Roch Smith, Jr.:

"Is it possible for government officials to enter your home without your permission or a search warrant? Ask Greensboro resident and local blogger Juan Vasquez and he will tell you yes -- in Greensboro they do. City inspectors entered his home without his consent in March of 2004. There was no emergency. No complaint. But city employees entered his home without his permission anyway. He is not alone."

Roch offers a helluva piece of, dare I say it, journalism... with some opinion thrown in for good measure...

"....The city council should take charge of this issue. It should demand an immediate moratorium on RUCO inspections while it sorts things out. It should come to a thorough understanding of what went wrong and why, make their findings public and consider remedies beyond those offered by city staff with an opportunity for the public to comment on the proposed remedies...."

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I'm sure there is a trade name for a small headline that supports a big headline, I'll just call it a 'sub-header' for now, and I call a foul on one that the N&R used this morning.

The story is about school superintentent Terry Grier's suggestion that Guilford County might want to implement a couple of sex-segregated elementary schools.  The headline reads: Parents cool to proposal for single-gender schools.  The above the fold 'sub-header' reads: "Splitting genders 'doesn't accomplish much' critics say"

While I'm confident there is no shortage of critics to same-sex public schools who would flatly say that educating boys and girls in separate settings "doesn't accomplish much", Leonard Sax, to whom the quote is attributed, isn't one of them.  As the article states, Sax is the "...executive director of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and author of the book "Why Gender Matters."

What he said in the last paragraph is: "Just putting boys in one school and girls in another doesn't accomplish much."  Sax's real point is that simply separating girls and boys into separate classrooms won't get the job done, the school has to train a school's staff to take advantage of each sex's learning style.  If I were Sax and a newspaper used my own words to call my life's work into question, I'd be pissed-off.

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For the record, and back to the meat of the article...  I think uniform wearing, same-sex schools are so much window dressing.  I have to agree with Hampton PTA president Donna Wilson-Brown, who's school has been treated like a laboratory rat in recent years,"...You can't keep changing everything without fixing the root of the problem."  Just listen to her boring, non-headline-grabbing - but spot-on and common-sense-exhibiting - fix for her child's school, "...a better solution would be for Hampton to become a traditional neighborhood school and for the district to recruit high-quality teachers and principals who want to stay."

It's time our school board adopted the KISS strategy for improving schools: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

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