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♦ WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2006 4A Houston .IJourtutl OPINION Daniel F. Evans Editor and Publisher Don Moncrief Managing Editor Home schooling should he allowed The European Court on Human Rights ruled this past week that parents do not have the fundamental right to home school their children. Basically what that means according to reports is now all 25 states in the European Union could act to ban home schooling. Does it signal the end of home schooling in America? Well, supposedly education and political experts are reportedly debating that exact question right now. Why is unknown? Here are a few statistics and facts from the federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics. There were 850,000 chil dren home schooled in 1999. That number was 1.1 million in 2003 and around 2 million today; the growth rate has been 7-15 percent per year. According to the NCES, reasons people home school are: 31 percent are concerned about the social environment of public schools, 30 percent want to provide moral and religious instruction, 16 are dissatis fied with public school and 9 percent have a desire for more family time and to provide individualized instruction. Also according the NCES, a study of 5,000 home school graduates showed that once home schoolers graduated, they found work and were more involved in their commu nities than the average public school stu dent. And, listen to this. Home schooled chil dren scored an average of 20 to 30 percen tile points higher than their average public school counterparts on standardized tests. No offense to public schools, which prob ably take no offense anyway considering the fact having fewer students enables them to have more one-on-one time, but Europe can do what it wants. In America, we hope it stays the way it is. Letter to the Emtor Security is at the core of our education Current events in our country continue to remind us of the premium we must put on the issue of safety in our schools. As a former administrator and now a candidate for the Houston County Board of Education, I can relate to many concerns pertaining to safety in our schools. Because parents send their most precious possession, their children, off to school everyday, safety must be a top priority. We have taken a number of steps to keep our children safe here in Houston County. I am proud to have played a small part by implementing features like security monitoring systems and cameras, safety planning, security personnel services, Crimestoppers and ADVANCE (a drug, alcohol, tobacco and gang aware ness program ). If fortunate enough to represent the people of Houston County, I would continue to push for increased safety measures to include the installation of advanced surveillance equipment and electronic entry pads, increasing the number of on site safety personnel, requiring the use of student IDs, as well as adding strate gies in the ADVANCE program to help students deal with internet predators, violence and bullying. Security is at the very heart of our educational enter prise. In order to provide our students an optimum envi ronment from which to learn, it is absolutely crucial that we do everything possible to keep our schools safe and secure. Marianne Melnick, Warner Robins Send your Letters to the Editor to: The Houston Home Journal P.O. Box 1910 • Perry, Ga 31069 or Email: hhj@evansnewspapers.com Julie B. Evans Vice President Foy S. Evans Editor Emeritus And, listen to this. Home schooled children scored an average ol 20 to 30 percen tile points higher than their average public school counterparts on standardized tests. Be aware of your kids' online activities UTT ow many of you have been I lon MySpace? More than JL A once? How many have a MySpace account?” At our seminars called “Play it Safe: A Parent’s Guide to Internet Safety,” an expert asks parents this question. At some schools, 50-60 percent of par ents say they have accessed this wildly popular place for kids to connect with one another, express their creativity and experience uncensored content and communication posted by some of its 100 million registered members. At other schools 5-10 percent of parents acknowledge visiting MySpace. This means that somewhere between 40-95 percent of parents we speak to have never been to the online place where many kids spend an average of 1.5 hours a day. And if they have read or heard the horror stories attached to online personal content generation sites, most parents still don’t have a clue what their kids are doing there. We make a lot of recommendations in our seminars on Internet safety, but the two most important things we say are: •• 1. what your kids are experi encing online. Follow their activities, install filtering and tracking software, ask for their password to sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Xanga. Then go there with them to see what they are talking with friends about, what they have posted on their site and others’ and see what their “friends” are posting to your child’s site. If you haven’t been to these sites before, you may be alarmed at what you find. Nevertheless, click around on the site and learn more about the people your child has accepted as “friends.” (The word “friend” doesn’t have the same meaning it did just a few years ago. Now it simply means someone you may or may not know, who has requested access to your site, and td whom you have granted that permission.) 2. Talk with your children about the Internet. This is the most important thing you can do in the area of Internet safety. As a reminder, we’re not only trying to help parents keep their kids safe from the predators who stalk, kid nap and abuse children; we’re also con cerned about other influences online that parents are usually not aware of. Your kids - or grandchildren, nieces, "Your teachers say you just are not able to “Congratulations, my boy! think for yourself..." You are going to have a career in politics!” Cleaning the can can be just as good as a tune-up Why is it that a clean car drives better than a sloppy car? Is it for the same reason that a car runs better when you’re thinking of selling it? In any case, I cleaned out my car recently, and it has run great ever since. I never intended to spruce it up, though; as with most things I do around the house, my wife was the moving force. On a recent Saturday, I mowed the yard, as usual. The next day, as usual, we got into my car to drive to church. “Where did all this grass come from?” she asked as we settled in our seats. “You must have left your windows down when you mowed the yard and some grass got inside.” An innocent enough remark, but I never leave my windows down. I am a confirmed closer and locker. My car is never left unlocked, even if it is parked in the driveway. Why the obsessive-compulsive behav ior? I think it’s part of being a father. A man’s main function in a family, you probably know, is to go from room to room, shutting off lights, turning off radios that aren’t being heard, secur ing dripping faucets and closing doors that should have been closed. It’s what we do. My wife knows I would never have mowed the grass with my car wide open. OPINION nephews, younger siblings, or neigh bors - need to know that online dan gers exist in subtle and not-so-subtle forms: mature discussions in chat ' rooms about sex and sexual orienta tion, photographs and videos of others from the mildly offensive to hardcore pornography, language, jokes and atti tudes that may not reflect your values. That’s why we strongly suggest every family with children between the ages of 8 and 18 draft an Internet Behavior Agreement to spell out the parents’ expectations of what the child (ren) will do online - and what they won’t. Last week I detailed a few content points for this Internet Behavior Agreement: ■ When, where and for what dura tion will your child be allowed to access the Internet? For some, the answer may be, “She is only 10 (or 12 or 15); she doesn’t need a MySpace account.” That is a perfectly acceptable (and wise) answer. ■ What kind of content is the child allowed to access? Be specific. ■ What kind of content is NOT allowed? Be more specific; don’t assume they will know or follow your implied rules. You must tell them what is not OK, and why. This week I want to give you as many additional content points for the Internet Behavior Agreement as we have room for. ■ What are your expectations of how they conduct themselves? Tell your kids that activities such as cyberbul lying, hate speech or bigotry, profanity or dirty jokes are not acceptable for a member of your family. Remind them that they represent the whole family online, and not just themselves. Also, let your older kids know that future employers or college admissions offices may one day find their writings, pic tures or videos online and make deci sions about your child’s future based on a fleeting attempt at humor. ■ What are your child’s privacy rights? She was just doing what she does. I leaned down and looked at the car pet in my car. “That’s not grass,” I told her. “That’s just months of dirt and trash that’s been dragged in from every foot and paw in the family. I guess it’s time to clean out the car.” She just nodded; wifely mission accomplished. After church, I checked out the car in detail. How many gum wrappers can one center console hold, anyway? Pens, gasoline receipts, napkins, toothpicks and something that looks as though it once might have been a bite of some thing. I had lived with all that junk for months but had grown so accustomed to it that it never even caught my eye. My wife, though, has a sharper eye. I opened the rear hatch and noticed for the first time that the cargo area was even worse. It really did look like a dead lawn. Ik Greg Hunter Columnist Georgia Family Council Glynn Moore Columnist Morris News Service HOUSTON DAILY JOURNAL A Georgia Bureau of Investigation com puter forensics expert - and mother of seven - told me this was her statement to her children: “There is no presump tion of privacy in this house.” She has seen the crimes, and their associated pain and suffering, caused when kids get careless online, and she knows the best prevention is parental involve ment and guidance. Remember, this is not like sneaking a peak into your daughter’s little pink diary hidden in her closet. These are conversations posted for 100 million to see. ■ What are acceptable uses of other technologies, particularly mobile devic es? What can they do on their friends’ computers? More and more new tech nologies are allowing unfiltered access to the Internet - video iPods, picture phones and video phones, even por table gaming devices. And the pornog raphy industry has been scrambling quite effectively to produce material our children can access easily through these devices. In the words of my friend at the GBI, “Why do kids need a video phone or these other devices? If parents want to get their child a phone, buy them one that they can use to make a phone call - not to access objectionable and dangerous material online.” Well said. ■ What happens if the rules are broken? One mom, a writer with the Los Angeles Times, told of her experience with getting her daughter a MySpace account. Wisely, she put rules like these in place and together they signed their agreement. When she found a profanity on her daugh ter’s site, mom removed her daughter’s privileges for two weeks. Later, when the daughter posted a picture of herself with her friends making an obscene gesture, mom revoked privileges until her daughter’s next birthday - about nine months away. This was a mom willing to put up with the comments such as, “You’ve taken away all my fun,” “You don’t love me,” “You’ve ruined my life!” and others. But she is also a mom who wants to protect her daughter from making unwise decisions, and to let her experience consequences at the hand of her loving mother rather than as the victim of a stranger. To order your copy of the Play it Safe guide, go to www.georgiafamily.org. Then I realized that what passed for leaves of grass were actually the brown needles of Christmas past. Christmases past, no doubt, because I’m pretty sure I found traces of cedar, pine and fir. Thank goodness I found nothing that was alive or once-alive. I recalled the time I found a neighbor, well into December, busily scrubbing out the trunk of his car. He told me his wife had bought a frozen turkey that had rolled out of the bag and been left in the car by mistake. Do you know what a thawed dead bird smells like after it ripens? My neighbor did, and it took a lot of elbow grease to deturkey that car. (If memory serves, those neighbors became vegetarians, denounced the observance of Thanksgiving and rolled down their windows when driving through an automatic car wash.) I spent the good part of a day vacu uming out my vehicle. I tossed away a bag of trash, scrubbed down the floor mats, washed the windows and spiffied up the dash with spray-on vinyl pro tectant. When I had finished, it was just like having a new car, except that there was no new-car smell; just the odor of cleaning products. I didn’t mind, though. It could have been worse. It could have been turkey. Reach Glynn Moore at glynn. moore@morris.com.