Teachers prevail in grading law suit

AUSTIN — Texas school districts no longer can force teachers to give students higher grades than they earned on class assignments or on their report cards, a Travis County judge ruled Monday.
Eleven districts — mostly in the Houston area — had sued Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott over his interpretation of the so-called truth-in-grading law that was passed last year. They argued it applied only to assignments and exams and were fighting to keep their policies that ban cumulative report card grades lower than a certain number, typically a 50.

The school districts suing were Aldine, Alief, Clear Creek, Deer Park, Dickinson, Fort Bend, Humble, Klein, Anahuac, Eanes and Livingston.

The superintendents say their minimum-grade policies help discourage students from dropping out by giving them a mathematical chance at passing a class, even if they blow one grading period. But teacher groups and the bill’s author, Sen. Jane Nelson, R-Flower Mound, counter that such policies are dishonest and don’t prepare students for college or the work force.
State District Judge Gisela Triana-Doyal ruled against the districts’ reading of the law, which effectively means that schools across Texas must abolish minimum-grading policies unless the decision is appealed and overturned. The state does not track how many districts have such policies.

May appeal
Richard Morris, the attorney for the school districts that filed the lawsuit, said he would consult with the superintendents about pursuing an appeal or trying to lobby the Legislature for a change.
The judge said the statute was “not ambiguous,” even though it didn’t specifically mention that it applied to cumulative six- or nine-week grades that appear on report cards. But Triana-Doyal emphasized she wasn’t opining whether the law was good or bad education policy, noting that both sides made valid points.

“People have different opinions about what’s in the best interest of kids,” she said.
Nelson, a former teacher, said the ruling was “a victory for Texas teachers, students and parents because now all grades — on class assignments and report cards — will accurately reflect how well students have mastered their course work.”

She said she doubted her colleagues would retreat from the law next session after unanimously passing her bill last year.
Dropout strategy

Clear Creek ISD Superintendent Greg Smith, the only school chief to testify, said the district’s minimum-grading policy has been an effective dropout strategy over the last 13 years. At one high school last year, he said, more than 30 students benefited from the policy and were able to pass.

Without the policy, he said, “I think you close the light at the end of the tunnel for some students.”
For example, if a student earned a 20 grade during one six weeks, he still would fail the semester if he earned a 90 the next two grading periods.

The Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, which intervened in the case on the side of the Texas Education Agency, argued that minimum-grading policies take important authority away from teachers and are “not in the best interest of students in the long run.”
“I feel like it’s unethical,” Mary Roberts, a teacher in Humble ISD, testified about her district’s policy, which bans report card graders lower than a 50.
ericka.mellon@chron.com



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Hurricane seminar tonight!

A NEWS RELEASE FROM THE CITY OF KEMAH

Please mark your calendars to attend the City of Kemah Hurricane Awareness Program.

DATE: Wednesday, June 30

TIME: 7:00 P.M.

LOCATION: Kemah City Hall, 1401 Hwy 146, Kemah

This program will be presented by Mr. Gene Hafele, Chief Meteorologist in charge of the Houston-Galveston Area National Weather Service Office in Dickinson, Texas.

Mr. Hafele has a wealth of experience, starting his career with the National Weather Service at the Fort Worth Office in July of 1974. In 1984 Mr. Hafele took his skills to the Spaceflight Meteorologist Group at the Johnson Space Center and served as the Lead Forecaster for nine space shuttle missions.

Mr. Hafele received his Bachelor of Science degree in Meteorology from Texas A&M University in 1974 and a Masters Degree in Public Administration in 1988 from the University of Houston, Clear Lake.

In addition, your local emergency coordinator and other elected officials will be on hand to answer any questions. Refreshments will be served.

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Recovery Effort in Gulf Expected to Continue Despite Storm

By JOSEPH BERGER

A tropical storm moving across the western Gulf of Mexico that is likely to strengthen into a hurricane is not expected to seriously disrupt efforts to capture oil gushing from the stricken BP well, officials of the Coast Guard and BP said Monday.

Adm. Thad W. Allen, of the Coast Guard, who is commanding the federal response to the disaster, said at an afternoon press conference that high seas produced by Tropical Storm Alex should not force the evacuation of rigs and other equipment from the blowout site, which is 50 miles off the Louisiana coast. Should an evacuation take place, he said, it could halt the work of collecting oil and drill relief wells for about 14 days.

“As it stands right now, absent the intervention of a hurricane, we’re still looking at mid-August," to have relief wells shut off the gusher entirely, Admiral Allen said.

However, BP officials said that what could be delayed, even by current wave heights, is an effort to prepare what is known as a “floating riser system” that will help raise the daily total of collected oil from, about 25,000 barrels to as much as 50,000 barrels. At a briefing Monday morning, Kent Wells, a senior vice president of BP who is overseeing BP’s efforts, said the storm is expected to follow a track that will take it well west of the blowout site, but it may produce waves of 10 to 12 feet, which Mr. Wells said was too high for the “very precise work” on the surface needed to prepare the floating riser system.

Mr. Wells said the containment cap and a second system that are collecting 25,000 barrels of oil a day would not need to be disconnected and the drilling of two relief wells should continue on schedule. The first relief well is supposed to pump in heavy mud and shut off the gusher sometime in August.

Tropical Storm Alex is on a course heading for northeastern Mexico and a stretch of Texas. Meteorologists at Accuweather.com said they are anticipating a landfall between Tampico, Mexico and Brownsville, Tex. Wednesday night or early Thursday.

Meanwhile Associated Press reported that BP had filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission that indicate the cost of capping and cleaning the spill have reached $2.65 billion. BP has lost more than $100 billion in market value since the drilling platform the company was operating blew up April 20. The costs include spill response, containment, relief well drilling, grants to gulf states, claims paid, and federal costs, but not a $20 billion fund for damages the company created this month.

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Alex may effect Gulf oil production ..

HOUSTON (Dow Jones)--Tropical Storm Alex, expected to become a hurricane Tuesday, seems to be headed on a path away from the bulk of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas production and refining infrastructure. But some production impact will be felt as one of the largest energy producers in the Gulf said Monday it was shutting down several platforms as a precaution.

Royal Dutch Shell PLC (RDSA) said it had pulled 700 workers from its Gulf operations, and some 835 workers remained offshore. The company is shutting in production from its Western and Central Gulf of Mexico assets to prepare for the potential full evacuation of personnel Tuesday. The company started pulling workers from the Gulf over the weekend. The company didn't specify how much production would be shut or how many platforms were being evacuated.

At 11 a.m. EDT, Alex was located about 85 miles west-northwest of Campeche, Mexico, in the western Gulf of Mexico, and was heading towards southern Texas and northern Mexico. Most U.S. offshore oil and gas platforms are located in the eastern part of the Gulf, far from Alex's forecast path.

Alex "is not likely to have a major impact on production or refining in the U.S.," Doug MacIntyre, senior analyst at the Energy Information Administration, told Dow Jones Newswires Monday. "Alex's current path appears to avoid most of the oil and gas production platforms and any of the major refining centers."

Energy markets Monday seemed to take the storm in stride. Light, sweet crude for August delivery ended 61 cents lower at $78.25 a barrel a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Natural gas for July delivery on the New York Mercantile Exchange settled 2.96% lower at $4.717 million British thermal units.

Gulf producers Apache Corp. (APA), Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), and Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (APC) also said Monday they have started evacuating non-essential workers from the offshore facilities expected to be in the path of the storm but none have so far reported any impact to their production.

BP PLC (BP, BP.LN) said Monday it pulled non-essential personnel from three offshore facilities in the the Gulf, and that production was not affected. The company evacuated workers from Atlantis, Mad Dog and Holstein platforms.

Alex may delay BP PLC's plans to increase the amount of oil collected from a leaking well in the Gulf by a week, a company official said Monday.

While the storm's winds are expected to stay far to the west of the Deepwater Horizon spill, high seas are likely to become an issue this week, said Kent Wells, a senior vice president with BP, in a press briefing. Waves up to between 10 feet and 12 feet would prevent BP from hooking a third rig up to an underwater containment system, a process that needs three days of good weather, Wells said.

Two rigs, the Discoverer Enterprise and Q4000, are already collecting between 20,000 and 25,000 barrels of oil a day from the well, which has gushed ever since a rig working at the site caught fire and sank in April.

Chevron Corp. (CVX) and ConocoPhillips (COP) said that they have not evacuated workers, but that they are closely monitoring the forecast for Alex.

A hurricane watch was issued for parts of the south Texas Gulf coastline area and parts of northern Mexico, the National Hurricane Center reported Monday on its website.

The NHC, in its advisory, also said Alex likely will become a hurricane Tuesday and has increased in strength, now with winds of 60 miles per hour.

The watch area for the U.S. extends from south of Baffin Bay to the mouth of the Rio Grande in Texas, with Mexico issuing a hurricane watch from the Rio Grande to La Cruz.


-By Isabel Ordonez, Dow Jones Newswires; 713-547-9207; isabel.ordonez@dowjones.com

(Brian Baskin and Angel Gonzalez contributed to this article

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Lockheed Martin is trimming its Orion spacecraft workforce by 20%

Lockheed Martin is trimming its Orion spacecraft workforce by 20% as it works with NASA to redefine the vehicle as a crew rescue capsule for International Space Station crews.

The cuts amount to 300 Lockheed Martin employees and 300 subcontractor personnel. While the company is working to find new positions for the displaced staff within the company, “layoff notices are probably inevitable, and that will happen shortly,” according to Linda Karanian, Lockheed’s Washington-based director of human space flight programs.

Orion, like the U.S. space program as a whole, remains in limbo following the Obama administration’s announcement that it wants to cancel the George W. Bush administration’s Constellation Moon-Mars program in favor of myriad technology development efforts and human missions to alternate destinations such as asteroids.

Lockheed Martin anticipates little difficulty in transitioning Orion from a full-up spacecraft intended for missions beyond low Earth orbit to a crew rescue vehicle. “Our current Orion requirements as a crew exploration vehicle encompass any requirements we foresee that would be imposed … on a lifeboat,” Karanian says, noting that the company is convinced it can provide a vehicle that would involve only “marginal delta cost” to NASA beyond the current program.

“We’re looking at various things to use—test vehicles, perhaps, that we’re already on contract for,” Karanian says. “When we’ve completed tests, we [could] provide those to NASA to launch to the space station to serve as lifeboats.” If a decision is made quickly, and appropriate funding provided, the company believes it could have an Orion lifeboat ready for launch to the station by 2013.

Both Lockheed Martin and NASA are in the awkward position of still being legally bound to continue developing Orion as a full-up crew exploration vehicle, since NASA’s Fiscal 2010 appropriation bill forbids the agency from canceling any element of Constellation.

And Congress—which has mounted stiff, bipartisan opposition to Obama’s space plan—is watching both customer and contractor carefully. Some Senate lawmakers recently raised alarms when they received word from Orion subcontractor Alliant Techsystems that no more funding would be forthcoming for Orion’s Launch Abort System (LAS)—a costly safety measure that would not be needed on a scaled-back Orion lifeboat. NASA, they assert, is either violating the law or doing whatever it can to circumvent it (Aerospace DAILY, April 23).

Following a successful pad abort test of the LAS system at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., on May 6, Lockheed Martin believes it can legally “pause” work on the LAS “until NASA decides the direction forward, without impacting launch availability,” Karanian says.

The program has passed a number of other recent milestones, including a preliminary design review in August 2009 and a software PDR in April of this year. The program’s critical design review will begin in September and is likely to extend into 2011.

Orion photo: Guy Norris

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Crew Busy With Science and Maintenance; New Crew Prepares for Launch

Flight Engineer Tracy Caldwell Dyson was in the Destiny laboratory working on the Oxygen Generation System. While the advanced life-support system has been experiencing problems, the station continues generating oxygen with backup generators. Caldwell Dyson changed out a pump then plugged and unplugged connectors with no resolution or source of the problem revealed. Ground controllers continue troubleshooting the system.

Caldwell Dyson also worked with the SPHERES experiment which studies a trio of autonomous, basketball-sized satellites and how they interact with each other. Ongoing since 2006 inside the International Space Station, SPHERES tests techniques for automated rendezvous and flying in formation in microgravity.


Commander Alexander Skvortsov and Flight Engineer Mikhail Kornienko were in the station’s Russian segment inventorying gear and supplies. They also relocated items from the Zarya control module to the new Russian Rassvet Mini-Research Module. The cosmonauts tagged up with specialists on the ground for those activities and other maintenance tasks.

At the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the Expedition 24 crew members conducted a fit check inside the Soyuz TMA-19 spacecraft. The spacecraft will be mated to its booster rocket on Saturday and rolled out to the launch pad on Sunday. Lift-off to the International Space Station is scheduled for Tuesday at 5:35 p.m. EDT. Flight Engineers Doug Wheelock, Shannon Walker and Fyodor Yurchikhin will dock to the Zvezda service module Thursday at 6:25 p.m. They will join their new crewmates after hatch opening a couple of hours later

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Man accuse of stealing astronaut sapce suit

by Tiffany Craig / 11 News
khou.com

CLEAR LAKE, Texas -- A Clear Lake man is accused of stealing the original space suit belonging to Sally Ride. The daughter of Calvin Smith, the man accused with the crime, said her dad had a crush on America’s first female in space.
For most of us, peering through plexiglass is the closest we will get to a space suit. Paul Spana at Space Center Houston showed 11 News many of the suits on public display.

“Here you see it at your scale, the human scale,” said Spana.

Spana said one of the most popular suits belong to the first female in space, Sally Ride. In 1983, Ride was the first woman to blast into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.

“That was early on in the shuttle program,” said Spana “It was a big deal back then.”

That moment in history has become a big deal again, thanks to Calvin Smith.

According to court documents, Smith worked for Boeing’s Flight Group Processing Office. That office handles the maintenance of NASA flight suits.

The one thing court records don’t explain is how Smith managed to walk out of a secured area with the suit, a watch and other space items totaling $10,000 dollars.

Smith’s family said he has mental problems and had spent time in the Harris County Jail for domestic violence. When he got out, he gave his mother a list of things to pick up at his home.

According to Smith’s daughter, one item was a suitcase wrapped in duct tape. Curious about the contents, she opened the case and found the suit and a rejection letter from the Smithsonian Institution. Smith’s daughter said he was trying to sell the suit.

Court documents show that Smith's wife said she was already suspicious of her husband’s behavior after past visits to NASA and Space Center Houston. She said Smith would laugh as they passed suits with Ride’s name on it and make comments about knowing where Sally Ride’s original flight suit was. He told her he was very secretive about how he knew.

Smith’s wife turned him in to authorities. He now could face up to ten years in federal prison if convicted.

Spana said you just can’t swipe space stuff and get away with it.

“It’s not something you can hang on the wall and show off because everyone is going to know,” he said.

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