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Show Rural schools' problems include Exhibit demonstrates transportation, teacher pay geol~gic changes CEDAR OTY, Utah (AP) - Problems common to rural chools throughout the country include providing transportation, offering a wide spectrum of classe and paying teachers enough to keep them for leaving for the ci.ty, said Dean Swanson, president of the National Rural Education As ociation. Some rural schools even have to feed tudents breakfa t on their long bus ride to class, Swan on said la t week in a keynote s peech at the three-day Utah Rural Schools conference at Southern Utah Univer ity. More Indians, Asians and Latinos are enrolling in rural schools, and when English i not their first language, school are expected to provide the same education they give other tudents, he said. That problem often is compounded by ca h hortages in mailer districts. In Utah, even school di tricts recently have been reprimanded by the federal government for failing to provide non-English spealcing student with a quality education. On the positive side, Swanson said, 92 percent of rural students go on to some kind of post-secondary training, a opposed to 66 percent in urban areas. He also said more rural s tudent come from two-parent familie , which are more likely to get involved i n their children's schooling. The sheer distances between rural communities also play a role in how chools accommodate extracurricular activities as well as class time. One of the most recent Utah rural school controversies has been the Utah State Board of Education's elimination of the four-day week. Many rural district bad scheduled Monday-through-Thursday classes to allow travel time for sports, debate and other activities. They met the requirement for 990 hours a year by lengthening the school day. But state chool Superintendent Scott Bean aid more than l 00 schools bad fewer than 180 days of class - some had as few as 140. "Their achievement suffered," Bean told The Salt Lake Tribune. "I would rather have them in school 200 days a year at five hours a day than what they were doing." Bean recommended that the s tate school board mandate 180 days of in truction without exception, which it did last spring. For ome, this became the crucial example of how a decision-maker on the populous Wa atch Front could influence the destiny of rural schools. Lynn F. Bills, director of the Southeastern Educational Service Center in Price and a former Daggett School District superintendent, said, "The distance involved in getting kids to their events was monumental." Now schools are likely to have to interrupt regular school days to fit in the extracurricular activities, he said. A photographic exhibit showing geologic changes at various locations in the Grand Canyon will b shown at the Braithwaite Fine Arts Gallery on the Southern Utah University campus through August 25. The exhibition opened last week. "Geologic change can be as sudden as an earthquake or as slow a the drift of the continents. When the change is slow, the trick is seeing it," Mandy Brooks, gallery director, explains. "This exhibit matches 'then' and 'now' pictures from the Grand Canyon together with narrative to explain some of the changes." The 'then' photographs wet"e taken during a 1923 trip to the Grand Canyon by R. C. Moore, director of the Kansas Geological Society from 1916 to 1954. Moore's trip was con sidered the most important study of the Canyon since John Wesley Powell's 1869 and 1872 explorations. In 1991, the geologic society Jed a 16-day trip retracing the Moore expedition. The purpose Student aid fraud still widespread WA HINGTON jAP) - Faced with damaging new evidence that they failed to top fraud, top Education cpartm nt officials in isted they h:ive improved over ight of the nation' big-money tudent aid program . But even supporter remained skeptical aft r a bli tering congres ional hearing la t week concerning what Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., called "yet another maj r failure." "Your rea urance today f've beard befor ," Nunn told Assi tant Education Secretary David Longaneck r, after Longan cker testified the agency was working to improve management of the Pell Grant program. At the hearing, attorney for the Senate Governmental Affair p rmanent ubcornmittee on inv ligations cited the case of a now-bankrupt Lo Angeles trade school that collected $58 million in federal aid, allegedly in part for "ghost students" who never enrolled. "This may be an aberration," Nunn said. "But I've seen o many aberrations, it might be a pattern." The Educ.ation Department and the inspector general's ffice failed to uncover the problem at lade American Sch ols and stop the flow f taxpayer money, despite numerous review over several year , Nunn said. lade is under investigation by the Justice Department, he aid. The company's attorney conEirmed the inv stigation, but aid the own rs deny wrongdoing. They have not been charged. "I'm as appalled by what we're hearing today as you ar 1 11 Longanecker told lawmakers. But he argued that the Education Department has improved i handling of student aid program in the last few years - keeping uspect schools out from th stan, and doing more frequent audits to catch school tha misbehave. Nevertheless, problem keep popping up among forprofit trade schools. For that reason, the department will oon propo e chang in the way it deals with tho e chools, Longanecker aid. But the lade ca e could have more immediate politic.al fall ut for the department. Asked if he were w rried it would give ammunition to House Republicans who want to abolish the depanment, Longanecker aid: "That's certainly a concern." In a highly publicized crackdown two years ago, Congre required the Education Department to kick out of the tudent Joan program any chools with high numbers of tudents who defaulted. But many of tho e chools witched to the Pell Grant program, which bas fewer aieguards, Nunn said. He prorni ed a crackdown on fraudulent hools. And in the Hou e, Rep. Marge Roukem_a, R-N.J., introduced a bill that would require the department to expel school £ram the Pell Grant program if they are lcicked out of the student loan program. The lade schools - six in California and on in Florida - declared bankruptcy and closed in March, three days after the FBI raided school offices. About 4,000 mostly p r, Hispanic student were left in the lurch. Senate investigator contend lade official collected federal Pell Grant money for tudents who either never enrolled in classes or failed to appear after registering. California state officials have said they are inv tigating whether lade failed to reimburse the federal government when students dropped out. Federal prosecutors in Lo Angeles would not conunent. The Pell Grant money has since disappeared, and three of the lade chools' owners have returned to their homes in Argentina, aid Alan Edelman, an attorney for the S nate subcommittee. A fourth is living in Los Angeles. lade operated schools in downtown Los Angeles, Santa Ana, El Monte, North Hollywood, South Gate and Oxnard, Calif.; and Hialeah, Fla. ,. of the 1991 trip, led by Lee Gerhard, current director of the Kan as Survey, was to study the change in the Grand Canyon by repeating photographs taken by Moore's l70up sixty-eight years earlier. Images in the exhibit, titled "The Canyon Revisited," include modern prints of the vintage 1923 photographs alongside contemporary photograph taken from identical vantage points and showing the ame formations, caverns, and waterways. "The 1991 crew found the original vantage points for 45 of the 1923 photographs," Brook said. "The new photos show a vari ty of change in vegetation, the erosion of beache , and the effects of floods." Also on exhibit through July 28 are works completed by SUU Art Department alumni. They cover a wide range of media and style. The gallery is free and open to the public Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m.-8 p.m . It is closed on Sunday and university holidays. |