Three years after winning a legal battle to stay in school, Ryan White, a Cicero, Ind., youth with aids, will have his story told in a television docudrama.
ABC will air “The Ryan White Story” on Monday, Jan. 16, from 9 to 11 p.m. e.s.t. It recounts how the boy contracted the disease through a blood product he took for his hemophilia, and how school officials and some parents in Kokomo, Ind., sought to keep him out of his middle school for fear he was a health threat to other children.
Ryan eventually won a court ruling allowing him to return to school, and his family moved from Kokomo to Cicero, where they received more hospitable treatment.
At a screening of the film last week in Washington, Ryan and his family were welcomed by Mary Hatwood Futrell, president of the National Education Association. The nea is helping to circulate a classroom study guide on the film.
Ryan, now 17, expressed satisfaction with the film, in which he is seen briefly as a boy in a children’s hospital who befriends the title character. “I just wish I had a bigger part,” he said.
The four finalists for the 1989 National Teacher of the Year award have been announced.
The competition, which has been held each year since 1952, is sponsored by the Council of Chief State School Officers, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., and GoodHousekeeping magazine.
The finalists are:
Jenlane Gee,. 32, a 3rd-grade teacher from Modesto, Calif.
Gary L. Stringer, 34, a senior-high science teacher from West Monroe, La.
Leslie Jean Roche, 37, a junior-high social-studies teacher from Rockville, Md.
Mary V. Bicouvaris, 49, a senior-high government and international-relations teacher from Hampton, Va.
For the past two years Jay C. Levine, a 7th- and 8th-grade counselor at Detroit’s Jackson Middle School, has been donating $20,000 a year--half of his annual salary--to the United Negro College Fund to establish a scholarship fund in his name for students pursuing a college degree.
In three more years, Mr. Levine will have donated $100,000 to the fund, and at that time the counselor hopes to use the interest accrued on his money to begin awarding college scholarships.
First preference, said Mr. Levine, will be given to students from Jackson. Thereafter, if money is still available, students from Detroit’s Southeastern and Kettering High Schools, where Mr. Levine previously taught English, will be eligible.
The uncf will follow its procedures, based on financial and academic criteria, to select the recipients, who will be able to use the money to attend a uncf college of their choice, said Mr. Levine.
“I always had it in mind to set up a scholarship fund,” he explained. Establishing the fund through a well-known organization such as the uncf, Mr. Levine observed, guaranteed that “the scholarships would continue to be awarded after I’m gone.
