“Outsiders ought to mind their own business,” the Nebraska Council of School Administrators said in a public statement last week after the Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the Moral Majority, led a rally last week in support of an unaccredited Christian school.
The demonstration, “organized and directed primarily by outsiders who have entered Nebraska in an attempt to impose their opinions on a Nebraska matter,” prompted the statement, said Robert Peterson, executive secretary of the Nebraska Council of School Administrators. Nebraskans do not need “outsiders sticking their supercilious noses into the conduct of Nebraska business,” Mr. Peterson said.
The Rev. Everett Sileven, pastor of the Faith Baptist Church in Louisville, has continued to operate his unaccredited school in the church in defiance of court orders. He maintains that school employees are church employees and are not subject to state control. Authorities had padlocked the church door, but have since removed the lock. The ban on entering the church for school purposes, however, continues.
The rally in support of Mr. Sileven drew about 1,000 people--half the total population of Louisville--from ten states. The demonstration was filmed for use, according to Mr. Falwell, in his Thanksgiving television special.
To allow any group to operate a school without “some minimum required expectations of the school’s performance is poor public policy,” the ncsa statement said. “How would we feel about our children if it were the American Nazi Party or the Communist Party or the Ku Klux Klan?”
The ncsa represents 975 public- and parochial-school administrators.
The 31st annual Teacher of the Year competition is gathering momentum, as education officials around the coun3try select state winners.
In Missouri, Barbara Giardina, a high-school accounting teacher in St. Louis County’s Hazelwood School District, was selected state Teacher of the Year for the 1981-82 school year.
Ms. Giardina is not the first outstanding teacher to be recognized in her district. Beverly Bimes, another Hazelwood High School teacher, reigned as Missouri Teacher of the Year in the 1979-80 school year and as National Teacher of the Year in 1980.
South Carolina’s Teacher of the Year is Mary Ann Blaskowitz, an English teacher at Camden High School.
And in Tennessee last week, the honors went to Martha Sue Elkins, a sixth-grade teacher from Oak Ridge.
In Georgia, four finalists have been selected from among 79 entries. The state winner will be announced at the November meeting of the Georgia Board of Education.
The national winner is picked by the Council of Chief State School Officers, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Good Housekeeping magazine.
“Institutional obsolescence"--the failure of schools to adjust to their changing clientele--may be the greatest obstacle to both quality and equity in education, says Chicago Superintendent Ruth B. Love.
“We must change the institution,” Ms. Love said last week in an address before the College Board. “We must look at some different ways of structuring our schools and our classrooms if we’re going to meet the needs of the diverse population that we face today.”
While praising some of the innovations of the recent past, Ms. Love said some, including bilingual and compensatory education, have done harm by “labeling and fragmenting” children.
And, she added, “I’m not sure that it’s our role to feed, to clothe, and to provide for the health services. Not that they aren’t important, but I would like to have us share a little bit with the other agencies and institutions.”
Ms. Love said she has often told her staff that “we are now asking the public schools to do what we used to pray to God for--and that’s everything.”
