Predictably, Hillsborough County’s new school choice plan has resulted in a return to the days of separate but ‘equal’ education, with poor and minority students being crammed into schools lacking such basics as bathrooms and books.
The number of Hillsborough schools with high concentrations of poor students nearly doubled this year, with some lacking basic supplies and facilities.
Washington K-8 and James K-8 schools started the school year without enough books, teachers and working toilets.
Students at two others, Oak Park Elementary and Franklin Middle, remain in portable classrooms for a second full year. There’s limited computer access for Franklin students because their portables lack enough security.
Admittedly surprised by the spike, district officials rushed extra tutors to some of the schools in advance of this week’s FCAT testing. They will begin special teacher training in the summer and plan a separate teacher recruiting day, where they will offer more money to experienced teachers.
Frustrated parents are taking note.
“As far as this school getting a fair shake, I don’t see it happening,'’ said Dwayne Ellis, Franklin’s PTA president. His two daughters attend the school.
A year ago, a dozen Hillsborough public schools reported nearly 90 percent or more of their children qualified for free or reduced-price meals based on federal guidelines.
Now there are 23 such schools, a transition tied to a district plan to let some families choose their own schools.
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Hillsborough is following a nationwide pattern of resegregation as it enters its first year of school choice.
The choice plan, which went into effect in August, allows families of certain students to choose from schools in their assigned region as long as there is room. That includes families living in Tampa’s generally impoverished inner core, where forced busing to the suburbs took place for decades to desegregate schools. It ended this year.
Few families from the inner core ended up choosing schools, so most were assigned to their neighborhood schools.
“This was a predictable outcome,'’ said Sam Horton, president of the Hillsborough County branch of the NAACP and a retired educator. “It was about this way in 1954. It’s no different now.'’
Yeah, this outcome was very predictable, especially considering that it was by design. The Tribune innocently reports that ‘The choice plan, which went into effect in August, allows families of certain students to choose…’ without detailing which lucky students get to make a choice.
The only students required to make a choice are those who were previously bused to nice schools from their blighted inner city neighborhoods. Guess what: the poor and under-educated parents of those kids often failed to make a choice, and even when they jumped through all the right hoops, they were told ’sorry, but the nice schools are all full…’
Estella Gallegos was turned down Tuesday when she asked that her 13-year-old daughter, Maria Hernandez, be allowed to return to Mann Middle School in Brandon in August. Children from her neighborhood have been bused there to desegregate schools in the suburbs. The choice plan is ending forced busing, but Maria wants to go back.
The mother and daughter were attending a hastily called meeting of parents from Tampa’s urban core. The students are being assigned by the district to two schools in their neighborhood - James and Washington - that will re- open in August as kindergarten through eighth-grade schools to provide necessary space.
About 2,000 urban core families did not apply for the program and were assigned to mostly urban schools, the district said.
Gallegos, who speaks little English, said through her daughter that she never knew she could apply to have Maria return to the Brandon school or she would have.
Maria says, “I don’t mind the bus ride'’ from her home near Ybor City.
Under choice, the district is divided into seven regions, and families eligible for choice were supposed to be able to choose from schools within their region. The district would provide transportation to some of those schools.
Families eligible for choice this year were those with children entering kindergarten, sixth and ninth grades and all those living in the county’s urban core. About 45,000 students districtwide were eligible.
As of Tuesday’s sparsely attended meeting, letters had not been sent to all the affected families notifying them of their assignments, district officials said. Families that attended were confused, and some did not like their options.
Left Feeling Deflated
Derwin and Loretha Bozeman applied for choice by the Jan. 9 deadline. They showed up with a worn notification card saying they got their first choice of Tampa’s Wilson Middle School for their daughter, Bianqa, who has been attending Pierce Middle School. They then got a letter saying they failed to participate in choice and needed to come to Tuesday’s meeting, they said.
“We were told we can go to either Booker T. Washington or back to Pierce,'’ Derwin Bozeman said. “We want Wilson. It’s the only blue-ribbon school in the area, and we live closer to Wilson than Pierce.'’
As of Friday, the family had made no decision. “This is like a big evacuation of air from the balloon. We don’t know what we’re going to do.'’
The Bozeman family is among a group of 1,500 families the district erroneously assigned to already-crowded schools. They were all supposed to be called, but the Bozemans said they never were.
As a result of overcrowding at the nice schools, 2 old schools were reopened: Washington K-8 and James K-8 schools, the same schools that lead today’s article because they lack basic necessities.
The school choice plan was designed from the beginning to be burdensome to those who were least likely to have the time or expertise to navigate its confusing rules. The game was rigged to bring back segregation, and that’s exactly where we are today.
In fact, back in February of last year, Hillsborough educators blamed a computer glitch for assigning poor kids to wealthy white schools, and decided to turn away many poor kids who had actually been assigned to the school of their choice.
Then they found ways to make room at those same schools for other kids whose parents were resourceful enough to call the right people at the school board and complain.
So, the bottom line is that poor and minority kids who were previously attending desirable schools were reassigned to schools like Washington and James and essentially written off as not deserving of books or teachers or bathrooms.
For background on this fiasco, BlogWood: Norwood’s Fair and Balanced Nattering: School choice separate but equal
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Hmmm… regular folks seem to be waking up to the fact that all of the much ballyhooed housing development in and around downtown Tampa is not designed for them.
About 60 young professionals packed a small room at the Tampa Museum of Art on Thursday night to drill city and development officials about why they can’t afford most of the housing planned for downtown.
Of the 27 condominium projects planned for the urban core, very few are offering units below $200,000, and many are priced at more than $1 million.
The Tampa Chamber of Commerce’s Emerge Tampa, a group for young workers, held the forum to get answers and send a message that they want downtown to become vibrant with homes and nightlife, and they want to be a part of it.
First, if you earn a limited income and yearn for something better, don’t get in bed with the Chamber of Commerce. An entity which exists to further enrich businesses and the already wealthy ownership class through massively profitable development is not going to fight for affordable housing.
In fact, developers write the rules around here, and they’re not about to offer an affordable condo to the likes of you.
Developer Frank DeBose heads a Hillsborough County board intended to encourage affordable housing, but he doesn’t include that type of housing at the Pinnacle Place twin condominium towers he plans downtown.
Requiring developers to include lower-priced homes could discourage them from building in Tampa, said DeBose, chairman of the county’s housing finance authority.
Instead, DeBose said, incentives such as tax breaks or other taxpayer-financed subsidies would be a better way to encourage construction of affordable housing.
That pretty much sums up Tampa’s problems: the developers write and enforce the rules. Frank is happy to do the right thing, and take full credit for it, but only if his largesse is financed by taxpayers.
So, instead of focusing on affordable housing, which naturally leads to diverse, vibrant, interesting and desirable communities Tampa’s leaders tend to look for ways to push the working poor away from downtown.
The developers invariably promise something better for the residents of blighted communities, but those promises are empty, as residents end up scattered and the vast majority are never able to return to the neighborhoods from which they were evicted.
Here’s an idea:
why not pump some city and county money into the rehabbing the empty and crumbling downtown buildings such as the Floridan Hotel and the old Kress building? These and tons of other vacant downtown properties could be cut up into apartments and lofts, incorporated as condos, and offered to the working poor as a viable home ownership option.
Downtown would be infused with new energy. Nighttime activities would increase. Vibrant new communities would blossom and grow. The powerless people who we are now talking about dislocating and scattering would suddenly have just a little say in their own future, as they form condo boards and start to practice a little self-determination.
And, as people started using downtown on the evenings and weekends, impressions like this (from the original Tribune article cited at the beginning of this post) would quickly change.
“I’ve been thinking, `Is Tampa really my place?’ ‘’ said Veena Rayapareddi, 33, who moved here from Washington, D.C., two years ago to work for an information technology company. “I like Tampa, but I don’t see much that will keep me here. When I go downtown on a Sunday afternoon, I don’t see even one person walking.'’
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The right wing extremists who have latched onto Terri Schiavo in a blatant attempt at self-promotion are dredging up medical cases with so few similarities to Terri’s that comparisons are meaningless, but they still insist that a miraculous cure is just a prayer away. In real life, Terri has lost so much brain matter that virtually every legitimate medical professional agrees that recovery is impossible.
For 20 years, she was silent, a prisoner of a terrible accident that damaged her brain.
But last month, Kansas resident Sarah Scantlin suddenly began to talk. The media called it a miracle.
Could it happen to Terri Schiavo?
“It gave Terri’s family great hope,” said Randall Terry, the Operation Rescue founder who has been organizing protests on behalf of the Schindlers, Schiavo’s parents. “Terri is in a better condition than Sarah was.”
Leading neurologists disagree. They say that, as similar as the two women’s cases may appear, Schiavo’s brain injury is far more severe than Scantlin’s. Recovery in cases like Scantlin’s is rare, but possible. In cases like Schiavo’s, they say, it can’t happen.
“This recent case has no relationship to it at all,” said Dr. William Kessler, chairman of the neurology department at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It’s like comparing apples to oranges.”
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Kessler said that, based on descriptions of Scantlin’s abilities before she began speaking, her damage was less severe than Schiavo’s.
People with those two different brain injuries may look the same physically - but their condition is very different. Think of different kinds of infections, Kessler said.
“If you saw two patients who had a fever and trouble breathing, you might think it was the same case,” he said.
But one could have an easily cured pneumonia, while the other had usually deadly Ebola, he said.
“To a neurologist, you would never equate those two cases,” he said.
To Terry, of Operation Rescue, those opinions don’t matter. Scantlin wasn’t expected to speak again, he said.
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Terry pointed to such doctors as Dr. William Hammesfahr, a Clearwater neurologist who has examined Schiavo for her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler. Hammesfahr has said in court that Schiavo tried to follow simple commands and that her eyes fixed on her family. Hammesfahr, who was called “a self-promoter” in a court order by the judge in Schiavo’s case, declined to comment Thursday.
Brain scans show that parts of Schiavo’s brain have atrophied and been replaced by spinal fluid. With such severe damage, Schiavo can’t show the recovery that Scantlin has, said Dr. Michael Pulley, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Florida College of Medicine in Jacksonville.
“Those types of changes don’t reverse,” Pulley said. “If you lose big pieces of brain, regardless of what it is - trauma, stroke, surgery - it doesn’t come back.”
The only documented case of someone recovering from a permanent vegetative state came in the early 1980s, said Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurology professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School who has examined Schiavo.
And in that case, the patient’s scan showed no brain atrophy, Cranford said. “The one thing we learned from that, you look at shrinkage of the brain,” he said. “Terri has massive shrinkage.”
Schiavo also has more severe brain damage than two patients in a New York study published this month, Cranford said. In that study, the patients diagnosed as minimally conscious showed increased brain activity when they heard audiotapes of loved ones’ voices.
Cranford said it’s hard for people without neurological training to accept that people in a vegetative state can’t recover and aren’t aware of their surroundings. They sleep. They wake. They grimace.
“It’s very hard, because when you look at Terri Schiavo, you can think she’s interacting, but she’s not,” he said. “When you have loving, caring parents like the Schindlers, you just want to deny they’re in a vegetative state. It’s a terrible syndrome.”
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THE LATEST
Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer is expected to decide today whether to give Terri Schiavo’s parents time to pursue appeals. Greer’s order preventing Schiavo’s husband from removing her feeding tube expires at 5 this afternoon.
We’re down to fundies and quacks pursuing their own agendas, feeding the family false hope in order to keep themselves in the limelight. Punks like Randall Terry and need to be seen for what they are - opportunistic con men skilled in using baseless faith to steer their victims toward a state of delusive dreams.
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Jeb! has a new plan to improve public education: shift low performing students into private religious schools that have absolutely no accountability. That way, the students’ low test scores wont drag down the averages of their former classmates, and Jeb! can point to rising test scores and claim to have done something. Oh, and religious institutions will get even more money from the state, which is unconstitutional, but let’s not get bogged down by details. What’s not to like?
Florida would get its fourth, and possibly its largest, school voucher program, with as many as 170,000 poorly scoring children eligible for “Reading Compact” vouchers, under a proposal unveiled by Gov. Jeb Bush Wednesday.
Children who score in the lowest level on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test three consecutive years could get a voucher to any private school — religious or secular — or to another public school.
Bush said the vouchers are necessary because 17 percent of sixth-graders and 18 percent of eighth-graders have failed the FCAT reading section three years in a row.
“That’s a trend,” he said. “And that’s a trend we need to deal with early on to make sure it doesn’t happen systemically.”
Critics said that giving the worst-performing students vouchers and letting them disappear into a private school system with no public accountability is no way to solve the problem.
“They said vouchers. And I said no,” said Wayne Blanton, director of the Florida School Boards Association, about his briefing from Bush’s office on the issue.
Palm Beach County Schools Superintendent Art Johnson said it also could create problems with the balancing of schools for enrollment purposes.
Bush’s announcement came Wednesday even though “Opportunity Scholarships” — his first and smallest voucher program, for children at schools receiving an F grade two out of four years — have been declared unconstitutional by a state appeals court because they send public money to religious schools. The Florida Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments in the case this spring.
“The governor is just showing a lack of respect for the courts,” said Ron Meyer, the lawyer for voucher opponents who successfully argued the case before the 1st District Court of Appeal.
In most respects, the reading vouchers would be more like McKay vouchers for disabled children and corporate tax credit vouchers for poorer children than they are like Opportunity Scholarships in that the McKay and corporate programs have less state oversight and fewer restrictions than the Opportunity program does.
Schools that take Opportunity Scholarship vouchers, for example, must agree to take the state voucher as full payment of tuition and fees, must not discriminate on the basis of religion, and must not force children to pray or worship. And children who get them must take the FCAT each year.
But schools participating in Reading Compact vouchers, according to language by Rep. Rep. Anthony Traviesa, R-Tampa, would be able to ask parents to pay tuition and fees on top of the state voucher amount, would be allowed to admit or not admit children based on religion, and would be allowed to compel worship. Children would not have to take the FCAT, only the standardized test used by the school.
Those test scores would be given to parents — as FCAT scores are. But while public school scores are aggregated and produce an annual grade for every school, the scores from the voucher students would be aggregated across the entire program by an “independent private research organization” that would be prohibited by law from revealing how well particular private schools were doing.
“Why do that? Then we’d know what was going on,” quipped Sen. Ron Klein, D-Delray Beach. “The governor always seems to be afraid of accountability when it comes to voucher programs, and I don’t know why.”
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Yesterday, it was reported that know nothing busybodies were praying to God Jeb! to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case. It seems their prayers have been answered.
State officials again tried to step into the legal drama over Terri Schiavo’s life Wednesday by filing an 11th-hour motion to block the removal of her feeding tube. A judge rebuffed the move, although he extended an order barring the tube’s removal until Friday.
The unexpected filing by the Florida Department of Children and Families to investigate reports of abuse against Schiavo was reminiscent of lawmakers’ passage of a 2003 law forcing doctors to resume feeding Schiavo after she went six days without food and water.
The DCF move capped yet another day of political and legal intrigue in a case with no shortage of dramatic developments throughout its seven-year history.
Just as in 2003 when lawmakers were spurred to action by thousands of communications from people wanting to keep Schiavo alive, e-mails and phone calls once again flooded Gov. Jeb Bush and lawmakers.
Bush pledged to do “whatever I can within the law” to keep Schiavo alive, but he sent a blunt message to those who oppose removal of her feeding tube by declaring he will obey “the rule of law.”
“I’m not going to grandstand,” Bush said. “I’m not going to do something that would be completely inappropriate and disrespectful of the laws of the state of Florida.”
George Felos, a lawyer representing Schiavo’s husband, Michael Schiavo, protested DCF’s motion. “This reeks of political arm twisting,” he said. “The governor and Legislature are trying to make an end run around the court system.”
Schiavo’s parents praised the DCF help and said the judge’s order preventing removal of the feeding tube, unrelated to the DCF action, was another “miracle” to extend their daughter’s life.
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(Pinellas-Pasco Judge George) Greer appeared irritated as Kelly McKibben, a counsel for DCF’s Orlando office, stepped forward during the hearing to speak on a motion to intervene in the case as a crowd of up to 80 people, most of whom support Schiavo’s parents, stirred. Some mumbled, “Amen.”
Greer would have none of it, saying DCF was not a proper party to the hearing.
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DCF officials refused to comment and declined to say who ordered the move to intervene.
Bill Spann, chief of staff at DCF, said the agency could not provide any information because state law prohibits the disclosure of abuse allegations.
If abuse is proved, Spann said, a report is made to law enforcement and custody of the victim can be transferred away from an alleged abuser.
A copy of the DCF motion was not immediately released. The motion does not note who has made the “abuse and neglect” reports and contains little detail of the allegations.
Schiavo’s family has previously complained that they believe husband Michael Schiavo had abused his wife.
……
Felos said DCF has previously investigated “scores” of abuse allegations, though none, he said, have ever been substantiated.
Asked if Bush and state lawmakers were behind the DCF action, Felos said, “It’s so transparent. I think the general public realized that.”
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Company’s Work in Iraq Profited Bush’s Uncle
The Iraq war helped bring record earnings to St. Louis-based defense contractor Engineered Support Systems Inc., and new financial data show that the firm’s war-related profits have trickled down to a familiar family name — Bush.
William H.T. “Bucky” Bush, uncle of the president and youngest brother of former President George H.W. Bush, cashed in ESSI stock options last month with a net value of nearly half a million dollars.
“Uncle Bucky,” as he is known to the president, is on the board of the company, which supplies armor and other materials to U.S. troops. The company’s stock prices have soared to record heights since before the invasion, benefiting in part from contracts to rapidly refit fleets of military vehicles with extra armor.
William Bush exercised options on 8,438 shares of company stock Jan. 18, according to reports filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He acknowledged in an interview that the transaction was worth about $450,000.
Nothing new here…
Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power
Orcinus: Bush, the Nazis and America
CorpWatch: Bechtel Wins Iraq War Contracts
CBS News | All In The Family
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This is just too good to pass up: a parent whose kids are ineligible to receive vouchers gets them anyway and uses them to help her kids learn songs praising Jesus. Then the kids are held up as model successes of the very program which they have cheated in order to enroll in.
For school voucher proponents, the morning was almost perfect.
The children on stage sang songs about Jesus while about 2,000 of their classmates in matching red T-shirts clapped along. Attorney General Charlie Crist promised to expand vouchers and Gov. Jeb Bush , who is expected to unveil a new type of voucher today , vowed that corporate tax credit vouchers would continue as long as he is in office.
There was, for voucher fans last week, only one glitch: The parent chosen to offer a testimonial for corporate vouchers was by her own statements ineligible to receive them but, because of a lack of oversight, has had two children enrolled for three years.
The law passed in 2001 at the behest of a major Republican donor requires participating children to have been enrolled in a public school the year before they first receive vouchers. Linda Rutledge, a social worker, said she got vouchers for her son and daughter in 2002 , even though they were attending a Catholic school at the time and had not attended public school for several years.
“Somehow, you’ve got a poster child for this program, and she’s flatly ineligible for the program? How does that happen?” asked Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville.
King was instrumental in the program’s founding but is in his second year of pushing legislation to add “accountability” to the state’s three voucher programs, which this year are sending about $120 million of public money to private schools.
John Kirtley, the Tampa businessman who effectively runs the corporate voucher program, did not return phone calls for comment.
Cindy Forster, head of the HEROES voucher group in Jacksonville, which receives money from Kirtley for corporate vouchers, said in an e-mail that of more than 10,000 children in the program, Rutledge’s children were among 24 improperly enrolled by FloridaChild, a group that no longer distributes vouchers.
Only five such children, including Rutledge’s two, are still receiving vouchers, Forster said.
Rutledge said her children had attended a Catholic school for several years on private scholarships. When her son was finishing eighth grade , the highest grade at the school , three years ago, both children applied to and were accepted by Duval County magnet schools.
Rutledge, however, learned of corporate vouchers and decided instead to send her children to Potter’s House Christian Academy.
“I think it’s an excellent program because it gives us choice,” she said, praising her son’s “spiritual growth” at the school.
But remember: according to Jeb!, state voucher money does not aid religion in any way.
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As a Florida Supreme Court fight over the constitutionality of throwing state money at private religious schools looms, Jeb! aims to expand his controversial voucher program. His ultimate goal is the destruction of the public school system, because educating poor people without simultaneously indoctrinating them into a hateful and violent religious creed is not an efficient use of taxpayer money.
Students who fail the state’s reading test three years in a row would be offered vouchers for private school under a sweeping new education bill Gov. Jeb Bush is expected to unveil today.
The proposal also would change the way teachers are paid, taking into account working conditions such as low-performing schools, high-crime areas and teacher shortages.
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Bush was leading a trade mission to Bogota, Colombia, on Tuesday. His office would not discuss the proposal before today’s announcement.
The proposal is almost certain to face strong opposition from Democrats, many of whom have questioned the constitutionality of vouchers.
“I think we ought to focus our efforts on improving our public schools,” said Sen. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton. “The future of Florida’s children, the future of Florida’s economy, depends on good, quality public schools.”
Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach, said money would be better spent on provisions such as reading coaches. “We need to solve the reading problem within the school system that’s supposed to teach them to read,” he said.
The bill, which was still being drafted Tuesday, would be a major expansion of the state’s voucher program at a time when its legal future is uncertain.
In a November decision, the 1st District Court of Appeal ruled that the state’s original voucher program is unconstitutional because it allows tax dollars to be spent on religious schools. It was the third such court ruling since the voucher law was passed in 1999. The Florida Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments on the issue this spring.
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As protestors prayed to God Jeb! to intervene, a Judge issued a last minute stay to prevent Michael Schiavo from carrying out Terri’s wishes by allowing her to die. The OK should come soon, though, ending an odyssey started by well intentioned parents years ago and artificially extended by manipulative Christians and supercilious politicians who have cynically preyed upon the family in order to further their own agendas and careers.
Schiavo case nears decision - maybe
The seven-year legal battle over the fate of Terri Schiavo reaches a critical and familiar juncture today leading either to the end of her life or more legal maneuvers to sustain it.
Just days before the 15th anniversary of their daughter’s collapse, Bob and Mary Schindler are once again asking a judge today to stop Michael Schiavo from ordering his wife’s feeding tube to be removed so they can explore further appeals.
A judge’s order barring the tube’s removal expires at 5 p.m. today, opening the possibility that feeding will be stopped for the third time since 2001.
On Tuesday, the case hit the latest in a long series of legal standoffs.
First, an appeals court released an order that seemingly cleared the way for Schiavo’s husband to order that his wife’s feeding tube be removed. But less than an hour later, Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer issued a second order stopping him at least until Greer hears argument today about whether to grant a further stay.
Without the food and water the tube brings, Schiavo is expected to die within two weeks.
Lawyers on both sides of this bitter and protracted legal battle agree that the case is at an important crossroads.
“Tomorrow is a huge day,” attorney David Gibbs III, who represents Schiavo’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, told reporters Tuesday.
George Felos, a lawyer representing Michael Schiavo said, “We’re hopeful the courts will finally come to the point of saying, “No more delay.’ ”
……
Tuesday started as have so many days in this complex legal contest - with protests, competing news conferences, last-minute court orders and the shadow of uncertainty hanging over everything.
Protesters stood outside Michael Schiavo’s Clearwater home early in the morning as police watched nearby. Up to 50 people also protested outside the hospice in Pinellas Park where Terri Schiavo lives, holding signs saying “Thou Shalt Not Kill” or “Let Terri Live.”
Matthew Irwin, 24, a student at the University of Florida went to the protest with his mother.
“We’re here to pray for Gov. Bush to intervene like last time,” he said. “He has the constitutional power and the ability to give Terri life today.”
At 1 p.m. Tuesday, the 2nd District Court of Appeal issued a mandate, essentially finalizing an earlier unsuccessful appeal by the Schindlers. Some thought the court would spell out instructions on when the feeding tube could be pulled, which could have delayed the act for weeks.
About 11 a.m., Terri Schiavo’s father, Bob Schindler, told protesters outside the hospice: “I don’t have much to say except we are begging and pleading for the Legislature and Gov. Bush to save Terri from being murdered in cold blood.”
Upon its release, the district court order offered no instructions on when the feeding tube could be removed. In such an event, Felos had promised that his client would seek to end life-support immediately.
But about 1:45 p.m., Greer issued an order preventing the removal of the feeding tube that has kept Schiavo, 41, alive since her collapse Feb. 25, 1990, from a suspected chemical imbalance, which stopped her heart and severely damaged her brain.
……
The Schindlers’ lawyers will ask Greer at a hearing today to extend his stay. If Greer doesn’t, Felos told reporters that his client will again have health care professionals remove the feeding tube.
“As soon as he is legally authorized, he will discontinue artificial life support,” Felos told reporters at a news conference.
Unlike 2003, when state lawmakers and Bush stepped in and forced doctors to reinsert Schiavo’s feeding tube - a move later overturned on appeal - Felos doesn’t think lawmakers have any options left.
“There is nothing they can do to overturn the final judgment of the court in this case,” he said. “I think legislators know that, their staff people know that and the governor knows that.”
……
Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who has been asked by the Schindlers to organize protests on their daughter’s behalf, expressed hope Tuesday that state lawmakers could intervene.
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ChoicePoint was just gonna notify California victims and leave everyone else hanging, but then word got around, and the company is now scrambling to save face.
The personal information of more than 10,000 Floridians — things such as birthdays and bank account numbers — was released to identity thieves in a massive security breach.
It’s the kind of information that can be used to create credit card accounts or drain bank accounts.
Overall, 145,000 people living in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and three U.S. territories will receive warning letters, which will be sent out by the end of the week. Only California and Texas had more people affected than Florida. California authorities estimate a half-million people could have had their information stolen.
The announcement Monday from the data broker ChoicePoint comes in the wake of revelations last week that criminals posing as legitimate businesses in California were able to gain access to 19 billion pieces of information on individuals.
ChoicePoint is one of several companies that gather personal information on people, then package and sell it for profit. Its mishandling of that information has set off a political firestorm from California to Washington, with some public officials calling for stepped-up regulation.
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ChoicePoint is one of the largest warehouses of personal data in the country. The Georgia-based company keeps a massive store of records that includes everything from an individual’s date of birth and Social Security number to their employment history and driving records. Employers, loan officers, law enforcement and media outlets, among others, pay ChoicePoint for access to its databases.
Companies like ChoicePoint, said Linda Foley, co-executive director of the California identity theft center, “know as much about you as God does.'’
SCANDAL NOTIFICATION
Now, in an effort to contain the widening scandal, ChoicePoint is sending letters to everyone whose information may have been given to a fraud ring. It asks people to call a toll-free number and urges consumers to check their credit reports for suspicious activity.
……
Publicly-held ChoicePoint is no stranger to controversy.
In 2000, it bought Boca Raton-based DBT, a data collection company that had its contracts with the Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI suspended because its founder was once suspected of ties to Bahamian drug smugglers. DBT also was hired to help build Florida’s infamous felon list for the 2000 presidential election. Many of those people, who were purged from voter rolls, were actually eligible to vote.
The breach was first discovered in October, ChoicePoint said, when it detected signs of fraudulent activity in the Los Angeles area. But it said that city authorities asked the company to not notify individuals because of a pending investigation.
In late January, it said it was cleared to begin notifying Californians. In connection with the fraud, a Nigerian citizen last week pleaded no contest in California state court and was sentenced to 16 months in prison.
PRIVACY LEGISLATION
Only California has a law requiring data collection agencies to immediately notify people when their personal information has been stolen or given to suspicious groups.
If not for California’s law, no one would have ever found out about this. And that “immediate” notification clause seems to have been stretched to the limit, as most of the stolen information was delivered to the thieves (by ChoicePoint itself) last summer.
They are only notifying victims from other states now due to pressure from at least 38 Attorneys General.
Hmmm… California officials estimate 500,000 and ChoicePoint claims “only” 145,000. Ultimately, it may turn out that many more than 10,000 Floridians were affected.
Posted as National
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