Editor’s note: RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!!! 

A tragedy still haunts the newsroom in the Gold Rush town where my newspaper career began. It’s not the ghost of some scoundrel whose just deserts helped the city earn its reputation as “Old Hangtown,” it’s this banner headline about a natural gas mishap that took out a single-family home:

HOUSE BLOWN TO SMITHEREENS!!!

OK, my foggy memory may have added at least two of those exclamation points. I never even actually saw the specter myself, to tell the truth, I just heard the editors swapping stories about a long-ago article whose headline, in retrospect, may have overreached.

Forebodings of a similar sensationalism clawed up my spine as the feature stories for this issue of California Schools came in. One opened with an ominous vision of “vistas and skies turned dark, dreary and possibly dangerous,” another with a brutal serial rapist eluding capture. Three children are dead within the first hundred words of the third.

But staff writer Marsha Boutelle wasn’t being sensationalistic in choosing that way to open her story, “We’re Not Gonna Take It: Breaking the Cycle of Bullying”; she was just putting down in black and white what the stakes can be when children torment each other.

“Tens of thousands suffer every day as the result of a classmate’s verbal, physical or electronic abuse. Student bullying is one of the most frequently reported discipline problems in K–12 education: 21 percent of elementary schools, 43 percent of middle schools and 22 percent of high schools reported such harassment nationwide in 2005–06, according to the U.S. Department of Education,” Marsha reports. She goes on to explore effective strategies for overcoming the problem. One, Rick Phillips’ Safe School Ambassadors program, has been employed in 800 K–12 schools across 26 states in the past nine years.

“We create ambassadors within the different cliques at the school,” Phillips, who delivered a well-attended presentation on his program at CSBA’s Annual Education Conference and Trade Show in San Diego last year, told Marsha. “In each clique, we have one or two people who are in the ‘leadership’ position already. Over time—not overnight—we begin to see positive change,”

For his story, regular contributor Scott LaFee opted for an arresting image to get readers’ attention. After painting a word picture of those dark, dreary vistas, he adds a twist: What if the air inside our schools were as bad for our children as those polluted skies outside, he asks in “Let’s Clear the Air: Indoor Air Quality Affects Students and Staff.”

Or, to put it more positively: What if our schools were free of unhealthy particulates? What if they were properly ventilated, and the children—and staff—were in an environment that supported good health and clear-headedness?

Attendance would go up, for one thing. So would academic achievement, according to studies Scott cites.

Sounds good. So how do school boards establish that sort of environment?

“We’re just promoting common sense here, Susan LaCombe, a school nurse and asthma program manager for the Los Angeles Unified School District, told Scott, “things you can do but maybe don’t think about, like not bringing outside products to school like air fresheners. Or using the air conditioning system properly. Or recognizing a situation before it becomes a problem. There are lots of everyday things people can do—teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards.”

As in Marsha’s article, our third feature this issue takes its opening from true events. Writer Kristi Garrett reports that the key to catching a sexual predator who’d been victimizing the Louisiana bayou country lay in a branch of mathematics in which symbols stand as ciphers for unknown numbers. It sounds complicated, but it’s a mental discipline most of us no doubt tackled in school.

It’s algebra.

Kristi makes the connection in “Cracking the Code: Why, How and When Should Students Learn Algebra?” Again, it’s an important story well told, and again, it comes complete with answers to the questions it poses. Aside from her dramatic, “ripped from the headlines” example of algebra’s utility, Kristi explains how established theories of cognitive development are evolving, and how our approaches to teaching algebra need to adapt accordingly.

“Teachers tend to teach math the way they learned math, in a very procedural way. That works for some kids, but it doesn’t work for all kids. Teachers need to learn new teaching strategies to help all students be successful,” Nadine Bezuk, director of San Diego State’s Improving Student Achievement in Mathematics program, says in Kristi’s article.

(Longtime readers may recognize Kristi’s byline. A writer and editor on our staff for six years before moving on to other pursuits, she graciously agreed to come back while our senior writer, Carol Brydolf, is on leave.)

Leave it to our fearless leader, though, to tackle the most terrifying topic of all—the state budget. You can read CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin’s scathing commentary for yourselves—I wouldn’t dream of stealing any of his thunder about the unholy thing lawmakers conjured up. Instead, I offer this vignette from the scene of the crime one Saturday when the Legislature was convened for a rare weekend session:

Sacramento was enjoying a brief respite from a welcome winter storm. The winds that had rattled our windows the night before had slackened. The icy needles of rain were gone, and shafts of golden sunlight stabbed through the roiling clouds. The break favored the 150 world-class athletes in town for the Amgen Tour of California bicycle race, which began with time trials on a 2.5-mile route around the Capitol grounds.

Hopping on my own bike, I headed downtown to jostle with cheering onlookers along a blocked-off street. My timing was impeccable. Within minutes, I craned my neck to see a motorcycle bearing down—fast. A placard on the windscreen announced the approaching rider: ARMSTRONG. Another motorcycle followed with a TV camera person perched on the back. Then came a spandex-suited blur on a matching bicycle, gone before you could say Jack Flash. Another camera crew followed, trailed by a car with extra bicycles clamped on top. “Who was that?” I asked, just to be sure. The crowd assured me I’d caught a glance of Lance Armstrong, the reigning champion of cancer survivors.

Instead of sticking around to watch the other riders race by, I locked up my own bike and strode over to the state Capitol, a gorgeous white neoclassical building modeled on the one in Washington, D.C. I wasn’t the most casually dressed guest who passed through the metal detector that day; other tourists in rain ponchos and baseball caps milled around the marble hallways. Down one passage was a block-lettered sign: “LEGISLATURE’S FAILURE TO ACT: DAY 89” it proclaimed, as if it were advertising a long-running vaudeville revue; a narrow electronic strip underneath toted up the state’s mounting deficit in garish red numbers.

Gold lettering above the tightly locked, heavy wooden doors alongside gave star billing to the office’s absent occupant—ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER—as if Hollywood’s “Last Action Hero” were starring in his own movie, with no role in the state’s budget melodrama that the nearby signs recounted.

I walked back down the hall, passing beneath an interior dome glowing 120 feet above the Rotunda, and climbed three long flights up an elegant staircase. Carpeted halls led to visitors galleries above both the Senate and Assembly floors. No senators were in their crimson chamber, just a portrait of George Washington and the Latin phrase Senatoris est civitatis libertatem tueri (“It is the duty of a senator to protect the liberty of the people”). I wandered over to the Assembly; nope, nobody there either, just a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and the inscription Legislatorum est justas leges condere (“It is the duty of legislators to pass just laws”).

Downstairs, the garish red numbers mounted, the tourists milled. Outside, the racers furiously pedaled circles around the building, and no one seemed to be getting anywhere fast.