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A. Vouchers

Several state legislatures and city school systems have adopted or are considering school voucher plans that allow students to enroll in private schools with municipal and state tax support. Search the Internet to find out how extensive this is. The movement is challenged by supporters of the public schools and by those who worry about religious schools receiving tax money.

B. Death Rates

Here are the states with the three highest death rates in three categories. The figures are 10 years old:

Motor Vehicle Deaths
Mississippi 27.7
Wyoming 27.5
South Carolina 24.0

Firearm Homicides
Louisiana 8.9
Mississippi 7.8
Alabama 6.8

Suicide
New Mexico 19.8
Montana 19.3
Nevada 18.4

Rates are per 100,000 residents of the state.

Bring the figures up to date by accessing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics.
Interview campus authorities for the reasons these states fit into these categories.
Obtain the data for your state.
Write a story centering on where your state fits into these figures.

C. Purges

Search the Internet for an article about the pressure on textbook publishers to conform to certain racial, religious, social pressures. For example, in late 2004, the Texas Board of Education approved new health textbooks for the state's high schools and middle schools after the publishers agreed to change wordings in the texts so that marriage was described as strictly between a man and a woman.

     The textbooks had used "married partners" instead of "husband and wife." A Board member pointed out that Texas had adopted a law banning gay civil unions.
     In Cobb County, Georgia, the school district board voted to put stickers in biology textbooks stating that evolution is "a theory not a fact" and that the subject should be "approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." Five parents sued the school board, contending that the stickers violate the separation of church and state.
     The author of the textbook, Kenneth Miller of Brown University, objected to the stickers, saying that "theory" implied that the concept "is like a hunch, not the scientific understanding."
     Find out what happened in some of these attempts at censorship and write a 300 word feature about the conflicts.

D. Drinking Deaths

A 19-year-old student at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colo., died of alcohol poisoning with a blood alcohol level of .436 percent, more than five times the .08 percent national standard for drunken driving. An 18-year-old freshman at the University of Colorado died from alcohol poisoning after a fraternity initiation ceremony. His blood alcohol level was .328.

     These deaths, experts say, represent a fraction of the problem of binge drinking on college campuses. Students in one year died after drinking bouts in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Virginia an Colorado. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism estimates 1,400 students 18 to 24 die a year from alcohol abuse, most in traffic accidents.
     Many more survive near-lethal intoxication only because they were rushed to emergency rooms by friends.
     Search the Internet for the national situation and blend this with what you learn from campus authorities and from hospital records. Write a feature for the Sunday newspaper, or prepare a documentary for television or radio.

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