Okla. Man Charged With 1st-Degree Murder

A grocery store stocker was arraigned Monday on first-degree murder charges in the killing of a 10-year-old girl in what authorities said was an elaborate plan to eat human flesh.

Kevin Ray Underwood, 26, was led into court with his hands and feet shackled, and spoke softly as he told the judge he needed a public defender.

McClain County Judge Gary D. Barger entered a not guilty plea for Underwood, whose court-appointed attorneys requested a gag order.

They complained that officials had made "inflammatory, prejudicial and conclusory statements" to the media that had helped fuel widespread interest in the case. A hearing on the motion will be held Tuesday, the judge said.

Authorities believe Underwood killed Jamie Rose Bolin last week after she disappeared after going to a library. Her funeral was scheduled for Thursday.

Prosecutor Tim Kuykendall said after the arraignment Monday that he would seek the death penalty.

"In my 24 years as a prosecutor this ranks as one of the most heinous and atrocious cases I've ever been involved with," he said.

During the arraignment, a man in the hall outside the courtroom yelled, "Let's string him up. Let's string him up, baby killer, and hang him." Police led the man away.

Underwood was arrested Friday and held without bail after drawing suspicion at a checkpoint set up near the apartment complex where he and the young girl were neighbors.

Authorities said he led investigators to his apartment, where they found Jamie's body in a large Rubbermaid tub sealed with duct tape in his bedroom closet.

Authorities believe Underwood lured the 10-year-old into his apartment, beat her on the head with a wooden cutting board and suffocated her with his hands and duct tape.

Police Chief David Tompkins said investigators believe Underwood sexually assaulted Jamie after he killed her and planned to eat the corpse.

Meat tenderizer and barbecue skewers found in his apartment were intended for the little girl, Kuykendall said.

According to a police affidavit, Underwood confessed that he killed Jamie, telling FBI agents: "Go ahead and arrest me. She is in there. I chopped her up."

Police said that while there were deep saw marks on the girl's neck, she had not been dismembered.

In a brief, tearful telephone interview with The Associated Press, Underwood's mother was in disbelief and horror over the accusations.

"This is something that I don't know where it came from," said Connie Underwood. "He was always a wonderful boy.

"I would like to be able to tell her family how sorry we are. I just feel so terrible."

Underwood's parents have visited him in jail, with the conversation ending in tears, Tompkins said.

"It seemed to help the family out a lot and help Kevin out a lot," Tompkins said. "Kevin realizes he has done wrong."

By SEAN MURPHY, Associated Press Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060417/ap_on_re_us/girl_slain_oklahoma
;_ylt=Ahv4TUQ0hh9sqBjDfkmhjCRH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-

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Tax Procrastinators Find Calendar Friendly

Spotted two extra days by a friendly calendar, procrastinating taxpayers scrambled Monday to file their returns on time — and grudgingly give up whatever they owed.

In Little Rock, Ark., Ronald Edwards said he had been clinging as long as possible to the $2,500 he owed to the state and federal governments. He finally gave in on the last day.

"If I had a refund, you wouldn't see me here right now," said Edwards, a 49-year-old computer programmer. "If I'm going to pay, I'm not doing it until the last second."

Charles Lane, 67, a retired postal worker from Philadelphia, had the same idea.

He had vivid memories of things getting pretty rough at the office on tax deadline day. Nevertheless, he was one of a steady stream of last-minute filers headed to the post office Monday.

"I wasn't getting any money back," Lane said. "I was in no hurry."

With April 15 falling on a Saturday this year, taxpayers nationwide had at least until Monday to file their returns.

Ralph Savage, 63, of Philadelphia, started thinking about doing his taxes in March. But like always, he said he found himself running to the post office on the last day.

"My nickname is Mr. Procrastinator," Savage said.

A sign on a post office in downtown Pittsburgh said it would stay open until 9 p.m., with the last pickup at midnight to accommodate latecomers.

Jake McElligott, 38, a university administrator from Pittsburgh, said he completed his return but sat on it before filing just under the wire.

"I owed money. I was gong to file on the last day, whenever it was," he said. "They were done awhile ago, but I just held on to that money as long as I could."

A holiday observed Monday in Massachusetts gave some taxpayers an automatic extension. Patriot's Day commemorates the battles of Lexington and Concord, the beginning of the Revolutionary War.

That meant taxpayers in states that file with the IRS office in Andover, Mass. — Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia — had until Tuesday, according to Peggy Riley, an IRS spokeswoman. Maine also observes Patriot's Day.

While some late filers had only themselves to blame, others were fighting logistical problems.

In Olympia, Wash., Radha Yarlagadda stopped by a downtown post office during lunchtime to mail his taxes only because he was unsuccessful in his attempt to file online. He said the system would not accept his form.

"It was very frustrating," said Yarlagadda, 31.

In Newark, N.J., Helen Lam was standing in line to mail her federal tax payment — for the second time.

Lam, of Mineola, N.Y., sent in her tax return at the end of March, but got back from vacation last weekend to find that her check had bounced.

"It's annoying because it's hard to find out what you should do when you bounce a check," she said.

At a post office in downtown San Francisco, the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tried to make things warm and fuzzy for last-minute filers.

Two cats, Cuddlebug and Molly, and a black-and-white pit bull puppy named Petunia greeted people as they squeezed in ahead of the deadline.

"It's nice to pet a dog while you're standing in line," said Chris Colwick, 35, an environmental planning consultant. "It's a nice distraction, and she's a sweet girl."

Last-minute filers in Grand Rapids, Mich., could have their anxieties massaged away.

David Crawford, the proprietor of the Stress Less Massage Clinic, was offering free massages in the lobby of the city's main post office.

"He is in the right place at the right time," Crawford said while kneading the arms of an unfortunate postal patron who discovered — after driving to the post office and mailing his city, state and federal returns — that he had locked his keys in his car.

By PATRICK WALTERS, Associated Press Writer
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060417/ap_on_re_us/tax_deadline;
_ylt=ArAJjJva5KsN7HmGjtYpOL9H2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MjBwMWtkBHNlYwM3MTg-

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School Makes Kids Use Buckets for Toilets

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - A principal trying to prevent walkouts during immigration rallies inadvertently introduced a lockdown so strict that children weren't allowed to go to the bathroom, and instead had to use buckets in the classroom, an official said.

Worthington Elementary School Principal Angie Marquez imposed the lockdown March 27 as nearly 40,000 students across Southern California left classes to attend immigrants' rights demonstrations.

Marquez apparently misread the district handbook and ordered a lockdown designed for nuclear attacks.

Tim Brown, the district's director of operations, confirmed some students used buckets but said the principal's order to impose the most severe type of lockdown was an "honest mistake."

"When there's a nuclear attack, that's when buckets are used," Brown told the Los Angeles Times. The principal "followed procedure. She made a decision to follow the handbook. She just misread it."

A message left by The Associated Press for the principal at the school before business hours Monday was not immediately returned, and Marquez did not return telephone calls from the Times.

Appalled parents have complained to the school board. Brown said the school district planned to update its emergency preparedness instructions to give more explicit directions.

Parents and community activists asked the school board at its April 5 meeting to explain the principal's decision. They also sought promises that the lockdown wouldn't be repeated.

"There was no violence at the protests, so this was based on what?" activist Diane Sambrano asked. "It was unsanitary, unnecessary and absolutely unacceptable."

by The Associated Press
http://news.yahoo.com/news tmpl=story&cid=519&ncid=519&e=7&u=/ap/20060417/ap_on_re_us/
immigration_classroom_buckets_3

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History's vital role in America

''HARDLY A MAN is now alive/ Who remembers that famous day and
year," wrote the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, about April 18-
19, 1775. Of course, Longfellow in 1860 wrote his popular
poem ''Paul Revere's Ride" in order that future generations would
never forget the events of that night and day. But no one reads
Longfellow anymore.

It is not surprising therefore that the meaning of April 19, 1775,
has slipped from our memory. This is unfortunate, for Patriots Day
ought not to be just a time for baseball and the running of the
Marathon. Americans died on the day we're commemorating, and their
deaths set in motion an eight-year war that resulted in the creation
of the United States of America.

Not just the people of Massachusetts but all Americans have a stake
in the history, in the memory, of what happened in Lexington and
Concord. That is why the National Council for History Education, an
organization dedicated to promoting history in the schools, is again
organizing events in Concord and elsewhere on Patriots Day as part
of its ''Make History Strong" campaign. The focus is especially
important at a time when the No Child Left Behind Act's focus on
reading and math mastery is cutting into class time for history and
other subjects.

Every nation has sites of memory that give its people a sense of
themselves as a single entity. But we Americans have a special need
for these sites. A country like ours, composed of so many immigrants
and so many races and ethnicities, has never been able to assume its
nationhood as a matter of course. We Americans have had to invent
our nationhood. In comparison with the 230-year-old United States,
many states in the world today are new, some of them created within
the relatively recent past. Yet many of these states are undergirded
by people who had a preexisting sense of their ethnicity, blood
connections, and nationality. In the case of the United States, the
process was reversed: Americans were a state before they were a
nation, and much of American history has been an effort to define
that nationality.

Without our history, we lose our sense of what holds us together and
makes us a single people. McDonald's and Starbucks scattered about
the land are not enough to make us a nation. We need our history in
order to be a nation, but we also need to know our past in order to
know our future.

The best place for our youngsters to acquire knowledge of our
history is in school. Yet from all the data gathered, it appears
that young people are not learning much about America's past. One
recent test of seniors from 55 top liberal arts colleges revealed an
appalling ignorance of American history. Eighty-one percent of the
students could not identify Valley Forge or the ringing words from
Lincoln's ''Gettysburg Address" -- ''Government of the people, by
the people, for the people." Only 34 percent could name George
Washington as the victorious general at Yorktown.

By contrast, most of the students knew the popular culture only too
well. Ninety-nine percent of them could recognize the cartoon
characters Beavis and Butt-Head. A society whose best students have
such a thin understanding of its past is a society in trouble.

The Bush administration and Congress have been rightly concerned
with declines in students' reading and mathematical abilities, and
they passed No Child Left Behind as a remedy. But they seemed to
have had no awareness of the disastrous consequences of this act for
teaching history in the schools. When I mentioned this to a
prominent Republican, who is a big fan of history, he asked, ''How
so?" ''Well," I replied, ''if you were a superintendent of schools
who was going to be judged solely on how well his students did in
reading and mathematics, where would you put your energy and money?
Certainly not in teaching history." ''We never thought of that," he
said.

Congress has tried to offset this with Teaching American History
Grants. But these grants are being undermined by the emphasis on
reading and mathematics. Just as teachers benefiting from these
grants are being trained to teach history in more interesting and
effective ways, their classes are being cut back or cut out
altogether. If we hope to have a society aware of its past, we need
a much more balanced approach to the curriculums of our schools.
Above all, we need to recognize how essential a thorough grounding
in the history of our nation is for our citizenry.

By Gordon S. Wood
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/
2006/04/17/historys_vital_role_in_america/

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States Omit Minorities' School Scores

States are helping public schools escape potential penalties by skirting the No Child Left Behind law's requirement that students of all races must show annual academic progress.

With the federal government's permission, schools deliberately aren't counting the test scores of nearly 2 million students when they report progress by racial groups, an Associated Press computer analysis found.

Minorities — who historically haven't fared as well as whites in testing — make up the vast majority of students whose scores are being excluded, AP found. And the numbers have been rising.

"I can't believe that my child is going through testing just like the person sitting next to him or her and she's not being counted," said Angela Smith, a single mother. Her daughter, Shunta' Winston, was among two dozen black students whose test scores weren't counted to judge her suburban Kansas City, Mo., high school's performance by race.

Under the law championed by President Bush, all public school students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014, although only children above second grade are required to be tested.

Schools receiving federal poverty aid also must demonstrate annually that students in all racial categories are progressing or risk penalties that include extending the school year, changing curriculum or firing administrators and teachers.

The U.S. Education Department said it didn't know the breadth of schools' undercounting until seeing AP's findings.

"Is it too many? You bet," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in an interview. "Are there things we need to do to look at that, batten down the hatches, make sure those kids are part of the system? You bet."

Students whose tests aren't being counted in required categories include Hispanics in California who don't speak English well, blacks in the Chicago suburbs, American Indians in the Northwest and special education students in Virginia, AP found.

Bush's home state of Texas — once cited as a model for the federal law — excludes scores for two entire groups. No test scores from Texas' 65,000 Asian students or from several thousand American Indian students are broken out by race. The same is true in Arkansas.

One consequence is that educators are creating a false picture of academic progress.

"The states aren't hiding the fact that they're gaming the system," said Dianne Piche, executive director of the Citizens' Commission on Civil Rights, a group that supports No Child Left Behind. "When you do the math ... you see that far from this law being too burdensome and too onerous, there are all sorts of loopholes."

The law signed by Bush in 2002 requires public schools to test more than 25 million students periodically in reading and math. No scores can be excluded from the overall measure.

But the schools also must report scores by categories, such as race, poverty, migrant status, English proficiency and special education. Failure in any category means the whole school fails.

States are helping schools get around that second requirement by using a loophole in the law that allows them to ignore scores of racial groups that are too small to be statistically significant.

Suppose, for example, that a school has 2,000 white students and nine Hispanics. In nearly every state, the Hispanic scores wouldn't be counted because there aren't enough to provide meaningful information and because officials want to protect students' privacy.

State educators decide when a group is too small to count. And they've been asking the government for exemptions to exclude larger numbers of students in racial categories. Nearly two dozen states have successfully petitioned the government for such changes in the past two years. As a result, schools can now ignore racial breakdowns even when they have 30, 40 or even 50 students of a given race in the testing population.

Students must be tested annually in grades 3 through 8 and at least once in high school, usually in 10th grade. This is the first school year that students in all those grades must be tested, though schools have been reporting scores by race for the tests they have been administering since the law was approved.

To calculate a nationwide estimate, AP analyzed the 2003-04 enrollment figures the government collected — the latest on record — and applied the current racial category exemptions the states use.

Overall, AP found that about 1.9 million students — or about 1 in every 14 test scores — aren't being counted under the law's racial categories. Minorities are seven times as likely to have their scores excluded as whites, the analysis showed.

Less than 2 percent of white children's scores aren't being counted as a separate category. In contrast, Hispanics and blacks have roughly 10 percent of their scores excluded. More than one-third of Asian scores and nearly half of American Indian scores aren't broken out, AP found.

Ms. Smith's family in Missouri demonstrates how the exemptions work. Shunta' and other black children in tested grades at Oak Park High School, which is in a mostly white suburban Kansas City neighborhood, weren't counted as a group because Missouri schools have federal permission not to break out scores for any ethnic group with fewer than 30 students in the required testing population.

"Why don't they feel like she's important enough to rearrange things to make it count?" her mother asked.

In all, the tests of more than 24,000 mostly minority children in Missouri aren't being counted as groups, AP's review found. Other states have much higher numbers. California, for instance, isn't counting the scores of more than 400,000 children. In Texas, the total is about 257,000.

State educators defend the exemptions, saying minority students' performance is still being included in their schools' overall statistics even when they aren't being counted in racial categories. Excluded minority students' scores may be counted at the district or state level, officials said.

Scott Palmer, a consultant for the Council of Chief State School Officers in Washington, said he hoped critics will focus on the 23 million children whose scores are being counted by schools rather than those whose scores aren't reported separately.

"There's a huge positive feeling for the notion" of making schools accountable, Palmer said. "It's a huge plus."

Spellings said she believes educators are acting in good faith. "Are there people out there who find ways to game the system? Of course," she said. "But on the whole ... I fully believe in my heart, mind and soul that educators are people of good will."

Bush has hailed the separate accounting of minority students as a vital feature of the law. "It's really essential we do that. It's really important," Bush said in a May 2004 speech. "If you don't do that, you're likely to leave people behind. And that's not right."

Nonetheless, Bush's Education Department continues to give widely varying exemptions to states:

_Oklahoma lets schools exclude the test scores from any racial category with 52 or fewer members in the testing population, one of the largest across-the-board exemptions. That means 1 in 5 children in the state don't have scores broken out by race.

_Maryland, which tests about 150,000 students more than Oklahoma, has an exempt group size of just five. That means fewer than 1 in 100 don't have scores counted.

_With one of the most diverse school populations in the nation, Florida has created a special "provisional," or probationary, category for schools that are failing to meet the law's requirements. The deal helped Florida publicly claim that fewer schools had failed to meet their performance goals for two consecutive years. But federal education officials said the new category was mostly for public relations purposes and won't help schools escape penalties.

_Washington state has made 18 changes to its testing plan, according to a February report by the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Vermont has made none. On average, states have made eight changes at either the state or federal level to their plans in the past five years, usually changing the size or accountability of subgroups whose scores were supposed to be counted.

Toia Jones, a black teacher whose daughters attend school in a mostly white Chicago suburb, said the loophole is enabling states and schools to avoid taking concrete measures to eliminate an "achievement gap" between white and minority students.

"With this loophole, it's almost like giving someone a trick bag to get out of a hole," she said. "Now people, instead of figuring out how do we really solve it, some districts, in order to save face or in order to not be faced with the sanctions, they're doing what they can to manipulate the data."

Some students feel left behind, too.

"It's terrible," said Michael Oshinaya, a senior at Eleanor Roosevelt High School in New York City who was among a group of black students whose scores weren't broken out as a racial category. "We're part of America. We make up America, too. We should be counted as part of America."

Spellings' Education Department is caught between two forces. Schools and states are eager to avoid the stigma of failure under the law, especially as the 2014 deadline draws closer. But Congress has shown little political will to modify the law to address their concerns. That leaves the racial category exemptions as a stopgap solution.

"She's inherited a disaster," said David Shreve, an education policy analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures. "The 'Let's Make a Deal' policy is to save the law from fundamental changes, with Margaret Spellings as Monty Hall."

The solution may be to set a single federal standard for when minority students' scores don't have to be counted separately, said Ross Wiener, policy director for the Washington-based Education Trust.

The law originally created the exemptions to make sure schools didn't unfairly fail schools or compromise student privacy when they had just a small number of students in one racial category, Wiener said.

But there's little doubt now that group sizes have become political, said Wiener, whose group supports the law.

"They're asking the question, not how do we generate statistically reliable results, but how do we generate politically palatable results," he said.

___

Associated Press Writers Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami, Nahal Toosi in New York and Garance Burke in Kansas City contributed to this report.

By FRANK BASS, NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON and BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writers
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060417/ap_on_go_ot/no_child_loophole_7

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