February 13, 1986
Happy
Valentine's
Day
VOLUME 14
Selective Service to
Obtain Names of Aid
Applicants
By Christopher Connell
Associated Press
Shuttle Disaster
Claims the Lives of
Crew members
By A. JoildoD
U.S.A. Today
The heavens promised to become a
classroom as the space shuttle
Challenger blazed majestically
towards the stars.
Millions of students and teachers,
primed to watch and learn from the
first teacher in space, waited in awe
and wonder Tuesday morning. Students
gathered around model space shuttles.
Teachers switched on TVs to show the
often-delayed countdown.
Children from astronaut Christa
McAuliffe’s hometown of Concord, New
England, stood on rivers near the Cape
Canaveral launch pad, red and white
visored caps craned upward as their
teacher-heroine headed for space.
Then, in a searing, white flash, a
science lesson tragically exploded into
a human lesson. Seven lives disap
peared in the beautiful blue sky over
Florida.
* Teachers, students, and an entire na
tion began learning the unplanned
lesson of Challenger’s last flight. The
cost of unlocking the secrets of the
universe is high, the risks great.
“One minute there was the anticipa
tion, the laughter, the dreams and the
next minute there was a horrible, horri
ble explosion,” said Gordon Corbett, a
Yarmouth, Maine, science teacher.
“God, this is awful, this is the worst
thing that has ever happened.”
The explosion silenced classrooms,
put school flags at half-staff and sent
grief through the ranks of USA teachers
who were so proud that one of their col
leagues had suited up for the mission.
All 1,200 Condord High School
students were cheering the launch
when a teacher asked them to be silent.
Some murmured, “This can’t be
real...we can’t be watching this.” The
students were sent home early, tearful
heads bowed.
In Spring Valley, 111., Superintendent
Walt Westrum’s students were
“ecstatic. They counted down in unison
with NASA, and when the ship lifted off,
huge applause erupted. Then all of a
sudden...”
Westrum had set up the 2,000-school
“Classroom Earth” network of 2.5-
million students to receive lessons
broadcast from the spacecraft. “The
teacher would have looked out her win
dow and seen her whole classroom-
Earth.”
In Cheyenne, Wyo., Michael Pearson,
one of more than 100 finalist for the
teacher-in-space spot, shared the
tragedy with 450 students in a high
school auditorium, then went home
where he found this note form his
students:
“Dear Mr. Pearson. We know how
badly you feel. Please don’t cry. If you
feel you need to talk to someone come to
us.”
Marie Ishee, science teacher at
Houston’s Northbrook Senior High
School, asid, “I saw the flash but paid
no attention to it. I had the same feeling
when John F. Kennedy was shot. I
couldn’t believe it. There was dead
silence when I told my students about
it.”
Students at Royal View Elementary
School in North Royalton, Ohio, a
Cleveland suburb, had built a miniature
shuttle on a school bus. Todd Jacobs, 10,
said, “Most everybody was sitting
there, just staring.”
Allen Barwick was teaching physics
at Wilson Senior High in Washington,
D.C., when he was told the shuttle had
exploded. Crying “No,no,no, it’s not
true!,” he fell to the floor, crying.
With the first in-flight tragedy to
strike the USA’s space program,
parents and educators worried about
the children who witnessed an incident
unmatched except by film or video fic
tion. It could have been their teacher.
Salem, Conn., mathematics teacher
David H. Wordell, another finalist,
said, “It will scar them. It will take a
long time to get over such a personal
tragedy.”
Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton of
Harvard Medical School said putting a
teacher in space makes the tragedy
more personal to the young.
“They took a mother of small
children and school teacher. They open
ed everybody’s hearts and minds to it.
Now it’s going to be extra hard.”
But psychologist Joyce Brothers said
children can learn from this to “not be
afraid of their future” and realize pur
suing knowledge “outweighs the
tragedy of those who have taken a risk
and lost.”
Some students reaction reflected
world tensions. A sixth-grader at
Chinook Middle School in Bellevue,
Wash., Brian Schielke, said, “I was
scared. I thought maybe it had been
shot down by the Russians.” And
Elizabeth Costello, principal of St. Rose
of Lima School in Denver, Colo., said a
first-grader asked if a terrorist
sabotaged the craft.
The tragedy could mark adults just
as deelpy - if not more deeply. George
Hamilton, Philadelphia planetarium
director, said space fhghts are routine
for children. “Adults will be more
shocked.”
Wordell said after he heard the news,
“I couldn’t teach. I couldn’t talk to
anyone. It’s still a shock. I could have
been that person. It comes home.”
Some schools canceled classes for the
day. But Washington, D.C., biology
teacher Nancy Cooksy said, “I wanted
to stay here. I deal with things best
when I deal with them through my
students.”
The Challenger disaster seems fated
for a place beside the Kennedy
assassination in the nation’s memory.
People will always remember where
they were and what they were doing
and the catastrophe will shape the
thoughts, and lives, of the millions wat
ching.
Paul Castelli, 10, fifth-grader at Im
maculate Conception Monastery
School, Queens, N.Y.: “I always
wanted to be an astronaut, and still do.
One explosion dosen’t mean there’s go
ing to be one every time.” Debbie
Bauer, 12, a seventh-grader; “I thought
it would be great to send a teacher in
space. Now I think you don’t know what
can happen there.”
David Hoff, a high school physical
science teacher in Velva, N.D.: “A lot
of hopes and dreams of a lot of people
blew up with that shuttle. ”
President Reagan, speaking to the
nation’s schoolchildren, said
“sometimes painful things like this
happen,” but added, “It’s all part of
taking a chance and expanding man's
horizons. The future dosen’t belong to
the fainthearted. It belongs to the
brave.”
Of all the brave crew members, said
Brothers, McAuliffe was special
because "she was risking her life and
was willing to do so to bring back to
children her first-hand knowledge of
space.”
In classrooms and hallways, the
words of Christa McAulffie, a smiling
New Hampshire mother and teacher
who caried her son’s stuffed frog
aboard the shuttle, will be
remembered. “Go for it,” she said after
being selected. “Go ahead and push for
something.”
The Department of Education will
give the Selective Service System com
puter tapes with the names of 5 million
student aid applicants in a move aimed
at uncovering young men who have fail
ed to register as potential draftees.
William J. Bennett, the secretary of
education, and Maj. Gen. Thomas K.
Turnage, director of selective service,
announced the agreement today at a
news conference.
It is the latest step in government ef
forts to carry out a 1982 law called the
Solomon Amendment, which bars stu
dent aid from males who fail to register
with the Selective Service System.
The draft was abolished in 1973, but
following the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in 1979, the Carter ad
ministration and Congress began re
quiring young men to register at age 18.
While their names are kept in a central
file, they cannot be conscripted unless
Congress passes new legislation
reinstating the draft.
The Education Department will
share the computer tapes from its Pell
Grant program each year with Selec
tive Service. More than 2 million
students receive Pell Grants each year
and 5 million apply for them through
the College Scholarship Service and the
American College Testing program.
The Solomon Amendment—named
for its sponsor. Rep. Gerald B.
Solomon, R-N.Y.—requires male
students to register or be denied federal
grants and loans. Student must sign a
statement that they have complied with
the registration law.
Bennett said the new arrangement
“will not only protect the federal tax
payer, but also fulfill our obligation to
those millions of fine young men who
have registered to serve their country if
ever needed.”
He quoted Theodore Roosevelt as
saying “the first requisite of a good
citizen in this Republic of ours is that he
shall be able and willing to pull his
weight.”
“One of the ways in which college
students can pull their weight and fulfill
their responsibility of citizenship is by
standing ready to defend their country
in time of need,” Bennett said.
Turnage said, “Over $8 billion of the
taxpayers’ money support the federal
student aid programs, and I am happy
that technological advances gives us
the capability to monitor these most im
portant programs.”
Men are required to register at any
U.S. Post Office within a month of their
18th birthday. Government officials say
98 percent have done so, with 15 million
registered since 1980.
The penalty for failure to register is
up to five years in prison and a $10,000
fine.
FEBRUARY IS
BLACK
HISTORYI
MONTH
Wild Boars Charging
At Swan-Hunting Trio
Get Their Goose Cooked
Nancy Webb
The Charlotte Observer
The two wild boars looked like registered Republicans to Hyde
County Sheriff Roland Dale because “they were really charging
us.”
And N.C. Supreme Court Justice Burley Mitchell Jr. tended to
agree.
“They just may have been (Republicans).” Mitchell said.
“They were certainly mean enough to be. But we treated them in
a nonpartisan fashion.’*
The sheriff and the justice, both Democrats, recalled in
telephone interviews Friday that moment earlier in in the day
when they were charged by two wild boars-each weighing 200 to
300 pounds-while hunting swan at Mattamuskett Farm in a remote
area of coastal Hyde County.
Their guide, Bryan Schmitt, Residence Director in Simons Hall,
who happened to be carrying the only loaded gun, saved the day
when he shot and killed the first boar. In the meantime, Mitchell
and Dale quickly loaded their guns and brought down the second
animal. Dale said.
No one was hurt.
One of the animals will be dressed and eaten at a pig pickin’.
Schmitt, also a democrat, plans to mount the other. Dale said.
Despite the interruption, the swan hunt went on, with the judge
and the sheriff bringing home what Mitchell called the “the most
meat I’ve ever seen come out of a duck pond.”
Soaring Education
Costs May be
Eased Through CFI
Parents of junior and senior high
school students currently may be fac
ing a greater financial dilemma than
how to pay off holiday bills. They are
staring straight ahead at ever-
mounting costs of financing their
children’s college educations.
Along with the how-to-pay dilenuna,
they often face questions on where to
turn for information on available funds
for higher education. In North Carolina,
that place is College Foundation Inc.
(CFI), a private nonprofit corporation
which serves as the central lender in
the state for educational loans. North
Carolina banks and special investors
provide the funds for these loans.
CFI advises parents and students to
explore with the college they are con
sidering all aspects of financial
assistance from grants to work pro
grams to loan funds.
Probably the least well known of such
loans, according to conununications
coordinator, Mary Bland Josey, is the
N.C. PLUS Loan Program which is
open to parents of dependent
undergraduates and graduate students.
This program is not tied in any way to
family’s demonstrating financial need.
Unlike the North Carolina Insured Stu
dent Loans, for which a student must
show financial need, N.C. PLUS is
available regardless of income level, as
long as the borrower can demonstrate
the ability to make the required mon
thly payments on the PLUS Loans.
Under this program, loans may total
up to $3,000 per academic year for each
qualifying student.
Josey points out that the advantages
of the N.C. PLUS Loan are low monthly
payments over a long repayment
period, a more even “cash flow” while
the student is enrolled in college , and
the opportunity to accelerate payments
at any time without penalty.
The interest rate is 12%, based on dai
ly unpaid balance, with an insurance
fee of 1% deducted from the loan pro
ceeds. Unlike the Insured Student Loan
for which repayment is delayed until
after the education is complete, repay
ment on a PLUS Loan begins within 40
days of the date the loan is issued; but
the monthly payments may be lower.
Prejudice is defined in the
dictionary as “preconceived
judgement or opinion.” They
could have added “without
regard to facts.” •
Although prejudice may be
for something, it is usually
against something, or worse,
some person or class of per
sons.
Prejudice is an old word,
which defines an old and bad
habit.
The world’s great religions
unanimously preach
brotherhood and regard for one
another. But one of the world’s
commonest sins is prejudice.
Prejudice blocks clear
thought. It blocks un
derstanding. And it blocks
progress toward peace among
men.
Prejudice is local. Prejudice
is global. It exists in many
forms and manifests itself in
many ways.
And never does prejudice do
any good for anyb^y, any
nation, or any people.
There have been many
fighters against prejudice, and
occasionally they accomplish
some movement in breaking
down barriers which exist
principally because of
prejudice.
Not long ago the nation
honored a fighter against
prejudice who did accomplish
something for victims of
prejudice.
But until all mankind sees
each other as individuals
without reference to color,
religion, or nationality
prejudice will unfortunately
still present problems.
When prejudice disappears
from the face of the earth the
era of peace on earth will be at
hand!
Wednesday Night
Film Festival
Wednesday February 26
Easy Rider
8:00 p.m. Turner Auditorium