children\'s development, then you
can begin to do more of the connecting of the dots, and it\'s not asking
everybody to be everything.

You know, teachers who complain about being turned into substitute
parents have legitimate grievances but they\'re not supported if \-- for
example, there\'s a wonderful SRO, School Resource Officer Program but
the teachers and the SROs only connect when the kid\'s in trouble. It\'s
not helpful if the SRO, the School Resource Officer, is so separate from
the rest of the policing districts that they are not able to transport
in-tell between what\'s happening in the community and the schools and
vice versa, and it\'s not useful in devising strategies for intervention
for the most troubled and troublesome kids if the teachers and mental
health folks and law enforcement and all these folks aren\'t talking
from a similar frame of reference, not about their expertise in what
they can do but about what a child is needing and how they can bring
those areas of expertise to it and talk from the perspective of the
child.

And something that came up this morning about resources and money and
the money walks, well, one of the issues is, when money walks, it\'s
hard for people to be very interested in listening to what the other
knows. And we get into the silo effect and we get further and further
away from what it is to be this child and by the way, what it is to be
this teacher or this cop or this judge, et cetera, et cetera.

And we get far away from saying, \"Well, whoa, hold on a second. Who is
this kid and how is that the starting point for where we need to go\"?

MR. JONES: And may I also respond to that question? You know, so, you
know, who do you go to, who is the go to person? Is it the teacher or
the counselor or whatever? And I think first of all, as the panel is
pointing out, it\'s just, first of all, educating our culture, our
teachers, our superintendents, et cetera, to the fact that trauma hurts.
It\'s the gift that continues to give. Educating individuals that it\'s
a real phenomenon and that children experience. I mean, you guys have
quoted many wonderful statistics, actually dramatic, drastic statistics.
You know, one statistic is up to 91 percent of children in high-risk
areas actually experience this traumatic events. But again, it\'s just
educating school professionals that indeed, trauma is very prevalent, it
hurts, it also lasts.

So given that, you know, one of the things that we\'re doing in our
clinic and in fact, this is based on Steven\'s model, the CDCP model is,
first of all, teachers are busy. They\'re trying to pass, you know,
getting the children to do well on standardized tests, et cetera, but
first of all, it\'s just educating teachers to the impact of trauma,
just simple psycho-education and then having those teachers refer
children to counselors. Counselors seem to have somewhat more time than
do \-- well, I\'m sure counselors wouldn\'t want to hear me say this,
but we found that counselors in our district are better able to work
with children. So teachers referring children to counselors and then
working with those counselors. We\'ve got great dialogue with counselors
in our area with our clinic and so those cases where the counselors
can\'t deal with children, they simply refer onto our clinic.

And so we\'ve got trained graduate students and other mental health
professionals actually screening children, assessing children,
diagnosing children in appropriate instances and then carrying out
intervention. So, you know, there are ways of getting the job done. But
again, I think first of all, it\'s just educating, you know, educating
America that trauma hurts, you know, and that it lasts, and it costs,
yeah.

DR. JAYCOX: Yeah, I just wanted to add that in addition to sort of
training the teachers and school administrators, there\'s also
supporting the teachers and school administrators because both from the
Katrina example and the inner city example, the staff members are
exposed to the same stuff every day and have their own symptoms, their
own burn-out issues, their own desire not to get into it too far with
the students and so they need help, too, both in learning how to help
their students but also, now, how to help themselves, I think.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Without naming names, I just thought as you were in this
cycle that we all work in, sometimes \-- and you\'ve mentioned it two or
three times, those that have been victims of different types of trauma
then sometimes get into education, don\'t mean to be but they\'re trauma
givers. And somehow we have to help break that. I heard that two or
three times stated in a different way.

Other comments or questions? Yes, Fred?

MR. ELLIS: Yeah, for Lisa, in one of your slides you talked about there
were at least 30 programs for schools and only five have been evaluated
in any kind of controlled trial. Can you speak a little bit about the
five that have been evaluated, the results of that?

DR. JAYCOX: Yeah. CBITS is one of them and so Marleen presented that.
There is \-- a few of them are quite similar. So the UCLA Trauma, Grief
Program, CBITS and something called Multi-Modality Treatment for Trauma,
MMTT, have a lot of components in common and are for diverse kinds of
traumas and they also sort of incorporate those cognitive behavioral
techniques. The other two are ones that have been developed overseas, so
one is the classroom based intervention which has been used in Gaza and
in refugee camps and in displaced persons\' camps and so that was tested
actually by USAID and then it has been sort of revamped and it\'s been
used quite a bit in New Orleans, Save the Children funded its
dissemination. So it\'s been tested there and that\'s been used here.

And then the last one is one that is just newly developed and being used
in Israel in elementary schools and middle schools for ongoing terrorism
kinds of events, similar to what Marleen.

MR. ELLIS: And the evaluation, I\'m assuming that they do the efficacy
of the programs are.

DR. JAYCOX: Yeah, it\'s a reduction in PTSD symptoms, behavior problems
and depressive symptoms usually. I mean, it\'s very hard \-- I\'m sure
many of you know that it\'s hard to do school-based research especially
when you\'re delivering some kind of intervention because there\'s the
need to serve all students that you identify as a need, for instance for
intervention programs. So they don\'t tend to be long-term outcomes for
any of the programs to really look over time, unfortunately. They tend
to be more short-term types of symptom reductions and unfortunately, you
know, we\'ve tried to gather information on grades. It\'s really hard to
fit into an experimental design, because the grades are collected at
certain time points that don\'t match your intervention experiment. And
you know, grades come middle year and end of the year whether or not
your experiment, your intervention happened at the right time point.

So that\'s something that, you know, we have a lot of interest in trying
to get more information about, how does it really change academic
indicators and we feel like that would help schools get more interested
in these kinds of programs, but we\'re just not quite there yet with the
research. Marleen mentioned, we have indications that improvement in
PTSD symptoms map onto improvement in grades but you can\'t directly
link it to intervention effects.

DR. WONG: In terms of just this committee, we wanted to give you a copy
of this manual which Dr. Jaycox developed and this is the intervention
that we talked about that the evidence-based study was conducted. So
we\'ll leave this for the committee.

MR. HINGSON: As I listened to you talk about the types of incidents that
these young students are exposed to, it struck me that a lot of these
are family generated; domestic violence, child abuse and so on. Could
you tell us a little bit about the engagement of the parents in all of
this and how you deal with that and issues of confidentiality and the
\-- there must be a whole series of those sorts of issues being worked
through.

DR. MARANS: That\'s a great question and it also goes back to connecting
the dots and some legal issues. I want to take up the confidentiality
quickly because when we present on our law enforcement/mental health
partnership, that\'s always one of the first things that comes up.
\"Well, we can\'t talk with each other\", et cetera, et cetera. Well,
people forget that parents, unless they\'ve crossed the line, they\'re
in charge and if you ask parents as part of your standard of care, \"Is
it okay if I\'m in touch with Officer so and so and vice versa\",
services are always introduced as voluntary and you sign waivers because
the parent has a feeling that you\'re on their side and you want to do
what\'s right by them and their children.

We have about an 85 percent acceptance of the sharing information. It\'s
very limited. It\'s very limited to the issues that the other
professional is going to be able to address. So that whether it\'s with
the police or Department of Children and Protective Services or Domestic
Violence Advocates, the kind of information that\'s shared is specific
to what these other professionals are going to bring to the table.

The other part is, is that one of the things that didn\'t come up
although it was implicit, many of the parents who are difficult to reach
are themselves the \-- this is an inter-generational issue. And do you
know what it\'s like being a teacher when the parent doesn\'t show up?
You just get mad on them, you know. And the problem is, is that they\'re
not showing up to PTA meetings and they\'re not coming to school
conferences because they\'re also depressed and they\'re also limited.

One of the things that in consultation that I was doing in Louisiana,
I\'m blocking because it was so unpleasant, but going to one of the
trailer camps of evacuees from the Ninth Ward, the rate of school
suspensions and all the problems that were being described earlier was
only matched by the clinically significant rates of depression amongst
the primary care givers that was off the charts in terms of general
population.

So partially, we\'re often not very successful in our efforts and it
takes a special effort to reach out to parents. Where the efforts are in
some ways easier, are when the circumstances are more serious. That when
for example, parents have crossed the line, have gotten involved in
abuse and neglect, that\'s where the state is often able to increase and
bring leverage to a situation that can be productably motivating for
families.

Otherwise, we\'re looking at how do we engage parents where they are
better? How do we stop waiting around for parents to come to either
schools or mental health clinics, where they feel they\'re going to be
judged and looked down upon when they\'re already feeling low? How do we
use some of the natural, you k now, places that they\'re likely to come
to whether it\'s domestic violence shelters and increasing the services
we have available there, whether it\'s meeting in substations of police
departments, whether it\'s \-- so there are a range of efforts that are
afoot but this is a major issue when what you\'re trying to do is engage
someone who themselves have been so traumatized over a period of time
and then acutely in a kind of engagement that is counter to what
they\'re experiencing.

DR. WONG: One of the things that we saw in schools \-- and my staff,
they\'re all part of the teachers\' union. I mean, they\'re part of the
district, so they\'re not coming from a community agency. They\'re
actually part of LA Unified School District. So parents are accustomed
to talking to counselors and despite that we also get the consent. We
get active consent for parents.

And we engage them in CBITS and that there are two to four sessions
where we talk with the parents about you know, what are some of the
symptoms of PTSD, do they know about the incident that their child had
been involved in and it was surprising that, you know, children protect
parents. They don\'t tell their parents about what happened to them.
They don\'t tell them all the problems that they\'re having; they\'re
not sleeping, they\'re afraid, or all of that kind of thing, but one of
the really lovely things that seem to happen between the parents and the
children after this treatment and I don\'t know if it was the treatment
or just because, you know, they were able finally to come together and
talk about this was that parents stopped being punitive with their kids.

You know, they finally got it, like, \"I didn\'t know that that\'s how
it was affecting you\". And they stopped \-- in fact, one of the fathers
said, \"I was getting really physical with my son because he wouldn\'t
go to school, he wouldn\'t go to sleep at night. He\'s wake up and he
wouldn\'t follow directions and he was getting into fights\". But during
one of the first years that we did this program, 76 percent of the
parents \-- so we had all these kids, hundreds of kids. Seventy-six
percent of the parents said, \"There\'s someone else in my family I want
you to see. Now I understand what this is about. See my husband, you
know, see my brother\". I mean, they all had someone that they
recognized clearly were traumatized.

DR. MARANS: We don\'t like to use the word \"normalizing\" but you get
the idea that the approach that has been discussed in terms of
psycho-education makes a big difference if somebody \-- and we all know
this from medical illnesses, right? When you\'re feeling really anxious
about what\'s going on with you, it makes a big difference when somebody
tells you what\'s going on with you and arms you with some information.
So the experience of using these kinds of approaches says, \"Well, of
course you\'re having this experience and here they are, and here\'s
what can be done\". And sometimes parents need more assistance in
feeling like somebody has got their back, whether it\'s in terms of
safety but also being able to experience that the teachers and the
counselors and anybody else aren\'t wagging their fingers saying, \"What
terrible parents you are\", but, \"Well, of course you\'re having a
tough time with this\". DR. JAYCOX: Just to touch on the confidentiality
issue, most of our work has focused on screening kids for community
violence because of those privacy issues and then many of them turn out
to have other traumatic events in their past that sort of come out over
time and then we deal with them as they come. So it is more acceptable
for the school and the community to say this is a study about community
violence that\'s what we\'re going to focus on and then once the kids
get into groups, they end up talking about domestic violence that
they\'ve witnessed and other things and we do end up having to report
child abuse, you know, to some degree.

It\'s not all the kids but then as it comes up, then we can handle it.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Montean, Belinda.

MS. JACKSON: Hi, a quick question on whether or not there currently is
any studies or any research being one on the military child and children
that attend non-DOD schools as well as the children that attend DOD
schools and the services and support that\'s provided.

DR. JAYCOX: I know that DOD has been in touch with us occasionally to
ask about our program and other programs, and we\'ve sent them materials
because they are interested in doing this kind of programming, for
instance, on the bases in Germany but I don\'t think that there\'s been
any systematic research that I\'m aware of on kids. Do you know
something?

MR. MODZELESKI: There is some, Montean. I mean, many of the states are
working not only with the military children, I mean, where they\'re
seeing more problems are with the National Guard and reserve units which
don\'t have the support of the military. So Mona Johnson (phonetic) in
Washington, Pennsylvania, there\'s three or four states I think that are
doing quite a bit of work with \-- and I don\'t know whether Mike knows
any, but there are about three or four states.

DOD has a small unit working on this. Unfortunately, if you go to the
Department of Defense and ask about this, they\'ll tell you the same
thing you heard today is not enough resources, not enough time, not
enough energy to do this. As a matter of fact, a key person working on
this for DOD is leaving DOD and going out to Hawaii to do this on a
local level. So you\'ll lose the leadership at the DOD level.

MS. SIMS: Thank you. My question sort of dovetails off of that in that
it\'s what has been the uptake of the CBITS program as an example, in
general and specifically within the LA Unified School Districts?

DR. WONG: Well, we\'re sorry we weren\'t able to show you but we had
children from LA Unified actually speaking on this video about how when
they would go into school and what their \-- what their experience with
trauma was and how it was dealt with differently with teachers and also
a little bit about how CBITS has taken off.

I think that people who recognize that they are dealing with traumatized
children are more than ready for this. They\'re ready to get into it. I
think that the acceptance is like in any other situation. If they
recognize that there\'s a problem, they\'re more than ready to take it
on.

Where the problem hasn\'t been recognized or they say, \"Well, that\'s
just those kids and that\'s how they, you know, deal with things,\" and
you know, make sort of blanket statements about you know, their
behavior, they\'re not so interested. So we have schools that have hired
three social workers and psychologists to deal with these issues and we
have schools who say, \"That\'s not my job and I\'m not going to do
it\". So but CBITS has also been disseminated around the country, so
there\'s different places, for instance, Madison, Wisconsin and
Baltimore and in Minnesota we have some sites. In the Native American
Reservations in Montana there\'s a big effort around CBITS. We have
CBITS Australia and Japan. I mean, you know, places where people \--
yeah, little pockets where they recognize, \"This is that I\'m dealing
with\".

You know, and we had a teacher on the video say, \"I knew it wasn\'t
because these kids were stupid. I just couldn\'t figure out what it was
when I walked into my classroom, I\'d just feel the hair come up on my
arms because something had happened last night and these kids were
acting out. And until I started asking those questions, you know, like
tell me about what happened last night\", and she started getting the
answers about, you know, \"I saw my brother shot, I saw this happen\",
it was then that she began to realize that there had to be something
before learning to be \-- something that went along with learning, you
know, where somebody had to sit down with these kids and talk about what
had happened to get them to a place where they could actually attend to
what was going on in the classroom.

So I would say it just \-- it really depends on the interest of the
individual educator and it starts with the leadership. If the principal
says, \"Yes, this is what we\'re dealing with,\" it\'s school-wide.

MS. SIMS: And are there key items or brief measures widely available for
use in terms of, you know, screening for trauma exposure and then being
able to \-- you know, to do it on a wider scale, for example, if this
were going to be integrated into a safe and drug free school screener
for example?

DR. WONG: Yeah, well, we \-- everyone keeps asking for shorter and
shorter, so we have done some work to try and shorten what we used
originally and I think we\'re now down to a seven-item community
violence exposure screener and a nine-item PTSD screener. So it\'s
really quick but it doesn\'t focus on all sorts of traumas. It sort of
depends what the school is interested in screening on.

You know, some are more interested in getting at the family stuff or
there\'s been a recent event and would want to focus in on those things.
But we do feel like we have good scorers and such for picking kids who
might benefit from some kind of trauma focus program and have some short
measures.

DR. MARANS: Lisa just made a reference to something I think is really
important, that when we think about trauma and heightening awareness,
it\'s not just about exposure to violence, you know, and this is not
just about our schools, it\'s about our hospitals and a whole range of
services that come into contact with kids. When kids lose a parent
suddenly to, you know, a sudden death and gee, surprise, surprise, there
are symptomatic behaviors that are presenting in the classroom, what\'s
the teacher supposed to do when a kid has just had emergency surgery and
is coming back after a prolonged absence from the school?

You know, one can kind of, you know, wind out the list. So I think this
idea about considering again the awareness as Russell was pointing out,
of what are the links between overwhelming experiences in the lives of
children and the way they present behaviorally and in compromise
functioning, that\'s the key.

MR. JONES: Yeah, well, stated. Lisa, just in response to Belinda\'s
question in terms of screeners, yes, there are several other very short
screeners within the National Child Traumatic Stress Data Core that
could be given out to children systematically and, you know, boy, it\'s
my hope that the Department of Education really takes that on and that
that become a very fundamental component of the, you know, educational
initiative that children are systematically screened for the occurrence
of traumatic events and in assessments and that kind of thing. And
again, it doesn\'t have to be the Department of Education doing all of
that. I mean, once we know that children need a certain criterion on
that screener, they can then be referred out to you know, other
agencies; community psychologists, psychology clinics, et cetera. I
mean, that can be done. It\'s just a matter of doing the gimbling if you
will, with other organizations who are expert in the assessment,
treatment and diagnosis of traumatized children.

But I think I want to go back to another point. You know, the importance
of \-- you know, there\'s a saying that culture counts. That was
benchmarked by, I believe, Secretary David Satcher some years ago,
talking about the psychological impact of any number of things on people
of color. But I think culture counts. But in this context, I think,
trauma counts. You know, and if the Department of Education could convey
that message that, indeed, trauma counts.

There was a question asked earlier in terms of how receptive are parents
to interventions, et cetera. You know, what we found and I\'ve heard
that from many of my colleagues, that once parents become aware of the
impact of a traumatic event on their child, they beat the doors down to
get help. Once they realized that trauma has not only a psychological
but also a biological and neuro-biological consequence, parents will
jump at that. They \-- parents are protectors of children but you know,
parents don\'t know what they don\'t know. If they don\'t know that this
traumatic event impacts my child, you know, not only for the short term
but the long term, there\'s no need for intervention. And in fact, what
parents often do following a traumatic event is get over it and let\'s
move on. I\'ve had parents tell me that for many years following fires
and Hurricane Andrew, and even Katrina. \"It\'s over, let\'s get over it
and let\'s move forward\".

But once parents hear the message that, indeed, trauma hurts, trauma
lasts, I think they\'re very prone to seek out screening and to seek out
interventions. And even though, you know, we only have five
interventions so to speak that are evidenced based, there are many,
many, many more that are evidenced informed, that\'s simply meaning that
the components of those strategies that are evidence based, are also
part of those that are evidenced informed.

So again, there is solid treatment strategies, intervention strategies,
to help children across our nation that are traumatized.

MR. MODZELESKI: Before we go down this road, I have a question and
Russell, maybe you could jump in, too. I mean, listening to all of you
and having many years of experience, it\'s sort of like if this is the
first time I\'ve landed here, I\'d say there\'s absolutely no problems
with screening and there\'s \-- merely tell the parents that trauma
hurts and that everybody is going to jump in and that this is \-- you
know, this is easy.

Our experience tells us otherwise. Our experience tells us that
screening is, even as easy as it is, nine scale or five scalers, that
there are many people out there who don\'t believe in it, who don\'t
trust in it; as a matter of fact, feel that there\'s some negative
consequences to it. There\'s still many people that don\'t believe that
trauma hurts. So the flip side of that is what are the negatives, I
mean, that we should be looking for because this is not merely doing it
because we are well aware of the obstacles.

So could you talk briefly about what those obstacles are? Why do people
still fight us tooth and nail on screening and fight us tooth and nail
on trauma, to be quite frank with you?

MR. JONES: One response might be it\'s just in terms of culture. You
know, it\'s the culture of the way people think. You know, I don\'t know
the extent to which, you know, those individuals that you\'re talking
about have been educated to the impact of trauma and also the prevalence
and incidents of trauma in \-- you know, in those families, in those
communities, et cetera. So I think that\'s just \-- again, that\'s
psycho-educational piece, I think, is very important and again, the
incidents again, and the prevalence of that occurring in that community,
in that family, is essential.

DR. JAYCOX: Whenever we conduct a research project together, we have
many issues with trying to recruit families to participate and some of
the reactions are that, \"Well, my child doesn\'t need it so I\'m not
going to let you screen. I think everything is fine\". But also some
fear that there will be some intrusion to family business and concerns
about child abuse or domestic violence or other things going on at home,
immigration status, all sorts of things.

I think this could open up too many personal issues. And so I think
that\'s where we lose families in our research projects. And the
research projects put a lot of extra hurdles into consents that school
programs don\'t always have. But when we\'ve implemented just as a
program, we have much better success. If a school rolls out a program
that doesn\'t need a lot of extra forms, scary forms signed, it tends to
go better. But still, I think, it does sort of cross the line into
questions about home life or parents are concerned about that, that is
one of the barriers.

DR. MARANS: I think there\'s another \-- I\'m glad you raised it, Bill.
You know, the other element \-- I would agree with what\'s been said.
The other element is, you know, I think Lisa was sort of alluding to
this, you\'re going to do the research and then what? So there\'s the
whole exploitation issue which, I think, many communities feel
particularly from an academic side.

I find I have to explain away being part of Yale University. I have to
remind people that we\'re out 24/7. It doesn\'t matter what time of
night or day, et cetera, et cetera, and actually, as Russell says, when
we\'re in somebody\'s living room, we\'re welcomed, but if you come in
and say, \"We\'re going to do research,\" well, then it\'s just, you
know, Yale writing articles off the backs of people\'s suffering.

I think there\'s another element. America is just a wonderful country of
fads, isn\'t it? And so there have been some terrible egregious things
done in the name of trauma and help. After 9-11 Bill Moyers asked me to
take a phone \-- you know, do a phone thing with him on television. And
I got this call from a teacher. She was a second grade teacher in New
York City and this was just a week and a half after the attacks. And she
said, \"I was told by my principal that I was to have all of my second
graders draw pictures and talk about the attacks of 9-11.\" She said,
\"I felt awful doing this\".

There is an ersatz not based on the science that Marleen and Lisa were
talking about but a kind of a faddish, cultish, whatever knee jerk kind
of if you talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, everything is
going to be okay. And you know, one of the things \-- we talked a lot
about the backing away from trauma but there\'s a flip side and the flip
side is the psychological equivalent of ambulance chasers.

And you know, when you feel immobilized, when all of us feel
immobilized, what do we want to do, we want to get active. We want to
get busy. We want to do something. Well, sometimes that can be done in a
way that\'s intrusive and insensitive and unplanned and unregulated and
that has an enormous additional impact that puts people off and rightly
so.

And the media doesn\'t help when it\'s \-- you know, the camera and the
microphone in the face of people who are going to perserverate after
they\'ve been overwhelmed and trauma, trauma, trauma is being rammed
down people\'s throats. That\'s not a good way of reassigning and
helping people regain a sense of agency. So thinking about how we do
that is also part of a public health approach to this issue that Russell
keeps going back to and ways in which we contextualize people\'s
experiences in science, in subjective experience and bringing the two
together.

MR. JONES: You know, Bill, in response to your question, just real
quick, it\'s about relationships. And I think many times when traumatic
experiences occur, there aren\'t relationships on the ground. You know,
when people are traumatized, they\'re more likely to respond to people
that they know, people they have a track record with. And I think that
attempting to do screening without having relationships with individuals
or anything else, people are turned off.

We wrote a book chapter not long ago and it\'s talking about how to do
research and how to carry out services with people of color and
marginalized populations. And we talk about some very specific things
that mitigate against individuals wanting to become involved in what we
do, whether it\'s in the school or whether it\'s a research thing. We
talk about mistrust. We talk about access. We talk about culture and we
talk about linguistics. And the extent to which those things aren\'t
discussed within individuals, I think dictate specifically, the
likelihood of them not becoming involved in what we do. So it\'s just
\-- it\'s using our science to reach the unreachable so to speak, or to
reach the under-served if you will.

One of the things that we did down in New Orleans is did focus groups
with mental health professionals to find out their perception of the
storm and their perception of needs and their perception of the needs of
those that they were working with, developing those relationships. And
once that\'s done, in many instances, folks are much more open to allow
you to do what it is you would like to do in hopes of you know,
assisting them to deal with their grief, dealing with their stress and
other reactions.

So it\'s relationship, I think it\'s relationship building.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And we\'ll close with one question, Fred.

MR. ELLIS: Actually, it\'s kind of more of comment. I\'m glad Bill
brought that up. I\'m reminded of that movie, if you\'ve seen it,
\"Black Hawk Down\", where the Army guys are in their Humvees driving
through the urban area getting shot up and at one point the Humvee stops
and this old salty sergeant is all shot up and bleeding and he turns to
this private and says, \"Get in and drive\", and the private looks at
him and says, \"Sarg, I\'m shot\". And he said, \"We\'re all shot, get
in and drive\".

And that always has struck me, as Bill said or eluded to, you know,
almost the American culture. I think Steven was very insightful on some
of the resistance that you might face on some of this. Having said that,
you know, I think it is a very interesting \-- it\'s a fascinating area,
but I do think there is an element of \-- maybe it\'s the word
\"trauma\". People don\'t understand what in the world you\'re talking
about trauma, what do you mean trauma. \"We\'re all traumatized, we all
have things that happen in our life and don\'t send me a psychologist
who is going to analyze me all the way back to childhood where I had a
nightmare\". You know, that, I think, turns people off. But I think the
concept of what you all are talking about, I think, potentially has some
real value.

I guess, my point, it would really help if we had the empirical evidence
\-- evidence-based stuff to convince folks like me that, \"Hey, this is
worthwhile doing, it\'s worthwhile pursuing. You know, it makes a lot of
sense anticdotally, common sense-wise, and boy, it sure would be great
if I could see some real differences in some GPAs and some reduction in
suspensions and expulsions and behaviors and things like that\".

DR. MARANS: I think we all agree. The only thing I\'d underline is your
point about the over-use of the term \"trauma\" goes back to the issue
of public education. Trauma is not about being upset. It\'s about having
your brains scrambled and it\'s about not being able to function the way
you could before an event and then not being able to recover as quickly.

It\'s also important to note that not everybody who\'s traumatized
develops PTSD. And not everybody who\'s traumatized doesn\'t recover.
Most people do. The percentages that Marleen was referring to, these are
significant number. When we\'re talking about 20 percent of the
population she was describing, this is a significant number and it\'s
costing our country billions and billions and billions of dollars.

So in addition to the heartfelt sympathy that we feel for people who are
impaired by overwhelming, truly overwhelming mind and brain altering
experiences, we have to also get better at being able to do the work
that monetizes and demonstrates not only the symptomatic changes that
can occur but the cost savings that can occur as well, and in the
opposite direction, the cost incurred when we don\'t do what need to be
done.

CHAIRMAN LONG: The \-- and maybe we could engage this committee on this
one. I was thinking along the same lines as we talk about students and
we talk about attendance, think what it does for those that \-- in the
educational community, those that teach and those that are in the
classified force and some of our states, I would \-- in the larger
states, that would cost several billions of dollars a year just in
absenteeism from the reaction. I was also in closing thinking Marleen
you were talking about Israel and then we were talking about culture and
that\'s what really makes this an interesting subject and a very
difficult subject for the American public to tackle.

And with Israel, with pretty much one culture, and then this wonderful
crazy quilt we call America, with all of our cultures that are present,
and I do believe that culture plays a tremendous part. I was thinking
about in some of our communities with the \-- how the African American
community might take a different view than \-- and I would go clear to
the other \-- the Hmong community or the Native American community when
we start to talk about the same subject. So, it\'s very complex, very
important. We deeply, deeply appreciate your expertise. This has been
incredibly interesting, Steve and Marleen and Lisa, thank you so much.

(Applause)

CHAIRMAN LONG: We\'ll take about a 10-minute break and be right back
with our next panel.

(A brief recess was taken at 1:28 p.m.)

(On the record at 1:39 p.m.)

CHAIRMAN LONG: Okay, for our final panel of the day, and this panel will
speak to and we\'ll be asking questions about rural and urban schools
because this has come up in our discussion in prior meetings and that\'s
of course, why these experts are here.

And I would like to, starting on my left, Liz Redmon, Federal Projects
Director for McNairy County Schools in Tennessee, welcome. And next to
Liz is Doug Swanson, Former Federal Projects Director for Gage County
Schools, Nebraska, Doug, welcome. And next to Doug is Melissa Thompson,
Project Director for Garfield-Heights Public Schools in Cleveland, Ohio,
Melissa, welcome. And next is, Lynn Krehbiel-Breneman, Project Director
for Minneapolis Public Schools in Minnesota, is that good, okay?

If you\'re looking at this list, there was a different spelling but I
checked to see and I got the right spelling and everything. If I
remember right, Lynn, you don\'t have to answer this, just recently, I
think the Hawk-Eyes beat the Gophers in basketball. Okay. We will start
with Liz and then go to Doug, Melissa and Lynn and then as you know,
because you folks were sitting in the audience, we\'ll have a dialogue.
So thank you all for being here, and Liz.

MS. REDMON: Thank you. Distinguished members of the Advisory Committee,
thank you for giving me the opportunity to give you glimpse of what a
rural school system looks like, what funding streams we raised to meet
the needs of our students, what prevention and intervention programs and
activities we use, statistics for the programs, our academic achievement
and our needs for continuing to meet the needs of our students and our
community.

Let\'s being by looking at \-- taking a demographic look. McNairy County
is a rural county in southwest Tennessee with a population of 25,285. We
border Mississippi. The per capita income is \$19,393.00 and the median
household income is \$30,154.00. Our school system has 3,997 students in
kindergarten through 12^th^ grade and then we have with a 53.6 percent
being economically disadvantaged. We also have 125 pre-K students all of
whom are economically disadvantaged. Our ethnicity percentages are 87.05
White, 11.78 percent African American and 1.17 percent Hispanic.

As a small rural system, we braid various funding stream dollars to
accomplish the federal mandates, the state mandates and the needs of our
students. I know from looking at your transcripts on the web that
you\'ve already talked about in prior meetings about the state grant
portion of Safe and Drug Free Schools and also the discretionary funds.
When I first began working with Safe and Drug Free Programs back in
1987, our basic grant was about 45,000.

As you can see on the PowerPoint slide, it has dropped to \$20,315.00
for this year. This is the only pool of money for drug prevention and
character counts for the regular school program. The 21^st^ Century
Learning Center grant is the source of funding for our after school
program which serves 1300 students each year. Providing students with
additional time and the assistance of certified and trained staff to
actively engage students in meaningful, remedial and enrichment
activities in a safe, secure environment addresses a multitude of
academic, wellness, social and emotional needs. And if you remember in
our prior, he said it even builds resilience.

Title VI is Rural School Money and we have received this for two years
now, but we\'re not assured of this. When I chased it all the way back,
when we didn\'t get it one year, I found out it was based on kind of an
elusive type formula that didn\'t make a lot of sense but we\'re proud
that we have it. This provides funds for technology, for training for
teachers, and also a social worker to assist with our Student Assistance
Program.

The Youth Violence and Drug Prevention Grant is a competitive grant and
it has been used to develop student assistance program which is a
combined effort of administrators, counselors, educators and parents to
identify and provide assistance to students who are experiencing
difficulty coping with the school and/or home environment.

And one of the things we\'re really proud of and I\'ve listened to a lot
of the discussion today is we are now having a lot of parents contact
the school and say, \"I\'d like to refer my son or daughter because they
are experiencing some difficulty or they\'ve had some kind of trauma\".
And when you get to where the parents call the school to ask for help,
you know you must be doing something right.

This is a three- year grant and it has allowed us to train staff, hire a
social worker, and implement the program. And I\'ll explain this program
a little bit more and its impact. This year in October we were awarded
two Learn and Serve Grants to further meet the needs of more drug
awareness and education but both of these are in our after school
program. The LAB, which is the Learning Alternative Behavior grant is a
state grant but if you\'ll notice in each of these funding streams that
we braid, the funding is declining and yet we are expected to continue
to meet increased teacher salaries, increased other cost and I\'m
wondering when that\'s going to kind of hit at a crossroads and we
forget to \-- we\'re not as effective as we once were.

I know it\'s the responsibility of the local system to absorb more and
more but there\'s only so much you can when it\'s a very rural system
with very limited industry or business base and a very limited tax base.
What I want you to see on the next slide are the prevention and
intervention programs and activities that we\'ve been able to implement
because we took the basic state Safe and Drug Free Grant and we used it
to identify needs and then to develop strategies and programs to meet
the expectations and to implement those programs.

The first four are funded with Title IV Safe and Drug Free funds. As we
evaluated the effectiveness of what we were doing, we realized that our
efforts were not enough. Years ago someone said when you start drug
prevention programs, you need to have in place some intervention
programs because you will flush out programs. The search began to
identify new funding streams to accomplish these needs as they arose
because when we started, we started purely as prevention.

The McNairy County Drug Alliance, ours is probably one of the oldest
ones in the state and it\'s been ongoing and meeting quarterly to
address the needs. When they began working with us, they looked at what
we needed and what could we do to address it, and DARE was an outgrowth
of these discussions. The Selmar (phonetic)Police Department and the
McNairy County Sheriff\'s Department sent officers to be trained to
DARE. No school funds, no grant funds, they took it upon themselves.
While DARE has not proved effective in a lot of places, it has in our
county because these are the officers that they see in the community.
These are the officers that they work with and they have built that
relationship that you\'re talking about. In fact, one of our officers
told me just recently that one of the young men that had just gone
through DARE he saw him out late at night one Friday night and it was
about 12:30. And now this is in 5^th^ and 6^th^ grade and he knew he
shouldn\'t have been out.

He asked him, called him by name, again, the relationship, called him by
name and he said, \"Is this where you need to be\"? The young man looked
at him and said, \"No, sir\". And he said, \"Then don\'t you think
you\'d better get where you need to be?\" And in a rural area you can do
that, but again, it\'s the relationships.

Together partnerships were forged and new directions were taken where we
were going and what we needed to do. The need for an after school
program came next. We have probably 80 percent of our parents work. They
needed something after school. We also knew that we needed extended time
for students because a lot of times, they just need more time or it
needs to be presented in a different way. We were fortunate enough to be
one of the last cohorts for the 21^st^ Century Learning Center Grants
from the Federal Government.

That started out at 840,000 and now we\'re funding at 540 through a
state grant, so we try to make the best of everything we have. The LAB
came about the same time because we had students that couldn\'t function
in the regular classroom. The Student Assistance Program was implemented
with a Youth Violence and Drug Prevention grant to be the early
identification, referral and counseling vehicle. The first year we
trained four teens and hired one social worker who served 77 students.
Evaluation showed us that one social worker for eight schools was not
enough. The next year we received Title VI funds and we added another
social worker.

This slide shows that together they served 160 students last year. Now,
look at this; this year, August to December, again because the program
is becoming more widely known, parents are now referring their children
because they begin to have these problems at home. In this first
semester this year, they\'ve already served 141 students.

All of these programs have been prevention and intervention efforts to
address the underlying needs of students so that with assistance they
would be able to focus on the business of getting a quality education.
If the kids have underlying problems, they cannot focus. The statistics
on this slide show that we are making progress but we still have work to
do.

This shows the discipline hearing authority and also our LAB and what
we\'re trying to do. What is the payoff of running these various funding
streams to meet our student needs? The academic achievement reported on
our annual report card published by the state shows our progress. You
can see the academic gains that have been made in 2005 and 2006. Our
system improved in every area in grades 3 through 8 and we made our
wonderful AYP, Annual Yearly Progress under No Child Left Behind.

Our percent proficient and advanced is above the state average and above
the state target. Our graduation rate is 90 percent. Have we made it?
No, we\'re still striving for the NCLB goal of 100 percent. What has
helped us is being held accountable, being able to have basic ground
amounts and then being able to access various funding streams to address
the identified needs.

Now, in looking at this slide, you\'ll see that we didn\'t \-- it just
didn\'t happen overnight and it was a combination of the intervention,
it was a combination of the after-school funds. It was a combination of
everything and everybody working together. There is no silver bullet in
the school business and each child is very, very different.

Now, what\'s still needed? In looking at our community, we know that we
need more staff to follow through with what we have implemented. In my
school system, I do all the federal projects; I, II, IV, V and VI. I
also supervise the after school grant which serves 1300 schools, the
youth violence grant, and in between work with community partners and
also write grants. Being forced to wear the multiple hats in a small
system is rather grueling. And over time, overall effectiveness slips.
To be effective we must inspect what we expect. I\'ve told them in our
system that we are on our third year of our state funding for our 21^st^
Century and that we\'ve been told if we make our gains, if we do what we
say we\'re doing and do it effectively, we will get another year of
funding.

So I said, you know, people can drop in any time and the schedule is
posted. And what is posted is what\'s supposed to be going on. And it\'s
supposed to be effective. Well, recently we had some people come to
visit from another school system and they all went into shock. We\'re
doing it, we\'re okay, we\'re on track, we\'re on track.

And you see, again, you must be able to inspect what you expect and you
must be held accountable and that\'s what it\'s all about. What has
helped us is being held accountable but then being able to use that
basic grant as a source of identifying needs and then being able to
access those additional streams. Our community has also identified four
areas that must be addressed. We have a new juvenile judge who is
working with us and interestingly enough, on his truancy cases that come
before him, he is now sentencing parents to community service in the
schools and they are doing janitorial work, which is rather interesting.
Not many parents want to do that so maybe they will get their kids up
and get them to school.

Some of the things that he mentioned and some of the things that we want
to work on in our system are first of all juvenile justice software. Any
time you seek grants, you must what your basic needs are and then you
must have a plan. Well, in his probation office, he has an 82-year old
and 80-year old that have been working and they have not wanted to use
computers. So therefore, they have passed up all the money available for
juvenile justice software. So if any of you know where we might access
some money for juvenile justice software to track and summarize the
data, please let me know.

We must have increased parent involvement at the prevention level. You
know, when you\'re doing prevention activities and we usually have \--
we have two what we call family fun nights a year; one in the fall and
one in the spring, and we have anywhere from 400 to \-- well, from 100
to 400 parents that come. We feed them. We have programs that share what
we\'re doing and we also try to listen to what they have to say.

But at this level, a lot of times it\'s the parents that are already
supportive of the school. What we\'ve got to have is also required
parental involvement at the intervention level. When the juvenile judge
met with us, he said, \"Can you mandate parents be involved\"? And I
said, \"Yes, sir, we can\". We have to have parent permission in order
to test, assess or work with children individually.

However, the problem is that parents can refuse service and if you\'ll
remember on the slide we had some that it showed parents\' refusal of
service. We\'ve been trying to address that, weren\'t quite sure how,
and he said, \"I\'ll tell you how you can do it\". He said, \"Give them
a choice\". Okay, I like choice, we can deal with that. \"But we\'re
offering them services, what else can we do?\" And he said, \"You can
give them the choice of taking advantage of the services you\'re
offering or if the situation doesn\'t improve, whether it\'s truancy or
misbehavior, you can tell them that if it doesn\'t improve, that you
will file a petition with the juvenile court\". He said, \"But I hope
you\'ll use a little common sense and not overrun my court\". So we\'re
going to try that. Another thing that we do not have in McNairy County,
being in West Tennessee almost all treatment dollars, almost all
intervention dollars as far as juvenile justice and so forth, goes to
Jackson or Memphis. So we really need a juvenile detention center, some
place where he can at least put these kids because by the time they come
through his court, there\'s not a lot that they can do. Working
together, we can achieve these goals but what we need is continued
funding of current programs and activities, but then we need to be able
to access specialized funding. So we are a big believer in the basic
grant fund, grant program, but we also know that that can help to
identify our needs, that can help us begin to plan certain activities
and programs, but then we like being able to apply for discretionary
grants and then also we need to look for some specialized funding to
address the needs.

When we evaluate in each year we evaluate the programs, we have advisory
council meetings. One of the things that we\'re very careful to do is to
not include just parents and just community people who believe in what
we\'re doing but to also include those parents who are nay sayers, those
ones that probably have given us the most grief, because by including
them, we show them that their opinions are important to us and believe
it or not, some of the best ideas have come from them because find out
that maybe they haven\'t had good school experiences.

They don\'t feel welcome and we\'ve been able to address some of the
very issues that have kept parents from participating in what we do.
Overall, our goal is truly no child left behind and we can do this if we
realize that all bad behavior is not the same. It\'s caused for
different reasons and until we find out what\'s going on, we cannot
address the needs of that child. Our system wide slogan is building the
future one child at a time and as long as we truly take that to heart
and we look at the needs of one child at a time in order to build the
future one child at a time, we will be able to be successful.

This is my information. If you have any questions or want to know about
any of the other programs, I\'ll be glad during the question time to
answer that. Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Elizabeth. And next, we\'ll turn to
Doug. Doug.

MR. SWANSON: Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation to
participate today. I anticipate that many of you have worked with rural
settings, directly or indirectly in your careers and that some of you
may have not. So what I\'m going to do is give you a little bit of a
tour of what rural Nebraska and rural states like Nebraska are like.
I\'m going to give you some of the views from rural America, talk about
some of the general issues. I\'m not going to talk just specifically
about what\'s on in our grant programs, but I\'m going to talk about
some of the general issues going on with rural schools and communities,
some of the school safety concerns in rural communities, some of the
alcohol and drug issues and then talk a little bit about what\'s working
and what could be done better. I will try to do that in the 20 minutes
allotted and first I just wanted to explain, I am currently from the
University of Nebraska, Lincoln Extension Program, Land-Grant
University. I work with the 4H Youth Development Program, so I have
contacts in all 93 mostly rural counties in our big state. Our state
takes eight hours to drive across one way and four hours the other way.

I know there\'s bigger states than ours but it is a large state. And so
I tried to take the perspective of many parts of our state, not just
Gage County. I used to be in a role similar to yours working with five
local public school districts, four of the very rural in Gage County,
Nebraska and that\'s how I got invited here because we\'ve worked with
several federal grant programs.

So now, it\'s time for a little break. Why don\'t you jump in my van
with me and we\'re going to go to Adams. Adams, Nebraska sits about 30
miles south of Lincoln. Lincoln has about 225,000 so the residents of
Adams have a lot more access to things that a population center has than
many rural towns do. However, it\'s still 30 miles away. Adams, as you
can see, is small town. Let me pull my slides out here so I can see what
you\'re seeing.

I want to \-- the first place we should probably go is to the city hall.
And this isn\'t 40 years ago. These pictures were taken Saturday. As you
can see, the city hall might have limited hours so the best way to reach
them is just call them. Every good town has a library. This is the
library. It\'s been one of our partners in many of our programs in the
county. It\'s a little difficult to access partners sometimes because
they have no phone line, they have no computer access. A 75-year old
volunteer who staffs this from 1:30 to 4:30 two days a week, has a phone
at home but no answering machine. So my project assistant has actually
driven the 30 miles to Adams to set up programs with her on the hours
that she knows she\'s available. And if you\'re going to be doing school
projects and you need a library, it\'s a nice little library but as you
can see, it\'s limited hours, you have to plan ahead.

As we go through Adams, this is Main Street, the business district.
Here\'s the primary businesses. There\'s a bank, that\'s the big
building. We\'ve got the little grocery store in the middle and a
restaurant on the right. That\'s pretty much the businesses. They\'re
pretty lucky. There\'s a lot of towns this size that don\'t have those
three things.

As you can see in the background, we\'re in the middle of farming
country and this is the staple of the community, one of the reasons the
community exists is the grain elevator. It is actually, this town is
building a new multi-million dollars ethanol development facility. And
there\'s one other staple that every little town needs is the funeral
home. And then there\'s the school. It\'s one building, K through 12.
They are actually expanding and building onto the building because like
I said, they\'re only 30 miles outside of Lincoln and they\'re starting
to get acreages that people live south of Lincoln and they\'re starting
to grow a little bit.

So this town has lots of aspirations but on our way out of town I just
want you to see, little towns have lots of aspirations. They\'re trying
to raise \$250,000.00 for their community center but you can see
they\'re thermometer is stuck at the bottom as far as raising funds for
their new community center and that their signs is tentative that
they\'ll do this if we can. So now we\'re back to the meeting.

I just wanted to set some context to what rural Nebraska is like. Hope
you enjoyed your tour. Tips are welcome. Adams has 489 people. As I was
explaining to you, the size of Nebraska, as you can see almost 500 of
Nebraska\'s 600 towns are less than 1,000 people. I live in Beatrice
which is about 30 miles south of Adams. We have 13,000 people and we\'re
a major population area. We\'re the 11^th^ largest city in Nebraska. We
have the big new Walmart. We \-- people come for groceries from miles
around in the northern Kansas, everything. We\'re the place to be.
Nebraska has 1.7 million people and then I didn\'t put a map of this up
but I also talked to the panhandle a lot preparing for this on Friday.
The panhandle is a lot more remote because these small towns don\'t have
Lincoln 30 miles away from them.

There are 11 counties in the panhandle of Nebraska, if you\'ve ever seen
that portion and there are 90,000 people in those 11 counties. They have
a lot of challenges and I\'ve included their challenges in my
presentation today.

Just to give you a brief picture of the school systems in Nebraska.
Adams actually falls in the I believe, the 20 \-- I think they\'re just
moving up into the 42 to 79 per class. And this is not just elementary
centers, this is K through 12 average of class sizes in Nebraska school
systems. One of the reasons there has been some legislation in Nebraska
of eliminating the districts that aren\'t K-12 and one of the real
issues is geography because as I explained these small towns aren\'t
close to larger places and so this is the school sizes. And we can talk
about these numbers during discussion but I just wanted to give you a
picture for number of kids per like 8^th^ grade or 10^th^ grade or
whatever.

I\'ve already mentioned this but, depending upon where you\'re located,
a town from 2500 to 20,000 is considered a major business center. I\'m
not just talking about Nebraska. I\'m talking about Wyoming and North
Dakota and South Dakota and some of the places you guys come from. This
isn\'t news to you. Many times schools is the only facility available
for public gatherings, so that just draws dynamics to how the school is
involved in the community.

And unlike some of the things we heard in the last panel where we saw
that map of number of unsolved murders, in these communities, yeah,
things happen but not very often and so there\'s a safe feeling.
There\'s a lack of acknowledgment of problems. It\'s \-- the schools \--
when something happens, they\'ve been trained but they\'re not used to
it. They\'re a little softer. They\'re not as hardened on some of these
things.

So now I just want to move onto the general rural issues that I gathered
and one of the problems is that there\'s a lack of knowledge of
services. We found in gathering a directory of services in Gage County
which has about 20,000 people, that we have over 140 services that
either exist or reach out in or outside of the county, reach out to our
citizens but people don\'t know what they do. They don\'t know that they
exist. They don\'t know \-- just because it\'s named this an agency in
rural America might do 10 things and you don\'t know because they have
this name that they also do the thing that relates to your problem.

There\'s a huge stigma about receiving help, especially in the mental
health area but in other areas as well. The feeling is they want to stay
underground. They want to go to another community for help, even if it
means driving three hours because they figure nobody else needs help.
They figure that they\'re the only ones, but in all reality, in the
small town everybody knows they need help. And many of them want them to
get help and most of them would help them in any way they can but it
doesn\'t eliminate \-- even though they\'re caring and understanding and
want them to get help, it doesn\'t eliminate the big problem and that is
everybody knows everybody and even though they\'re helping and caring,
they\'re still going to talk about it. They\'re going to talk about
their problem, their problem is going to be public knowledge and that\'s
what people are afraid of.

So as we move on down that slide, many times, even though you would
think this wouldn\'t be the case, we\'re finding the schools isolate
themselves from the rest of the community. They kind of have the same
issue, \"We don\'t want to open our doors and let them know what our
problems are.\" But really these issues related to mental health and
alcohol and safety, they\'re community issues, not school issues. It\'s
just schools are where we can get to the kids sometimes.

One of the things and this was really like some things I heard in the
last panel, is that support for teachers are necessary. Some of the
traumas we were talking about earlier this afternoon were based on
one-time really awful experiences but you were also talking about
cumulative things. And we have, for example, one of our small rural
schools is kind of becoming a drug culture, lots of family structure
falling apart, lots of poverty, no transportation and they\'re not
dealing with one trauma event that happened but these kids are dealing
with multiple trauma events, and the teachers, we set up a teachers\'
support group from our therapist and they were knocking down the doors
to come in. We need to provide mental health support even when there\'s
not an obvious trauma for our teachers.

Let\'s see. One of the things that I don\'t want to skip over is the
reality of getting training for staff when you want to train them in
working with trauma, train them in crisis teams, train them in new
curriculum, train them in whatever. In many parts of our states people
who can teach, are teaching. There are no substitutes available. So
therefore, you can\'t pull a team of teachers out to train them because
there\'s nobody to sub for them.

Our state is working on some initiatives to improve that situation but
this was particularly evident in the panhandle. They just told me, \"We
can\'t pull teachers out to train them because there would be nobody
with the kids\". Therapists are overloaded. There are therapists around.
It takes \-- and this is probably the same in the urban area, though.
You refer them, it will take at least three weeks to get an appointment.
I don\'t think that\'s probably a lot different. Because of all the
issues the schools are dealing with, there sometimes is a lack of a
focus on education in the schools because there\'s so much other stuff
they have to deal with. And we know that\'s important because if the kid
is not ready to learn, they can\'t learn anyway so you have to undo or
create an atmosphere where the kids are ready to learn but they\'re
dealing with so many things other than education. Communications is a
challenge especially out in the western half of our state. A lot of
people have internet but dial-up and there\'s other kinds of issues
related to communications as well.

The untreated generational problems, I wanted to mention, I had a
therapist \-- and maybe this is a description you\'ve heard before, but
we put some therapists in the schools and they were doing mental health
for the kids with parental involvement and that\'s certainly the way to
go. It helps break down the stigma. It helps with transportation issues
which we have. It helps with lots of different things but one of the
problems the therapists were finding is they described it to me as an
onion.

They said, \"When we started to unpeel the layer with the kid, we found
out it really had to do \-- the layer was \-- under the layer was
another layer of the onion which was parent\'s problems, which we talked
about before. And you just kept on peeling and it was generational
because there hasn\'t been mental health services available in these
towns, they haven\'t been able or willing to drive to Lincoln. They have
things that are effecting them that are way deeper and you just keep
unpeeling and unpeeling and \-- am I a slide off? Thank you. I\'ve gone
too far? Is somebody else doing that? Back up one more, one more. It\'s
hard when you can\'t see it, so I appreciate that.

Okay, just see if there\'s anything else left on that slide. I think I
got about five minutes left. Support for teachers is important. Lack of
education. Okay. So the schools are left to deal with lots and lots of
problems. So the important part is community partners but part of the
challenge we have there is we have the same people doing everything.
They\'re at every meeting, they\'re at every event. They\'re at
everything because \-- not because we don\'t have enough partners. It\'s
just that not everybody is involved. We\'re not engaging the business
community. We\'re not engaging the faith community. We\'re not engaging
all the people that need to be engaged and through our grant\'s
involvement we\'ve done a really good job of we actually tore apart
three groups that call themselves coalitions and merged them into one
coalition. And that took a lot of work but it really made a difference
and I think Michael can share some of the impact that we\'ve had in
doing that. That\'s one of the things that we\'ve been really successful
in.

One of the other issues in the rural communities is because of lack of
funding, lack of staff, lack of whatever, they tend to create their own
programs instead of using the evidence-based programs like Step 1 or
hundred of other things. And I think they may be missing out on some
opportunities by not buying into the evidence based programs. And
there\'s lots of reasons for that.

I\'ll move quickly through some of the next slides but bullying,
physical and mental intimidation between kids is an issue that we have.
One of the problems in creating crisis teams and other kinds of \-- we
have skip teams, we have student assistant teams, is it seems that the
person who gets chosen for those teams is the new person, the new staff
member, because they don\'t have enough on their plate yet or they
don\'t have as much on their plate yet, but the right person with the
right personality, with the right knowledge, with the right experience
isn\'t on the team. So that\'s a problem.

We certainly have the never happen here syndrome. We\'re not hardened by
daily violence in the area. The ability to comply to some things because
of the size of staff is an issue. I mean, I think we\'re doing a good
job of complying but it is an issue. And one of the things that is
really happening in partnerships with our law enforcement is law
enforcement turnover in small communities is high because it\'s low pay,
it\'s entry level positions. They have no connections to the community
so they move on. And one of the things that we did in our grant was
instead of training a team of officers, we took a couple of higher level
officers that we knew weren\'t going anywhere and we trained them to be
trainers and now they are training \-- this particular training was how
to deal with an active shooter in the school. And now those two officers
are training everybody as they come and go, and it\'s much better to do
it that way than to continually lose people that went to this major big
time training.

I already moved on \-- there\'s a button down here I didn\'t know and
that\'s what\'s doing it. I\'ll get my finger off of that.

Our police chief used to work in Omaha, which is with suburbs
three-quarters of a million people, most of our 1.7 million. Now he\'s
the police chief in this town of 13,000 and he says \-- although
everybody says this, he sees a huge difference in the that\'s the way
it\'s done here when it comes to alcohol and drugs. He says parents
condone it a lot more in rural than in city. He says there three groups
of people. There\'s a group of people who, like us, they\'re really
against alcohol use among young people and then there\'s the group that
don\'t care at all, and then they are the most danger group are the ones
that give it lip service but go buy it anyway. And that\'s the largest
group in his opinion.

The bar is the only community gathering spot in many towns like Adams,
so kids from day one see alcohol being an important part of every
activity in the community. Family structure is dropping. Drug culture is
moving to the community. We\'ve got rental houses that have meth residue
and hotel rooms with meth residue. We\'ve got meth labs being made in
backyard. We\'ve got all those issues and just the issue of, \"I
partied, I made it, so will my kid\", and I don\'t think that\'s unique
to rural.

What\'s working, and I\'ll try to wrap up here real quickly, is the
awareness and ownership of issues is increased through coalition
activity through doing things that are data driven, taking surveys and
finding out what\'s really happening, that\'s something we\'re getting
much better at in Nebraska. The grants that are available, all of the
ones are really making a difference in communities and the fact that
most of them are now requiring coalitions to give to funding is
outstanding. You\'re creating relationships that weren\'t being willing
to be created before and it\'s important.

The trend to putting mental health support in schools is important.
Schools are starting to do a little bit of that on their own, even if
they don\'t get a grant. Putting social workers in school helps teachers
to have time to teach and it helps with the stigma of the mental health
issue.

Other things, the connections being made, coalitions, safety plans,
crisis teams, they wouldn\'t happen without the money and the
encouragement to do that. Meth laws seem to be helping a lot and that\'s
where the changes of not being available to buy the things that you make
meth labs with. Data collection is huge and we have an abundance of
caring, dedicated people who continue to challenge themselves and get
better.

Lastly, some of the challenges and it\'s not to say that people don\'t
understand the need for all the things behind No Child Left Behind but
in small staffs, there\'s some real challenges and it adds stresses in
all the requirements for the testings and standards and the other types
of things. People aren\'t against it, they just \-- it just adds one
more thing.

One of the problems we had is that grants come, they approve solutions
and then school boards and communities don\'t get behind continuing and
sustaining the efforts and the last thing is we have schools who turn
down opportunities because of the fear of looking bad if other people
get into their system. Sustainability is important. Community issues,
community owning the issues, not blaming it on the school is important,
having youth leadership, that\'s one area we\'ve got to get better at,
getting youth involved in these processes.

I did include a handout that I won\'t spend time on now but I would
encourage you to look at it. I will just briefly explain that the
handout is statistics of the four most rural schools in Gage County
related to risk behavior compared to the statistics statewide in
Nebraska including the urban and you will see that we\'re a lot higher
on things like drinking and driving, carrying a gun, reporting poor
family management and number one, is we are huge compared to the larger
towns on our kids believe their parents\' attitudes favor drug and
alcohol use.

These are interesting numbers. They\'re relative to other small
communities and we\'ll be glad to talk about them in discussion. Time
goes fast. I appreciate your attention.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you so much, Doug. And next we\'ll turn to Melissa,
Melissa Thompson.

MS. THOMPSON: Good afternoon. I\'m going to actually step up for a
moment and give you some additional materials that I\'ve prepared for
you today. I do have more if you run out. I\'m not exactly sure which
number it is in your binder; however, I have prepared an outline for you
to follow along with my remarks this afternoon. There is no PowerPoint
but rather the materials in front of you and the outline.

Good afternoon to you again, invited guests and federal project officers
that are in the room. On behalf of the Garfield Heights City Schools,
Board of Education, Dr. Jeanne Sternad, Superintendent of Schools and
the phenomenal staff of the Center for Learning Support Services, I am
proud to lead. It is an honor and privilege to participate in this panel
to consider the unique needs of rural and urban schools and to discuss
what can be done to better meet those needs.

I am also pleased to join my fellow panelists, Liz, Doug and Lynne, who
I\'ve enjoyed meeting and getting to know today and when the Fiesta Bowl
results were not favorable for this Ohio State University graduate, I am
honored still to represent the great State of Ohio and I am still proud
to be a Buckeye.

One of 13 first ring school districts in Cuyahoga County, there are
unique challenges confronting Garfield Heights City Schools. First ring,
also known as inner ring, are communities in Cuyahoga County that border
Cleveland and are marked by significant student mobility, racial and
economic diversity and cultures of violence. To illustrate these
challenges, please consider the following. In December 2006 enrollment
in Garfield Heights City Schools was 4,108 students.

New enrollment data beginning in July 2006 through December Garfield
Heights City Schools enrolled 782 students, withdrew 477 students and
changed the address of 149 students within the District. The great
majority of new students enrolled in Garfield Heights City Schools move
in from Cleveland or from other first ring or inner ring communities. In
2002/2003 school year, when we first submitted our Safe Schools/Healthy
Students Federal Grant Application, the racial demographics in Garfield
Heights City Schools was the following; 78 percent Caucasian, 16.9
percent African American, 2.5 percent multi-racial, 1.4 percent Asian,
1.1 percent Hispanic and .1 percent American Indian.

As of December 2006, our students are; 57.9 percent Caucasian, 34.8
percent African American, 3.9 percent multi-racial, 1.9 percent Asian,
1.5 percent Hispanic and 2 students are American Indian. According to
2000 census, of the near 80,000 students in the 13 first ring school
districts in Cuyahoga County, 17 percent are living in poverty. The
2005/2006 state report card for Garfield Heights City Schools indicated
that 38.1 percent of our students were considered economically
disadvantaged. This was based on enrollment of over 3800 students.

Our current enrollment has grown to over 4,000 students, most of whom
are economically disadvantaged. It is reasonable to assume that this
percentage has increased. The culture and violent and increased
awareness of internal and external threats are experienced in Garfield
Heights City Schools like many other school districts around the
country. We are noticing an increase in aggressive behaviors and a
decrease in proud in solving skills among our students. Mental health
and substance abuse prevention and intervention are part of our daily
routine. Social skills groups, anger management classes and a
district-wide theme of character education has become the way Garfield
Heights City Schools does education. At a survey conducted in December
of 2006, parents indicated their top priority is keeping our schools
safe and our students healthy. This was more important to them than
curriculum and instruction. So what has been done in the Garfield
Heights City Schools to meet the unique needs of our students? The
Garfield Heights City Schools, as part of the Garfield Heights Learning
Community, demonstrates basic values that meet the needs of the heart
with clear academic goals applying to all children in appropriate
facilities and where all community members work together.

Meeting the needs of the heart to make conditions right for learning is
our message. The Center for Learning Support Services is the central
office department largely responsible for the programs and services in
the district and community that promote safe schools and healthy
students and families. There are four primary programs and initiatives
within the Center for Learning Support Services. They are, Safe
Schools/Healthy Students, the Garfield Heights Youth, Family and Teen
Services Program, affectionately known as GYFTS, the Alternative
Juvenile Program, and the Garfield Heights Family to Family System of
Care. A brief fact sheet and more detailed brochure are included is the
folder that I provided.

In 2003 we were fortunate to be the recipient of the Safe
Schools/Healthy Students Grant. Now in our fourth year no cost extension
period, we are completing the activities that never would have been
possible without this funding. As a result of this grant, we became
aware of safety concerns in and around our district and more
importantly, we were able to respond. There are electronic security
doors at each of our five school buildings. There are large letters
above each exterior door on every school building.

District staff now display photo identification cards and upon entering
a school building in Garfield Heights City Schools visitors now receive
a red visitor identification badge. Safety plans are in place
district-wide and electronic floor plans will soon be filed with the
Garfield Heights Fire and Police Departments. Safe Schools/Healthy
Students funding strengthen our collaboration with these local
responders and the emergency response and crisis management grant
awarded in October of 2006 will continue our work together.

This school year, with our emergency responders, we will participate in
tabletop exercises, functional drills and work on a comprehensive
pandemic plan and I also want to note that our non-publics, based on
discussion this morning, are involved in that process and are included
in our planning efforts. Of the 12 staff within the Center for Learning
Support Services, four are paid exclusively from Safe School/Healthy
Students. They are directly responsible for keeping our students safe
and healthy.

Included in the GYFTS program are the social workers providing the group
counseling, violence prevention and character education programming to
our students in grades pre-K to 12. They also make the mental health and
substance abuse treatment referrals for students requiring this level of
intervention. The staff member coordinating the alternative juvenile
program interrupts the violence in the school district and community by
providing services directly to those students committing misdemeanor or
status offenses, including assaults and drug abuse.

The Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court provides partial funding to support
this program. Together these four grant paid staff members, the Safe
Schools/Healthy Students Grant paid staff members, are responsible for
the 255 referrals made to community based mental health and chemical
dependent treatment agencies receiving Safe Schools/Healthy Students
funding.

Finally, the Garfield Heights Family to Family System of Care became
part of the Center for Learning Support Services to work with children,
teens, birth parents, relative and kinship care givers, grandparents,
foster families and adoptive families actively involved or at risk of
involvement with the Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family
Services. In this program, we provide clothing and food, referrals for
counseling, and resources to secure housing including the payment of
security deposits and utilities.

Funding for this program is provided by the Cuyahoga County Board of
Commissioners. In addition to these programs, there\'s a host of
partnerships and projects managed through the Center for Learning
Support Services. As a central office administrator in the Garfield
Heights City Schools and Director of the Center for Learning Support
Services, and I\'ll add Project Director for the Emergency Response
Crisis Management Grant, and Project Director for the Safe
Schools/Healthy Students grant, I believe we are traveling along a
positive path to keep our schools safe and our students healthy.
However, we are at a crossroads in our journey and it raises the
question, what can be done to better meet the needs of our students?
While our commitment to meet the needs of the heart to make conditions
right for learning began over 14 years ago when Dr. Sternad, our
Superintendent, wrote and submitted the first grant to local foundations
to begin the work in our learning community, it has been grant funding
and Title IV, Safe and Drug Free Schools funding that has allowed us to
truly realize our vision. Based on the work in Garfield Heights City
Schools, funding from the US Department of Education to prevent youth
drug use and violence and focus on emergency response and crisis
planning, has been integral to our success.

In Garfield Heights City Schools our crossroad is the challenge of
knowing that the road leading to these programs and services not only
meet the needs of the heart to make conditions right for learning but
also keep our schools safe and our students healthy. The other road is
that of school funding in a state where levies are difficult to pass
particularly in first ring communities experiencing increased rates of
student mobility and poverty. And Garfield Heights City Schools Safe
Schools/Healthy Students funding will soon end and Emergency Response
and Crisis Management Funding is not for personnel.

Title IV funding supports our safe school help line and allows the
purchase of prevention materials and direct services for students;
however, these funds are also limited. Search Institute research has
found that the 40 developmental assets are powerful influences on
adolescent behavior, both protecting young people from many different
problem behaviors and promoting positive attitudes and behaviors.

The staff of the Center for Learning Support Services reflects and
reinforces these assets and more importantly, it creates a caring school
climate to develop these assets in our students. Before I close, please
allow me to share a brief story about Jay.

I began my career in Garfield Heights City Schools as a case manager in
the GYFTS program and my office was located in our middle school. Jay,
at the time, a sixth grade student, was my first referral. His risk
factors were high and his perceptive factors low but for me Jay was not
a risk, he was at promise. His journey was difficult and sometimes
plagued by destructive behaviors, including substance abuse.

Slowly but surely and at times very slowly he persevered. With his
parent\'s support, he willing became the poster child for turning risk
factors into protective factors. He traveled around the State of Ohio
with me sharing his story with school and community leaders in many
venues. He won the hearts of many due to his honest feedback and at
times harsh judgments of the self-righteous attempts of educators and
youth serving professionals to help youth. I was so proud and I have to
share, I was so proud to take this picture with Jay at is graduation
last year in June. I\'ll make sure that you\'ll get an opportunity to
see closer.

Last week Jay, now a sergeant in the United States Army, called to let
me know he was home from Iraq. On Friday, I took him to lunch and he
shared his many accomplishments and of course, in Jay style, shared his
opinions on education, politics and life at 20 years of age. I told him
how proud I am of him. When I mentioned to him my visit with you today,
he said, \"I\'m proud of you, too, Ms. Thompson.\" So with Jay in mind,
again, I ask, what can be done to better meet the needs of our students?
Continue to support school districts like the Garfield Heights City
Schools in achieving the mission of meeting the needs of the heart to
make conditions right for learning where schools are safe and students
are healthy and at risk students are at promise. Thank you for your time
and attention. I appreciate this. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank
you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Melissa, we\'re all proud of that you do, too. Lynne,
you\'re next.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Good afternoon, Deputy Secretary Price, Chair
Long, committee members, Ms. Davis and my fellow panelists. It\'s very
nice to be with you today. I appreciate the opportunity to participate
in the conversation and I hope that all our remarks today are helpful to
you as together we are trying to figure out ways to help rear strong,
healthy, good decision making, resilient students.

I just have to say there are Ohioans everywhere. I am transplanted to
Minnesota and this afternoon we\'re going to talk about Minneapolis,
Minnesota but you just need to know, we\'re everywhere.

In my remarks this afternoon I would like to do a couple of things.
First of all, I would like to highlight for you three general areas of
need from the perspective of an urban district, that of Minneapolis,
Minnesota. And I\'m speaking from my experience and also from my past
eight years in the Minneapolis public school district both in the Office
of Safety and Security there and then for the last four years as a
project director for Safe Schools/Healthy Students with the able
assistance and I want to publicly acknowledge my Federal Project Officer
who is with us today, Ms. Jane Hodgdon Young and ably supported by Mr.
Michael Wells. So it\'s nice to see you both and I can\'t say enough to
you as a panel about the wonderful support we have received from these
colleagues. They are very dear to us.

The second thing I will do in my remarks today in addition to
highlighting three areas of need is that I will share with you some
examples of how those needs manifest themselves, so that you have a
sense about what we\'re talking about in an urban perspective. I\'ll
offer a few thoughts of how things should be and complete my remarks
with some suggestions to you about how you and we can work together and
some ways in which you could be of some ongoing help in urban
situations. So that\'s my focus for today.

First a bit of context, Minneapolis Public Schools is an urban district.
You have two slides that show some of the important features of
Minneapolis Public Schools. There are a couple of additional shadings
that I would like to add to the information that you see on the slides.
In addition to the information on the slides, Minneapolis Public Schools
has 90, 9-0 languages spoken. We have about a 30 percent mobility rate.
We have many young people who are homeless or highly mobile, who spend
several nights in shelters until they have to move to another shelter.
Sometimes those shelters are in the area of their neighborhood schools,
sometimes they are clear across town.

We also, like many schools, are losing some students to private and
charter schools and in the State of Minnesota it\'s particularly easy to
organize a charter school. I think it\'s helpful for us as urban
districts to look at the learnings we can learn from the private schools
and from the charter schools but from an urban standpoint, we also have
seen a decrease in student census because of the private and urban, I\'m
sorry, charter schools.

My hunch is that as I share with you some of our issues this afternoon
that you will find them similar to some of the points my colleagues have
raised but I would like to submit to you today that what is unique about
the perspective from an urban district is the shear difference in size,
scope and scale of the situations about which we\'re going to speak. I
would like to anchor our remarks today in a quote that we have used as
the hallmark of our Safe Schools/Healthy Students work and it has helped
keep us on track as we have gone down the road of many changed in the
Minneapolis Public Schools. A bit of wisdom from our elder, \"Let us put
our minds together to see what lives we can make for our children\".
That has helped us stay on track.

Three needs from the urban perspective that I\'d like to share with you
today and I will highlight them and then speak in a little more depth
about them. First of all, the need for strong, articulate, stable,
focused leadership at all organization levels. Secondly, a broad
definition of learning that derives from the needs of children and young
people and the third need is a need for cooperative, honest, data based
conversations into shared planning and decision making among school
districts, city and county entities, community organizations and
families. Let\'s take a look at each of those.

Strong, articulate, stable, focused leadership at all organization
levels; we are in the fourth year of Safe Schools/Healthy Students.
It\'s a discrete period of time which we can stand back and look at. In
that time, Minneapolis Public Schools has had four superintendents, two
of whom, including the current one, have been interim. Four directors of
curriculum and instruction, five principal investigators, five finance
clerks, and 21 personnel changes that have only to do with Safe
Schools/Health Students. I\'m not speaking about the district as a
whole, I\'m speaking about one set of discrete programs. Additionally,
we have had one county reorganization in the area of children\'s mental
health and wellness and we have had three police chiefs in four years.
Therefore, I need to share with you and stress, we need to do what we
can to encourage strong leadership at all areas of an organization.

What should that look like? The slides suggests, this has played itself
out this lack of leadership in the fact that it has taken two plus years
to get a social skills curriculum into the district. It has taken two
and one half years to work out the process by which the police alcohol
and drug use citations have a channel for getting into where people can
help the young people. And I do not say any of this in faulting, I think
you know that, but I do say it in terms of the realities in which we are
trying our best to serve kids and you have helped us through your
support and we still have much work to be done and so that, of course,
is my goal in sharing some of the examples from our district.

The second need about which I want to speak is the broad definition of
learning. We need to acknowledge that learning goes beyond basic
academic areas and beyond tests. These are critically important but we
need to think about services that derive from students\' needs and we
need to start with a need-based approach and our friends on the trauma
panel made those points, Marleen particularly over and over again, just
incorporate some of her thought because it\'s certainly true in our
urban experience.

Why is this important? Again, let me share from some of our experiences.
We have been able to increase in Minneapolis and in Hennepin County the
number of early childhood screenings at age 3. That\'s great and now we
don\'t have enough appropriate placements. We have been able to, because
of the screening, have some placements and with some state help, we are
aware of more in-home and relative health care but we can\'t get those
folks trained around the best practices in early childhood education. So
we have not yet managed to bring together all of the players in this
large area who need to work together, obviously systemically.

So if you have more kids screened, that\'s great but then I would argue
that it\'s unethical to screen and not have resources to help the very
kids whom you have \-- whom we have screened. Similarly, we have young
people who need drug and alcohol support. We do that screening but,
again, we have services that are not sufficient or in an area with 90
languages and all the cultures and ethnic groups that we have, we have
services that are not culturally appropriate.

Through Safe Schools/Healthy Students, we have been able to make some
connections. We\'ve been able to help some agencies get connected with
us so we\'re definitely on the right path. But again, I highlight this
as a need in an urban setting. We have experimented with mental health
services in the schools. We have increased them and we have been able to
increase the cultural responsiveness of services. We\'ve had wonderful
partnerships by which we brought in community organizations to work with
out students and these are community organizations that are focused on
various ethnic groups, culture groups. So we\'ve been able to get the
beginnings of responsive, culturally responsive drug and alcohol
support. We need much more training. We know that and we\'re trying to
figure out how to build that into our sustainability plan. Again, I
highlight that to you so that you are aware of where we are seeing needs
and together we can think about those. We are exploring some funding
models also, so I\'m hopeful that we, in executing our responsibility
under the grant, will be able to come back to you and in another six to
12 months and say, \"We have a funding formula that we think will help
lots of districts\", and so I think that\'s incumbent upon us as part of
our responsibility.

Our teacher very much need cultural competence training. One of my
colleagues tells the story and describes himself as having been working
in schools. He says, \"First, I spend 15 or 20 minutes with a young man
who is Hmong and I talk with him about whatever it is that\'s on his
mind.\" And he said, \"And then I turn around and I face a boy soldier
from Africa\", and none of us has yet the cultural competence to handle,
address, assess, the needs of our kids and we owe that, and again,
we\'re working on that. We have begun looking at teaching teachers what
signs to look for in mental wellness and we\'ve also piloted teaching
our teachers about the concepts of mental wellness in other cultures
because not everyone would describe mental wellness in the ways in which
we do and we want to be \-- we want to honor that and be effective with
students in all the cultures. So that gives you some ideas there.

A broad focus on learning that comes from student needs also has to
include human resources alignment. Let me just remind you that in our
district we have high staff mobility so that we have had a team of
consultants working with schools in leadership teams helping them know
how to put into place school-wide behavior systems and the year after
many of those team members are in another school because of bidding,
because of a seniority system, which is not helpful many times to our
students.

In many cases our least experienced teachers have ended up teaching our
students with the greatest learning needs. Now, this is not the first
time you\'ve heard that, I know but I want to just give you some of the
scoop from Minneapolis. HR concerns and HR aligned against student needs
is critical and we need to figure out how to get there quickly.

Seniority has cost us many teachers of color who have come out of school
and are younger in their experience levels and they\'re gone with every
round of cuts. And because of some of seniority rules, we cannot always
get the best folks in the best positions. That\'s important, so you need
to know that these are, again, issues with which we struggle.

And finally, the third need that we have as an urban district is some
honest dialogue about what\'s going on in our district. We need to talk
about the isolation of students of ethnic groups, of gay, lesbian,
bisexual and trans-gender students, of racism, the lines between that
and crime and violence. Just yesterday our interim superintendent, Dr.
William Green was interviewed by Minnesota Public Radio and he reminded
us all that when you think the way to be safe on the street is to
posture how tough you are, or the way to be safe in school is to be a
smart aleck or be tough, or when you\'re really afraid that you might be
hurt after school because the latest rumor on the street about who\'s
doing what to whom and we do have gang violence in Minneapolis, your
thought is not on learning.

We need to figure out ways to come together as agencies to address this.
We need to look at homelessness which as you all know, often leads to
substance abuse and co-occurring mental health and chemical health
issues. We need to look at a group of institutions and people at the
racially and ethnically divided City of Minneapolis, again with the
sense of isolation. We get into the \"My kid, not your kid\", the
decisiveness, the lack of cooperation. We have many ethnic communities.
We struggle with the best ways to educate all folks and we need to get
the conversation on the table with all of the agencies, with the
citizens with our parents.

We need to talk about the relationship of the district with community
organizations because schools can\'t do it all. We have not done well at
reaching out in the past. We need to have these conversations about who
can do what, who brings what to the table but the center of this has to
be driven by student need and by honest dialogue.

The struggles and barriers that I\'ve presented on this slide many of
those we have talked on. I have offered them to you as reminders and as
illustration of the struggles and barriers particularly with working
with the community. It took us four years to get a community partners
manual together that would insure children safety and adult safety.
Communications in a large urban district is a very difficult matter.
It\'s the old, you don\'t turn the Queen Mary around on a dime in terms
of accommodating change. We need some models for accomplishing change in
huge systems.

We have, again, tried and been successful in small pieces. We intend to
keep it on. We\'re working sustainability plans with Safe Schools/Health
Students and with our newly received ERCM grant and so finally, I would
just offer to you some ways in which I think you can be of help in urban
districts. Just as Safe Schools/Healthy Students requires the
cooperation and the sign-on of agencies in order to get the grant, I
would urge you as a committee to carry that through in all of your grant
approaches or in all of your work, and that would be beyond the initial
application. That would be in terms of field visits and ongoing
monitoring. That\'s been great for us. It\'s often been the impetus to
get people together, to get institutions together across institutional
boundaries, across political boundaries, across personality boundaries.

We intend to go forward with professional competency development around
cultural competence, chemical and mental health awareness, anti-racism,
work. I would suggest to you that that is an area where you could join
us and other urban districts in putting wisdom, in perhaps putting
dollars but in being explicit that these are some of the hard issues
that we have to talk about now.

I would suggest that for districts who are thinking about implementing a
systems-wide learning and behavior supports, that you again, strongly
urge this, that you begin to talk more about the best practices for
district-wide approaches. We need to think about that in our district
with our 30 percent mobility. We now have the staff in place to do that.
I would suggest that that is key to success in any district and urge you
to offer that message.

I would love it if you could help fund some work to explore the most
effective staffing systems for learners. I will cheer, you will cheer,
we will do it together but I would love that to be done. We could
certainly use the help, we could certainly use the wisdom and I would
like you to help us and we, as I\'ve said earlier, will be glad to help
you in terms of finding approaches and formulas that make mental and
chemical wellness support to students economically viable because that
takes the work of a lot of people and a lot of minds.

So I hope that this has shared with you a perspective from urban life.
I\'m thrilled with the work that we\'ve been able to do. We have so much
more and I thank you for your help, would love you to stay involved with
us and we with you as you think about some of these topics and put the
tough ones on the table for the sake of the future lives of our kids.
Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, Lynne. As we now move into that next
phase and I think one of you characterized it best when you said the
conversation, so if we could have that conversation. And before Russell
asks the first question, if it\'s any solace to you, if I recall Ohio
State did win in basketball the other night, so that \-- Russ.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: This is a losing proposition, don\'t you think?

(Laughter)

MR. JONES: Thanks so much, panel, for the many excellent points that
were made and also gestures or places of success that you met. But
Lynne, since you went last, the recency effect, but I\'m just wondering,
you were talking about the high turnover rate and I\'m just wondering if
you can give us a sense of why that is or why that was and to what
extent the Department could assist with that.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Many causes, I think, Russell. One is lack of
affordable housing. That manifests itself in mortgages paid and lost. It
also is the rent cycle of you can afford a place for a month or two and
then you can\'t afford it and so you move elsewhere or move with a
relative, that\'s another reason. A third reason, economic conditions,
some new job growth in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, some not so. Sometimes
family or spousal abuse and so leaving home for the safety of spouses
and children and therefore, the shelter existence. Those are the
responses that come most to mind in response to your question.

MR. JONES: Have there been mechanisms set in place to address those
issues or \--

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Yes. We have a department now of Learning
Supports that focuses under McKinney-Vento on homeless and highly mobile
students. This year we were able to pull off a stronger collaboration
with the city and the county so that we didn\'t have just school workers
going out and trying to help families, but we have school workers going
out with friendly police people, and I\'m saying it that way because
these are the not and talk cops they call themselves, and they are going
out of a position of solicitness and not you know, \"Where the heck are
you\", and finger pointing and that kind of thing, and we\'ve tied them
in with some of the community agents also are sending representatives
out.

We have moved some of the early childhood screening that I told you
about. We\'ve moved that out into the shelters. The whole concept of the
school learning to go out to where the community is and where those
needs are is still a learning curve for us. We\'re getting there. So
those are some of the things that have happened to address it.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Howell?

MR. WECHSLER: I have a couple of questions for Elizabeth. I want to
follow up on your third and fourth slides. Your third slide lists a
whole bunch of funding streams and then the fourth side lists a lot of
really neat sounding programs. I\'m wondering is there any way to really
separate out which of the programs really resulted from \--
specifically, from the Safe and Drug Free Schools funding that you got.

MS. REDMON: The first four on the fourth slide, the Drug Alliance, is a
direct result of the Safe and Drug Free Schools and that has been in
existence since 1987 to help us plan, organize and determine needs. The
Character Counts also is funded with Safe and Drug Free Schools. The
Aspire and Junior Team Board and Life Skills, the first four are funded
with Safe and Drug Free Schools.

MR. WECHSLER: And that\'s with the 20 to \$25,000.00?

MS. REDMON: Yes.

MR. WECHSLER: What would happen in your district if there were no \-- if
that source of funding was removed?

MS. REDMON: We would struggle. We would have almost no prevention
dollars because the only other prevention dollars that we have come
through the 21^st^ Century and that\'s after school. Through the Learn
and Serve we have just recently received a Meth Free Tennessee Learn and
Serve Grant which is also in the after school program. If we didn\'t
have that basic grant, we would have almost no prevention activities.

MR. WECHSLER: And what would happen if that prevention grant was
doubled?

MS. REDMON: Then we would be able to expand our student assistant
program. We would be able to work more with parents to get that parent
involvement. You know, we could expand. We could hire a person who would
be

\-- if it was doubled, we could hire a person at least part time to
oversee all of those prevention activities which would make them much
stronger.

MR. WECHSLER: One last question, and I don\'t know if you ever saw that
show but I want to play Deal or No Deal with you. Here\'s the deal. The
deal is you can double that pot of money. The catch is that half the
school districts in the country are not going to get any more funding
from Safe and Drug Free Schools, so there\'s a chance that you\'ll get
zero, but there\'s also a good chance you\'ll get double. Are you going
to take the deal?

MS. REDMON: Sure.

MR. HERRMANN: Let me follow up on that one, too, and just a suggestion,
Howell, Liz is very familiar with the Coordinated School Health Model.
You two might want to have a conversation after this about sort of
Liz\'s plans because I think you would be very interested in that. I
don\'t think it necessarily applies to the work of the council, but I
want to be sure and mention that.

This is \-- I have a question for the rural folks first. Can you
characterize for me your relationship with your local law enforcement
agency?

MR. SWANSON: Our relationship with the law enforcement, the sheriffs,
the local police in Beatrice, the county attorney and all that has
really increased with Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant that we got in
\`02. They came to the table. They were to the table some before but
that grant really, really helped it because they saw their role, they
saw the justice, they saw the involvement of people they could relate
to.

We have a really good relationship with schools, talk to them regularly.
They have meetings together. We were lucky enough to have an officer in
school for awhile. I don\'t think that\'s there any more but the issues
of confidentiality and all of that, I just think the relationship is
strong.

They\'re sharing information, they\'re working together. They\'re
developing plans for individual kids with law enforcement in schools and
other agencies all involved in the same room together and I\'d say it\'s
strong.

MS. REDMON: Ours with the law enforcement is good. With Juvenile Justice
it\'s just now beginning and that\'s exactly why we did not apply for
Safe Schools/Healthy Students, because we didn\'t have that partnership.
We are seeing that with new Juvenile Judge taking place. I mean, he\'s
talking with us. He is looking at what are the needs of the students and
I can see it strengthening, and I can see it really making a difference.

MR. HERRMANN: And then the second question, really, I think is for all
of you. You know, one of the things I wonder about is, is it better to
provide a small amount of funding over a long period of time or a
relatively really substantial amount of money over kind of a three or
four-year period. And I\'m wondering \-- I think all of you either have
ended a Safe Schools/Healthy Students Grant or approaching the end to
it. What\'s life like after the grant? What kind of things are still
going to be in place and over the long term, what kind of things will
you have gotten out of it?

MR. SWANSON: Just to respond to a couple of those points, I think that
there\'s a real need with grants to consider systemic changes rather
than just hiring a bunch of personnel because we ran into the thing of
hiring a bunch of mental health therapists for the schools and then
being able to sustain personnel is difficult. I think \-- I\'ve worked
in some other areas where similar amounts of money spread over five
years might be as effective, even though it\'s less per year than say,
large amounts for three years because you get some planning time, you
maybe don\'t build that year one budget up as big. I think large amounts
of money are still very useful like the Safe Schools/Healthy Students
grant but extending it over just a little bit longer period of time and
also really encouraging sustainability plans from day one and maybe not
so much \-- I don\'t know, you need some direct personnel but you really
need to think about how you\'re going to sustain direct personnel,
service delivery personnel.

MS. THOMPSON: I\'d like to respond because as Doug indicated, we really
were beginning with the end in mind, knowing that it was not going to be
there forever, talking about Safe Schools/Healthy Students. And one of
the \-- I\'ll share that one of the challenges and I think it served us
well, and I\'ll be very honest, for me it was a challenge truly but also
being a central office administrator and part of the district\'s
leadership and administrative team, but serving as the project director,
while it truly has been two and now three full time jobs, a lot of work,
but on this end of it, I would not have done it differently because
while there was a lot of work, and a lot of work, because I\'m part of
the leadership structure and my direct supervisor, with or without the
grant, is the superintendent of schools, the agenda of Safe
Schools/Healthy Students emergency response crisis management has always
been at the table. That is the agenda and it has become part of the way
that we do business. So it\'s part of the infrastructure of how Garfield
Heights City Schools does education.

I mention that and it\'s \-- again, it was a lot of work but at the same
time it was worthwhile because when things were being discussed it was
no longer the what we do as educators and what we do in the school
district, and then Safe Schools/Healthy Students, but it was part of the
discussion that was so inter-woven to the point now where in the survey
results that I shared, that our parents have indicated that Safe
Schools/Health Students is more important than curriculum and
instruction.

Now, that might be concerning but at the same time they recognized that
this is so vital to the way that our district has to do business because
of the challenges that we face and the things that our students are
confronting, they\'ve determined that this is necessary. Now whether
they vote and allow us to raise taxes in order to keep that is another
story but we did not, as Doug indicated, did not spend a lot of money
with the staff because that does result in turnover. If person knows
that, you know, I may not have my job after three years, then if
something else comes along within a year\'s time being in that position,
they\'re going to leave. So again, we really started at the beginning
with our sustainability planning. What is it that we\'re going to have
to do making sure we were communicating to the board of education and to
our community, our parents and working with our business partners.

And I\'ll share one just from a sustainability standpoint. Ponderosa
Steakhouse is working with us to provide family night, a buffet type
style restaurant, you know, and that money goes to support our character
education programming, so that when we no longer have Safe
School/Healthy Students, that conversation began two years ago. So that
way the parents that are coming to feed their children, they can see
where the money is going. It goes for character ed. It goes for this
particular program or initiative and it\'s not just going into the abyss
of, you know, school funding, \"What are you guys really doing with the
money\"? This is something concrete that all of our young people will
benefit from.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Our situation primarily because of the
complexities of the district and driven in part by the size, Safe
Schools/Healthy Students has not been able to assume the kind of
position that you have just described Melissa, but it has worked more
sneakily intentionally to infiltrate the system. And as we have talked
about sustainability, the four ways that we have talked about it with
our folks have been if you are providing services that students need,
they need to continue after this year. So hook them onto something that
already exists in the district, join with an outside organization,
private, public, and integrate that work with the work of the
organization, expand the competence and the skills of personnel because
personnel may go to a different school but they\'re still there after
the grant is over. And fourthly but literally in fourth position is look
for additional money because we don\'t want to construct other systems
that need to keep this churn of money going. So in direct response to
your question, the short term larger amounts of money has been the most
helpful approach to us in getting the partnerships established and
getting people\'s minds set from day lackadaisical there\'s a beginning
and an ending so people don\'t get into that, \"We\'ve always done it\",
or, \"We think we\'re going to do it\", cycle and by being real clear,
this has to go on for our kids. So that has allowed us to take some
risks and be out on some limbs that we wouldn\'t have been able to with
a lesser amount of money or with something that continued and therefore,
people got lackadaisical.

MS. REDMON: One of the things, too, is that we know that any kind of
sustainable change takes three to five years. So by putting those
restrictions in place, those expectations of forming coalitions,
bringing people to the table to work together and then \-- and it takes
money to train people to get things going. So really what works well is
that larger amount of money at the beginning and then possibly even
stepping down where you gradually withdraw as opposed to just being a
large amount for say three years and then it\'s gone.

MR. SWANSON: I just wanted to real briefly respond to your last direct
question that said what\'s life like after Safe Schools. It\'s really
good actually, because I saw Safe Schools as a launching pad. We have
been done with it for awhile. We were \`02 funded but the things for the
next 10 years that are going to happen related to safety, school
environment and drug and alcohol are because of safe schools. There\'s a
launching pad.

MR. ELLIS: That\'s probably a good segue into my question. The data that
you provided in the presentation talks refers to the Gage County risk
and protective factor survey data both for Nebraska statewide and the
percent in Gage County. Is Gage County a recipient of the Safe and Drug
Free Schools Programs?

MR. SWANSON: Safe and Drug Free Schools, yes. I \-- I mean, yes, they
are.

MR. ELLIS: I\'m not trying to give you a hard time but just looking at
the data, you know, in your slides you make the reference that the
programs are working and yet, 45 percent of the 10^th^ graders have used
alcohol in the last 30 days, 20 percent have been smoking cigarettes, 11
percent prescription drugs, 27 percent binge drinking, 40 percent
drinking and driving, 10^th^ graders, 37 percent believe the laws favor
drug use, 62 percent believe their parents favor drug use. Fifty-three
percent of the kids have a low commitment to school.

MR. SWANSON: Absolutely, let me respond to that.

MR. ELLIS: Okay, I\'m wondering what\'s \--

MR. SWANSON: Okay, the Safe and Drug Free Schools is limited amounts of
funds \-- and I didn\'t even work with those. I would have to talk to
the individual administrators in the schools about where they go. It\'s
really small amounts but the reason I say things are working and that
it\'s a launching pad to the future is because we did do that data in
\`03 and it\'s starting to improve but what is improving is our level or
organization and our level of impact before Safe Schools/Healthy
Students. And it takes so long when you have a community that hasn\'t
addressed these issues.

Before Safe Schools/Healthy Students, nobody worked together. We had
four or five different organizations that were all doing the same thing
and they never got beyond awareness. Well, if you don\'t get beyond
awareness, you never get to behavior change. And now we\'re working
together and the anticipation is we\'ll get to behavior change. Do these
numbers show success over the last 10 years? Absolutely not, absolutely
not, but we\'ve got the Safe Schools/Healthy Students grant in \`02 and
it \-- you don\'t change that culture in three years or four years.

But the systems are \-- I think if I came back here in seven, eight
years, the numbers would be much better because of the way we\'re
organizing as a community. We\'re now using data to make decisions. We
didn\'t even do this data before, ever. So as far as your direct
question on Safe and Drug Free School monies, I honestly can\'t even
tell you how it\'s used because it\'s so small.

MS. KEYS: I wanted to ask \-- another issue that we really haven\'t
touched on but is really kind of a pressing issue particularly in rural
areas has to do with workforce development and I think in particular in
the mental health field, and I don\'t know if you\'ve experienced not
having sufficiently trained personnel even when you have grant money for
positions that you might have available. And if we\'re thinking about
developing infrastructure using grant money for sustainability, might we
need to be thinking about how to incorporated within those programs the
expectation that some dollars go towards the development of a workforce
and that\'s one question.

And then the second question is do we need to become more flexible in
our expectation of who delivers what kind of services because of just
the lack of certain kinds of professionals. So thank you.

MS. REDMON: Let me address that because in our rural system, when we
first started out particularly with student assistance program and I
became looking for a social worker, it was kind of interesting because
we immediately were able to find a master\'s level social worker who had
just moved into the community. When we added the additional one, again,
we didn\'t find a masters level but we found a bachelors level working
with our masters level and she\'s currently working on her masters
level. It\'s almost like if you lower the expectations, then you don\'t
really look for and find those capable people. And I think you have to
have that level of competence, that level of training. If you don\'t
then your program is not going to be successful.

So while I say don\'t lower the expectations, I\'m also saying, make
sure that there are funds for training to find additional people, if
necessary, or to find initial people, if necessary, but I think that the
expectations have to be there for it to be successful.

MS. KEYS: And let me add just one other thing and that is something that
we haven\'t talked about which I think is, again, particularly relevant
for rural areas is the use of technology both in service delivery,
supervision, et cetera so if you want to comment on that, too.

MS. REDMON: Technology is something that when we first started, it was
kind of interesting, our goal was to have one internet connection per
classroom. We have gradually built on that through E-rate and through
some other areas that have been very, very beneficial to help us develop
that technology. You have to have that mind set, just like what we are
experiencing now with the juvenile court system. They didn\'t want
technology. They didn\'t take advantage of technology and now they\'re
still keeping a paper file and you can\'t follow through with that.

When we started the students assistance program, we bought computers
with the idea that we wanted to compile data, we wanted to be able to
\-- we know that data is important in order to know whether you\'re
being successful or not. And I think technology is something that has to
be incorporated, it has to be planned for and that\'s where having the
large pool of money the first year gives you that opportunity to put
those pieces in place.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Could I ask some \"-bility\" questions? I\'ve heard, just
a series of quick answers because it might be helpful for me anyway.
When I say \"-bility\" questions, I mean, I\'ve heard sustainability,
and I think we would all agree that to have sustainability that we have
to have stability because I heard a thread of that through there.

And then what gets in the way of that is mobility. So that\'s why I said
talk over a question about \"bilities\". And we have a rural situation,
we have an urban situation here. Let me ask first of all if you\'d just
quick answers, what about your approximate percentage of student
mobility, if we could just go one, so we can get rural to urban just to
get an idea and then I\'m going to ask some questions about \--

MS. REDMON: In our school system we have eight schools. We have two that
are very stable because there\'s very little rental property. Our two
larger areas where there is more rental property, we have a higher
mobility rate. Our mobility rate in those larger areas is anywhere from
28 to 30 percent. In the two schools where there\'s very little, it\'s
interesting because we don\'t see that turnover in students and
therefore, we don\'t have the problems we do.

Now, are we finding an influx of people coming in? Yes. We\'re not sure
how people find McNairy County but we\'re getting a lot of people from
Florida, from California and from the larger cities. So it\'s almost
like people are looking for stability and by looking at \-- for
instance, 40 percent of our teachers have masters degrees. We have 30
percent of our faculties can retire within the next five years. So
we\'ve had that stability. And it\'s almost like we\'re seeing people
seeking that.

MR. SWANSON: Ours is low.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Low, I would imagine very low.

MR. SWANSON: Yeah, I don\'t have a number. It\'s talked about but it\'s
low.

MS. THOMPSON: And I mentioned that as an inner ring suburb of Cleveland,
ours is extremely high. And it\'s actually one of those indicators that
explains first ring districts, one of those things that we all share and
that is high rates of student mobility and it follows what Lynn was
speaking of, we refer to it as an eviction cycle, often the case.

And I\'ve talked with our municipal court judge that hears our evictions
in Garfield Heights weekly and she\'s making referrals to us because of
that, because we\'ll find that people are moving into places where they
knew that they couldn\'t afford it but operated off of a cycle where,
\"I have to stay somewhere\". So, you know, it is one of those kinds of
situations and they go between the first \--

CHAIRMAN LONG: When you say high do you mean 40 percent, 50 percent?

MS. THOMPSON: You said, 30, I would probably agree to about 30 and I
mentioned the actual raw numbers for us from start to beginning from the
start of the school season for the 2006/07 school year and up to
December that we were noticing how many young people came in, how many
left that withdraw and new enrollment cycle.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And you said about \--

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Around 30.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Okay, and what I want to get at, that was just a
baseline. What would you say just a straight shot comment about mobility
of teachers, because there\'s a point to be made here for what we\'re
talking about with the mobility of teachers with the least experienced
teachers teaching the youngsters that are at the highest risk. Do you
have much mobility?

MS. REDMON: We don\'t have a problem with that because we don\'t \-- all
of our schools are funded equitably. All of our schools have pretty much
similar populations. We just don\'t have a lot of movement from one
school to another.

MR. SWANSON: Ours is low and I would say in my personal opinion,
sometimes it needs to be a little higher.

MS. THOMPSON: Ours tends to be low also actually.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And Lynne, yours tended to be \--

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Ours tends to be higher and I don\'t have those
figures with me, David, but driven by two things; first of all
decreasing student census, so fewer jobs, so job cuts, and then combine
that with the seniority bumping and bidding as you all know it, that we
perpetuate the cycle of less experienced, most needy kids.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And the last question; number of superintendents in the
last 10 years? Two, two, two.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Five.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Okay. See, I think that something that the Federal
Government needs to start to pay attention to and could be helpful,
it\'s like the gorilla in the room, when we talk about mobility and when
we talk about it with students, but when we start to talk about teachers
and having those least experienced teachers teaching the youngsters and
all these things we\'ve heard today at the highest risk and then add one
more ingredient to that, the tremendous mobility of superintendents and
just \-- I\'ll just ask one, why do you think that you\'ve had five in
the last 10 years? You are on tape. Seventeen \-- is that 17 seconds or
17 minutes?

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Yeah, what you\'re witnessing is me trying to not
be caution, just try to figure out how in the world to summarize. Our
longest tenured superintendent, Dr. Carol Johnson, who was there for I
believe six to seven years, left to go to a larger district, that is
Memphis. In her wake the board put an interim superintendent in place
who was in my opinion doing a very good job but the board misread the
community, did not do an appropriate vetting or get community input and
the politics led to his not being appointed as the permanent
superintendent.

In the third case, our superintendent brought some strengths and some
politics caught up with the superintendent. And in this case now, Dr.
Bill Green, our current interim, who has expressed an interest in
staying in the job as permanent, became the healer in the community
outreach, mender of fences and the board is now faced with a very
difficult decision as to whether to keep him without a search or go
through the time, the money, the possible disequilibrium of a search in
order to be transparent in its process versus keep him as a known
quantity, certainly as a respected leader for the sake of stability and
all these kinds of things that we\'ve been talking about, including
getting a coherent behavior management and curricular process in place
across a very disparate district.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And the reason that I asked those questions, I think that
we\'ve \-- that the Department might want to think about, if you could
be a catalyst, I truly believe that until we in American education face
the fact this mobility factor, especially with teachers, and pull in CTA
and American Federation of Teachers and start to really have a
conversation about it, and at the same time pull in a group called board
members and because board members are the ones that we\'re talking about
here, that\'s the reason that we have \-- one of the main reasons that
we have tied to contract, that we have a dialogue with the National
School Board Association that emulates out to the different states so
that we can start to talk about this high mobility with those leaders
because I\'m hearing all of you say, whether it\'s rural or urban that
it gets in the way of stability and sustainability.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: One of the facts that our board was given to
consider as it was thinking about is it going to do a search or not for
our permanent superintendent, the board was told by one of the outside
consultants, I believe, that it expects that this spring there will be
12 openings in urban districts.

CHAIRMAN LONG: In what geographic area?

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: For superintendent. Pardon me?

CHAIRMAN LONG: Twelve openings in what geographic area?

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Nationally, I believe but of major \-- I\'m
sorry.

CHAIRMAN LONG: We just had 10,

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Pardon me?

CHAIRMAN LONG: We just have 10 in our county, so that\'s why \--

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Oh, understand.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Other questions? Yes, Russ?

MR. JONES: Yeah, an issue that we haven\'t talked about is race. And I
was just wondering if I can get a sense from the panel the breakdown of
race and ethnicity groups within your purview.

MS. REDMON: We\'re 87/13 if you put it all together, 87 percent
Caucasian and 13 percent other, almost 11 percent of that being African
American.

MR. SWANSON: In the specific county where I\'ve worked it\'s 99 percent
Caucasian. I was trying to represent Nebraska as a whole as a rural
state. There is a major increase in the Hispanic population where some
school districts are 50 to 75 percent now Hispanic and we also have
several Native American tribes in our state as well, but those \-- the
Hispanics are gathered around the meat packing plants in our state. And
those rural districts, like I said, are over 50 percent Hispanic.

MS. THOMPSON: And in Garfield Heights it\'s 47.9 percent Caucasian, 34.8
percent African American and the balance would include multi-racial,
Asian, Hispanic and American Indian.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: And in Minneapolis, on the second slide in your
notebook we have the breakdown, African American 71.8, White American
28.2, Latino, 16.4, Asian American 9.7, Native American 4.3 and then
breakdowns for special ed, English language learners and free and
reduced.

MR. JONES: Yeah, thank you. The reason I ask that question, Lynne, you
brought up, I thought a very good point. You brought up a number of very
good points, but one in particular was cultural competence. And I\'m
just wondering the extent to which the lack of cultural competent
training has led to some of the untoward consequences that different
ones of you have faced.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: It certainly has. In our situation, Russell, one
of the most painful ways in which lack of cultural competence has
manifested itself is through staff and teachers who don\'t know how to
relate to students or who, because of their unconscious racism, hold
different expectations for kids and knowingly or unknowingly convey
those.

MR. JONES: Can you provide an example?

(Pause)

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Millions are running through my mind. I\'m sorry.
Let me just collect my wits for a second.

MR. JONES: Sure.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Most of them are painful.

MS. REDMON: While she\'s thinking, let me give her a little bit of time
to think. MR. JONES: Okay.

MS. REDMON: I know sometimes when you\'re trying to do that. We have
moved up into \-- for awhile we only had about less than five percent
minority of any kind. As we moved on up, we did diversity training with
all of our administrators, our central office staff, our principals and
assistant principals because we thought they needed to know what the
differences, what the various backgrounds. And then in Tennessee, a big
emphasis, I guess it\'s been nearly four years ago, we brought to \--
they brought to Nashville and put a lot of money into poverty training,
went through the Ruby Paine training and so forth because what we were
seeing in Tennessee was a definite increase in poverty. And this helped
tremendously because then we trained someone and then we came back \--
we trained four people in our district and we came back and worked with
our school districts.

And at that time, one of the sub-groups that was not making AYP was out
economically disadvantaged. But by coming back and sharing that training
with our administrators, and with our teachers and making that concerted
effort, within two years that\'s no longer a problem.

We also look at with our African American students what was happening
there because we weren\'t seeing them make that difference. And we made
concerted efforts. One of the areas that we were particularly seeking
was that we had a low percentage of African American students that were
testing for the gifted program. And so what we have done is we have a
class at our school that has that largest population and it\'s a class
to expand their experience background so that they can do better \--

MR. JONES: That\'s great.

MS. REDMON: \-- on the individual achievement or IQ tests and so forth,
because we know that that is culturally biased and that\'s our way of
addressing that. But I think if school systems will look at and identify
those needs in those sub-groups and then put time and effort into the
training, you\'re going to avoid some of the things that Lynne was
talking about because if you\'re teaching and the only background you
have is a middle class or an upper middle class, you can\'t have that
empathy.

One of the best things that came out of the Ruby Paine training was a
questionnaire, \"Could You\" \-- and we had to go through \-- we
answered three different ones, \"Could You Survive in Poverty\"? And we
all flunked it, you know, we couldn\'t. We didn\'t know how to access
all the different things. The interesting thing, too, was that the
majority of people that went through the training also discovered they
couldn\'t survive in wealth because, you know, to me if you can save
money and have something that looks like, then fine, but in wealth,
huh-uh.

MR. JONES: Right.

MS. REDMON: So I think that you have to look not only at diversity but
you\'ve got to look at your sub-groups.

MR. JONES: Yeah, that sounds very good. In fact, there\'s a term we have
for that, it\'s called cultural gimbling. And you\'re interacting with
folks of different colors, ethnicities, backgrounds, et cetera. Let me
just a follow-up question, was that training funded by this initiative
and to what extent is it ongoing?

MS. REDMON: The poverty training was funded through Title I. The
diversity training was funded through local funds.

MR. JONES: I see and is it ongoing training or is it just one time?

MS. REDMON: No, no, it\'s ongoing.

MR. JONES: Great. Excellent.

MS. THOMPSON: If I may, I\'d like to respond to the question as well. In
Garfield Heights, race in particular is a very emotionally charged
situation. I mentioned that when we submitted the Safe Schools/Healthy
Students proposal initially, 78 percent were Caucasian, 16.9 percent
African American. Now, we are 57.9 percent Caucasian, 34.8 percent
African American. That has created a significant problem in the Garfield
Heights community.

Not everyone in the community has received the changing demographic in
Garfield Heights very well. In fact, you know, the survey that I
mentioned that we did in December we surveyed students, parents, staff
members in the district. Everyone in the district received the survey
and one of the things that continued to come up was the \-- from our
students, some White students feeling that African American students
were being treated differently. African American students feeling that
White students were being treated differently.

In fact, we had a parent \-- and this will just give you a little
insight on where we are as a learning community in some respect. There
were an opportunity to write in comments and a parent \-- now, of course
anonymous, we have no idea but a parent wrote the comment was, and I
have to say this was a provider that we work with, so this was an
out-source type of survey. This is what they do for a living. They do a
phenomenal job and have been working with us as a result of Safe
Schools/Healthy Students.

The parent indicated that the safety problem in the district has to do
with all the Black people and that her children are now having to play
with colored people and so that\'s an indication of where some residents
in the community are as it relates to race. And it is a real issue in
the district and community and sometimes is quite a challenge to
overcome. We are doing training as Liz stated. We also have the work of
Ruby Paine. One of the challenges that we confronted, however, was for
some it was an issue of culture of poverty, therefore being synonymous
with Black, African Americans and having to really work through that.
And Dr. Wells, who I love dearly, has really helped me and worked
through that piece because it\'s greater than just culture of poverty.
It\'s culture poverty. It\'s not culture of poverty for African
Americans. And so that has constantly been this piece that we\'re trying
to massage and work through and it has to be ongoing for that reason.

Certainly it was a great opportunity to have these consultants come in
and work with us and the work continues including on Friday of this
week. So it is yet a work in progress.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Thank you for the thinking time. I have four or
five examples for you.

MR. JONES: I\'m a clinician.

CHAIRMAN LONG: You only get one, however, Lynne.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Pardon me?

CHAIRMAN LONG: You only get one, however.

MS. KREHBIEL-BRENEMAN: Not for a topic as critical as this. From the
most individual level to the systemic level, Russell, here\'s a give and
go. I have a person on our staff who works in a couple of middle
schools, a couple of high schools. He was gifted with this incredible
ability to connect with kids, all kids. If I could clone him, I would.

In a particular high school \-- and he wanders around and talks to kids.
He also does some groups and things like that. But for the purposes of
this story, a recent couple of weeks ago, he was walking in one of our
high schools and he saw a young lady outside of the classroom. They
greeted each other. She was looking pretty glum and he asked her,"
What's the deal.\"

\"Well, I got into trouble in Ms. Jones\' room\". My staff person is an
African American gentleman. The young woman with whom he was speaking is
an African American young lady. My staff person\'s name is Mr. Martin.
Mr. Martin came back the next day, same young woman outside the same
door, same period. \"What\'s happening\"? Similar discussion, \"I got in
trouble in Ms. Jones\' room\". The story unfolds. \"I tried to tell her
what happened, she didn\'t listen. I tried to tell her what happened\".

Okay, long story short, Mr. Martin made his rounds several more days and
the young woman was at her post outside of the classroom away from
instruction time with apparently an unresolved issue between her and Ms.
Jones. Now, I don\'t know any more. I do know that at least from her
perspective as reported to me, there was something going on there
between her and Ms. Jones.

I know it takes two to tango, but I also know that racism lives and that
appeared to factor into that individual situation.

On a larger level one of our \-- a couple of our high schools now and
eventually all of them, are going to be looking at their small learning
communities, the SLCs because a couple of those SLCs inadvertently have
become sorters of kids in part by race. So some of the kids know, \"Oh,
the dumb kids are in that one\", or, \"The kids of color are in that
one\". I will say certainly that was not foremost in anybody\'s mind in
creating small learning communities, but that \-- be that as it may,
whether it was foremost in their mind or not, the fact remains and now
those boundaries on those small learning communities have been changed.
So that\'s good news, but White privilege, inadvertence, who knows and
again, this is not a situation in which I was directly involved,
Russell, but on a more systemic level, yes, issues like that.

And finally, on the broadest sweep, Minnesota has one of the largest
achievement gaps between students of color and White students in the
country. Now this is not just Minneapolis, so I have to say, I\'ve
switched a frame here. But you all know that and we know that painfully.
So whether it\'s at the individual student level or at the highest
level, we have issues of racism and cultural competence that we\'ve only
begun to work out and we have a huge need to go much further very
quickly. There are some examples.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you, Lynne. And we\'ll close with either a question
or a comment from Tommy.

MR. LEDBETTER: Yes, I have two questions but one of them is just very
short. I mean, it\'s a geography lesson. McNairy County, Tennessee, I
know that Adams and Ruskin are 30 miles south of Lincoln and I can make
some reference to that and Minneapolis and Cleveland, but McNairy
County, Tennessee, what is the county seat of McNairy County? I\'m
trying to get a place in my mind where \--

MS. REDMON: Selmer.

MR. LEDBETTER: Selmer.

MS. REDMON: We\'re directly south of Jackson Tennessee and we border the
Mississippi Line.

MR. LEDBETTER: I know where you\'re at. Now my question, you mentioned
that you think that it\'s important to have large sums of money funding
the first year and then gradually reduce those, that that\'s a better
way of funding the program. One of our panelists earlier today used some
terminology that \-- they didn\'t say it exactly the way I use it but
you know, being a school administrator, I believe that the terminology
is pretty close to my philosophy on things. And that is that if you
don\'t inspect it, don\'t expect it because it will not happen. And
that\'s pretty basic to the way I view programs in schools.

The funding for these programs, the personnel that are involved in the
supervision of these programs that\'s a big area of funding. I
understand when you\'re talking about salaries, you\'re talking about a
lot of computers instead of just one, to just have that one person at
full salary.

If the salaries were the area that was reduced from a year to year
basis, do you think the programs would have a better chance of being
sustained if say the program in your school system, the first year you
funded the salary at 100 percent and the second year at 66 percent and
the next year at 33 percent and then the fourth year, obviously,
there\'s no funding for it, do you think that your school system would
maintain that position for that person being able to gradually reduce
that salary? Do you think they would pick it up?

MS. REDMON: It has happened in our system where we have started out with
totally funded and then gradually backed down. It is more apt to be
sustained that way than if it\'s totally funded for three years and then
it\'s gone because you have to build that \-- help the community see the
need for it. Now we haven\'t invested in a lot of salaries, other than
our after school program. That\'s the largest part of our after school
program, but in the supervision of it, we didn\'t add a lot of
additional people for two reasons.

I wrote the grant, I knew what we wanted to do and I asked to supervise
it and so therefore, you know, I just added another hat because I knew
if we brought in someone new, it would take at least a year to get up to
speed and then at the end of the term, that person would be gone.
Therefore, what we\'ve done, we\'ve put the money \-- the first 21^st^
Century grant, we bought a lot of computers, we bought a lot of
software. We looked at what the needs were and then we put it into after
school personnel. We didn\'t put it into a lot of extra salaries.

MR. LEDBETTER: But you\'re a rural school system where an urban school
system may have more money invested in salaries because they\'re
supervising more.

MS. REDMON: Right, but in what areas we have, we have found that if you
step it down, it\'s more apt to because see, the board will pick up 25
percent. You know, we won\'t have this if you don\'t pick up the 25
percent. But if you just totally \-- you just kind of have to play games
and you have to sell it and make it something you can\'t live without.

MR. LEDBETTER: Well, I guess the thought that\'s in my mind is how much
easier would it be to sell the importance of the program to the board if
they only had to absorb a portion of that salary each year.

MS. REDMON: It would be much better, that works better and the thing
about it is, now our parents are saying like with our after school
program, \"Well, we\'ll be glad to pay for it when the funding runs
out\", because they see how nice it is to pick up their kids from a safe
secure environment with their homework done and with the extra help if
they need the extra help or with the enrichment if they don\'t need
remediation and then all of them have that second hour doing something
that\'s fun and they\'ve learned something from it.

So I think that\'s probably going to be a lot of our sustainability is
that sliding scale.

MR. LEDBETTER: Thank you.

CHAIRMAN LONG: Thank you very much, panel. We appreciate it. Thank you
individually, Elizabeth and Doug and Melissa and Lynne. And let\'s give
them a big thank you.

(Applause)

CHAIRMAN LONG: And a reminder for us that tomorrow breakfast is 7:45 to
8:00 and then from 8;00 to 8:30 we have an ethics briefing. I don\'t
know which two of you on the panel caused this. I won\'t go into names.

MS. DAVIS: This is a mandatory briefing for all non-federal members of
the committee, so the federal members, if they want to slip in at 8:30,
you\'re more than welcome to, but from 8:00 to 8:30 for the non-federal
members, there\'s an ethics briefing in the break room.

CHAIRMAN LONG: And we won\'t get into it, but some of the states for
elected officials have already had this. So, I mean, this is \--

MS. DAVIS: I think the federal level is \--

FEMALE PARTICIPANT: Not through the Department of Education.

CHAIRMAN LONG: No, but I mean, it\'s a federal, so as I say, we don\'t
need to get into it. But what I want to do is thank all of the panels
and also thank this wonderful committee; great questions, a lot of
information and through eight hours you\'ve finished absolutely one
minute early. You\'re wonderful. Have a great night.

(Whereupon, at 4:01 p.m. the above-entitled matter concluded.)