BUFFALO, Mo. — Suzanne Feldman realizes she’s an anomaly: a soon-to-be college graduate who wants to return to the languid rhythms of rural life rather than flee. 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. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Many students dread public speaking and say they only sign up because the class is required. But in Sam Blank’s classroom, they find it isn’t so terrifying. “I’m a pretty well-liked person, considering the fact I teach a course that creates fear in people,” jokes Blank, 62, a communications professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York . Blank is among millions of educators who are praised, glorified — and sometimes verbally torn to shreds — on websites where students go to rate their professors. Luckily, he got a stellar rating: the No. 1 community college professor on the website RateMyProfessors.com . RateMyProfessors.com, known as RMP, is the front-runner among such sites, with about 1.9 million unique visitors a month, says comScore, which tracks Web traffic. Owned by MTV ‘s college network, mtvU, RMP lists more than 1 million professors from 6,500 schools in the USA, Canada and England . Other smaller such sites include KnowYourProfessor.com and ProfessorPerformance.com . On RMP, professors are rated on a five-point scale, for overall quality, helpfulness, clarity — and how easy it is to get an A in their class. Students also give chili peppers to professors they consider “hot.” Despite some harsh comments warning others away from professors some raters didn’t like, the website is about “shining a spotlight” on the best professors, mtvU’s Carlo DiMarco says. “College students always sought the advice of their peers, friends and family members” about which classes to take, he adds; online, they can seek advice from thousands of voices. Rodney Kashem recently bought RMP’s rival, ProfessorPerformance.com, and has revamped the site. Kashem, 24, a grad student at Dartmouth College, says it’s the same as checking hotel ratings before spending money on vacation; students are “customers” who want to make sure their tuition is well spent. Blank says he didn’t know about his top rating on RMP, but when a reporter told him, he said it was “absolutely wonderful. … Perhaps it’s an affirmation of my ability to teach.” Juann Watson, a psychology and mental health professor at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, N.Y., was rated the site’s “hottest” professor of the year. Watson, 44, says she’s honored to be recognized, but “a chili pepper means nothing at this stage in my life or in my accomplishments.” Ted Coladarci, director of institutional research at the University of Maine, has studied how closely RMP’s ratings align with the teacher evaluations students write at the end of courses, and he says there’s a strong correlation. His findings , with co-author Irv Kornfeld, were published in the journal Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation. But he cautions that students motivated to go online to rate a professor do not necessarily share the same opinions as everyone who took the class. “An instructor’s RMP ratings tend to derive from an exceedingly small and arguably biased sample of all students the instructor has had,” he says. Coladarci adds that some instructors receive less-than-stellar RMP ratings but nevertheless enjoy high ratings on their school’s official student evaluations of teaching. These cases, he says, “serve as an important cautionary note for RMP users. In short, it’s risky to form judgments about instructors and their courses based solely on what you see on RateMyProfessors.com.”

Every year, the scene plays out in classrooms across the nation. A child clings to his mother, tears welling in his eyes as he pleads with her to stay a few moments longer. The first day of kindergarten is an exciting time for parents and children, but it can also be stressful, especially for kids who have never spent significant time away from Mom and Dad. The good news is that psychologists say separation anxiety is generally short-lived and there are time-tested methods to help reduce everyone’s tension. The root of the problem Experts say separation anxiety can be spurred by biology and environment. “What’s known about separation anxiety is there’s not really one single cause for it,” said Wendy Bravo, a marriage and family therapist based in Reno “If the child tends to be more anxious, you know, anxiety-prone, there are certain things in the environment that will trigger it.” In other words, there are certain children who simply are born anxious. “Different kids have different strengths and weaknesses,” said Kristen Davis-Coelho, a psychologist for Renown Behavioral Health in Reno. “Some are much more adventurous, really like new experiences, and other ones are a little more tentative. Sometimes it can surprise a parent.” Biology or not, family psychologist and syndicated columnist John Rosemond said he believes parents almost always play a significant role in the problem. “When you find a child of school age, kindergarten, first grade, it is almost always associated with parents and specifically a mother who has had difficulty separating from the child from day one,” he said. The good news? In most cases, separation anxiety is quickly reversible. Davis-Coelho said only about 5% of children suffer from separation anxiety disorder, a severe form that lasts longer than a few weeks. Advance planning Bravo said children who are prone to anxiety tend to do better when they know what to expect each day, so she suggests getting them settled into a predictable schedule early. “The child would have their time to eat, their time to go to sleep,” she said. “Maybe a couple of weeks before they start school, they can start a new routine that won’t change when school starts.” Davis-Coelho agreed that advance parental planning can make a big difference. She said parents can do other little things, too, like drive their child to school before classes even start. “Show them where you’re going to be dropping them off, where they’re going to get to play at recess,” she said. “Or pretending. Playing school. Actually getting the toys, having the kid be the teacher and the parent be the teacher. Playing school bus if they’re going to be riding the school bus, where they walk down to where their bus stop is and the parent pulls up in their car and pretends to be the school bus.” The goal, she said, is to make school feel familiar, so the transition is less difficult. Rosemond said his approach to treating separation anxiety is unorthodox because he actually recommends against prolonged conversations about a child’s issues. “Most professionals are going to tell parents to reassure the child and sit down and talk to the child,” he said. “I am absolutely convinced, and my experience confirms this, that the more you talk to the child about the problem, the worse it gets.” So, who’s right? Davis-Coelho said she believes different strategies work with different children. Ultimately, it’s up to parents to decide what approach is resonating with their child. Crying fits One thing everyone agrees on is that parents should nip meltdowns in the bud. That means the best thing a parent can do if their child is crying is leave. “The parents have got to say, ‘We’ve talked about this, and we’re not going to talk about it anymore. You’re going into class, and I’m leaving,’” Rosemond says. “It’s got to be very, very short and sweet.” Bravo and Davis-Coelho agree. “Keeping the amount of time that you let that go on to a minimum is important,” Davis-Coelho said. “The longer the child is feeling that level of panic and upset, the more the memory is getting burned into their head at how awful it is.” Planning an exit Although it’s difficult to leave a child in tears, Rosemond said parents need to be tough. “These parents have this anxiety that this reflects some deep-seated psychological issue that has to be resolved,” he said. “I say to parents, ‘No, there’s no deep-seated psychological issue here at all. It’s just that this child has never learned to comfortably separate from you because of your anxieties. You have to be the actor here. You have to suck it up. The minute the child sees that you have no anxieties whatsoever, the child’s going to be fine. Even if the child cries … it’s no problem. The schools are used to dealing with these things.’” Experts say that most anxious children will stop crying within 15 to 20 minutes of their parents’ departure, and they will then join the class. “Eventually, they’ll calm down,” Bravo said. “Some kids will be different than others if they have a different temperament. … The parent has to be really firm and just leave and let the teacher take care of it. Many times, just 10, 15 minutes later, they will go away and the child will slowly get used to the new environment.” The day after Often, the first day is the toughest, but Davis-Coelho said parents also can take steps to make the rest of the week go smoothly. “The first strategy you can use is developing what I call a special ritual in the morning between you and your child,” she said, “a particular way of saying goodbye. A phrase that you both repeat to each other about seeing each other later. A special handshake. Some sort of ritual in the morning. … Every morning you say goodbye in that particular way.” Pay attention Most children will have conquered their separation anxiety within a month, experts say. If the problem drags on, there might be a broader problem. “If it’s interfering with their functioning or with the family’s functioning, if it’s causing a lot of stress or interfering with them going to school, making friends, probably at that point therapy should be sought,” Davis-Coelho said. In the unlikely case that it comes to that, Bravo said parents should consider a family appointment because the child could be reacting to something unexpected. “Look at if there are any major changes going on in the family, for instance divorce, moving to a different neighborhood, different school, someone who died recently,” she said. “If the parents think that this is a problem, you know, the separation anxiety is becoming a problem, I would recommend they seek treatment that includes family therapy because many times the child is just reflecting something else that’s going on in the family.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

NEW YORK — For their first fire drill, students at the Refugee Youth Summer Academy trooped out of the building behind their teachers. All that was missing were the sirens. The blaring alarms had been muted, for fear they could trigger terror in children who recently arrived from war zones and other conflict areas. The silent fire drill was part of the balancing act for staff at the six-week program that helps youngsters who have survived wars and refugee camps prepare for a new experience — American public school. For some of the kids, formal education has been haphazard or nonexistent, said Elizabeth Demchak, principal of the school, run by the International Rescue Committee , which works with refugees and asylum-seekers. For others, school consisted of sitting and taking notes surrounded by dozens of others with a teacher reciting a lecture. Preparing them means helping them learn how to go to school along with what they learn there. “When they enter the classroom in September, things won’t be so new for them, and having taken away that freshness, that newness, you’re also taking away that fear,” Demchak said. That’s where something like the fire drill comes in. Running a drill, explaining what it is, can help keep students from reacting negatively when they experience it in school. “If a child has lived in an environment, especially in a conflict area, where they’re accustomed to hearing sirens and sirens are a signal for an emergency … when they hear an alarm going off in their school it may trigger a certain memory, it may make them act in a certain way,” Demchak said. “We’re teaching them how to disassociate certain triggers that had a negative connotation with things that are here to help and protect them,” she said. The Youth Academy program has about 120 kids this summer who will be in kindergarten to 12th grade this school year. The students’ homelands are a litany of the world’s hot spots, combat zones and conflict areas: Iraq. Afghanistan. Sierra Leone. Burma. Most have been here for less than 18 months. Some will be starting school in America for the first time. In the program, the children work on their English, writing and math. They take art, dance and music. They go on field trips. From the length of the day to changing rooms between classes to raising their hands and interacting with teachers, the program tries to mimic what students will experience. That was a blessing for Helen Samuels, 17, who attended two years ago and works there this summer. Half Burmese and half Thai, she hadn’t been in school for two years when she arrived here in June 2008 from the refugee camps along the Burma-Thailand border. She was a frightened girl and the program helped reassure her. “We had to learn all the basics of how to be a student, starting from you had to come to class on time,” Samuels said. “It helped me, to prepare me to see school is not something scary.” Among those starting this fall is Basserou Kaba, a 16-year-old from Ivory Coast, an African nation divided between government and rebel forces. The teen, who was in 12th grade before coming here in April, will start in 10th grade to improve his English. He is happy that U.S. teachers expect students to ask questions, unlike those in his homeland. “In my country, the teacher teach what he wants,” Kaba said. “You don’t understand, it’s your problem.” Kaba admits he’s a little nervous about his language skills but says he’s now comfortable with the idea of going to school. “In this program, I came to know what is the school in U.S.,” he said. The IRC program and others like it can play a vital role in helping them build their lives in a new country, said Michele Pistone, a law professor at Villanova University School of Law who specializes in refugee issues. New arrivals can benefit from being taught such common practices for Americans, she said, as parental involvement in a child’s education. “In the United States, our system, there’s much more interaction between parents and teachers than there is elsewhere around the world,” Pistone said. “A lot of the refugees I’ve worked with — because they’re coming from an environment where there isn’t that expectation of involvement — they tend not to be.” The IRC program, which ends Friday, holds parent-teacher conferences and encourages parents to get involved. One who did is Bushra Naji, 53, who was a teacher in Iraq for 25 years before leaving for Syria in 2006 and the United States in 2008. Now she volunteers, helping students in kindergarten through second grade. In Iraq, she said, she taught English by writing on a blackboard and having her students repeat after her. Here, she said, her eyes shining and her smile bright, it’s “very exciting” to see the teachers interact with the children. “I wanted to be younger,” she said, “to be teacher here.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

LOS ANGELES — When state budget cuts imperiled city schools, a group of parents fought back by enlisting Hollywood stars to spread a message targeting one of their own, Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggar . The satirical video featuring actors Megan Fox and fiancee Brian Austin Green highlights how funding shortfalls have killed jobs for librarians, nurses, translators, janitors and teachers. While the video was filmed in the affluent hills above Hollywood where Green’s son attends Wonderland Avenue Elementary School, the cuts are more deeply felt at an inner-city school like Markham Middle School. Both schools have been highlighted as the Los Angeles Unified School District has grappled with $1.5 billion in budget cuts and nearly 3,000 teacher layoffs during the past two years. But comparing the two schools shows a remarkably uneven impact, and just how much depends on factors ranging from income and parent involvement to teacher tenure. The state’s education funding crisis, now entering its third school year, only promises to widen the breech between the haves and have-nots in the nation’s second-largest school district. Nestled in leafy, secluded Laurel Canyon, Wonderland is more than just a top school in the city — it’s one of the best in the state. In addition to the video that has been viewed more than one million times, Wonderland second graders were featured on CNN writing to Schwarzenegger to protest budget cuts. Serving gang-plagued Watts and two of the city’s largest housing projects, Markham is one of the city’s lowest performers with test scores 34% below the acceptable mark. The ACLU sued the school system this spring charging that Markham students weren’t learning from substitutes who replaced laid-off teachers. Schwarzenegger himself held up Markham as an example of how the teacher tenure system backfires because layoffs disproportionately strike younger teachers eager to work in the inner-city. The two schools have been long divided by more than freeways. The year before Tim Sullivan became Markham principal two years ago, 142 students were arrested around the 1,500-pupil campus. The assistant principal went to prison for sexually abusing female students. To keep kids safe on their way to school and maintain Markham free of gang graffiti, Sullivan decided to meet regularly with local gang leaders. “This isn’t the place for the weak and fainthearted,” said the 43-year-old principal. A more basic problem was finding teachers. Sullivan didn’t get a single inquiry at district job fairs so he recruited recent graduates keen for the challenge at annual salaries averaging $45,000. When budget cuts rolled around last year, Markham lost half its teaching staff — 35 teachers — because they hadn’t reached tenure. They were replaced by substitutes at a daily salary of $173 — more than a fulltime probationary teacher earns, but without benefits. In some cases, the subs served as little more than babysitters. Several gave all students a C grade because they didn’t have enough schoolwork to grade adequately, according to the ACLU lawsuit. Another 34 teachers, including 10 long-term subs, got pink slips this year, spurring the ACLU’s successful injunction to halt the layoffs. “A high moral calling can only last so long before you feel like the butt of a joke,” said English teacher Nicholas Melvoin, who was laid off last year but returned as a long-term substitute. The layoffs have stripped the curriculum to basics, without electives. Markham’s plight drew the attention of Schwarzenegger, who used the school as backdrop to announce his support of tenure reform that would allow schools flexibility in layoffs. Across town, Wonderland Principal Don Wilson’s problems are far different. A pile of resumes sits on his desk for a job opening next year. Electives are not subject to district funding whims. The school has full-time art, music and gym teachers, plus teaching assistants for each teacher, paid for by parents through the PTA’s fundraising nonprofit, which raises $350,000 a year. Boosters have paid for elaborate playgrounds, cutting-edge equipment in classrooms, field trips and professional development for teachers. But Wilson must work to keep that revenue flowing. He spent a recent Saturday night in a tent on the playground to help raise $500 per child in a sleepover fundraiser. “You become a developer,” Wilson said. “That’s a huge part of what I do here.” Parents are asked to contribute $700 a year per child and many donate more in cash and other initiatives such as buying mugs embossed with children’s art work. “Parents really value the public school opportunity because they’re not paying the big tuition bill,” said PTA President Terri Levy as she organized an appreciation event to provide breakfast, lunch and a car wash for each teacher. Wilson knows he’s fortunate, although he, too, has lost personnel and is down to having a nurse only one day per week at his 550-pupil school. The principal, who spent much of his career in the sprawling city’s more urban schools, said suburban and inner-city parents want the same for the children. But Wonderland parents possess not only a huge amount of resources, including those to make the slickly produced video opposing cuts, they also have high expectations. That’s the key difference, Wilson said. “They bring expectations as to what an education should be,” he said. “At other schools, parents and teachers come with a limited vision of high expectations.” Markham’s Sullivan doesn’t begrudge more affluent schools in the district. He does wish the system was more equitable. “Just give us an even playing field to show what we can really do,” he said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

These aren’t your old-school fundraisers. Bake sales to pay for field trips are giving way to online giving, fairs and businesses donating percentages of their sales as parents raise money to pay teacher salaries and save sports and art programs from budget cuts. “We see an ever-increasing need for parents to go above and beyond the call of duty,” says Chuck Saylors, 50, president of the National PTA (Parent Teacher Association). “School districts can’t keep the cuts out of the classrooms.” “Really, we shouldn’t have to be put in this position,” says Melissa Neumann, 39, who has two children in Cupertino , Calif., schools. “We shouldn’t have to fundraise basically for the core curriculum: reading, writing and math.” Still, she and others say they’ll do what they can: • In Cupertino in the Silicon Valley , parents have collected $1.6 million, close to the $2 million they hope to raise by Saturday, to save the jobs of 110 teachers. The district of 18,000 children needs to close a $7.3 million budget shortfall next year. The parents have asked every household in the community to donate $375. They got businesses to donate a portion of their sales on given days. • In Mokena, Ill., outside Chicago, parents want to raise $250,000 by December to keep 48 sports and other activities, including band and after-school tutoring. The district of 2,100 students needs to cut $2 million from its budget next year. The parents have raised $27,000 with movie nights, concerts, car washes and fairs. • In Portage, Mich., parents have $10,000 of the $1.3 million they need by June 2011 to offset state cuts that forced the district of 8,700 to end school a week early and offer teachers early retirement. Educators applaud the efforts, but they say fundraising to operate schools is not sustainable. “You have the funding for one year and then what?” says Dan Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators . He warns fundraising will widen the opportunity gap between affluent and low-income children. The National PTA discourages parents from raising money for school operations, Saylors says. He says parents need to hold officials accountable. Goals can be hard to reach. Parents in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., tried to raise $186,000 to save three teachers. They got $30,000, not enough for one job, says Elizabeth Neve Calderone, 42, a mother of two. “It’s disappointing,” Calderone says. “We don’t want to be dipping into our pockets any more than we have to, but if it means saving a teacher or two, we’ll do it.”