NATION/WORLD
Thursday, June 9, 2016
East Oregonian
Page 7A
A look at chronic absenteeism
Tessa Ormenyi via AP
In this Sept. 16, 2015 photo students hold up a sign about
rape at White Plaza during New Student Orientation on
the Stanford University campus in Stanford, Calif.
Stanford sex assault
victim becomes a
powerful symbol
By SUDHIN THANAWALA
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO —
With her furious and graphic
12-page letter to the court, the
young woman at the center of
the Stanford University sexual
assault case has instantly
become a powerful symbol
of courage and resilience to
other sex-crime victims, all
while remaining anonymous.
Her widely shared state-
ment has been held up as a
must-read for boys and young
men and a source of strength
to other women who have
fallen prey to sexual assault.
BuzzFeed and The Wash-
ington Post posted it online,
and CNN’s Ashleigh Banield
read nearly the entire thing on
the air.
In it, the woman recalled
the emptiness she experi-
enced after the attack, vented
her anger over her assailant’s
seeming lack of remorse and
described in detail her inva-
sive hospital examination,
recounting the ruler nurses
used to measure the scrapes
on her body and how enough
pine needles to ill a paper bag
came out of her hair.
“What brought tears to my
eyes was just how courageous
she was,” said Victoria Kress,
who teaches counseling at
Youngstown State University
in Ohio and works with sex
assault victims. “It’s not
typical that somebody does
come forward in this type of
a way.”
A
nationwide
furor
erupted last week when a
judge sentenced the woman’s
attacker, Brock Turner, a
20-year-old former swimmer
at Stanford, to six months in
jail, triggering criticism that a
star athlete from a privileged
background had gotten
special treatment. Prosecutors
had asked for six years in
prison.
The fury grew when it was
learned that Turner’s father
had sent the judge a letter
lamenting that his son had
already paid a steep price “for
“It brought tears
to my eyes ... it’s
not typical that
somebody does
come forward in
this type of way.”
— Victoria Cress,
Youngstown State
University counselor
20 minutes of action.”
The victim has not come
forward publicly outside
court, and little is known
about her other than her age
— 23 — and that she wasn’t
a Stanford student. She was
attacked as she lay uncon-
scious behind a dumpster in
January 2015 after drinking at
a fraternity party, authorities
said. She said she did not
remember the assault.
In her statement, she said
she would learn from a news
report later how she had been
found naked.
She did not immediately
tell her boyfriend and parents
about the attack, pretending
the whole thing wasn’t real,
she said. She didn’t talk, eat
or sleep.
But she also thanked her
parents, sister, boyfriend and
friends for their support and
a prosecutor who “never
doubted” her.
Experts said she effectively
highlighted the obstacles
to recovery that sex assault
victims face and the support
they need to succeed.
“We know that there are
things like being believed,
being supported by those
around you that can help
in terms of recovery,”
said Victoria Banyard, a
psychology professor at the
University of New Hampshire
who studies the long-term
effects of sexual assault.
In a recent text message,
the woman told a prosecutor
that she was staying anony-
mous to protect her identity,
but also as a statement.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The
problem of students habitually missing
school varies widely from state to state,
with about one-third of students in the
nation’s capital absent 15 days or more
in a single school year, according to an
Associated Press analysis of govern-
ment statistics.
At the other end of the spectrum,
Florida had the lowest rate of chronic
absenteeism, 4.5 percent in the 2013-
2014 school year.
Overall, the national average of
chronic absenteeism was 13 percent, or
about 6.5 million students, the Educa-
tion Department said.
“Chronic absenteeism is a national
problem,” Secretary of Education John
B. King Jr., said in a statement on
Wednesday. “Frequent absences from
school can be devastating to a child’s
education.”
Bob Balfanz, a research professor at
Johns Hopkins University and director
of the Everyone Graduates Center,
called the numbers disturbing.
“If you’re not there, you don’t learn,
and then you fall behind. You don’t pass
your classes. You don’t get the credits
in high school and that’s what leads
to dropping out,” Balfanz said in an
interview.
The report was the irst release
of chronic absentee igures from the
department.
The Obama administration began
a program last fall that now works
with states and local groups in 30
communities to identify mentors to help
habitually absent kids get back on track.
As part of the effort, the White House
said Wednesday that a New York-based
company, STATE Bags, was donating
30,000 backpacks to children being
mentored in the program.
NBA star Kevin Durant is working
with the administration on the initiative.
“Sometimes the reasons come down to
not having what you need to be present
and ready ... like a book bag, school
supplies or the support of a caring
adult,” Durant said in a statement.
Detroit is among the new commu-
nities to sign up for the My Brother’s
Keeper Success Mentors Initiative.
Of the 100 largest school districts
by enrollment, Detroit had the highest
rate of chronic absenteeism. Nearly 58
percent of students were chronically
absent in the 2013-2014 school year.
In Washington, D.C., Michelle
Lerner, press secretary for the District
AP Photo/Matt Rourke
Children gather in the corridors of City Hall in Philadelphia, Wednesday.
of Columbia Schools, said the district is
taking an “all-hands-on-deck approach”
to try to ensure that students attend
school.
She said the school system last year
met its “in-seat attendance goal — a
measure that shows how many students
are actually present on any given day
— of 89.5 percent,” which she said was
an improvement over the previous two
school years.
“But we still have more work to do
to ensure more students continue to be
in school every day,” Lerner said.
Elsewhere around the country,
Washington state and Alaska had
chronic absentee rates hovering around
one-quarter of students with that level of
absences.
According to AP’s analysis, girls
were just as likely as boys to habitually
miss school. Nearly 22 percent of all
American Indian students were reported
as regularly absent, followed by Native
Hawaiians at 21 percent and black
students at 17 percent. Hispanic and
white students were close to the national
average of 13 percent.
Students are regularly missing school
for lots of reasons, Balfanz says. Many
are poor and could be staying home
to care for a sibling or helping with
elder care. Others are avoiding school
because they’re being bullied or they
worry it’s not safe. And then, there are
some students who simply skip school.
Schools should be creating
welcoming environments to make
students feel wanted each day, Balfanz
says. They also need to build relation-
ships with the kids who are regularly
absent to igure out what’s keeping them
away, he said.
As part of its Civil Rights Data
Collection, the department surveyed all
public schools in the country, covering
over 95,000 schools and 50 million
students. Roughly one in seven of
all K-12 public schools nationwide
reported having not a single chronically
absent student that year.
Chronic absenteeism is one of
several topics covered in the data collec-
tion. It also looked at school discipline
and high-rigor course offerings. Other
igures from the report:
• Black preschool children are
3.6 times as likely to get one or more
out-of-school suspensions as their white
counterparts.
• Black children represent 19 percent
of preschoolers, yet they account for
47 percent of preschool kids getting
suspended.
• White students make up 41 percent
of preschoolers, and 28 percent of
preschool kids with suspensions.
• Nationwide, almost half of high
schools offered classes in calculus,
and more than three-quarters offered
Algebra II.
• 33 percent of high schools with
substantial black and Latino enrollment
offered calculus. That compares to 56
percent of high schools with low numbers
of black and Latino children that offered
calculus. Similar gaps were seen for
physics, chemistry and Algebra II.
BRIEFLY
Iraqi troops in
Fallujah for irst
time in 2 years
NAYMIYAH, Iraq
(AP) — A column of
black Humvees carrying
Iraqi special forces rolled
into southern Fallujah on
Wednesday, the irst time
in more than two years that
government troops have
entered the western city held
by the Islamic State group.
The counterterrorism
troops fought house-to-
house battles with the
militants in the Shuhada
neighborhood, and the
operation to retake the city
is expected to be one of the
most dificult yet.
Prime Minister Haider
al-Abadi promised a swift
victory when he announced
the start of the operation
on May 22 to liberate
Fallujah, about 40 miles
west of Baghdad. But the
complexity of the task
quickly became apparent.
Although other security
forces from the federal
and provincial police,
government-sanctioned
Shiite militias and the Iraqi
military have surrounded the
city, only the elite counter-
terrorism troops are ighting
inside Fallujah at this stage
of the operation. And they
are doing so under the close
cover of U.S.-led airpower.
Periodic table
elements named
for Moscow,
Japan, Tennessee
NEW YORK (AP) —
You’ll soon see four new
names on the periodic table
of the elements, including
three that honor Moscow,
Japan and Tennessee.
The names are among
four recommended
Wednesday by an inter-
national scientiic group.
The fourth is named for a
Russian scientist.
The International
Union of Pure and Applied
Chemistry, which rules on
chemical element names,
presented its proposal for
public review. The names
had been submitted by the
element discoverers.
The four elements,
known now by their
numbers, completed the
seventh row of the periodic
table when the chemistry
organization veriied their
discoveries last December.
Tennessee is the second
U.S. state to be recognized
with an element; California
was the irst.
Element names can come
from places, mythology,
names of scientists or traits
of the element.
Other examples:
americium, einsteinium and
titanium.
AP Interview: Clinton says Trump behaving like a demagogue
By LISA LERER
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Hillary
Clinton opened her general election
campaign against Donald Trump
on Wednesday by accusing him
of behaving like a “demagogue,”
likening his attacks on judges, the
media, his opponents and their
families to dark moments in world
history.
“It’s classic behavior by a dema-
gogue,” she said in a telephone
interview with The Associated
Press. “We’ve seen it many, many
places and times in the world, and
that’s why I think it’s so dangerous.”
The presumptive Democratic
nominee, who declared victory
in her race against Vermont Sen.
Bernie Sanders on Tuesday, a
day after reaching the number of
delegates needed to claim the nomi-
nation, seemed to wonder during
the interview whether Trump’s
candidacy was little more than an
elaborate political stunt.
“I don’t know if this is just,
you know, political gamesmanship
that he thinks plays to the lowest
common denominator, but whatever
the reason for it is, it’s wrong and it
should not be tolerated by anybody,”
she said.
But even as she questioned the
sincerity of the real estate mogul’s
rhetoric, Clinton said voters need to
take his words seriously and called
them evidence that he is untrust-
worthy, unqualiied and unprepared
for the rigors of the White House.
While the two candidates have
never been personally close, their
political and inancial circles have
occasionally overlapped over the
years — especially during Clinton’s
Bernie Sanders under pressure to quit
WASHINGTON (AP) — Under mounting pressure from
Democratic leaders to abandon his presidential campaign, Bernie
Sanders returned home to Vermont on Wednesday following
dispiriting losses to Hillary Clinton. He vowed to ight on for a
political revolution but showed signs he would bow to the inevitable
and bring his insurgent effort to a close.
For Sanders, as his remarkable White House bid runs out of next
stops, the only question is when. Just as important for Sanders is how
to keep his campaign alive in some form, by converting his newfound
political currency into policies to change the Democratic Party, the
Senate or even the country itself, on issues including income inequality
and campaign inance reform.
To that end the senator was to travel to Washington on Thursday to
meet with President Barack Obama and Senate Minority Leader Harry
Reid and speak at a rally. Obama is expected to endorse Clinton as
soon as Thursday after his meeting with Sanders, and Reid is prepared
to discuss with Sanders how the self-described democratic socialist
might advance his goals back in the Senate.
time as a senator from New York,
Trump’s home state. Clinton and
her husband, former president Bill
Clinton, attended Trump’s third
wedding in 2005, and she said later
that she thought Trump was “always
entertaining.”
But Clinton expressed surprise
at what she described as the billion-
aire’s descent into “conspiracy
theories” in recent years.
“He always had opinions which
he freely expressed,” she said.
“I never really ever had any
information about him engaging in
bigotry and prejudice until he took
up the cause of the birthers against
President Obama, which is really so
bizarre,” she added, with an incred-
ulous laugh.
Clinton
and
Democrats
supporting her campaign are
attempting to cast Trump as a ruth-
less con artist who is tricking voters
in the same way he duped prospec-
tive students into enrolling into his
now-defunct Trump University,
a business that offered real estate
seminars.
It’s an argument Clinton and her
aides believe will appeal not only to
Democrats, but independent voters
and even some Republicans worried
about how Trump would manage
the nation’s economy and foreign
affairs.
While stopping short of calling
Trump a racist for his recent
comments about the federal judge
overseeing a class-action lawsuit
against Trump University, Clinton
said her rival has a “very unfortu-
nate and divisive tendency to attack
all kind of Americans.”
While Clinton seeks to paint
Trump as a dangerous huckster, he
has spent the past several weeks
since claiming the Republican
nomination working to deine her
candidacy.
Trump calls Clinton by the nick-
name “Crooked Hillary” and often
says she belongs behind bars for her
use of a private email account and
server during her time as secretary
of state.
“The Clintons have turned the
politics of personal enrichment into
an art form for themselves,” Trump
said Tuesday as he won the inal ive
GOP primary elections. “They’ve
made hundreds of millions of dollars
selling access, selling favors, selling
government contracts, and I mean
hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Trump promised to deliver a
speech next week focusing on “the
Clintons.” He’s also tried to re-ig-
nite past scandals that dogged Bill
Clinton’s administration, including
his impeachment trial and the
Whitewater land deal in his native
Arkansas.
Trump has met with Ed Klein,
one of Clinton’s most strident critics
and the author of books spreading
discredited rumors about her
marriage.
Another
inluence,
GOP
consultant Roger Stone, is known
for peddling conspiracy theories
about the Clintons. There is specu-
lation that political strategist Dick
Morris, a former Clinton adviser
turned adversary, may also join his
campaign.
Clinton said she is unconcerned
with all of it.
“I really don’t pay a lot of
attention to his efforts to attack me
personally,” she said. “I don’t intend
to respond to them because this is
his, this is his modus operandi.”
Instead, Clinton said she is
banking on voters turning to her
because of her comparative policy
depth, arguing that a frustrated elec-
torate is seeking “speciic policies”
more than “catchy soundbites” and
“throwing slogans around.”
For example, when asked
Wednesday about the upcoming
Summer Olympics in Brazil, she
offered a lengthy assessment of the
public health crisis caused by the
Zika virus.
While Clinton said it was
probably too late to cancel the Rio
de Janeiro Games, as some public
health oficials have urged, she
described the situation as “deeply
distressing.”
“It’s really a serious public threat
health and I don’t know that we’ve
heard the last word about the advice
about whether people or certain
kinds of people should go to Rio or
not,” she said. “This is not just about
Rio and the Olympics, this is about
a potential outbreak and epidemic.”
After calling on Democrats to
unify around her candidacy, Clinton
said she had no regrets about her
campaign against Sanders.
She wouldn’t offer any hints
of what kinds of concessions her
campaign might be willing to give
the Vermont senator in the party
platform.
The two campaigns and the
Democratic National Committee
are beginning the process of drafting
the policy on which Democrats are
to rally around in the fall election.
On Thursday, President Barack
Obama — who defeated Clinton in
2008 — was expected to formally
endorse his one-time rival, after
meeting with Sanders at the White
House.
“I feel very good about the
campaign we ran,” she said. “It’s
time that we move forward and
unite the party.”