Thank goodness the school year is almost over. In my town,a relentless heat wave has sapped teachers of the will to teach, and kids of the will to learn. Long, light-filled evenings go badly with sheets of math problems. My boys even seem tired of their all-important peer group.

And now comes word that federal officials are looking into the possibility of terrorists targeting the school lunch supply chain. According to an AP item in Newsday, the Agriculture Department's Food Safety Inspection Service has studied the vulnerability of three products -- milk, spaghetti sauce, and egg substitutes -- to terrorist tampering. Chicken nuggets are the current subject of agency attention.

School lunch, already suffering from often-deserved bad press for its high fat, high salt, and high yuck factor, just got even scarier.

Poor Garin Hughes. The Marietta, Georgia middle school student had his chocolate cookie-sneaking habit revealed in the media this week. A story in eSchool News described the 14-year-old picking through an unappetizing-sounding school lunch with a mystery fruit dessert. But Garin had a plastic-wrapped cookie hidden under his leg, something delicious for later.

In the past, that cookie probably would have been all the sweeter for the sneaking. But Marietta is one of three Atlanta-area school districts to adopt a new parental monitoring option with their electronic lunch payment system, MealPay. The new system informs parents of everything students purchase to eat at school -- even when they use nickels and dimes rescued from under the sofa seat cushions rather than the school's electronic payment system.

A school district spokesman said the option was added at the request of parents, who want to keep track of what their kids eat away from home.

Now, I know that kids are getting fatter, and yes, it's a serious problem. But is electronic spying on the snacking habits of adolescents the way to go here? A couple of points: First, it won't take Garin or his classmates long to figure out ways to beat the system. There are always ways. I remember pouring a lot of energy into covering my tracks at 14, even though they never led anywhere particularly scary.

Second, in some cultures a 14-year-old is an adult, ready to marry, hold a job, head a household. That's not our culture, of course -- adulthood seems to recede ever further into the hazy future for our young people. But certainly, by this age, kids should be -- and desperately want to be -- taking some responsibility for themselves. How can we start encouraging our growing children to behave more like adults, if we're going to marshall the awesome power of new technologies... to count their cookies?

I was wandering around on the Internet last week looking for information on anti-bullying legislation in the states. We were getting ready to publish Joan Lisante's story on cyber-bullying and I wanted to see how states were addressing this relatively new problem.

Then, because Google often has the effect of turning the Web into a Maze, I tumbled down an informational rabbit hole and found a fierce pocket of resistance to anti-bullying legislation and programs on the web site of Focus on the Family.

Now, I can understand why a group or a person might be skeptical that legislation is the best way to go about addressing kid-on-kid nastiness. I know I am. But Focus on the Family has a different concern. It perceives anti-bullying efforts as part of a campaign to make it easier for gay and lesbian students to be open about their homosexuality, and perhaps even organize groups such as GSA's on their campuses.

This seems to me like a perfect example of the kind of tunnel vision that prevents us from doing better by our children in all kinds of ways. School communities certainly need to find room for different beliefs and value systems within their student bodies. A student who believes homosexuality is wrong shouldn't be ridiculed. (Though I see no harm in some thoughtful challenging of preconceived notions on that front, seems like that is part of the educational process.)

But doesn't our responsibility to keep children safe in school -- safe from being slammed into lockers, for instance -- come first? Things have gotten better in many schools since I was a teen, but still too many homosexual students are bullied, harrassed and tormented. Too many wind up depressed, scared to go to school, forced to transfer, or even dropping out.

In Washington, D.C., a federally-funded school voucher program is finishing up its first school year. Because the program got a late start last spring, and because a high percentage of the students taking part were already attending either private or charter schools, researchers have not been able to begin assessing whether the program is meeting its most important goal: improving educational outcomes for students from failing public schools.

However, voucher proponents say that now the program is up and running, this coming September should see more of those students taking part -- a large enough number to allow for some solid research on outcomes.

In the absence of research, anecdotal evidence is standing in. The Washington Post, attempting to fill the gap in real data with a close look one family's experience with D.C.'s voucher program, recently profiled the Hammonds. Single Mom Nikia Hammond spends four hours each day on the bus taking her four children to a Baptist school, then getting herself to work, and then taking them home again. At the school, classes are small and the kids seem to be doing well, according to reporter Jay Matthews.

On the downside, the commute is brutal and eldest child Zackia Hammond, a talented runner, has had to give up her sport. I was struck by another detail: Hammond packing a breakfast of biscuits and sausages for her kids to eat while waiting for one of the two busses they take each morning.

The day after reading the Post story, I was sitting in the audience at a huge conference on the environmental causes of obesity in children and youth. Lack of time, lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and lack of opportunities for physical activity are of course key players in the obesity problem, especially among low-income children...and it occurred to me that at least for the Hammonds, the solution to poverty-related problem -- an inadequate public school -- was exacerbating others. Scarfing sausage and biscuit on a bus-stop bench is not the ideal breakfast experience. Giving up track is not something Zackia Hammond should have to do in order to get an adequate education.

When do you suppose we will get to the point where as a society we feel it is important to make sure all children have access to decent schools and decent food, along with safe settings to play and be active?

Like many parents, I have a long list of things I feel obliged to worry about. Some of them actually do worry me (babies forgetting to breathe in the middle of the night, kids riding bikes without helmets, one child failing to get off the subway in time and being whisked off to parts unknown). Others I don't really, sincerely worry about (running with sticks, brain rot from computer games, failure to ace the SATs) -- but my failure to worry about them nonetheless makes me anxious, which makes me just as miserable as really worrying. Works for me!

I'm always happy when someone with credibility tells me to stop worrying about something on my list. So my thanks go out today to Dr. Thomas B. Newman, a pediatrician and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCal, San Francisco. As reported in the New York Times, Newman wants parents and kids to stop worrying about cholesterol levels in children under 20. He doesn't think kids should have their cholesterol measured, even kids with high-cholesterol parents or other risk factors.

Fittingly, reducing worry is one of the main reasons for Newman's advice: a high cholesterol reading can make kids and parents anxious. Yet because diet has not been shown to be effective in lowering children's cholesterol, and because the prospect of a lifetime on cholesterol-lowering drugs is daunting, expensive, and not proven to be safe, it is a worry that doesn't lead anywhere.

Newman's view is not universally shared. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Heart Association, and the National Cholesterol Education Program recommend screening children with family risk factors. On the other side of the question, the American College of Physicians and the Preventive Services Task Force do not recommend testing before age 20.

What's a parent to do? For me, cholesterol is one of those non-essential worries, so I think I'll take Newman's advice. But not without worrying if I'm doing the right thing.

Send comments to susan@connectforkids.org

According to Edweek’s most recent review of educational technology spending, school districts’ tech dollars are flowing in a new direction – away from investments that show up in school classrooms, computer labs and libraries, and into data-management tools to help schools meet federal reporting requirements connected to the No Child Left Behind legislation.

This looks like an unintended (or at least unadvertised) consequence of NCLB, which is in danger of morphing into a Rube Goldberg creation for measuring, comparing, graphing and analyzing certain aspects of kids’ abilities.

Some recent findings on parent attitudes towards school reform from McREL (Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning), which has conducted a three-year series of community meetings, focus groups and dialogues on standards and accountability, indicate that parents don’t share the NCLB-driven obsession with test scores.

They don’t know – and probably don’t want to know – the difference between “norm-referenced” and “criterion-referenced” tests.

Parents, according to McREL, worry more about lack of funding, discipline, drug use and overcrowding than about standards-based reform.

And here’s a shocking finding: “Parents seemed comfortable with the notion that some children perform better academically than others.”

That does not mean that parents are comfortable with the very different notion that certain types of students – white kids, middle-class kids, loudmouth kids – perform better academically than others– minorities, low-income kids, shy kids. Instead, McREL found, parents worry that the drive for improved test scores is limiting the ability of schools to engage students with different styles, strengths and needs.

No Child Left Behind deserves enormous credit for taking on one of the most critical issues facing our children. But to succeed, it needs to develop a vision of achievement that goes well beyond having kids jump through expensive hoops and then graphing the results.

Send comments to susan@connectforkids.org

Last week, Connect for Kids hosted an online conversation with four experts in the field of foster care. The experts weren't researchers, field workers, teachers or advocates -- they were teens with foster care experience. And they pulled no punches.

The conversation covered a lot of ground, but the part that has really stayed with me came towards the end. Asked if they felt they had ever been failed by a social worker, all four answered with a resounding yes. They felt they had been lied to, not listened to, and ignored. That information they really needed to have so they could sleep at night, such as the location of a sibling, was withheld from them. The sense of betrayal emanating from their answers was overwhelming.

What is going wrong? Why is it that this person who should be a foster child's ally so often winds up cast as the enemy? Our teen experts suggested that social workers are overwhelmed by large caseloads. Probably true.

But it seems to me that there's more to it -- that something about the foster care system may make it hard for social workers and children to develop trusting relationships. Do social workers have to answer to too many bosses? Do practices in the field (for instance, generating written reports about a child's behavior that are not shared with the child but may affect his or her placement) taint the relationship? Do social workers always have all the information they need to be effective? Do social workers eventually buy in to the stigma that paints foster kids as "demented, angry bags of wrath" as one of our experts put it?

Send comments to susan@connectforkids.org

Recent news reports of young elementary school students being hauled out of school in handcuffs generated head-shaking around the nation, with blame doled out to fit the blamer’s perspective: “Kids today!” “Parents today!” “Schools today!”

Much the same is going on following the release of a new report from the Yale Child Study Center on preschool expulsion rates. The findings are pretty shocking: preschoolers are three times more likely to be expelled from school than students in K-through-12 schools. Boys are 4.5 times more likely to be expelled than girls; African-Americans are twice as likely to be expelled as Latinos and Caucasians. (Asian girls apparently just can't manage to get expelled.)

(The study also found highest expulsion rates among faith-affiliated and private preschools, about double those among Head Start and school-based preschools.)

Surfing around reading various news stories on this research, a few themes emerge. Kids are out of control – time to call Nanny 911. Violent TV shows and video games are feeding preschooler rage. And preschool teachers may need more training and support.

I’ll concede that last point. But until we know a lot more, I’m not ready to posit a breakdown in behavior among the bigwheels set. Lead researcher Walter S. Gilliam told the Washington Post one kid got expelled for cutting the computer mouse cords “to liberate the mice.” Call me soft on kids, but that’s kind of cute.

If boys are so much more likely than girls to get expelled, maybe that's a clue that there’s a design flaw in the preschool experience, rather than in boys? Likewise, the racial and ethnic disparities seem to reflect adult-world issues of racism more than anything else.

Yes, some portion of preschool expulsions may reflect really troubled little kids. But the broader reality is that more kids from more different backgrounds are going to preschool now, and preschool is more important to their eventual success in school and life. Little kids aren’t suddenly going to start developing sitting-still skills, no-hitting skills, and tolerance for that kid who keeps knocking down the block tower just to meet the needs of preschools, so preschools are going to have to get better. And quality isn’t cheap.

Send comments to susan@connectforkids.org

My new theory on why kids’ needs get such short shrift on Capitol Hill: transportation. Kids can’t offer Bill Frist, Harry Reid or any of the other Congressional bigwigs steeply discounted rides on cushy corporate jets.

Talk about great access! Spokesmen for companies like FedEx and BellSouth told the Washington Post recently that when a member of Congress flies on one of their jets, there is always a company lobbyist along for the ride. I guess an in-flight lobbyist is essential equipment, like those cushions that also function as flotation devices. Wonder what they find to talk about – affordable child care for their parenting workforce? In my dreams.

How can kids compete? All they have to offer is a bumpy thrill ride in a Radio Flyer. Or maybe the loan of a shiny two-wheeler. My son has an awesome bright yellow and purple model called a Huffy Maniac. With the seat all the way up Frist might be able to pedal without hitting his chin with his knees.

I’ve just been editing a story about a great after-school program in Eureka, Arkansas. The program is always scrambling for financial support, so some of the older kids tried to raise money for a trip to Washington, DC to lobby their Congressional delegation. They couldn’t raise enough, so they had to cancel the trip.

Think how much easier it would have been for them if they could have flown the members out to Eureka on a Learjet.

Send comments to susan@connectforkids.org

For years, I’ve been aware of WIC (the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) as a large, relatively uncontroversial, federal program for low-income mothers and children. WIC provides food support to a very specific population: pregnant women, breastfeeding women, infants, non-breastfeeding women parenting infants, and children under the age of four.

But until today, I never thought for more than a moment about what, exactly, WIC is giving these folks. I figured it would be healthy food – no federally-subsidized Twinkies – and that, within certain parameters, moms in the program would be able to use the assistance as their children’s needs (and whims) dictated.

Turns out that I was right about the Twinkies – but that’s about all. The WIC food “packages” haven’t been changed since 1974, when the program began. And it shows.

You can have a carrot – but only if you are a breastfeeding woman.

Want to substitute yogurt for milk? Sorry, no can do. Tofu? Not for you.

Eggs and cheese, however, take up a lot of space in the WIC food basket. Infants making the move to semi-solid foods have the choice of infant cereal – or infant cereal. No meat, no veg.

Fortunately, the reason I became aware of this weird world of WIC is that the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has come up with a proposed major overhaul which would, among other things, give low-income moms about $10 a month to buy fresh produce; reduce the egg and cheese allowance in favor of increasing whole grains and other healthy foods; and make other changes intended to encourage breastfeeding and generally bring WIC into line with federal dietary guidelines.
Let’s hope it wins support.

Send comments to susan@connectforkids.org