PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Two mothers filed a free-speech lawsuit Monday against a Pennsylvania school district that suspended their daughters for wearing the popular “I (heart) boobies!” bracelets. 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. PINK CLEATS: Football player back on the team BRACELET BAN: ‘Boobies’ not OK in S.D. schools 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. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Cheryl Hines spent her summer at school. Make that several schools. But the star of HBO ‘s Curb Your Enthusiasm wasn’t sitting at a desk. Instead, she was cleaning up run-down schools. The project became School Pride , a seven-episode series that premieres tonight at 8 ET/PT on NBC . Think Extreme Makeover: Home Edition for schools. But don’t expect to see much of Hines, who is School Pride ‘s executive producer, in front of the camera. She will “pop up here and there to try and guide people who might be inspired by the show,” she says. The gig is different. “When I go to work as an actress, I show up in an air-conditioned, nice place and somebody gets me coffee, and they do my hair and do my makeup until somebody tells me to go to the next air-conditioned room. On this project, I might have a toilet-bowl brush in my hand. I might be painting a classroom. At the end of the day, I just feel dirty and good.” A feeling she might not have if it weren’t for daughter Catherine Rose, 6, who started first grade this year. “Before I had my daughter, I really didn’t think about schools at all,” Hines says. “When she started school, it made me think about other parents and children, and made me feel like it does take a village. The idea of a child going to a school where the lights don’t work, where the toilets don’t flush, it makes me sad. “I know that it’s not because parents don’t care. … Most of the time the resources aren’t there. What I’ve learned and what I’m still learning is how to connect all the resources to the right people.” School Pride began with a “cold call” a few years ago to the principal of a school in Compton, Calif., where she volunteered. “I said, ‘I was wondering if your school needs any help,’ ” Hines says. “I thought I could donate some soccer balls and jump ropes. So she said, ‘Why don’t you come over and I’ll show you around.’ ” What she saw was “a bigger project than jump ropes and soccer balls. The school hadn’t been painted in 28 years.” The playground couldn’t be used because the sand was infested with bugs. After renovations were completed, the series idea sprouted. “I was just in a camera truck crying,” says Hines, who is calling from the site of her last school “reveal.” “I’ve cried a lot of tears of joy in the past five months.” This summer included the end of her nearly eight-year marriage to Paul Young (father to Catherine Rose), so the project’s timing “has been helpful,” Hines says. “My ex-husband is truly a good friend of mine. I still talk to him every day. He was part of the inspiration for this show.” Despite going through an amicable divorce, “it’s hard to go from being married to not being married,” Hines says. “Paul and I have so much respect for each other that it’s been difficult, but positive. We really do care about each other, and we’re going to be great parents to her.”

Students across the country are going on notice that drinking, smoking, using drugs or posting risqu? photos on the Web on weekends and during the summer can get them sidelined from school activities during the school year. 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. ETIQUETTE: Suicide shows need for civility, privacy online WEEK OFF: College bans Facebook, Twitter, all social media 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 .

IOWA CITY — The hour when Ariana Kramer will begin her college career is fast approaching — and her parents are in an office supply store, disagreeing about hanging files, of all things. “She’ll need them,” her mother says. “I don’t think so,” her dad counters. Ariana, meanwhile, walks dreamily through the store, offering no opinion on this particular decision. She is, in fact, confident that she will have what she needs when she starts her freshman year at the University of Iowa . FRESHMEN: Class of 2014 doesn’t know cursive, Clint Eastwood BY THANKSGIVING: Some first-year students want to call it quits NAVIGATING COLLEGE: Authors offer updated advice She has mom, the family organizer, with her, and dad, the calm encourager. And they have “the list,” which mom printed from one of those “what-you’ll-need-at-college” websites. New laptop. Check. Comforter with matching sheets. Check. Laundry detergent. Body wash. Antacid. Check. Check. Check. Mind you, Robin and Paul Kramer aren’t those crazy college parents — not like the mother who, as relayed by one dean of students at one California college, stayed in her daughter’s dorm room with her for four nights to help her adjust (until the daughter’s roommate complained). Nor have they ignored barricades intended to keep parents from trying to register for classes for their children, or crashed student-only orientation events, which officials at universities across the country say happens more and more. Still, even for average parents, the letting go is difficult — more so, they and many others say, than it was for parents of college-bound freshmen in decades past. Robin Kramer recalls how her own parents, who never attended college, dropped her off with a trunk full of belongings at Drake University , also in Iowa, in 1978. She set up her room and attended orientation without them there. “It’s just what you did then,” she says. It was much the same for Paul, whose father took him to the University of Wisconsin in 1977 and then went fishing. “It was a culture shock,” he says. “I wasn’t sure I was going to survive.” Perhaps that is part of what makes this “process of leaving,” as Robin calls it, more difficult. It is, all at once, overwhelming and exciting for everyone involved. But some say it’s often hardest for parents, who remember the days of college when there were fewer support systems in place for students. “I’m supposed to shed a few tears and then send her to the world, right?” the rational Robin tells her emotional self as she considers 18-year-old Ariana, the eldest of their two children. That remains to be seen. ‘Cut the cord!’ So how did we get here, anyway? It’s not that saying goodbye was easy for parents of past generations. But these days, moms and dads have gone from reading books that tell us how to raise The Happiest Baby on the Block to new handbooks such as The Happiest Kid on Campus: A Parent’s Guide to the Very Best College Experience (for You and Your Child) . YOU and your child? Linda Bips, a psychology professor who advises parents on letting go, used to carry scissors into workshops. “Cut the cord!” she would tell them. It evoked the chuckles she was looking for. “But I don’t do that anymore, because no one would listen anyway,” says Bips, a professor at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and author of Parenting College Freshmen: Consulting For Adulthood . The process, she has learned, has to be gradual. Marshall Duke, a psychology professor at Emory University in Atlanta, has been giving those kinds of talks for three decades and also has noted more parents struggling. For one, they’re more connected than ever, by Facebook and text messages and, increasingly, online video chat. They’re also often paying huge sums of money on their children’s education. “So they think that gives them license to intervene as they would in other investments,” says Duke, who also encourages parents to take a step back, even when it goes against the fiber of their very being. He wants them, in effect, to let their children falter, to figure things out for themselves, to become adults. For Ariana Kramer, it means giving up the comfort of what she freely calls the “bubble” she grew up in, the quiet home and highly ranked schools in suburban Chicago where her main task in life was to study hard and get herself where she is today. In physical distance, it wasn’t so far from the working-class neighborhoods where her parents grew up. The Kramers both marvel at the freedom they had as kids, riding city buses as preteens and able to stay out with friends until the street lights came on. That was their signal that it was time to go home. They went to neighborhood schools. Their friends lived across the street. They walked home for lunch. “When we were growing up, there were no Amber Alerts,” says Paul, who is 50. After they finished college and married, the Kramers eventually moved to their current home. Paul worked his way into medical sales and Robin, who is 49, created an at-home job for herself by managing businesses of lawyers and other self-employed professionals. It became apparent how different their children’s lives would be when they found themselves arranging “play dates” and driving them from activity to activity. “You had to be so much more involved,” Robin says — partly because, like a lot of people, they had fewer children to focus on than the average family of generations past. Ariana worked in the summers, eventually becoming a counselor at a Wisconsin camp she attended for years. That helped her become more independent, she says. But even she’ll acknowledge that the thought of taking the train or bus into the city, as her parents did, is still daunting. Over this past summer, she took on household duties — doing laundry, loading the dishwasher, learning how to write a check — to help prepare her for that real world she’s anticipating. In August, she moved in to her dorm at Iowa on the first day possible, so she had extra time to get her bearings. “I like simple,” she says. “I need simple.” Times are a-changin’ By many estimations, the Kramers are a low-drama family. But even they are having their prickly moments when they arrive in Iowa City, and that’s to be expected in this time of heightened emotions, experts say. Ariana rolls her eyes, for instance, when her mom suggests that she put her class assignments in her BlackBerry calendar. “Mom, I’m not like you. You’re way, too, uh …” — Ariana pauses and chooses her words carefully when she remembers her words are being monitored by a reporter — “better organized than I am.” It’s all part of the subtle push and pull that has been happening all summer, her mother says. One minute it’s “I can do it myself!” The next, Ariana is asking, “Mom, can you help me with this?” Robin is having her own internal struggles, trying to step back but finding it a challenge. “Let’s be real. As a mom, sometimes it’s just easier to do it yourself,” she says, as she stands amid boxes and unpacked suitcases in the room Ariana will share with a roommate. It’s nothing fancy, your basic 1920s-era dorm room, upgraded with an air conditioner that is welcomed on a late summer day in muggy Iowa. “Thank God I have you guys. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to do this,” Ariana says, as her mother deals out tasks. Per Robin’s instructions, mother and daughter unpack her clothes first, as Paul sets up the clock radio, the portable telephone and the microwave. For him, the dorm room and this whole visit make him a bit wistful: “I wish it were me,” he says. That, too, is a normal parental response to this transition, says Bips, the Muhlenberg College psychologist who’s also a baby boomer and remembers “never trusting anyone over 30″ back in her own college days. “Life is more serious as you get older. There’s more loss. There’s more responsibility,” she says “So I would guess people in their 50s, who have to pay for college and worry about their jobs and the economy — yeah, wouldn’t it be nice to go back?” Some parents also feel nostalgic as the realization hits that their role — one of their main purposes in life — is changing, says Duke, the Emory psychologist: “If it’s a first child — my gosh, that’s a sobering signal about the progress of life.” Increasingly, colleges and universities have noted the support parents need in letting go, so much that they are starting to formalize the goodbye. At St. Olaf College in Minnesota, incoming freshmen are shown a video with their smiling, crying parents waving goodbye as one big group. First-year students at the University of Chicago, meanwhile, walk their parents to the university gate as bagpipes play in what some university staff call the “parting of the seas.” At Drexel University ‘s LeBow College of Business in Philadelphia, a goodbye reception includes an unofficial “crying room,” set up with tissues and a counselor. It’s kind of a gentle joke, but one that’s meant to send a message. “The idea was that we understand this is a major change for everybody,” says Ian Sladen, LeBow’s assistant dean of undergraduate programs. “It’s just as tough for parents — probably tougher, really.” But in the end, the message from universities and colleges is the same: Parents, please go home. At the University of Iowa, there is no formal goodbye ceremony. The university does, however, have an orientation and newsletter for parents and an advisory board, where any concerns are addressed. Meanwhile, Ariana also is taking a class called “The College Transition,” a relatively new course that helps freshmen ease into college life. “I clearly need a course like that to survive,” she says, her eyes widening for emphasis. Courses like these, often referred to as “University 101,” are becoming more common on college campuses. The aim is to turn out students who are independent and ready for the workplace — without their parents in tow. “It was almost a badge of honor 30 years ago when students couldn’t make it,” says Sladen at Drexel. “No one would be proud of that today.” And that should help put parents at ease, he says. ‘Make the most of it’ After nearly three days together in Iowa, the moment for Ariana to say goodbye to her parents and 16-year-old brother Chase finally arrives. Her parents get a little philosophical over sushi. “If they ask you ‘What’s the best time of your life?’ I think everybody will say college,” her dad says. “So make the most of it.” “Have fun,” her mom adds. “But don’t forget about the academics.” As her parents say goodbye, Ariana takes on the role of comforter. “I’ll call you,” she says as she hugs her mom, who begins to tear up. Ariana grabs dad and then her brother, who’s also starting to cry. She teases him: “If you break anything in my room, you’re in trouble.” They laugh. Chase, of anyone, has seemed the saddest about his sister leaving: “I think she’ll be OK as long as she copes with everything,” he had said the day before. “Oh, she will,” her mom assured him. “She’s a coper.” And it is true, Robin and Paul have faith in their daughter. “Basically, I think she’s very grounded and has a good head on her shoulders,” Robin says. She pauses. “But I’ll still be thinking, ‘Did she remember to do X, Y and Z?’” Ariana’s family departs, and the new freshman looks content, if not a little lost. She leaves her door open (that’s how you meet people, her resident adviser said). She looks around her room. “It’s weird,” she says. “What do I do now?” It won’t be long before she phones home. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Joe Turant pointed to the rent-a-text signs in Fairleigh Dickinson University’s Florham Park , N.J., bookstore window last month and told his incoming freshman daughter, Caitlyn, “That’s what you’re doing.” With potential savings up to 50% off the price of a new textbook, the Colonia, N.J., father says renting textbooks will free up money for other things, such as the meal plan. E-BOOKS: iPad the next textbook? Maybe not “If we can get them through rental, great. Otherwise, she’s going to go online to try to find a lower price,” says Turant, who jokingly reminded his daughter that “Dad’s paying.” College students will be able to shop early and save hundreds of dollars on textbooks as more than 1,000 campus bookstores nationwide launch discounted rental programs this fall. The timing is right: The federal Higher Education Opportunity Act, which took effect July 1, says colleges must list required course materials for students during registration. “Students will be able to take advantage of more cost-saving options sooner, and they can save hundreds,” says Nicole Allen, textbook advocate for the Student Public Interest Research Groups. College textbook prices have risen at nearly four times the rate of inflation since 1994, with an average of $900 spent a year, Allen says. Successful pilot programs The rise of rentals means students can see substantial upfront cost savings without having to gamble on buying a used book and hoping the bookstore will buy it back, Allen says. Students can highlight and write in the rentals; normal wear and tear is expected. The country’s two largest college bookstore companies, Follett and Barnes & Noble, embraced the rental option after successful pilot programs last fall. Just 250 college campuses nationwide offered some textbook rental program during the 2009-10 school year, according to the National Association of College Stores. This fall, some 1,300 campuses will offer textbooks for rent. In late July, Follett had 720 of its 860 stores adopt the rental option, says spokesman Elio DiStaola. And half of Barnes & Noble’s 640 campuses have signed on, says Jade Roth, vice president for books at Barnes & Noble College Booksellers. Follett saved students $2 million off the cost of new textbooks in its seven pilot bookstores, including the University of Texas-Arlington, the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, and Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier, Calif., DiStaola says. An online alternative Typically, about 25% of the bookstores’ titles were available for rent. This fall, the stores expect to offer about 40% of titles for rent. “I’ve had students come up and thank us for this,” says Bill Coulter, bookstore director at the University of Texas-Arlington, where 6,000 students chose to rent last school year. “In my 44 years in this business, that never happened before.” “One student came up to the register and saved $300 … he was excited,” says Lee Cobb, textbook manager at the University of North Florida’s bookstore. Chegg.com, a California-based online rental company with 4.2 million titles available for rent — some up to 80% discounted — is expanding, too, by partnering with eight campus bookstores this fall. It partnered with California State University in Fresno in January and saw its number of Fresno users jump from 400 to 1,600, says Chegg.com spokeswoman Tina Couch. Meanwhile, Kyle Smith , 21, a Bridgewater, N.J., political science major at Drew University in Madison, N.J., says he’s excited to see how much money renting textbooks can save him. Drew’s bookstore will offer about 30% of its titles for rent this fall. Typically, Smith shops online for used textbooks. Being able to see the books he’ll need and whether he can rent will help in deciding if he can afford to take a course, Smith says. “Some poli sci courses call for nine or 10 books,” Smith says. “For me, it’s all about the bottom line. If it’s cheaper to rent, that’s what I’ll do.”

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Slow readers of the world, uuuuuuuu…niiiiite! At a time when people spend much of their time skimming websites, text messages and e-mails, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire is making the case for slowing down as a way to gain more meaning and pleasure out of the written word. Thomas Newkirk isn’t the first or most prominent proponent of the so-called “slow reading” movement, but he argues it’s becoming all the more important in a culture and educational system that often treats reading as fast food to be gobbled up as quickly as possible. “You see schools where reading is turned into a race, you see kids on the stopwatch to see how many words they can read in a minute,” he said. “That tells students a story about what reading is. It tells students to be fast is to be good.” Newkirk is encouraging schools from elementary through college to return to old strategies such as reading aloud and memorization as a way to help students truly “taste” the words. He uses those techniques in his own classroom, where students have told him that they’ve become so accustomed from flitting from page to page online that they have trouble concentrating while reading printed books. READING: Proficiency at 4th grade linked to nation’s success COLLEGE: One-third need remedial reading, math “One student told me even when he was reading a regular book, he’d come to a word and it would almost act like a hyper link. It would just send his mind off to some other thing,” Newkirk said. “I think they recognize they’re missing out on something.” The idea is not to read everything as slowly as possible, however. As with the slow food movement, the goal is a closer connection between readers and their information, said John Miedema, whose 2009 book “Slow Reading” explores the movement. “It’s not just about students reading as slowly as possible,” he said. “To me, slow reading is about bringing more of the person to bear on the book.” Miedema, a technology specialist at IBM in Ottawa, Ontario, said little formal research has been done on slow reading, other than studies on physical conditions such as dyslexia. But he said the movement is gaining ground: the 2004 book In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Changing the Cult of Speed sprang from author Carl Honore’s realization that his “rushaholism” had gotten out of hand when he considered buying a collection of “one-minute bedtime stories” for his children. In a 2007 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , the executive humanities editor at Harvard University Press describes a worldwide reading crisis and calls for a “revolution in reading.” “Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don’t even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words,” Lindsay Waters wrote. Though slow, or close reading, always has been emphasized at the college-level in literary criticism and other areas, it’s also popping up in elementary schools, Miedema said. Mary Ellen Webb, a third-grade teacher at Mast Way Elementary School in Durham, N.H., has her students memorize poems upward of 40 lines long and then perform them for their peers and parents. She does it more for the sense of pride her students feel but said the technique does transfer to other kinds of reading — the children remember how re-reading and memorizing their poems helped them understand tricky text. “Memorization is one of those lost things, it hasn’t been the ‘in’ thing for a while,” she said. “There’s a big focus on fluency. Some people think because you can read quickly … that’s a judge of what a great reader they are. I think fluency is important, but I think we can err too much on that side.” It’s all about balance, said Patti Flynn, an assistant principal in Nashua, N.H., and mother of a 10-year-old girl. Her school has offered, and her daughter has participated in, numerous reading challenges that reward students for reaching certain milestones — a pizza party for a class that reads 100 books, for example. Though such contests may appear to emphasize speed rather than reading for pleasure or comprehension, they also are good incentives for children who weren’t motivated to read, she said. The challenges have encouraged parents to make reading a priority at home, Flynn said. “The goal shouldn’t be to be whipping through a certain number of pages, the goal should be to make sure kids are gaining some conceptual understanding,” she said. Her daughter, Lily, said she considers herself a “medium-speed” reader and had to increase her speed to finish about 10 books for her classroom’s 100-book challenge. But she said she enjoyed the process and feels like she understood and remembers what she read. “It was fun,” she said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

More than once, Bailey Osborne thought about dropping out. Like the time her washing machine caught fire. And when daughter Madison was in bed for 11 days with swine flu. That’s when Osborne would look at her four kids and remind herself, yet again, that giving up on college would be a little like giving up on them. “I knew in my heart why I couldn’t just quit,” says Osborne, who on Sunday will celebrate Mother’s Day with a brand-new bachelor’s degree. Her kids — Ashley, 26, Tyler, 25, Casey, 16, and Madison, 4 — plan to be her cheering section Saturday when she graduates from Champlain College in Burlington, Vt. Osborne, 48, says she might never have made it without Champlain’s Single Parents Program, founded in 1988 on the premise that higher education is the surest ticket out of poverty. Rising out of poverty It seems to have made a difference. More than 500 students have earned a degree through the program. A study for the state found that, of 4,007 households that left Vermont welfare rolls in 2003, those who then pursued a college education earned more on average and were less likely to have returned to welfare a year later than those who didn’t go on to school. No one tracks that kind of progress on a national level. But federal data suggest more single parents are entering college. In 2008, they represented 13.4% of the nation’s 18 million college students. Most were women (74%). About one-third attended for-profit institutions. They were more than twice as likely as other students (54% vs. 23%) to be eligible for Pell Grants for needy students, says the non-profit Institute for Women’s Policy Research. And, as Osborne’s experience suggests, low-income parents face challenges far different from their childless peers: •About 1,700 colleges have day care centers for students, parents and faculty, and many also provide academic and financial support. Yet child care sometimes costs more than tuition, and federal funding for campus centers for low-income families has dropped from $25 million in 2002 to about $16 million last year. • Family Care Solutions, a non-profit in Philadelphia, has awarded nearly $2 million in child care grants to low-income students since 1998 but has made no new awards recently. “The lack of funding has seriously threatened our programs,” says president Sherrill Mosee. Demand is high: About 435,000 parents (most of them mothers) applied for scholarships offered since 2008 by eLearners.com, which links students to online programs. It has given 150 awards so far and wants to give 280 this year. •Federal welfare laws since 1996 have emphasized jobs more than education, says Amy Ellen Duke-Benfield, a policy analyst for the Center for Law and Social Policy, a non-profit advocacy group. A few states, including Maine and Kentucky, have created incentives for college-going welfare recipients. But, she says, many states are cutting services, such as tutoring and transportation, that are often critical to single parents. Help for parents is eroding Champlain’s program, funded by state, federal and campus dollars, is no exception. Vermont recently halved its contribution; director Carol Moran-Brown says services will continue, with some changes. Professionals in the field would like to see programs on more campuses but aren’t optimistic. “I have not seen a growing interest in supporting student parents,” says Karen Alsbrooks of Ohio State University , which has a program and has hosted conferences on the topic in recent years. She also is co-founder, in 2005, of Higher Education Alliance of Advocates for Students with Children. About 25 colleges, including Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Berea College in Kentucky, are members. Each program has unique features. Some offer housing, for example, or child care. All aim to help single-parents juggle multiple responsibilities. When her daughter’s illness kept Osborne at home, for example, case manager Felicia Messuri arranged extensions on her homework. When Osborne’s washer was damaged, Messuri tapped an emergency fund to replace it. Many times, Osborne says, Messuri was her “go-to person.” And Single Parents Program “is the glue that holds everything together.”

USA TODAY’s Mary Beth Marklein asked four moms about being a student. See the full report here . Theola Moore, 40 Homestead, Fla., single mother of six. Earned bachelor’s online in January from KaplanUniversity. Biggest challenge: ?It wasn’t always easy being there for my kids’ extracurricular activities and maintaining my GPA. I consider myself a “supermom.” The secret to success: ?Motivation. I tell my kids that the word “can’t” is not in our family’s vocabulary. LaQuandria Blakley, 22 Moore’s daughter, and a single mother of one in Homestead. Earned associate’s degree online in January from Kaplan. Biggest challenge: ?Staying motivated. I had to keep reminding myself that I was doing this to better the future for myself and my daughter. Best part: ?My mother said, “If I can do it, you can do it.” I can tell my daughter I was able to raise her and go to school at the same time. Fraidel Phelps, 34 Married mother of six; graduates Saturday from the Community College of Philadelphia. Best part: ?The example I am setting. When my children see me doing homework, they are much more eager to do theirs. The secret: ?My husband and kids pitch in. I do whatever tasks come my way immediately. There is always something new. Shameka Sawyer, 32 Single mother of three; graduates Saturday from the Community College of Philadelphia. Best part: ? I can show my kids that anything is possible if they work hard and never give up. The secret: ?Believing in yourself. Also, family, friends, and mentors are the people who will encourage you to keep going.