January 23, 1985

The Boston Plan for Excellence was established last February when the Bank of Boston gave the city schools $1.5 million--said to be the largest gift of its kind to a public-school system--to establish a permanent endowment fund to enhance their educational quality. (See Education Week, Feb. 15, 1984.)

Working with children in two Illinois Head Start programs, Merle Karnes, professor of special education at the University of Illinois, is working to identify and develop programs for low-income gifted students. Head Start is a federally fund-ed program for preschoolers from low-income families.

ARIZONA

The board's proposed neighborhood-school policy, which would leave 10 of the city's elementary schools more than 90-percent black, should be approved because the school system was declared fully desegregated in 1975, and should "be entitled to be treated just as any other unitary system," William Bradford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, was quoted as telling a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

There is only one breeding pair of bald eagles left in New Jersey, but state officials have been bringing baby eagles into the state to be raised so they will remain in the habitat as adults. The midde schoolers, the first citizen group to take an interest in the problem, are planning to raise additional funds to acquire a second eaglet.

In the first case, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, the department sued the Wilkes County (Ga.) Board of Education, claiming that half of the county's black population is packed into one "single, grossly overpopulated district ... impermissibly submerg[ing] the voting strength of black citizens."

The guidelines are also a response to a court challenge to the constitutionality of the law launched last month by the American Civil Liberties Union in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia against the West Virginia Department of Education and Mr. Truby.

The new evaluation policy is the first time the state has mandated criteria for evaluation procedures, according to Thomas McNeel, deputy superintendent of schools.

I fully agree with Part II of the Court's opinion. Teachers, like all other government officials, must conform their conduct to the Fourth Amendment's protections of personal privacy and personal security. As Justice Stevens points out, [

• ], this principle is of particular importance when applied to schoolteachers, for children learn as much by example as by exposition. It would be incongruous and futile to charge teachers with the task of imbuing their students with an understanding of our system of constitutional democracy, while at the same time immunizing those same teachers from the need to respect constitutional protections. [
• ]

The impetus for that growth was a tax-credit law signed by then-Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. Under the short-term law, which ended in June 1984 after 18 months, companies that donated computer equipment to schools were eligible to receive a tax credit equal to 25 percent of the equipment's fair market value.

The survey, conducted recently by Texas Tech University, was designed to identify a set of skills or competencies for reading teachers. Of 825 professors questioned, 518 responded.