November 27, 1985

The 200,000 new members added to the rolls over the past several years have swelled pta ranks to 5.6 million, the association reports.

According to Rosemary Kolde, president of the ava, association officials were concerned about the amount of time Mr. Meredith, who serves on the boards of four corporations, would be able to devote to the job.

Developed by the publishing house Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, the center--which opened Oct. 15--is "an attempt on our part to make available to our community and to the people who come to central Florida the things we work on on a scale they can handle," said Roland J.B. Goddu, the company's director of educational research and development.

To Joyce Anisman-Saltman, laughter has a "hypodermic effect" on the classroom, injecting energy and interest into the day's routines.

Although officials last week said they had substantially recovered from the transportation crisis, they said they had been forced to reschedule the starting time of middle schools and to eliminate bus service for high-school students for two weeks.

The intent of the law is not to require teachers to be programmers, said Paul B. Gussman, a consultant to the state education department's office of special projects, but to make sure they have a working knowledge of how computers can be used in the educational process.

The chairman, Representative Patricia Schroeder, Democrat of Colorado, investigated Mr. Tancredo's Denver office in connection with an unusual chain of events:

The $500,000 study was sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health.

At a meeting in Los Angeles early this month, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the central body of Reform Judaism and a longtime advocate of public education, voted by a 2-to-1 margin to support the development of full-time, self-supporting Jewish schools as an educational option for parents.

Over the past three years, 20 members of the aap have been involved in mergers or acquisitions that, according to the association, have dealt a severe blow to the aap's revenue base. In addition, since January, 36 companies--out of a total membership of 260--have resigned from the association for financial reasons and because of concern that the aap is gravitating toward a "big-company orientation," according to the association.

Bradley Blanchette, an English teacher at Colchester (Vt.) High School, has been named Vermont's 1986 Teacher of the Year.

Doris Helge, executive director of the council, said that rural special educators may be required to work with students with a variety of mild handicaps, such as learning disabilities, behavior disorders, and mild mental retardation, yet many states require a teacher to be separately certified and trained to teach each one of those handicapping conditions. This requirement may pose a burden to rural areas that already find it hard to attract special-education teachers, she said.

The "open-enrollment" plan, which was championed by Gov. Rudy Perpich, allows 11th and 12th graders to take college courses with tuition paid by per-pupil state foundation aid. (See Education Week, Oct. 23, 1985.)

People for the American Way, a civil-liberties advocacy group, criticized all five of the texts on the grounds that they inadequately covered evolution.

The members of the Chancellor's Advisory Commission are Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; Theodore R. Sizer, chairman of the education department at Brown University; John Brademas, president of New York University; Patricia A. Graham, dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education; and Harold Howe 2nd, a senior lecturer on education at Harvard and a former U.S. commissioner of education.