The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 14

14A THE PALM BEACH POST THURSDAY, AUGUST 10, 1995 ossW" fill, HHM CdEUCMBi 1688 SL The Palm Beach Post TOM GlUFFRIDA, Publisher EDWARD SEARS, Editor LON DANIELSON, General Manager TOM O'HARA, Managing Editor RANDY SCHULTZ, Editor of the Editorial Page JAN TUCKWOOD, Associate Editor ALAN FERGUSON, VP Advertising LARRY SIEDLIK, VP Treasurer GALE HOWDEN, Director, Community Relations TOM HIGHFIELD, VP Circulation LINDA MURPHY, Director, Human Resources KEN WALTERS, Director, Marketing and Research Packwood and Senate stoop to kiss and quell Hurricane coverage kicks up dust epublicans want to be known as the party of family values. In protecting Bob Packwood, the GOP seems to be a "family" that values keeping its dirty secrets secret. What's little sexual harassment, influence peddling and lying so long as we keep it in the family? Voting mostly along party lines, the Senate decided last week not to hold public hearings on allegations that Sen. packwood, kissed, fondled and otherwise forced himself on a series of women from 1969 until 1990. (The list 'was belatedly updated this week to include a 17-year-old girl.) The Senate Ethics Committee had found "substantial credible evidence" that Sen.

Pack-wood sexually harassed the women, Ithat he tried to get people who had business before the Senate to hire his then-wife and that Sen. Packwood altered his personal diaries before turning them over as evidence. Democrats, led by Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, pushed for public hearings, and precedent supports them. ine senate always nas neia puDiic whenever the ethics committee has found "substantial credible evidence" of an ethics violation.

But the ethics committee itself caused the current problem when a motion to hold public hearings failed on a 3-3 party-line vote. Senate Republicans then had the gall to claim they were upholding precedent because in no previous case had the full Senate told the ethics committee what to do. In no previous case, however, had the full Senate needed to tell the committee The refusal to have hearings shows that senators have special rules for themselves. what to do. Though critics said Sen.

Boxer's motion was partisan, it would have removed partisanship by treating all senators the same. If the ethics committee found valid evidence, public hearings would be required. As if trying to give Sen. Packwood special treatment weren't bad enough, Sen. Mitch McConnell, who chairs the ethics committee, threatened to retaliate against Democrats by holding public hearings on Sen.

Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick. The Senate should have examined Chappaquiddick more closely in 1969. But certainly the Senate's ethical standards should have risen since then, and certainly since the 1990-91 "Keating Five" case, when a Democrat-led Senate protected Democrats who had helped a political patron, thrift bilker Charles Keating. Sen. McConnell threatened retaliation against Democrats, but senators from both parties heard his subliminal message: Go after Sen.

Packwood, and tomorrow you could be next. That message works. The proper message the one the Senate failed to deliver is that no senator should be above scrutiny or proper punishment. The Old Guard still is guarding itself. foolish and it's related to the news, we cover it.

I don't like seeing people being foolish and I don't like shootings. But this is our world. And when these things happen, we think about how to present them in the most accurate and fair way we, can. "Using the quote 'awesome' in the photo caption might not have been the best' thing to do. Running the picture was." Love those sharp-eyed readers who had big fun with the play on words in the headline above Saturday's New York Times', article, "Looting of pre-Columbian art; reaches epoch proportions." Said Ivan Wolff in a phone message) "What a strange use of the language.

Does this mean that we have now ushered in new era, a period of years in which this practice will become ubiquitous and accepted?" Linda Leeds said she thought, when I saw the word e-p-o-c-h. Then I checked my dictionary and said again." They obviously knew the distinction between epic, which has come to mean grand, and epoch, the beginning of an era. On stationery that showed a beaver saying, "It's just one dam project after another," Robert Terry of Palm Beach made my day. "Wow! An atomic typo!" he wrote, referring to the article that said "There was blackslapping and handshaking all evening." The Palm Beach Post's news staff covered Hurricane Erin like a blanket, but some fallout still reached this desk. From Deborah Harris of Lake Worth: 'Owner of Rapids water park pleads guilty to child molestation charges' is what the headline should have read.

Instead, this (Aug. 2) article was tucked away on Page 2B titled, 'Molester volunteered with The fact that this man owns a popular local attraction drawing thousands of children monthly was mentioned only briefly in the middle of the article." Ms. Harris said the paper "has done a disservice to the parents, children and local summer camps that take field trips to this water slide. We deserved to have this C.B. Hanif LISTENING POST ihbmbbmh news reported in a far more prominent location, regardless of your Hurricane Erin coverage." She's probably correct that not many readers noted the article.

A more prominent headline might have been all it would take. Carla Roccapriore wasn't pleased with that same day's lead news photo. Matter of fact, she said she was "in shock to see the picture on the front page of the two boys on the Jupiter Inlet checking out the 'awesome These guys must have thought making the front page was cool. Fields of bad dreams One reader says Erin obscured important news. Another didn't like a photo of daredevils.

"Playing in a hurricane is serious and dangerous," said Ms. Roccapriore, of Boca Raton. "There were two teens swept off the Boynton Inlet that same day (who) were lucky enough to be rescued! Remember the boy who was killed during Tropical Storm Gordon in November while surfing off North Miami Beach? It almost seemed as if The Post thought that (these boys') risking their lives was But Photo Editor Pete Cross says don't blame the messenger. "Our Page One photograph of the men on the Jupiter Inlet jetty while Hurricane Erin loomed offshore is a dramatic image. Unlike surfers, who are actually in the water and are at risk of being overcome by the sea, these guys were simply daring.

They had the luxury of a wire railing to' hold on to, unlike our photographer, Lannis Waters, who was right there with them but holding on to his cameras instead. Perhaps he was the most foolish. "We cover the news, whether people are being foolish or brave. If someone shoots and kills another human being, we're not promoting shooting people, we're telling our readers that something horrible has happened and you should know about it. If someone does something GOP laying siege to AmeriCorps How can a huge shopping center be made compatible with Jupiter Farms? It can't.

neighborhood plan. Commissioners in 1991 had changed the comprehensive plan to allow commercial development on nearly 40 acres. The rationale, according to Commissioner Karen Marcus, was to allow a project to be spread out and therefore more rural in character. Of course, there were no guarantees that it would be spread out. That decision should have been overturned by state planners, but the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council missed the deadline to appeal under circumstances that were, to put it politely, interesting.

Council Chairman Kevin Foley, who has had ties to people involved in the shopping-center proposal, allowed discussion of other issues to drag on. There was no quorum for a vote on the appeal that the council staff had recommended. So now the Jupiter Farms residents, sold out by county and regional agencies not to mention by some of their neighbors are reduced to arguing about appearances. embers of the Palm Beach County Commission put on their own theater of the absurd last month. They spent nearly two hours trying to figure out how to make a shopping center fit into a rural neighborhood.

Jupiter Farms was supposed to be a place where people could get a small sense of Florida as it used to be. Homes sjt on lots of between VA acres and 20 acres. Most roads remain unpaved. Signs warn motorists to watch out for horses. The Burt Reynolds Ranch was as urban as Jupiter Farms gets.

Until now. The people who want to keep Jupiter Farms rural are fighting, and losing, a rear-guard action against die shopping center to be built at In-(Jiantown and Jupiter Farms roads. The $sue last week was aesthetics, hinging an such questions as wood vs. stucco and slanted vs. flat roofs.

Commissioners considered 21 pages of such issues, arising from a lawsuit by residents Challenging approval of the center. The real issue, of course, is rural vs. grban. Some residents and property owners in Jupiter Farms are more interested in speculative land profits than in the area's rural character. They have allies in Burt Aaronson, Ken Foster, Mary McCarty and Warren Newell, the lour county commissioners who in 1993 approved the shopping center even though it conflicted with the county's rowth policies and the Jupiter Farms Hammock oday the Florida Education Practices Commission will hear three more Palm Beach County cases that illustrate the ridiculously high level of protection given teachers under most Onion contracts.

The price of that protection has been the dumbing down of standards for teachers. One case involves a teacher facing sanctions for sending LSD in a letter to Iior Kr-nf ir Ano Wit-rrtttio furrt tmic iii ul in ii vol ii giiua Lwy vcai ago. She pleaded guilty to a federal drug Charge and was sentenced to a year of home confinement, three years' probation, drug treatment and random drug screening. Yet she was allowed to refrain in her position as head of the special education department at Lanta-na Middle School. Assistant Superintendent Walter Pierce said the LSD episode was an isolated incident and that the teacher posed no danger to students.

His timid Approach reduced the possibility of the lawsuit that would be expected if state officials today don't reprimand or fine fier much less suspend or revoke her teaching certificate. Once again, students got secondary consideration. Another teacher had pleaded guilty to transporting illegal immigrants from the Bahamas six years ago and was placed on probation. But the district still hired the long-term substitute at Sun-coast High School, Contingent on his for teachers C.B. Hanif is an editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post.

AmeriCorps workers get all of $7,640 a year for living expenses, according td GAO, plus a $4,725 reward at the end of their service that will help many volunteers go to college. Leslie Lenkowsky, a solid conserva- tive who is president of the Hudson1 Institute and serves on the board of the Corporation for National Service, argued in the Washington Times that it was "unfair to attack AmeriCorps as the death knell of selfless charity" because "AmeriCorps is too small for that, and Americans are too big." The other argument against the ser- vice program is that it costs too much per" volunteer. GAO notes that the cost per volunteer to AmeriCorps is $17,629, at or below its original estimates. Counting the stipend, the scholarship and modest health-care and child-care costs, 69 per- cent of that sum goes to the volunteers; 8 percent is taken for federal and state administrative costs; and 23 percent goes into programs. But there's another number that: GAO included at the request of Corps' congressional critics: Counting outside contributions from state and local governments, other parts of the federal' government and private charities, the" "total resources" behind each volunteer is actually $26,700.

All that means is that AmeriCorps is doing what it promised to do, which is to use its program to "lever- -age" money from other sources into good' projects. By putting small amounts of cash into AmeriCorps projects, govern-1 ment agencies can accomplish useful -things at a low price. And what could be wrong with AmeriCorps encouraging civ- ic-minded business people to contribute- to good deeds? If the Republicans really want to trump the president, they should consider shifting AmeriCorps' emphasis to their own purposes by having it put more money into projects run by voluntary institutions and less money into government-run projects and then claim the program as their own. With the whole political world noting the urgency of strengthening local institutions and "civil society," it makes no sense to kill the small piece of the federal government that is trying to do just that. E.J.

Dionne Jr. is a member of The Washington Post's editorial-page staff. President Clinton's pet program has gotten good reviews and results. Republicans oppose it only because he can chalk it up in 1996 as a success. By E.J.

DIONNE JR. You would think a program that encourages Americans to do volunteer work, helps people go to college and disperses decision-making power from Washington to the states would be popular with the new But AmeriCorps, the national service program that is President Clinton's favorite initiative, faces big problems precisely for that It is a perfect target for Republicans who want to obliterate any distinctive achievements the president might claim in 1996. The Republicans certainly did not invent hard-ball politics, so no one can be shocked by what they're up to. And the attack on AmeriCorps is rational in light of the coming confrontation on the federal budget this fall. The president likes AmeriCorps so much that he'd probably trade program cuts 10 times its value just to keep it alive.

Who could walk away from a bargain like that? Not the House Republicans who voted to kill it. The Republicans are only the beginning of AmeriCorps' difficulties. Most Democrats are looking on in horror as the Republicans cut money from the full range of assistance programs for the poor welfare, Medicaid and food stamps, housing and energy assistance. Most liberals will fight a lot harder for those programs than for the $350 million to $500 million that would keep the service program around. AmeriCorps' troubles demonstrate how the budget deficit undercuts innovation in government.

New, experimental programs that might point to better ways of solving problems get plowed under because they lack the constituencies of established programs. It's always plausible to call something like national service a "frill" when it is stacked up against, say, food for hungry children. But if all innovations are killed by that logic, we'll never have better government. Three Palm Beach County cases show how hard it is to weed out inept educators. getting a state teaching certificate.

Now State Education Commissioner Frank Brogan is recommending a settlement that would award the certificate if he accepts a letter of reprimand, serves two years of probation and does not contest the Education Department's initial denial of his application. For taking $1,400 from a literacy program for home visits that he never made, the school board also suspended a J.C. Mitchell Elementary School teacher without pay in February 1994. The teacher resigned from the district in June 1994. So depending upon what action the commission takes against him today, he could also be back.

Teachers unions and the legislature do far too little for the innumerable good teachers. But there has been a proliferation of protections for the inept and sometimes dangerous teachers. Which helps explain why it takes an average of 108 days to document, provide remedial help for and, finally, get rid of a bad teacher in Florida. It's hard to argue that AmeriCorps has failed. Reviews from the states are good, and many Republican governors, including conservatives such as New Hampshire's Steve Merrill, admire the work that AmeriCorps workers 20,000 of them last year have done.

A draft audit by the General Accounting Office found that its projects "had been designed to strengthen communities, develop civic responsibility and expand opportunities for program participants and others." AmeriCorps slots are given out mostly by state boards, not by Washington, and AmeriCorps volunteers work mostly with local governments or private charities. They renovate inner-city housin'g, teach kids to read, clean up pollution, organize community crime-control measures, feed the hungry and help the elderly. Critics of AmeriCorps have two substantive arguments against it. The first is that "paid voluntarism" undermines the spirit of service. That argument might hold if AmeriCorps workers were paid vast sums, or if AmeriCorps volunteers were displacing others.

Neither is true. iH h-.