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The article discusses the parent-teacher association (PTA) fundraising programs and plans to divide funds equally among school districts in California. Topics include benefits to the needier school such as Edison Language Academy in Santa Monica, parents preference for split up of funds, and donation-balancing system in school systems. Comments by Craig Foster, a school board member from Malibu, is presented.

The article reports on the call of the administrators of Public School 166 and the Parent Teacher Association urging New York City officials to renovate the 0.5-acre playground on the West 89th Street which has been proposed in 2012 at $950,000. The group claims that children have sustained concussions, chipped their teeth and suffered broken bones. The proposal was blocked by a group another group of parents claiming the renovation would destroy the playground's architectural gems.

The article reports on the move of the voluntary Parent Teacher Association of Townsend Harris High School in Queens, New York City to pass a resolution which denounces the management style and some dealings of interim acting principal Rosemarie Jahoda with students and demands for her removal.

This article discusses how PTA groups are adopting better business practices to raise more money and change programs from running with chronic deficits to profitable ventures. In Livingston, New Jersey, the PTA reorganized a Friday pizza lunch program so that it earned $100 per week instead of losing money each week. Many of the PTA members have college degrees and had left business careers to become stay-at-home parents. PTA groups are evolving into sophisticated multitiered organizations.

Students at Public School 9 Teunis G. Bergen in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, started the summer with the grim news that they would lose four teachers next academic year unless parents raised $160,000 -- and soon. The principal of the school, Sandra D'Avilar, told the parent-teacher organization last month that she would have to cut the teaching staff because the school now had fewer children officially designated ''poor,'' and so had lost $360,000 in federal Title 1 funding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ''Way Beyond Bake Sales: $1 Million PTAs,'' on the cover of last Sunday's Metropolitan section, Kyle Spencer wrote about New York City public schools where parents' groups raise amounts in the $1 million range annually. On NYTimes.com, readers debated the role of private wealth in a public education system. A selection of comments is below. Readers also responded to Ginia Bellafante's Big City column, which examined the word ''gay'' and its changing currency as an insult in light of a court ruling that a false accusation of homosexuality could no longer be considered slander. In a large public-school system where the city gives the same dollar amount for each child, this is how the class system stays maintained. The haves have more. The have-nots don't. How different is it from the suburbs where local taxes support local districts, where wealthy towns have well-provided successful schools and poor towns have poor, failing, underfunded schools? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To the Editor: Re ''Way Beyond Bake Sales: $1 Million PTAs'' (news article, June 3), about the large sums raised by parents at some public schools: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

EACH fall, parents at the Anderson School, a highly regarded K-8 on the Upper West Side for gifted and talented students, receive letters from the PTA emblazoned with the school's elegant ''A'' logo. Though Anderson indulges in the usual trappings of public-school fund-raising -- bake sales, book fairs, auctions -- this letter is blunter: It urges parents to simply write a check. And it suggests an amount: This school year, it was $1,300. Ayda Gibson, 44, the mother of a first grader at the school, said she did not mind being asked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1952, two-thirds of Harvard applicants were admitted. The average verbal SAT score for incoming freshmen was 583. If your father went to Harvard, you had a 90 percent chance of getting in. Harvard's president at the time, James Bryant Conant, decided to change that. Harvard could no longer be about birth and WASP breeding, he realized. It had to promote intelligence and merit. Within eight years, the average freshman had a verbal score of 678 and a math score of 695. New sorts of people were going to Harvard -- more intellectual and less blue blood. But Conant didn't want his school to be home to unidimensional brainiacs. He hoped to retain the emphasis on character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The school board in Raleigh voted 5 to 4 Tuesday to roll back a policy that buses students to achieve diversity. The vote came in a tense meeting at which three people were arrested. The Wake County school board approved a plan to place students in schools near their homes rather than bus them to achieve economic diversity. The district's busing policy began in 1999. With the Supreme Court in 2007 limiting the use of race in assigning students, the policy became a model for other districts that wanted to maintain balance in school demographics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A suburban Philadelphia school district used school-issued laptop Webcams to spy on students at home, a family claims in a federal lawsuit. Lower Merion School District officials can activate the Webcams without students' knowledge or permission, the suit said. The plaintiffs, Michael and Holly Robbins, suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations. The district prides itself on its technology initiatives, including giving laptops to its 2,300 high school students. The district could not immediately confirm whether it has the ability to activate the Webcams remotely, a spokesman said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If buildings could sing, the Choir Academy of Harlem would echo with gospel and jazz. But the sound of music at the beleaguered school, once the home of the famed Boys Choir of Harlem, may soon become much fainter. On Monday, Department of Education officials announced plans to phase out the Choir Academy's high school, starting by not admitting a ninth grade in September, while leaving intact its middle school, which has performed better academically. The school is one of 20 the city has over the last two weeks proposed closing, from large ones like Jamaica High School in Queens to small schools created under the Bloomberg administration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theodore R. Sizer, one of the country's most prominent education-reform advocates, whose pluralistic vision of the American high school helped shape the national discourse on education and challenge longstanding ideas of what a school should be, died on Wednesday at his home in Harvard, Mass. He was 77. The cause was colon cancer, said his wife, Nancy Faust Sizer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Fear of the H1N1 flu virus has prompted nearly 2,500 school closings throughout Iraq, in what some health officials have called an overreaction or panic. Many parents are keeping their children home from school or sending them out wearing surgical masks, and some have complained that the Health Ministry has not provided them with enough information about the disease. ''It's one of the side effects of democracy,'' said Dr. Jaleel Al Shimari, general manager of the Baghdad Health Directorate for the Karkh section, who described most of the school closings as unauthorized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Corbin City, between Cape May and Atlantic Counties, was settled in the mid-19th century as a home for seafaring captains whose ships were unloaded at the end of the Tuckahoe River so cargo could be shipped to Philadelphia, 65 miles away. The ship traffic disappeared nearly a century ago, but Corbin City remains. It has a population of about 500, an annual budget of nearly $1 million, and a work force of one full-time and four part-time employees. It is home to one of New Jersey's notorious ''nonoperating school districts,'' meaning residents finance school administration costs even though Corbin City has no schools and its 90 students attend classes in adjacent Upper Township. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When Jeanne Shapiro received two letters on Saturday from Public School 290 on the Upper East Side, where she always assumed she would send her twin daughters, her husband cracked a joke about the way thin envelopes from college admissions offices tended to bear bad news. Mrs. Shapiro just laughed; P.S. 290 was a block and a half from the family's apartment, she figured, and every New Yorker knows that an address in a good school zone is tantamount to a guaranteed kindergarten seat. But the letters said the 5-year-olds had been placed on a waiting list for the school, on East 82nd Street. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Brooklyn Heights Montessori School announced Wednesday that it would continue to operate the Little Room, a well-regarded preschool for children with special needs, until August 2010 to allow all of the current students to finish the two-year program. The decision by the school's 23-member board of trustees came after more than a week of contentious exchanges between school officials and parents who have fought to keep the program from closing as early as next summer. School officials said they would use the additional time to try to find another home for the Little Room. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A BANNER over the doors at Boys and Girls High School, a 3,600-student brick behemoth on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, greets arriving students with the school's longstanding slogan. ''Pride and Joy of Bed/Stuy,'' it reads, in red letters. For Darrius Spann, a former student who was riding the E train the other day to his part-time job as a security guard, the words ring hollow. Mr. Spann first arrived at the school, as a 15-year-old student with a learning disability, in 2003, when enrollment there was closer to 5,000. He missed classes and was late several times, and before long he was suspended. When he returned, he says, administrators told him he would be on a reduced schedule, discharged after five periods instead of eight. Weeks later his schedule was shortened again, from five periods to three. Finally, the next semester, he was assigned to sit in an auditorium with about 100 other students from 7:30 to 10:30 each morning, filling out school worksheets before going home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''IN terms of my decorating style, I love stuff,'' Chase Cohl said. ''I love really unique and special stuff.'' Ms. Cohl, a 21-year-old poetry student at the New School, has a simple theory about accumulation and decor: ''If you pick up things that your personality is drawn to everywhere you go, you're bound to have an interesting space.'' The living room of the two-bedroom apartment she owns in SoHo is home to a motley array of items, including a zebra-print rug, a banjo (she's in a folk band), a petrified-wood end table and a vintage floor lamp with beaded fringe, bought at a local antiques shop. She found most of her furnishings, in fact, at antiques shops and flea markets (the Rose Bowl market in Pasadena is a favorite), except for the bed, which her mother picked out at ABC Carpet & Home. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

LENDERS have been foreclosing on about 250,000 homes every month this year -- one every 10 seconds. And among the hardest-hit Americans have been families with school-age children. Many of those families file for bankruptcy; indeed, nearly two-thirds of those trying to save their homes in bankruptcy have young children. Yet our laws make it especially difficult for families to keep their homes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

AS a freelance writer years ago, Karen Stabiner would sit down at her desk the moment her daughter left for elementary school, and she would stay there (but for a bathroom break or a sandwich) until the girl came home after 3 p.m. When Sarah headed off to N.Y.U. last fall and Ms. Stabiner stayed home in Los Angeles, she anticipated rediscovering her own rhythms -- taking time for lunches with friends, perhaps, or writing into the early evening. Instead she found that the pattern that began as an adaptation to her life as a mom was hard to break. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR 16 years, Ken Page lived in Chelsea, which many gay men consider their haven, a neighborhood where they don't feel uncomfortable. He had moved to Chelsea when he was a student at the Columbia University School of Social Work, and as much as he enjoyed the sense of fraternity in the neighborhood, he did not truly feel a sense of home. Twelve years ago, Mr. Page and his partner decided to leave the city. They wanted a more mellow life, and they wanted to live by the beach. But they didn't have a lot of money and they needed to be able to commute into Manhattan, where Mr. Page has a therapy practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I WAS a latchkey kid before the term became popular. Both my parents worked for the federal government. I rode a school bus my first two years of school but then moved to a different school at least two miles away from my home. I remember walking home and then riding my bike back and forth. At the time it was no big deal. Having to fend for myself probably helped me strike out on my own later in life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comments on the hiring of parent coordinator's for the New York City school system. Schools Chancellor, Joel I. Klein, who hopes to increase parental involvement; Schools with existing strong parental involvement which complain about the program; Concern that the position might create a barrier between principals and parents; Coordinators who are making themselves known in the schools; Program which may succeed where the PTA did not.