News & Reviews

Judge kills voucher plan, but schools & parents vow: We'll work things out Johnnietta McGrady used vouchers to enroll her two children in St. Thomas Aquinas School, away from the chaos of Cleveland's public school system. But last week, one day before classes started, a federal judge turned her world upside down-issuing a temporary order blocking the voucher program until he can hold a trial to prove the program violates the "separation of church and state." U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr., who struck down the program, has already declared his position on the question: "The participating schools are overwhelmingly sectarian. Therefore, the Cleveland program has the primary effect of advancing religion." But Ms. McGrady is concerned with advancing the education of her children: "I really can't afford the private school now." Now 56 private, parochial, and independent Christian schools that accepted voucher students are scrambling to find a way not to dump over four thousand students back into the public schools. Several are telling parents to keep sending their kids until things are straightened out. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, which operates many of the schools, said it would maintain the status quo for the time being. Sheila Bolek, principal of Our Lady of Peace, spent a busy day trying to calm down the upset parents of about 80 voucher pupils. "We're not going to turn anyone away. We'll work things out," she said. Many parents expressed a similar confidence that things would work out. Christine Suma told the Cleveland Plain Dealer: "I'm just going to send them and just figure out how to make the payments." Her husband, Steve, the sole breadwinner in the 14-member family, said he'd work more overtime in his job as a corrections officer to offset the $4,000 loss his family will suffer. The voucher program has been mired in controversy from the start. The Ohio Supreme Court this spring considered the voucher plan and struck it down on a legislative technicality but concluded there was no "separation of church and state problem." Lawmakers quickly went to work and rewrote the plan, which was signed into law by Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, only to see it blocked in federal court. Clint Bolick, director of the pro-voucher Institute for Justice, said the institute would assist in the appeal of the case and also intended to raise $8.5 million in private donations to bankroll the voucher program for the remainder of this school year. Rate hike doesn't spook the dow Great Greenspan Alan Greenspan repeated his amazing feat of raising interest rates without scaring Wall Street into a stock market plunge. Just as the Dow hit a new all-time high, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the second time in eight weeks, hiking the amount banks charge each other on overnight loans to 5.25 percent from 5 percent. This is supposed to be an inflation-fighting measure, one that is intended to cool the economy by making it more expensive for Americans to borrow money. The drought of 1999 Worse to come? This year's drought parched crops from Virginia into parts of the Midwest and forced suburbs from Washington to New York to restrict water use-but experts call it a typical dry spell. Something worse is yet to come, since severe ones (that cover at least one-third of the continental U.S.) come about once a decade-and the last one was in 1988. Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman called on farmers to buy more crop insurance: "Drought is like a cancer, slow, insidious and not always easy to detect in the early stages." The No-Comment Zone