25% of rich students who attend wealthy high schools get extra time to take the SAT. Yup. But only 1% of low-income students get the same privilege. That is because affluent parents have the financial means to test their children for learning disabilities through private testing companies or through their private high schools or public high schools in high-income areas. Students with disabilities are entitled to 50-100% more time to take the SAT.
Another reason that low-income students don’t get tested for learning disabilities is that their parents may not understand their rights. With overworked classroom and special education teachers and administrators, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the testing. So parents who may not speak English or need to work during schools hours don’t have the opportunity to request that their children be tested for learning disabilities. They also don’t know how to game the system the way that some wealthy parents do – Hint: college admissions scandal! I wonder how many students receive accommodations because their parents bribe a psychiatrist or testing agency.
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25% of rich students who attend wealthy high schools get extra time to take the SAT. Yup. But only 1% of low-income students get the same privilege. That is because affluent parents have the financial means to test their children for learning disabilities through private testing companies or through their private high schools or public high schools in high-income areas. Students with disabilities are entitled to 50-100% more time to take the SAT.
Another reason that low-income students don’t get tested for learning disabilities is that their parents may not understand their rights. With overworked classroom and special education teachers and administrators, it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the testing. So parents who may not speak English or need to work during schools hours don’t have the opportunity to request that their children be tested for learning disabilities. They also don’t know how to game the system the way that some wealthy parents do – Hint: college admissions scandal! I wonder how many students receive accommodations because their parents bribe a psychiatrist or testing agency.
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When the fire chief recommended 100 feet of defensible space around my house to help prevent wildland fires, I pulled out my pole saw (mini chainsaw on a pole) and got to work! It’s invigorating to cut through the 2”-to-3” diameter branches so quickly, but when I got to the 4-6” branches, I needed an industrial strength chainsaw. I rented a big electric chainsaw to limb up my oaks, redwoods, and pine trees on my 2+ acres.
With the help of 9 strong helpers, we cleared all of the fallen branches in 14 hours last weekend. The Resource Conservation District landed a grant to chip all of our branches for free! Homeowners need to put in the work to do the limbing, but if they can prove they’ve done that, they can get chipping done for free, which saves a lot of money and helps prevent the spread of wildland fires. Want to learn how to prevent wildland fires? Check out my “Disaster” page on my American Mothers California website.
My local bookstore Bookshop Santa Cruz now carries my book The Millennial’s Guide to Free Child Care in Your Home. If you’re in the area, stop by and check out the Local Authors’ Section!
Love to support brick and mortar bookstores, and hope you do too! You can buy the book directly from Bookshop Santa Cruz by going here:
https://www.bookshopsantacruz.com/millennials-guide-free-child-care-your-home
This is a guest post by Laina Farhat-Holzman. Laina is a historian, lecturer, and author of God’s Law or Man’s Law. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net. This article first appeared in The Pajaronian on Aug 9, 2019.
A short letter to the San Francisco Chronicle proposed a brilliant solution to our national plague of gun violence. The writer proposed that we nation-wide mandate liability insurance for all gun owners, as we now do for automobiles, Both are capable of human injury, death and property damage.
All that is needed is for our Congress to mandate liability insurance for all gun owners. The private enterprise insurance companies might like this mandate (lucrative for them) and such policies could be priced according to the potential damage these weapons can cause.
Anybody who owns a military-style rifle, an instrument capable, as we have recently seen, of murdering hordes of people in less than one minute, would have to buy a very expensive policy, unlike a handgun owner who can only kill one person at a time. How many assault weapon owners who are law abiding would want to assume this expense? We give them a choice.
In addition, an insurer could increase the premium for anyone who used a gun in committing a crime, a convicted spousal abuser, or someone mentally unstable, as identified by family or coworkers. If we cannot get a Congress with enough decency to enact a real gun control law, we could at least make it so expensive that it might be out of reach of anyone but criminal cartels (who need to be pursued another way). Insurance can do what our feckless lawmakers cannot do, and this method does not run afoul of the 2nd amendment, an outdated law that should be cashiered by our legislators if they had the guts. Personal lethal armories are not the same as “a well-regulated militia.”
Our lawmakers do not seem to be able to defy the National Rifle Association, even though we now know from the Mueller Report that this organization has received Russian financing. Putin is delighted to have Americans killing each other with such ease, something not possible in his own authoritarian state. There, only the State can kill peaceful demonstrators, not armed White Nationalists.
Some sensible bipartisan legislation has already been passed by the House of Representatives. These bills have been passed on to the Senate, where Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell refuses to bring these bills up for a vote! Mr. McConnell has earned his new nickname of “Moscow Mitch.”
I cannot imagine why Congress (both House, Senate) and the President would oppose such a capitalistic solution that could be immediately enacted as mandating insurance coverage for all gun owners. Nobody is taking their weapon away. Nobody is weighing in on the comparative dangerousness of weapons. We would only demand the same sort of responsibility of lethal weapon owners as we do for automobile drivers.
If we need to wait for legislation requiring military-automatic weapons to be surrendered to the authorities (nobody needs one for hunting or self-defense), it will take decades. If we try buying back such weapons as Australia and New Zealand have done, it will again take decades. But if we levy insurance on such weapons, the number of owners will rapidly decline. This can work as a pocketbook issue.
The non-system we have now faces another problem that nobody seems to be recognizing. Who pays for the hospitalization, property damage, and funerals of gun-violence victims now? Can you imagine being shot, taken to a hospital, and then being billed for the care? Our current non-system depends on Internet money-raising, iffy at best.
If we leave this to the Insurance industry to sort out, we give them a chance to redeem themselves for their unsatisfactory public service in healthcare. People in the midst of chemotherapy for Cancer often have to fight Insurance Companies to pay for drugs that they need. People injured in highway accidents are sometimes faced by unexpected draconian bills if they need helicopter transport or are taken to an “out of network” hospital in an emergency. Not acceptable.
Hospitals, Insurance Companies, and those injured by uninsured drivers, along with the hundreds of victims of automatic rifle slaughters, could instead benefit from government-mandated insurance coverage that nobody is getting now.
Agree? Send this column around. 686 words Laina Farhat-Holzman is a historian, lecturer, and author of God’s Law or Man’s Law. You may contact her at Lfarhat102@aol.com or www.globalthink.net.
Do your children have difficulty allocating enough time to do a good job on projects or prepare for tests? Does it seem like they’re juggling too many deadlines and responsibilities, and not working to their potential?
The Merit Planner may be the solution. Other planners just don’t cut it because there isn’t enough space to block off time to do tasks and most don’t have equal space for evenings and weekends.
The Merit Academic Planner is more powerful. It breaks down days into 30-minute intervals (from 6:00 am to midnight) so they can block off just the right amount of time for classes, homework, studying, eating, and extracurriculars. Since we need our evenings and weekends to complete many tasks, our planner is divided into 7 equal days.
Merit College Advisors guide students as they enter deadlines for tests and projects as well as college application deadlines. By entering when they’ll do each facet of the tasks required to meet due dates, the students no longer face 11-hour crises because they understand what needs to be done and how to reach their goals.
Notice more “support animals” on flights? Well, colleges are getting substantially more requests for support animals in dorms, too. The process requires a letter from a psychologist, which can be done as easily as paying $140 for a phone consult. These emotional support animals are permitted under the Fair Housing Act, so they are only allowed in the dorms, not outside the resident halls.
While it seems wonderful that students with mental health issues can take their comfort pets with them to college, I wonder how dorms will manage pets fighting, mating, or even killing another pet. Managing pet care requires patience and stability. What happens when the student has back-to-back classes, and Rover wants to pee – or starts barking? Does inconveniencing other students in nearby rooms matter, and who will mediate the hours of negotiation between the students? Or what if a student is allergic to pets or deathly afraid of dogs or snakes?
When I was in college, we had one cat that visited dorms at will. Cat lovers fed her and enjoyed her company, while others just shooed her away. One cat among 350 students; that can be manageable. Maybe colleges can have therapy dogs, cats, and rodents that students can visit as needed. Not sure how support animals in dorms will play out but hope it doesn’t negatively affect student admissions like learning disabilities do (trust me, colleges pay 4 times more to educate students with disabilities…).
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There’s a new tuition-reset movement that’s shaking up higher education. Several colleges have actually lowered their tuition in an era where sticker prices to elite private colleges are upwards of $70,000 per year. Yes, you read that correctly!
St John’s College reduced its tuition from $70,000 to just $35,000. Actually about 25 colleges have reset their tuition: Mills, Drew, Sweet Brian, Sewanee, Birmingham Southern, Elizabethtown and others.
Over the past 20 years, private college tuition has increased 166% — 2.5 times the Consumer Price Index. After the 2008 economic crisis (housing bubble), some economists wonder if higher education might be the next bubble to burst. Some believe that the college tuition price is a measure of its quality, which justifies the ridiculous tuition and housing costs parents and students must pay. Back when I was in college in the 1970s, annual tuition was less than $1000. How did annual tuition go from $1,000 to $70,000? Hmm.
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If creating 100 feet of defensible space around your home is something that you’ve put on the back burner (no pun intended), would losing fire coverage on your homeowner’s policy get your attention? It did for me. Since 2010, there’s been a 224% increase in complaints about rising insurance premiums for people who live in high-risk of wildfire areas. CALFIRE has designated specific zip codes to be at the greatest risk of wildfires and many insurance companies are not selling new policies and not renewing existing ones. Yup!
Besides moving to Alaska, the best way to position yourself so you don’t lose your fire coverage is to clear 100 feet of fuel (wood piles, brush, trees with low-hanging branches, wooden outdoor furniture) around your house. This will improve the chances that your house won’t burn if a wildfire heads your way. Insurance companies are being pressured to consider reducing premiums or renewing policies for homeowners who protect their homes by mitigating wildfires. It could also save your life if you get trapped and can’t evacuate.
As California Mother of the Year, I’m urging everyone to dedicate 4 hours per weekend to clearing fuel from around your homes. Schedule a “family clearing” block of time each weekend for a month. Put it on the calendar so family members have plenty of time to make plans. Then, designate specific tasks to be completed each weekend. Start with moving piles of firewood, wood, or wooden furniture/toys away from the house. Then weed whack overgrown areas down to 2-4 inches. Next, limb up all trees to 8-10 feet. Then haul everything to the landfill or chip branches to create mulch and spread it around your property. In one month you’ll create a safe home for your family, and you may be able to keep fire insurance coverage on what’s probably your biggest asset. Even if you’re not in a zip code that has stopped renewing fire insurance policies, with temperatures rising and droughts in the forecast, you may be next.
Share your family-clearing photos on the California American Mothers Facebook page. This will encourage others to create 100 feet of defensible space around their homes. Talk to your neighbors to do the same because insurance companies and CALFIRE will be looking at communities when delineating high-risk fire areas.
Let’s do this!
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If a parent gives up their custodial guardianship rights to their college-bound children and assign the role to friends or relatives, then their children can qualify for federal and other financial aid. The parents involved in this scam in Chicago (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) are doctors and lawyers with deep pockets to pay their attorneys to bail them out of this hot mess. They claim that their over $250,000 income isn’t enough to support their $600,000 spending habits. Hmm.
I wonder about wealthy people who CHEAT to get their children scholarship dollars for college. I wonder if they’re so self-absorbed that they don’t realize that they’re stealing money from students who really need the financial aid. Have we become a dog-eat-dog society? Many of these low-income students (the real ones) opt not to attend these pricey colleges if they don’t get scholarships or grants, and they often settle on community colleges or no college at all.
As California’s Mother of the Year, I’ve designed a simple disaster plan for families. Check out the Micro-Community Disaster Plan with tips, guidelines, and forms – all laid out for you to use.
Here is the Micro-Community Disaster Plan: https://americanmotherscalifornia.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Micro-Community-Disaster-Plan-and-Information-Packet.pdf
Create your own Micro Community that includes about 6-12 households. Talk to your neighbors to designate your Micro Community, and then use the “Micro-Community” form to fill in their names, contact info, and vital information about non-ambulatory people, pets, and livestock.
Then select a Micro-Community leader to represent the group. Ideally, this would be someone who is home a lot and capable of calling, texting, or emailing their community in the case of an emergency. This leader should be able to walk to each of the houses in their community in 30-45 minutes.
Send a copy of your Micro Community to your local fire department. Knowing that the fire department and your Micro-Community leader has this information will be comforting for all of your neighbors. Your Micro-Community leader will communicate with the fire department and keep you informed of evacuation orders and other life-saving information.
Share this with your neighbors, family, and friends. My hope is to get every family to join a Micro Community to prepare for disasters so everyone can work efficiently to mitigate problems. I’ll be blogging about setting up phone trees, Go Bags, and more in the weeks ahead!