Various KPR news

[TOM AVERILL AS WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN OLEANDER]: Well folks, it's a good thing Iola Humboldt -- the woman I live with -- wasn't home when the catalogue came in the mail. I shook my head and checked the back but sure enough, there was my name and address -- William Jennings Bryan Oleander, 105 County Street, Here, Kansas. I looked at the front again -- a bunch of naked people having an orgy. I opened it up and just as I suspected, everything in that catalog said "XXX" and "HOT HOT HOT." "My God," I thought. "I wonder how I got on this mailing list." My old heart pounding, my stomach churning, my mouth watering, I began turning the pages. Believe me, I could only imagine what the words inside might represent if I ordered something from that catalogue. Here are some titles. "Inner Beauty," "Island Heat," "Scorned Woman," "The Hot Box, "Harissa," "Arizona Gunslinger," "Hawaiian Passion," "Satan's Revenge," "Trial By Fire," "Clancy's Fancy," "Miss Grazi's Hot Stuff," "Melinda's XXX," "Six-Pack From Hell,"

"Sweet Fire," "Beaver Xtra Hot," and "I Am On Fire - Ready to Die." The description on that last one read, "Please note that this product does not simply rate a XXX. Nick Tenveldy feels that it warrants a XXXX rating." Well folks, I was ready to read on when I heard Iola Humboldt on the porch. Like a teenaged boy caught with a dirty magazine, I stuffed the catalogue under the couch cushion and I forgot about it for a week, until, like the mother of that teenaged boy, Iola Humboldt confronted me with the catalogue over our oatmeal breakfast. "William," she said, "were you thinking of ordering anything from this catalogue?" "Nope," I smiled. "I was just sampling it, remembering my younger days." Iola snorted. "Your younger days, from what you've told me, were miserable with this kind of temptation." Remember folks, Iola was a Home Economics teacher, also in cooking and hygiene. "In my younger days," I said, "I handled anything that

came along. A little spice was the variety in my life. But I know I can't stomach it now. You can throw that thing away." Then she surprised me. "Maybe we should hang on to it," she said. "Could be one of your grandsons might like something from it. Next birthday is Jefferson's. He likes hot things." "I don't know," I said. "His wife says he overdoes it." And I threw the "More Hotter, More Better Hot Sauce Catalogue" in the trash. Now don't get me wrong -- I've got nothing against spice and nothing against chili peppers; nothing against tongue-burning hot sauces, devilish barbecue marinades, jerked chicken curries, and chili-pickled garlic. But naked bodies on the hot sauce catalogue cover? And inside, tantalizing the tastebuds is equated with sexual pleasure. Tasting the forbidden is as wickedly sinful as biting the first apple in the Garden of Eden. And swilling down hot sauce makes you as Macho as any cowboy whoever threw down the whisky

frontier saloon. Perhaps Iola, looking at the waste can, said it best. "William, do you remember when a chili pepper was just a chili pepper?" ***** [NICK HAINES]: Talk to any teachers in Kansas, and you'll begin to realize that the state's schools are becoming increasingly violent. In the last few years, there have been numerous reports of the teaching staff being assaulted by their pupils and of teenagers bringing knives and guns into the classroom... Matters got to a head last May when a student at the Shawnee Mission East High School in Johnson County set off a pipe bomb during school hours. No one was hurt in the incident, but the- considerable damage to the building. The student involved was- because Kansas law only allows a school to suspend a child- academic year the student's only punishment was to miss around two weeks of school... Republican

Representative Lisa Benlon- law doesn't make sense. Benlon says students at the beginning of the school year, he would have faced- [LISA BENLON]: So the intent of my bill is to make it more equitable and give administrators a little more flexibility in how they want to treat students. If it happens at school than they flexibility to say maybe there more than just- To them, that's an early vacation. [NICK HAINES]: Thanks to Benlon's bill school principals in Kansas will now have the... ability to suspend students for a whole year. So if a youngster is expelled in mid-April, the school does not have to allow that pupil people back until the following April. The new law also will prevent expelled students from enrolling in other school districts. Right now, schools can't refuse to enroll the student who has been expelled elsewhere, regardless of the reason for the suspension. Mark Tallman of the Kansas Association of School Boards says that's becoming a major problem, especially in the urban areas

of the state where it's easy to travel from one school district to another. [MARK TALLMAN]: If your parents, legal guardians, or whatever are willing to say, "We're sending the child to live with a sister, an aunt, an uncle, a friend in another district," that's all it takes. [NICK HAINES]: State Senator Doug Walker, a Democrat from Osawatomie, is a former teacher. He knows firsthand how unsocial and violent some students can be. But Walker is concerned that denying disruptive students an education for 12 months may cause more harm than good. [DOUG WALKER]: You kick them out of school, they're not getting an education. They're on the streets. They're going to get into trouble. They're going to get into crime. They're going to get into drugs, if they're not already there. And so getting them out of the school system may solve the school's problem, but it doesn't solve society's problems. And we're going to be paying for those problems for a long time to come through the social service system, through the criminal justice system -- we're going to be paying. [NICK HAINES]: Walker says he could feel better about the new law if he believed there was an alternative education facility available to teach the expelled youngsters. Topeka currently has a

"second chance school" where violent students can go. The Shawnee Mission School District in Johnson County also has a similar facility. But few other places in Kansas have the resources for such programs. Yesterday, Democrat Representative Denise Everhart of Berryton, proposed an amendment to the state budget that would have added more than three million dollars to pay for such programs across the state. That amendment was rejected. Mark Tallman at the Kansas Association of School Boards says spending millions of dollars of state money forcing an education on students who don't want to learn is not a good use of public resources. [MARK TALLMAN]: Let's not kid ourselves. By the time you get to be 16, 17, 18 years old, if you don't want to learn, if you don't want to be in school, or see school as simply a place to be disruptive, I think there's a limit of what- of what really schools could be reasonably expected to do. We certainly are interested in efforts to provide alternative programs for these kids,

but I think we have a concern about putting a lot of money into helping children that don't want to learn, at the expense of children who are trying to learn." [NICK HAINES]: Under the law passed yesterday, individual schools will have the discretion to choose the criteria that constitute a yearlong student expulsion. The legislation, though, does provide students and parents with multiple opportunities to appeal a suspension decision to school districts and school boards. For Kansas Public Radio, this is Nick Haines reporting.