— Partnership will solve curriculum challenge
Senate Bill 179, which would require every high school student beginning with the Class of 2017 to complete an online course before graduation, has raised some concern. High schools are wondering where they will find the online curriculum to offer and how they will find the funding to develop it if that is needed.
Ivy Tech Community College has partnered with high schools across the state offering dual credit courses to more than 25,000 students and saving parents $12.2 million. Ivy Tech can be a partner to our high schools across the state to solve the online challenge they will face if Senate Bill 179 becomes the law.
Ivy Tech Online, a division specifically responsible for developing online programming, has recently commissioned a study to assess the high schools’ needs for online instruction based on its dual credit model. The college intends to review the results of this study in combination with any state mandates yet to come and package a program or programs that will meet the needs of the high schools and, more importantly, the needs of the students. We believe such a partnership will put these important technology tools into the hands of our high schools to best prepare our students for the future.
Change, sometimes coupled with challenges, continues to come with regularity in education. Ivy Tech is dedicated to working with high schools to find solutions to address these changes and challenges effectively. This is a partnership that our schools and our students would benefit from as people explore future solutions.
Linda Buskirk
Ivy Tech trustee
Drug war tramples many folks’ rights
You’re in your house, sound asleep, and a group of men kick down your front door. They have guns drawn, pointing at you, and they are shouting. You wake up from a sound sleep, and you don’t know whom they might be.
Your children are crying. They are scared. Who are these armed men?
Well, all too often, they are police officers who got the wrong address and are raiding your house because they believe, sometimes just on the word of an informant who wants to make a deal, that you have drugs. Sometimes the drug is marijuana.
Marijuana of course being less harmful than alcohol. The drug that about half of Americans have taken in their life without becoming violent drug fiends. The drug that our government finds bad enough that it is willing to engage in no-knock searches in the dead of night, knowing that innocent people will die defending their homes from people they believe are intruders.
When these innocents are killed, police or their commanders are almost never punished. If you are an innocent person who kills an officer you believe is an intruder, there is almost no chance you won’t be charged with Murder One.
These are the facts of the drug war in America. Americans losing their property not because they are accused of a crime, but because the property is suspected to be the product of drugs. The government can actually charge your car with essentially a crime, and the burden is on you, not them, to show why it shouldn’t be seized.
Illegal searches in the streets of America happen every day, in fishing expeditions in the war on drugs or, more aptly, the war on our Constitution. Teenagers who never sold drugs a day in their lives are urged by attractive undercover police in high schools to sell them drugs. When they finally do, they get years in prison. Indeed, the police in these cases insist on paying for the drugs to increase the charges.
This is the product of the drug war. How much longer before we cease to be free at all?
Jerome McCollom
Kokomo
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