The American Civil Liberties Union believes the lawsuit is the first in the country over a school’s ban on the bracelets, which are designed to raise breast-cancer awareness among young people. The rubber jewelry has become wildly popular among students, prompting bans across the country.

School officials in Easton argue that the slogan is distracting and demeaning, and that some staff feel it trivializes a serious illness.

The district banned the bracelets in October, a month into the school year and after students had been wearing them without serious incident, the ACLU said.

The two girls had their parents’ permission to wear the bracelets but soon found themselves in the principal’s office at Easton Area Middle School, the lawsuit states. They were also banned from school dances for a month.

Amy Martinez said her daughter Kayla’s suspension seems unduly harsh, given that the 12-year-old had agreed to wear the bracelet inside out, with only a breast cancer-awareness website address showing. That, too, was deemed inappropriate under the school dress code, she said.

“I don’t believe that vulgarity, obscenity, profanity or nudity (in the school code) apply to the word ‘boobies’ or ‘breast,’” said Martinez, an accountant whose late aunt suffered from breast cancer.

“There were teachers that had ‘breast cancer awareness’ T-shirts on” in October, National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, she said.

The ACLU calls the bracelets perhaps silly and irreverent, but not lewd or indecent.

“The First Amendment does not allow schools to censor students’ speech merely because some students and teachers are offended by the non-vulgar educational message, and silencing the speakers because other students may react inappropriately would amount to a constitutionally impermissible heckler’s veto,” the ACLU said in the suit.

“Seeing a bracelet with ‘I Love Boobies!’ on it is a conversation starter that leads to discussion and awareness of issues affecting young people,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court in Philadelphia on behalf of Martinez and Jennifer Hawk, the mother of an eighth-grader. The two girls are friends, Martinez said. Kayla Martinez continues to wear the bracelet to school under her sleeve, her mother said.

The suit asks the district to end the ban, allow the girls to attend all school functions and expunge their disciplinary records.

Easton’s superintendent did not immediately return a call for comment.

In discussions between the two sides before the lawsuit was filed, district officials complained the bracelets made some people uncomfortable and had prompted some boys to make inappropriate comments, the suit said.

“I don’t know … why the educators are not equipped to deal with distractions. Why do they have to ban, ban, ban?” Martinez said.

Schools from Florida to California have banned the bracelets.

The rubber jewelry is sold by the Carlsbad, Calif.-based nonprofit Keep A Breast Foundation to raise awareness and funds for breast cancer organizations.

Moms sue Pa. school over ‘boobies’-bracelet ban

The economic downturn also may have accelerated a trend in which students increasingly travel to less traditional destinations, says the report, based on a survey of about 3,000 colleges by the Institute of International Education, a New York-based non-profit organization.

Europe still attracted the largest share of U.S. students — more than 140,000 — but enrollments dropped 4%. They rose in Africa (16%), Asia (2%) and South America (13%). That growth was fueled in part “by new and sometimes more affordable” programs in developing countries, the report says.

“The economic situation around the world, not just the U.S., is clearly having an impact,” says Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice president of the institute. Although the 2008-09 figures are the latest available, there are signs that the most recent year has begun to see an uptick in U.S. students going abroad.

For those who didn’t go abroad, money wasn’t the sole factor. Mexico‘s H1N1 virus outbreak probably contributed to a 26.3% decline in the number of U.S. students studying there, the report says. Also, many colleges pulled programs there based on State Department advisories about drug-related violence along the border, Blumenthal says.

Family finances and campus budgets were top concerns.

“I heard stories about parents losing their jobs and students who would really like to go, but could not afford it,” says Howard Davison, a program coordinator for at Central Penn College in Summerdale, Pa., who canceled a 2008 student trip to Ireland.

State Department Assistant Secretary Ann Stock said study abroad is an important part of making U.S. students more world-conscious. “In a globalized economy, this just makes sense for our young people and our country,” Stock said of student travel to more diverse locations.

Among the highlights of the institute’s “Open Doors” report:

•260,327 U.S. students earned credit for study abroad in 2008-09, the latest year for which comprehensive data are available. That’s more than double the number from a decade ago but down 0.8% from the previous year.

• In a “snapshot” survey last month of 238 colleges, 55% reported an increase in the numbers of students going abroad last fall, a sign that the 2008-09 decline could be a short-term blip.

•A similar slowdown occurred among foreign students enrolling in U.S. institutions last year. Enrollments increased 3%, to 690,923, and pumped about $20 billion into the U.S. economy, according to Commerce Department estimates. However, the growth was driven primarily by a 29.9% surge among Chinese students; more than half of countries that send large numbers of students to the USA showed decreases.

Some, such as Davison, say they are hopeful that things are turning around. He took nine students abroad last year, and returns today from seven weeks in Croatia with 17 students. They “have had their horizons not only expanded, but exploded,” he says. “Students come back from this program with a new confidence.”

College study abroad suffers its first decline

At the request of the university’s Muslim Students’ Association, George Washington began offering a once-weekly, female-only swim hour in March. But it only recently turned into an online debate over issues of religious and sexual discrimination and — though not always explicitly — racism, spurred by an article in the student newspaper, The GW Hatchet.

The Lerner Health and Wellness Center pool closes to men for one of the 20 hours it’s open each week, with a tarp blocking the view through the glass door and a female lifeguard on duty. The university declined to comment for this article beyond a two-sentence statement that said its officials are reviewing the closure while they establish a formal recreational swim policy.

A few highlights from Internet comments on The Washington Post‘s and TBD’s recent coverage of the swim hour: “Should a minuscule minority force the overwhelming majority [to] abide by their rules or should it be the other way around?” “Western society should not accommodate to Islam on this point; it is Islam that should change.” And in rebuttal: “Come on, folks. An hour a week — what’s the big deal?” “It’s not an unreasonable request. ‘Women’ is like half the population.”

Many comments not quoted here could easily be considered racially offensive.

Despite the naysayers, Sisters’ Splash, as it’s called, is not the only special accommodation that a college has made for Muslim students. George Washington already has foot baths for pre-prayer rituals, and a handful of other institutions — including the University of Michigan-Dearborn and George Mason University — have them as well. In 2008, at the request of female Muslim students, Harvard University ran a one-semester pilot program that reserved six hours a week for female students only at one of its lesser-used gyms, though the program was discontinued after that semester. There’s also Gamma Gamma Chi Sorority Inc., an Islamic-based sorority that has five regional chapters, though not all are active.

Shelley Mountjoy, a doctoral student at George Mason who briefly attended George Washington as an undergraduate, doesn’t much care what goes on at private colleges. But she takes issue with the foot baths at George Mason and with other religious accommodations at public universities. She is afraid that policies like the female-only swim hour will have a domino effect and spread to other colleges. “I don’t want my tuition dollars paying to accommodate somebody’s religion,” she said. “It’s not the entire campus’s religion. We don’t all have to subscribe to Islamic law.”

Because George Washington is a private university, there are no constitutional issues with the swim hour, said Ayesha N. Khan, legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Should a similar program start up at a public university, the presence of church-state issues would depend on the many facts of the situation, such as whether access is religion-specific, Khan said.

Mountjoy, who serves on the boards of Atheist Alliance International and the national Secular Student Alliance, is also the founder and president of the Secular Student Alliance chapter at George Mason. She said that although some criticism of the swim hour and other services might stem from a bias against Muslim people, she takes issue with any type of religious accommodation. “I actually think that it’s in everybody’s best interest to keep religion out of our public schools,” she said. “I would react the same if this was a Christian-only swimming hour.”

Students say the criticism is mostly coming from off-campus. Shaeera Tariq, a sophomore at George Washington and vice president of the Muslim Students’ Association, helped initiate the swim hour. She said nobody really knew about it until the Hatchet article came out — and as it happens, she is a reporter at the paper and she pitched the article to her editor. “It definitely sparked a lot of debate amongst people, but it seems to me there is a definite positive sentiment on campus and people are in favor of it,” she said. “We’re not closing down the mall or something for an hour. We’re just closing down a pool that wasn’t used very often in the first place.”

John L. Esposito, an Islamic studies professor and founding director of Georgetown University‘s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said many of the negative reactions undoubtedly stem from an “Islamophobia.”

“It’s very clear that there’s a good chance many of them have a real problem accepting Muslims or Islam, and we’ve got to deal with that. In a pluralistic society, that form of bigotry and racism — we’ve dealt with it before and we’ve got to deal with it now,” Esposito said, referring to civil rights struggles. “It seems to me this is a perfectly understandable thing that we should be doing. All of these members of the community pay tuition and so faculty and administrators have to always be open to responding to and accommodating the needs of people.”

Esposito cited numerous other ways institutions serve different groups: parking for people with disabilities, campus chapels for various religions, and excusing attendance for students celebrating religious holidays other than the traditionally recognized Christmas or Easter. “If there’s a segment of the community that can benefit from an accommodation, you make it when you can,” he said. “The fact is, they have rights and you have to accept it.”

Zahin Hasan, president of the Muslim Students’ Association, said the number of women — Muslim and non-Muslim — who attend the swim hour varies. But the point is that the college is serving more students, better. “What I can’t understand is how utilizing an underused service, such as a gym pool, is a bad thing,” Hasan said in an e-mail. “Very few people know about the pool, and even fewer use it. The benefits of Sisters’ Splash far outweigh the few inconveniences it may present.” But, he added, a “great majority” of George Washington students have shown support for the swim hour.

According to a 2005 Gallup report, gender inequality is one of American women’s top concerns about “the Muslim or Islamic world.” (Notably, many Muslim women perceive the promiscuity, pornography and public indecency portrayed in Hollywood images as mistreatment of women in the Western world, the report says.) It’s an issue that is mentioned frequently in online comments about the swim hour. One person wrote, “If Muslim women are too modest to wear ordinary swimsuits when they swim, then maybe they should stop swimming and go see a psychiatrist. Teaching sexual repression is wrong; making women feel that they are bad and wicked merely for having female bodies is wrong.” Another wrote, “If because of religious convictions they chose not to exercise that freedom, the rest of society should not validate it by accommodating it.”

But the swim hour’s proponents — and there seem to be many — point out that about half of the student population can participate. And accusations of racism are not difficult to come by. “We’ve seen a number of these kinds of programs around the country. I think it goes way beyond Muslim women; I think there are enough women who would be more comfortable swimming in a same-sex environment that it would be of interest to women of all faiths in America,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “There is a cottage industry of Muslim-bashers that look for any opportunity to marginalize American Muslims or to demonize Islam, and any denomination of Islam in our society is going to be targeted by these people.”

There is more to the issue than religion, though. Erin E. Buzuvis, an associate professor of law at Western New England College and co-founder and contributor to The Title IX Blog, said it’s unclear whether barring men from the pool constitutes a violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law requiring gender equity in educational programs at federally funded schools and colleges. Men can still swim 95% of the time, so they’re not completely excluded. And if the program’s purpose is to accommodate a religious group, rather than women in general, that could work in the university’s favor.

“The university might have a plausible defense that while this would technically be a form of gender discrimination, that they’re doing it to accommodate a student’s religion,” Buzuvis said. “If that weren’t an issue, I would say a female-only swim hour would be highly questionable under Title IX.”

Muslim students’ female-only swim at GWU makes waves

Officials are worried about the impact on food safety, because large-animal veterinarians serve as inspectors at ranches and slaughterhouses.

“They’re basically on the front line when it comes to maintaining a safe food supply, not only in the U.S., but in products we export. Vets diagnose diseases that can be transferred from animals to humans,” says David Kirkpatrick, spokesman for the American Veterinary Medical Association.

A recent survey by the association found that only 2% of veterinary school students in 2010 graduating classes said they plan to work mostly with large, non-pet animals. Another 7% studied a mixed curriculum that included all types of animals, but the majority of those respondents lean toward pet care.

“We have known for years anecdotally that vets were having a difficult time finding people to work at their practice or selling it when they retire,” Kirkpatrick said.

“But now we know how big the problem is and how that will magnify over the years,” he said.

From 1998 to 2009, the number of small animal vets climbed to 47,118 from 30,255, while the number of farm-animal vets dropped to 5,040 from 5,553. And the AVMA found that large-animal vets often earn a lower salary: an average of $57,745 compared with $64,744 for small-animal vets, according to a 2008 survey.

The large-animal vet world is graying — half of farm-animal vets are older than 50, and only 4.4% are younger than 30. About a third of veterinarians working at the federal level are eligible to retire in the next three years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

At least six rural counties in California have just one large-animal veterinarian.

Stuart Hall, 28, a veterinarian in Visalia, Calif., said a single call can tie him up for four hours — time in which he can’t respond to emergencies.

“My worry is always that a farmer is going to try to take care of something themselves,” he said.

Hall was born in rural England and educated in London before his interest in working with cows brought him to Tulare County, the nation’s largest dairy producer, five years ago. He and his wife have a blog detailing his life as a farm vet.

“I just really like cows. They’re big, old gentle things,” he says.

Hall likes working outdoors, the drives through the country and the impact his expertise can have on food operations, he says.

But for pre-vet student Justeen Borrecco the decision to pursue a career in pet medicine was easy. She has been shoved, bruised and knocked down by the sheep she feeds every day as a student worker at the on-campus farm at California State University, Fresno.

“This is why I want to work with dogs and kitties. I don’t want to deal with anything bigger than me,” the 19-year-old said.

On Thursday she pulled on her farm boots, picked up bundles of hay and maneuvered her 130-pound frame around to feed dozens of ewes and lambs.

“But it’s still good experience. Anything I learn or help with, like vaccines or bandaging, can apply to other animals,” Borrecco said. The sophomore from Hanford, Calif., said it’s important to get as much hands-on time with animals before applying to vet school.

Several schools and states have tried to lure students to large-animal veterinary medicine.

At the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, applicants interested in becoming farm-animal vets have an admissions edge. The university has slowly boosted the number of students interested in large-animal medicine to 11 of 127, double the number from four years ago. The vet school has also reached out to high schools in rural areas.

More than a dozen states, from Washington to Georgia, offer some type of loan repayment program or other incentives if students pledge to work in a region in need of large-animal vets. Vet students typically finish school with about $134,000 in debt, according to the AVMA.

Iowa State’s VSMART program allows students focused on farm animals to reduce by a year the amount of time it takes to get a veterinary medicine degree — a big deal when you’re talking about spending upward of $32,000 a year, Kirkpatrick said.

Federal legislators have introduced several bills to help increase the number of farm animal vets, including the Veterinary Services Investment Act, which is aimed at recruitment, helping vets expand their practices and providing financial assistance for students. The bill passed the House in September and is awaiting approval in the Senate.

The students who have chosen to work with large animals are committed to their choice.

Elizabeth Adam, 26, of Santa Maria, Calif., earned a degree in English and business at Loyola Marymount University, and later worked as a consultant at a law firm — but really dreamed of being a farm doctor.

“I was making good money but was miserable,” she said.

Adam is now in her second year at Fresno State’s pre-vet program.

“This is for me,” she said. “The outdoors and the late night emergency calls and the country — I’m ready for all of that.”

Concern for food safety as vet students pick pets over farms

At public four-year schools, many of them ravaged by state budget cuts, average in-state tuition and fees this fall rose 7.9%, or $555 a year, to $7,605, according to the College Board‘s “Trends in College Pricing.” The average sticker price at private nonprofit colleges increased 4.5%, or $1,164, to $27,293.

Massive government subsidies and aid from schools helped keep in check the final price many students paid. But experts caution that federal aid can only do so much and even higher tuition is likely unless state appropriations rebound or colleges drastically cut costs.

“Just when Americans need college the most, many are finding it increasingly difficult to afford,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education.

When adjusted for inflation, the tuition increases this fall amount to 6.6% at public four-year colleges and 3.2% at private ones, according to the College Board.

Many students are finding relief in expanded federal aid, including tax credits, veterans’ benefits and a record expansion of the Pell Grant program for low-income students. In 2009-10, 7.7 million students received $28.2 billion in Pell Grants — an increase of almost $10 billion from the year before, according to a companion College Board report, “Trends in Student Aid.”

Even so, the maximum Pell grant covers just 34% of the average cost of attending a public four-year college, down from 45% two decades ago.

For now, government subsidies and aid from schools are helping hold down net tuition and fees — the actual cost students pay when grants and tax breaks are factored in.

Estimated average net tuition and fees this fall at public four-year colleges were $1,540, while at private colleges they were $11,320. Both are up from last year, but below what students paid five years ago.

“Despite the fact sticker prices have gone way up, there is so much grant aid out there that many students are really paying less than they did before,” said Sandy Baum, a senior policy analyst for the College Board and a Skidmore College economics professor.

That’s also contributed to a growing gap between those who receive aid and the one-third of full-time students who pay full freight for college, the report says.

Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said it’s important to note that tuition is climbing after a decade in which family income did not rise for 90% of Americans, and at a time when many areas of the country face high unemployment.

“We’re kind of on a national treadmill,” Callan said. “We’re putting additional aid in that is helping to buffer some students from the severity of this. But the tuition increases and the bad economy are raising the need for financial aid much faster than our investment in aid is moving.”

The student aid report found that grant aid per full-time undergraduate student increased an estimated 22% from 2008-2009, while federal loans increased 9%.

The Obama administration’s restructuring of the federal student loan program this year will direct more money to Pell Grants and tie future increases in the maximum grant to inflation. But college officials say the impact will be minimal because next year’s increase is small and tuition is rising faster than inflation.

Most students attend public schools, and states continue to cut appropriations. After adjusting for inflation, per-student state spending on higher education dropped nearly 9% in 2008-09 and another 5% in 2009-10 — and that spending includes soon-to-expire federal stimulus money.

Community colleges, which educate about 40% of college students, remain affordable, with tuition averaging $2,713. Lower income students receive enough aid to attend essentially for free.

Still, tuition rose 6% at public two-year colleges. State and local budget cuts paired with skyrocketing enrollment have prompted some schools to cut courses and limit enrollment.

The priciest private colleges are creeping closer to shattering the $60,000 ceiling in total cost to attend.

David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, emphasized net tuition and fees have declined 7.4% in the past decade in inflation-adjusted dollars because colleges are expanding student aid.

“Every institution that I talk to understands the absolutely critical role of aid and it’s going to be the thing they try to hold at the top of the list of priorities,” Warren said.

On average, about 55% of bachelor’s degree recipients at public colleges borrow money, and their debt is $19,800 by graduation, the College Board found.

Tuition at public colleges rose 7.9% this fall to avg. $7,605

These subtle moves can entice kids to make healthier choices in school lunch lines, studies show. Food and restaurant marketers have long used similar tricks. Now the government wants in on the act.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced what it called a major new initiative Tuesday, giving $2 million to food behavior scientists to find ways to use psychology to improve kids’ use of the federal school lunch program and fight childhood obesity.

A fresh approach is clearly needed, those behind the effort say.

About one-third of children and teens are obese or overweight. Bans on soda and junk food have backfired in some places. Some students have abandoned school meal programs that tried to force-feed healthy choices. When one school district put fruit on every lunch tray, most of it ended up in the garbage.

So instead of pursuing a carrot or a stick approach, schools want to entice kids to choose the carrot sticks, figuring children are more likely to eat something they select themselves.

“It’s not nutrition till it’s eaten,” said Joanne Guthrie, a USDA researcher who announced the new grants. The initiative will include creation of a child nutrition center at Cornell University, which has long led this type of research.

Some tricks already judged a success by Cornell researchers: Keep ice cream in freezers without glass display tops so the treats are out of sight. Move salad bars next to the checkout registers, where students linger to pay, giving them more time to ponder a salad. And start a quick line for make-your-own subs and wraps, as Corning East High School in upstate New York did.

“I eat that every day now,” instead of the chicken patty sandwiches that used to be a staple, said Shea Beecher, a 17-year-old senior.

“It’s like our own little Subway,” said Sterling Smith, a 15-year-old sophomore. (Hint to the school: Freshen up the fruit bowl; the choices are pretty narrow by the time Smith gets to his third-shift lunch period.)

Last year, the USDA asked the Institute of Medicine for advice on its school lunch and breakfast programs, which provide free or subsidized meals to more than 31 million schoolchildren each day. The institute recommended more fruit, vegetables and whole grains with limits on fat, salt and calories. But it was clear this wouldn’t help unless kids accepted healthier foods, Guthrie said.

“We can’t just say we’re going to change the menu and all of our problems will be solved,” she said.

The agency requested proposals from researchers on how to get kids to actually eat the good stuff. Cornell scientists Brian Wansink and David Just will get $1 million to establish the child nutrition center. Fourteen research sites around the country will share the other $1 million.

“Findings from this emerging field of research — behavioral economics — could lead to significant improvements in the diets of millions of children across America,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

Cornell’s focus will be developing “smart lunchrooms” that guide kids to make good choices even when more tempting ones are around.

“We’re not taking things away from kids,” Wansink said. “It’s making the better choice the easier, more convenient choice.”

Wansink is a prominent food science researcher, known for studies on the depiction of food in paintings of the Last Supper and how the placement of a candy jar can affect how much people eat from it.

Christine Wallace, food service director for Corning City School District near Cornell University, met him a few years ago and invited him to use her 14 schools as a lab.

“We tend to look at what we’re offering and to make sure it’s well prepared and in the correct portion size, and not the psychology of it. We’re just not trained that way,” Wallace said.

For example, some Corning schools had express lines for a la carte items — mostly chips, cookies and ice cream. The idea was to reduce bottlenecks caused by full tray lunches that took longer to ring up. But the result was a public health nightmare.

“We were making it very convenient for them to quickly go through the line and get a bunch of less nutritious items,” Wallace said.

After studies by Wansink, they renamed some foods in the elementary schools — “X-ray vision carrots” and “lean, mean green beans” — and watched consumption rise. Cafeteria workers also got more involved, asking, “Would you rather have green beans or carrots today?” instead of waiting for a kid to request them.

And just asking, “Do you want a salad with that?” on pizza day at one high school raised salad consumption 30%, Wansink said.

You can lead kids to healthy food, but can psychology make them eat?

Student athletes and those involved in other extracurricular activities in states including New Jersey, South Carolina and Indiana are signing codes of conduct that hold them accountable for their behavior regardless of whether school is in session.

Some parents say their districts are going too far.

“Schools are crossing the boundary of what they’re authorized to do and crossing into the realm of the family — that’s unconstitutional,” says attorney Matt Wolf who is challenging the policy in Haddonfield, N.J., where he represents a teenager who lost extracurricular privileges because of an underage drinking charge.

Haddonfield’s attorney, Joe Betley, says the district is well within its right to establish rules for participating in extracurricular activities.

“We can demand higher standards in leadership positions and from those wearing the uniforms of Haddonfield,” Betley says.

Code of conduct rules vary from district to district. Some cover only the school year, some include athletes and some expand to all students participating in extracurricular school activities.

“Participating in extracurricular activities is a privilege,” says Oby Lyles, spokesman for South Carolina’s largest school district in Greenville County. That privilege can be revoked when students who wear a school’s uniform or represent a school don’t follow rules of conduct at school and in the community.

• In South Carolina, Greenville and Pickens counties have year-round conduct policies for athletes, holding them accountable when school is not in session.

• In Indiana, Carmel Clay schools have a year-round conduct policy for athletes and band and choir members. The school district expanded conduct rules three years ago to include those involved in extracurricular activities, says student services director Steve Dillon.

• At least half a dozen New Jersey school districts have year-round conduct expectations of both athletes and students involved in extracurricular activities.

Other districts restrict the codes to a sports season or the school year, such as in Springfield, Mo., and Salem-Keizer, Ore., where athletes must be on good behavior 24-7 during the school year.

“To label something a privilege does not justify a violation of the First Amendment,” says Ken Falk, legal director for Indiana’s American Civil Liberties Union, which is fighting a code-of-conduct case in federal district court. The case involves discipline placed on two female volleyball players in the Smith Green Community schools last year after they were accused of posting sexually suggestive photos on social networking sites during summer vacation.

Erik Weber, attorney for the Smith-Green schools, says such policies can be enforced year-round because those representing the school in any kind of uniform can be held to a higher standard.

“If they don’t like the rules, they don’t have to play,” Weber says.

In Mountain Lakes, N.J., Michael Bernal-Silva fought his daughter’s suspension from a basketball team in 2007 after she attended a party where other underage students were drinking. Bernal-Silva settled out of court with the school district.

“You’re not cops,” Bernal-Silva said to the school board.

Bruno reports for the Daily Record in Morris County, N.J. Contributing: Ron Barnett, The Greenville (S.C.) News; Tim Evans, The Indianapolis Star; Didi Tang, Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader; Tracy Loew, (Salem, Ore.) Statesman Journal.

Schools enforce year-round conduct rules

Instead, the former judge found a “lively, articulate cross section of people” she meets for dinner, aspiring author workshops, parties and game nights, says Brown, now an attorney who joined Mensa as an undergrad at Spelman College.

“Honestly, it doesn’t look like a convention out of Revenge of the Nerds,” she says with a laugh. “We do have that, but that’s not all. There’s a little of everything.”

Brown, 34, is part of a growing and increasingly visible younger contingent of Mensa, the 58,000- member “High-IQ Society.”

American Mensa says 42% of new members in 2009-2010 were ages 29-49; in the past decade, membership of people under 30 has grown 63%.

American Mensa, now 50 years old, “is getting up there in age,” says national chair Elissa Rudolph, a Mensan for 35 years. But it aims to get “more people involved and younger people more involved,” she says.

It hopes to attract some with National Mensa Testing Day this Saturday; an estimated 6 million people in the USA (about 1 in 50) could qualify, Mensa says.

To qualify, a person must score in the top 2% of the population on an accepted, standardized test. That score can come from Mensa’s own admission test or one of 200 others, such as the Stanford-Binet, the Miller Analogies Test, the GMAT or the GRE.

What’s in it for members, besides bragging rights?

A network of people with whom to share a wide range of social and intellectual activities, says Rudolph, who joined in 1975 when she was a single mother in Pittsburgh.

Andrew Heffernan, 33, a reliability engineer in Albany, N.Y., appreciates the variety of people. “It’s not a professional organization, so we’re not all interested in the same thing,” he says. “Everybody has something new to add.” He was also familiar with Mensa’s “nerd” reputation but put it aside after checking out his local chapter, one of 135 across the country, three years ago.

“It’s not about segregating myself into a highly intelligent group, but learning and trying new things,” he says.

Adds Brown: “You know that the person standing beside you is going to be bright and interesting, even if you don’t share their politics or beliefs. I know I can count on having a lively discussion about something.”

Educating gifted children is of special interest to Mensa, Rudolph

says; more than 1,300 members are under 18. In addition to local activities and excursions, there is a national college scholarship program (for members and non-members alike), resources for gifted children, a quarterly online magazine, Fred, and a group for teens.

Alexis Wise, 19, a member since age 14, coordinates that group via text messages, Facebook and other forms of communications, and she helps plan activities for teens at Mensa’s annual national gathering.

Now a sophomore at Yale, she says: “I have the coolest group of friends, and that’s only grown over the years. I’ve learned so much. Not the type of academic learning we’re used to in school, but learning though conversation, interacting.”

Mensa’s face is changing as it catches a young brain wave

The aspiring high school math teacher is a member of the inaugural class of the Ozarks Teacher Corps, a group of southwest Missouri teachers in training who receive $4,000 annual scholarships in exchange for a three-year commitment to work in rural school districts after graduation.

Having grown up in a town with fewer than 3,000 residents, a place where your homeroom instructor is just as likely to be sitting in the same church pew come Sunday, the 21-year-old newlywed knows that small-town teachers are not just educators but also neighbors and role models.

“The community’s expectations are higher,” said Feldman, a senior at Drury University in Springfield, Mo. “When it’s a small community, everybody knows everybody — and expects a whole lot more.”

Faced with chronic teacher shortages and unable to compete with the higher salaries and greater social opportunities found in big cities and suburban districts, a growing number of rural school systems are turning to familiar faces to teach their students.

They know teachers with rural backgrounds are more likely to stick around and not leave after a year or two. They can be pretty sure that the absence of late-night clubs or art-house movie theaters won’t drive away otherwise idealistic young teachers.

And they can count on those teachers being more in touch with their students’ home lives, whether their parents are Indiana farmers, Mississippi factory workers or Northern California grape pickers.

“Small, rural communities are grounded in tradition and have deep roots,” said Catherine Kearney, president of the California Teacher Corps. “Someone who understands those traditions makes a huge difference.”

The California effort consists of more than 70 programs aimed at luring professionals with non-teaching experience into the classroom. Last year, the teacher corps shifted its emphasis to rural school districts in a state with 300,000 students from rural areas.

Half of those students are minorities, and 25% come from homes where English is not the native language. That makes for a different approach to teacher recruitment than programs based in other parts of the country.

Esther Soto, 43, started out two decades ago as parent volunteer in the rural Mendocino County town of Boonville, located 120 miles north of San Francisco. She spent 18 years as a teacher’s assistant before returning to school for her teacher’s certification.

Soto now teaches kindergarten in the Anderson Valley school district. When the high school found itself in need of a Spanish teacher, the native of Mexico took on that role as well.

“I know the families,” she said. “I’m more likely to make a connection. I’ve seen some of these kids since kindergarten. They can’t escape from me.”

Roughly 10.5 million students in this country — nearly 20% of the school-age population — attend rural schools, according to the Rural School and Community Trust, a nonprofit advocacy group based in northern Virginia.

The group’s research shows that the 900 poorest rural school districts have higher poverty rates than school systems in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia and other urban areas typically considered as the toughest places to teach, and learn.

It’s those sort of eye-opening comparisons that rural education advocates say demands a new, national approach to closing the gap. The Rural School and Community Trust found that 12 states graduate fewer than 60% of students from their poorest rural districts: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota and South Dakota.

“As a society, we focus our attention on inner-city kids, and blighted urban school districts,” said Randy Shaver, schools superintendent in Tupelo, Miss.

Shaver was one of nine rural superintendents from across the country who met with Education Secretary Arne Duncan late last year to discuss reform proposals.

His idea: a national rural teaching corps that would build upon the regional efforts found in places such as Missouri, California and Indiana, where Purdue and two other universities are training math and science professionals to return to the classroom.

“We need something that’s far more intensive and far broader,” Shaver said.

Many of the newer efforts to foster homegrown teaching talent aim to train not just capable educators but to also inspire those rural teachers to become community leaders.

Gary Funk, president of the Community Foundation of the Ozarks, which parlayed a $1.7 million private donation to create the Missouri program, hopes that Feldman and her contemporaries develop into “rural activists.”

To that end, Ozarks Teacher Corps participants immerse themselves in the study of rural economies, local history and other matters beyond their chosen specialties. They meet regularly for feedback and support and are assigned mentors to guide them through the early years in the classroom, when challenges and frustration can be at their highest.

“In traditional teacher training, we don’t focus so much on the context of community,” Funk said.

Rural teacher shortage spurs schools to court local help

Addressing a small group in an Albuquerque family’s front yard, Obama shifted from his recent focus on the economy, which has run headlong into the grim reality of continued high unemployment. Instead, five weeks ahead of midterm elections that could turn into a Democratic bloodletting, the president told voters to think about education when they head to the polls.

“Who’s going to prioritize our young people to make sure they’ve got the skills they need to succeed?” the president said.

“Nothing’s going to be more important in terms of our long-term success.” Obama argued that Republicans would cut education spending to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

Later in the day, Obama was heading to a big rally at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he hopes to replicate the raucous, youthful, big-stage events for which he became famous in the 2008 presidential campaign. Democrats will host hundreds of watch parties nationwide, and Obama will hold other campus rallies before Nov. 2 to warn young voters that the “hope and change” they embraced two years ago is at risk if Republicans sweep the midterm elections.

The president is aiming to close the enthusiasm gap that pollsters say separates discouraged liberal voters from energized conservatives who might lift Republicans to huge gains in congressional and gubernatorial races.

But Obama got a quick reminder from his audience of about 40 in Albuquerque that education might not be at the top of the agenda for recession-weary voters.

“If we don’t have homes to go to, what good is education?” one man asked.

A high school principal read a letter that he said was from a class in his school.

“What assurance will we have that we will be rewarded for good work?” the students asked. “There seems to be less money that banks lend our families, and most of all no jobs.”

The president acknowledged the anxiety of the younger generation.

“They’re growing up in the shadow of a financial crisis that we hadn’t seen in our lifetime,” he said, arguing his administration has sought to save jobs for teachers and others by closing tax loopholes, and is working to making it easier for kids to attend college.

Republican leaders, Obama said, “fought us tooth and nail … That’s the choice that we’ve got in this election.”

The event at the stucco home of Andy and Etta Cavalier in a small farming community south of Albuquerque comes as Obama tests out a relatively new format of backyard visits that give him time to explain his policies in cozy, unhurried settings. He’s coupling those with college campus rallies in four states Tuesday and Wednesday, trying to tackle Democrats’ two biggest needs: to pump enthusiasm into young supporters who may stay at home this fall, and to persuade undecided voters that Republican alternatives are unacceptable.

In a magazine interview, Obama admonished Democratic voters, saying it would be “inexcusable” and “irresponsible” for unenthusiastic Democrats to sit out the elections because the consequences could be a squandered agenda for years.

“People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up,” Obama told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview being published Friday. Making change happen is hard, he said, and “if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

Obama wants Democratic loyalists to be less apologetic and more forceful in asserting that he and the Democratic-controlled Congress are trying to move the country forward and Republicans would return to the policies of former President George W. Bush.

Obama: Education key to economic success