Parents held responsible for underage drinking

We hope that everyone has a safe and happy new years!

by Leanne Italie, Associated Press     Parents held responsible for underage drinking

NEW YORK (AP) — Parents of teens: If you think a drinking disaster at your kid's party can't happen at your house, not with your kid, because he's a good kid, it's time to wake up and smell the whiskey bottle tossed on your lawn.

Because of the high risk of underage drinking and driving this time of year, many parents open their homes to partying teens as a way to keep them off the roads. What some may not know is that liability laws can leave Mom and Dad vulnerable to lawsuits, fines and even jail time if underage drinking is found to be going on under their roof.

Parents can get in trouble even if they didn't know about the drinking.

That's what a Menlo Park, Calif., father says he is up against.

Bill Burnett, a Stanford University professor, was arrested the night after Thanksgiving over a basement party thrown by his 17-year-old son to celebrate a big high school football win.

Burnett said he and his wife had forbidden alcohol at the party and were upstairs at the time police received a call about possible drinking by minors. In fact, he said, he had twice made his way to the basement to check on the merry-making.

He spent a night in jail and was booked on 44 counts of suspicion of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Each misdemeanor count carries up to a $2,500 fine and nearly a year in jail.

Burnett questioned the deterrent value of laws that hold parents legally responsible even if they didn't know there was alcohol at the party.

"In this case I think arresting a parent isn't going to prevent kids from drinking," he said on the "Today" show.

Eight states have specific "social host" laws that say parents can get in trouble if underage guests are drinking, even if no one gets hurt, according to the National Institutes of Health. (Some of those states allow parents to serve alcohol to their own children in some situations.)

Sixteen other states have laws that hold Mom and Dad legally responsible for underage drinking under certain circumstances — for example, if a teen who drank at their home got into a car accident, NIH said. In other states, parents can get in trouble under more general liability laws.

Stephen Wallace, a senior adviser at Students Against Destructive Decisions, or SADD, which used to be called Students Against Drunk Driving, said that with an increased awareness of the dangers of underage drinking, law enforcement authorities are increasingly relying on social host liability laws to go after parents.

While he acknowledged that teens are adept at finding ways to drink on the sly, he said he is all for anything that gets at the problem of underage drinking. He said he finds it troubling that the Burnetts said they saw no alcohol consumed at their party.

"Parents need to say to kids, 'You shouldn't be drinking at all and you certainly can't do it here because we can be put in jail,'" Wallace said.

According to SADD research co-sponsored by the insurance company Liberty Mutual, more teens are saying that their parents allow them to go to parties where alcohol is being served — 41 percent in 2011, compared with 36 percent two years ago. Also, 57 percent of high school students whose parents allow them to drink at home said they prefer to drink elsewhere with their friends, Wallace said.

At some parties, the parents themselves supply the booze. In other cases, the kids bring it, sometimes with the hosts' knowledge.

"Some parents feel helpless," said David Singer of Demarest, N.J., who has 17-year-old twin daughters and a 20-year-old son in college. "Some parents feel they need to look the other way in order to help their kids fit in with the cool crowd. And some parents believe, 'It's better under my roof than who-knows-where.'"

Like Burnett, Singer said he doesn't condone drinking by his underage kids under any circumstances. And yet he found a whiskey bottle in the yard after a party thrown by his son.

Burnett acknowledged he made a mistake but said he doesn't believe police crackdowns like the one at his house do much good.

"All of this is probably going to go underground and result in a more dangerous situation for kids," he told the online news network Patch. "I really don't think it's up to the police to help me parent."

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Ryle student named honorable mention

From the Union Recorder . . .

Ryle High School student Austin Youngblood was named an honorable mention in the annual statewide prescription drug abuse prevention public service announcement (PSA) competition.

The annual PSA contest for high school students is part of Attorney General Jack Conway’s statewide Keep Kentucky Kids Safe initiative to alert Kentucky kids and their parents to the devastating consequences of abusing prescription pills.

The winning PSAs and honorable mentions will be posted on the Attorney General’s website. The winning video will also be included with anti-drug PSAs the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy distributes to television stations across Kentucky.

For more information on the prescription drug abuse education initiative or to see the winning PSAs, visit ag.ky.gov/rxabuse.htm.

Ryle Alum wins astronaut scholarship

Congratulations to Taylor Lloyd!

by the Community Recorder

The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation has selected University of Kentucky senior Taylor Lloyd, of Union, as one of this year’s 26 recipients of the prestigious $10,000 scholarship.

The ASF Scholarship is presented to outstanding college students majoring in science, technology, engineering or math.

“Taylor is an extraordinary student who shows incredible success in her studies and undergraduate research,” said UK President Eli Capilouto. “We are thrilled to see her hard work recognized by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. We believe she will be a major contributor to her field in the future, and this scholarship will help make that possible.”

Astronaut scholars exhibit motivation, imagination and intellectual daring, as well as exceptional performance, both in and outside the classroom.

Lloyd, the daughter of Gregory and Melinda Lloyd, attended Ryle High School before coming to UK. She is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in agricultural biotechnology and biology.

In addition to her studies, Lloyd is a Chellgren Fellow and member of the Society for the Promotion of Undergraduate Research and Alpha Delta Pi sorority. She is also a 2011 recipient of the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship.

As an undergraduate, Lloyd has been active in the university’s research enterprise. She currently is part of a project examining the temperature and light signaling pathways that govern the germination of seeds. Understanding these mechanisms would allow researchers to improve agriculture and meet the world’s demands despite climate change.

Lloyd works out of the lab of Bruce Downie, associate professor of horticulture at the UK College of Agriculture.

Lloyd, who pursued the ASF Scholarship to help fund the rest of her undergraduate studies, hopes to pursue a doctoral degree in seed biology and plant pathology. Upon completion of her doctoral degree,

Lloyd would like to pursue research and teach at a major university, maybe even in Kentucky. “I would love to come back to UK to teach and establish my own lab,” she said.

The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation is a nonprofit organization established by the Mercury astronauts in 1984.

For more about your community, visit NKY.com/union.

Happy Holidays

Here's to hoping that you have a warm and wonderful holiday break!

Exploration emphasized in UK's new required classes

The picture below shows Ryle alum Margo Cain working in one of her classes at UK.

From left, University of Kentucky students Linsey Ward, Kate Topley, Matt Dement and Margo Cain, worked on an art project recently in a class taught by Marty Henton. The class, part of the UK Core program, is aimed at helping non-art students to learn about art and creativity. CHARLES BERTRAM

http://www.kentucky.com/2011/12/19/1998971/exploration-emphasized-in-university.html

For Missouri Students, Cellphone Debate Isn't Academic

A very tragic story about cell phone use while driving.  Kentucky has banned any use of cell phones by drivers under the age of 18.  Text messaging while driving is prohibited for any driver, regardless of age.  The following quote by an 18 year-old passenger on the bus from the story is something we should all remember . . .

"If a text or a call is that important, it should be no problem pulling over to the side of the road and then take care of what you need to," Perona said. "No life is worth texting your friend or anybody back while you're behind the wheel."

By JIM SALTER and JIM SUHR Associated Press

ST. JAMES, Mo. December 17, 2011 (AP)

The text was about something innocuous: A request to go to the county fair. It set off a highway pileup that took two lives, injured dozens and left two school buses and a pickup truck in a crumpled heap.

As the nation debates a federal recommendation to eliminate cellphone use in cars, the high school band students from St. James who were involved in the wreck last year have already done it themselves. After losing one of their classmates, many of the teens made a vow: Using a cellphone behind the wheel is something they just won't do.

The young man who was on the other end of the pivotal text exchange, who says he didn't know his friend was driving, is still haunted by the catastrophic result of what began as a simple message about their plans.

"I pretty much feel like it was my fault," said the young man, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition that his name not be used because he fears retaliation from people who might blame him.

He was texting with 19-year-old Daniel Schatz, who investigators say set off the accident by slamming into the back of a semi cab that had slowed for road construction. The buses then crashed into the wreckage. Schatz and a 15-year-old girl on one of the buses, Jessica Brinker, were killed instantly.

The National Transportation Safety Board has cited that accident in its push to ban drivers from using cellphones — even hands-free devices. That recommendation has already met with resistance from lawmakers around the country who fear an unprecedented reach into people's driving habits.

But young people in St. James, a sleepy town of about 3,700 near the Mark Twain National Forest, have already changed their behavior.

"The majority of us will refuse to text and drive because of this," said Ian Vannatta, 16, who was on one of the buses and is a new driver. "It's the difference between life and death."

Emily Perona, now an 18-year-old senior, survived the bus crash with a broken pelvis despite sitting just one seat ahead of Brinker.

"If a text or a call is that important, it should be no problem pulling over to the side of the road and then take care of what you need to," Perona said. "No life is worth texting your friend or anybody back while you're behind the wheel."

The events of Aug. 5, 2010 — spelled out in a chilling Missouri State Highway Patrol report — convinced her of that.

Vannatta and Perona were among about 50 St. James band students piled onto separate buses — one for boys, the other for girls — on their yearly pilgrimage to Six Flags St. Louis.

Conditions were clear, though several stretches along the freeway were under repair. The buses made their way through two work zones before rolling up to a third at Gray Summit, about 40 miles southwest of St. Louis.

Michael Crabtree, a 43-year-old trucker bound for St. Louis for a load, had just gotten onto Interstate 44 driving a semi cab without a trailer. Near Gray Summit, along a straight, uphill ribbon of highway, he slowed for road work when he saw in his rearview mirror a silver pickup barreling down on him. He braced for impact.

The 2007 GMC driven by Schatz — a former University of Missouri reserve quarterback and a Republican state lawmaker's son from nearby Sullivan — hit Crabtree's cab at 55 mph.

Tour bus driver Eugene Reed saw the wreck from behind, pulled over and scrambled out to warn other approaching drivers. That's when both of the St. James buses rolled by.

To read the entire article - For Mo. Students, Cellphone Debate Isn't Academic

All-State Band Selections

Over 1,000 high school instrumental musicians auditioned recently in Elizabethtown, and approximately 200 were selected state-wide as members of the two all-state bands and orchestra. Please congratulate the following Ryle students on making all-state band!

Concert Band
Erin Deja - Flute
Kyle Kidwell - Alto Sax
Sam Kirby - Oboe
Jennifer Laufmann - Tenor Sax
Avery Williams - Trumpet

Symphonic Band
Kelly Tursic

All-State Chorus Selections

Congratulations go out to the following Ryle students for being named to the All-State Chorus by the Kentucky Music Educators Association.  Later this year they will perform in Louisville at the KMEA state conference.

Freshmen
Kayla Fargo
Rushika Fernando
Jordyn Nelson
Hannah Kipling
Sydni McDowell
Jared Sipple
Alex Warner

Sophomores
Jeff Moore
Daniel Kozar
Kennedy Wright
Shannon Winter
Hannah Kleckner

Juniors
Maria Franxman
Madison Murphy

All State Volleyball Players

Congratulations to Ryle sophomores Ashley Bush and Harper Hempel for being named to the All-State Volleyball Second Team!

For more details go to http://www.kvca.org/.

Ryle wrestlers defend crown

By Marc Hardin, Enquirer contributor   

The Ryle wrestling team will defend its championship at today's Raider Rumble, a 16-team pool tournament, but coach Tim Ruschell said it will be a challenge to hold off an impressive list of contenders.

"We want to try and get as many good teams as we can so it's tough for everybody," Ruschell said.

"It's a good early-season kickoff. It's a wake-up call, an opportunity for everybody to see where everybody else is at."

Qualifying starts at 10 a.m. The finals begin at 6 p.m. The Raiders are the two-time defending champions, but they will have to hold off six of the top eight teams in Kentucky plus Harrison and Columbus East from Ohio and West Virginia's Gundy, a former meet champion.

Among the Kentucky powers on hand are defending state champion Union, fourth-place state finisher Larue County and fifth-place Campbell County.

The Camels are returning four state placers, including 103-pound champion Garth Yenter, 119-pound runner-up Sean Fausz and heavyweight runner-up Mason Frank.

Competition should be especially keen in the lighter weight divisions, particularly at 126 pounds and 132.

Ryle's T.J. Ruschell is a favorite at 132 but he faces stiff competition in Raymundo Perez of Larue County and Justin Street from Grundy. Perez placed third at last season's Kentucky state meet. Street finished fourth in West Virginia and Grundy finished second as a team.

At 126, Ryle's Keegan North is in the same division as Campbell County's Fausz and Union's defending state champion Brock Ervin.

Ryle won last year by a half point over runner-up Union. Columbus East finished third.

Ryle wrestlers defend crown

Is Your Child Spending Too Much Time On Facebook?

By Rebecca VanderMeulen

Does it seem like your teen spends every free moment she has on Facebook? She's not alone.

In 2011 the magazine, Consumer Reports found that 20 million kids actively used Facebook over the last year. Of that, 7.5 million were younger than 13. The social-networking site's own rules prohibit users that young.

Beyond that, the consumer research firm Neilsen found that in March 2011, a typical Facebook user was on the site for a staggering 6 hours and 35 minutes at a time.

But is your child spending too much time on Facebook?

 

Before you can answer that, you need to know where your teen is using the site. Home computers aren't the only point of access, says Monica Vila, founder of The Online Mom. Kids also log on from cell phones, tablet computers and computers at friends' houses — sometimes even at school.

You should also know what your child is using Facebook for, Vila says. Does she hop on to chat with her friends, play games or keep in touch with grandparents? Vila advises talking with your child about what she does on the site and how she decides who to add as a friend.

Your teen may appear to choose Facebook over real life. But Larry Magid, co-director of ConnectSafely.org, says your child's use of Facebook is probably no different from the way you used the telephone when you were a teen. The only difference is the medium.

"There's nothing unusual about teenagers wanting to be social," Magid says. "Facebook is part of their real life." What's changed is the some of the ways in which teens interact with one another.

Facebook's Benefits

While teens often log onto Facebook at the expense of doing homework, Vila says the site can also help them in school. This spring, she says, some students at her local high school were chatting on the site about trouble they were having with a class project. A user who was a mutual friend of the students and their teacher alerted the teacher to this fact and the students were able to work through the problem with the teacher.

To read the entire article go to Is Your Child Spending Too Much Time On Facebook?

Official Calls for Urgency on College

by Tamar Lewin, published Nov. 29, 2011

As Occupy movement protests helped push spiraling college costs into the national spotlight, Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged higher-education officials Tuesday to “think more creatively — and with much greater urgency” about ways to contain costs and reduce student debt.

The Education Department characterized Mr. Duncan’s remarks, at a Las Vegas conference of college financial aid workers, as the start of a “national conversation” about high costs, which have prompted raucous protests across the country and ignited an angry push among some borrowers demanding debt forgiveness, federal grants and interest-free loans.

The department used the opportunity to call attention to steps the Obama administration had taken to reduce the net price that students and families pay for higher education and make it easier to repay student loans. But it was clear that the administration was taking heed of the rising furor over tuition increases, and a growing online debate about how much a college degree is worth at a time when few jobs are available for graduates.

“Three in four Americans now say that college is too expensive for most people to afford,” Mr. Duncan said. “That belief is even stronger among young adults — three-fourths of whom believe that graduates today have more debt than they can manage.”

College seniors with loans now graduate with an average debt load of more than $25,000. With outstanding student debt nearing $1 trillion — and exceeding credit-card debt — it makes sense that, as Patrick M. Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute, put it, college costs are in the spotlight as never before.

To read the entire New York Times article go to Official Calls for Urgency on College Costs

Emma Sullivan’s potty-mouthed tweet has a lesson for all of us

The following opinion article was written in The Washington Post.  It does not necessarily reflect anyone's views at school but it does discuss some very interesting and relevant issues.

Emma Sullivan’s potty-mouthed tweet
By Ruth Marcus, Published: November 29

Emma Sullivan, you’re lucky you’re not my daughter. (Dangerous sentence, I know: My daughters might agree.)

If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smart­alecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.

Also, that smartphone? The one you posed with, proudly displaying the tweet in which you announced that Brownback “sucked” and added the lovely hashtag #heblowsalot? Turned off until you learn to use it responsibly.

I may sound alarmingly crotchety here, but something is upside down in the modern world, which has transformed Sullivan into an unlikely Internet celebrity and heroine of the liberal blogosphere.

To recap, Sullivan, an 18-year-old senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, was on a school-sponsored Kansas Youth in Government trip to Topeka when she heard the conservative Republican governor speak.

Sullivan did not actually give Brownback a piece of her mind, as she claimed, but she let her feelings be known via Twitter: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person. #heblowsalot.” Sullivan had previously opined on such weighty subjects as the “Twilight” series (“Dear edward and jacob, this is the best night of my life. I want u. Love, ur future wife”) and Justin Bieber.

Sullivan’s foray into political commentary caught the eye of Brownback’s office, which was not amused. The Mission East principal called Sullivan to his office to demand that she write a letter of apology.

Of course, the governor’s office was dumb to complain about a tweet that no one saw. Pre-con­troversy, Sullivan had some 60 followers. Now she has 15,000. On Monday, Brownback was predictably backtracking. “My staff overreacted to this tweet, and for that I apologize,” he said in a statement.

Of course, Sullivan has a First Amendment right to express her views — although not unlimited. In a 1969 case upholding students’ right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court found that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate” but added that school administrators may prohibit expression that will “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school.”

The unresolved legal question is where the schoolhouse gate exists in an Internet age, as administrators grapple with social media and cyberbullying.

The Supreme Court recently refused to hear the case of a Connecticut high school student who was disqualified from running for senior class secretary after she referred to school administrators in a blog post with a vulgarity. Another case awaiting the justices’ action involves two Pennsylvania eighth-graders who were suspended after they created a fake MySpace profile depicting their middle school principal as a sex addict.

But the First Amendment focus confuses what can be constitutionally prohibited with what ought to be done. Regardless of whether the school could force Sullivan to apologize to the governor — authorities ultimately backed down — it was perfectly appropriate for the principal to explain how her attitude and language during an official trip reflected poorly on the school.

More to the point, as I constantly remind my daughters, parents are not bound by constitutional constraints. The Constitution does not grant teenagers the fundamental right to have a cellphone or use foul language on it. The parental role is to inculcate values of respect for authority — even those you disagree with — and the importance of civil discourse. It’s not to stand up for your little darling no matter how much she mouths off.

Not the Sullivans. After the governor complained, her older sister alerted the media. “It’s the speech they use today. It’s more attention-grabbing,” her mother, Julie Sullivan, told the Associated Press. “I raised my kids to be independent, to be strong, to be free thinkers. If she wants to tweet her opinion about Governor Brownback, I say for her to go for it and I stand totally behind her.”

With reinforcements. “We don’t want to stifle our kids’ political free speech,” parent Kate Cook told a meeting of the local school board. “Even though it may not be the best choice of words, that’s how kids communicate with each other.”

It is until we parents insist such language is not acceptable, explain that it is possible to disagree civilly — and insist on an apology when our children fall short.

“I would do it again,” said Emma Sullivan, emboldened rather than chastened. To put it in her terms, that blows a lot.