Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 50

6D TIMES SUNDAY, AUGUST 27, 1995 Facts document Florida Lottery's service to education By Marcia Mann began before the lottery even existed. The Florida Lottery provides only a small portion of education's overall budget enough to operate schools for only 13 days of a typical 180-day school year. And as an educator, I resent the fact that lottery revenues are paying largely for operational costs of A recent article and subsequent editorial in the Times presented several incorrect and misleading statements, including an interesting if hardly original notion that Florida's education system has not benefited from lottery revenue. mm am our schools rather than enhancing puAmmi them, as originally intended. TAKING EXCEPTION While extolling the start-up of Now let's take a look at the facts: Georgia lottery and its director, i First, the Florida Lottery has vour article failed to point out that the same person 30, Floridians and visitors purchased more lottery tickets than ever before.

Not only was this our best sales year ever, topping the previous year by $95-million, but the lottery's top three sales years all have occurred during the past four years. Clearly, Florida's lottery has never been stronger. Fourth, your article incorrectly stated the portion of each Florida Lottery ticket dollar that goes to education. For the past four years, the lottery by law has earned at least 38 cents on the dollar for education. Fifty cents is returned to players in the form of prizes and the rest covers operating costs.

On the other hand, Georgia's lottery has been required to send only 30 cents of each sales dollar to education, until a recent increase to 35 cents. Even with the increase, Georgia still sends a lower share of its revenue to education than Florida. Fifth, one must question the wisdom of using lottery revenues to pay for the college education of every high school graduate with a good grade average, regardless of the family's ability to pay and regardless of whether the student chooses to attend a private or public college. Does paying tuition really enhance the quality of education or does it merely provide a visible service that seems popular with voters and'perhaps further crowd college classrooms? Worth noting is that unlike Florida Georgia also has a state income tax that pays for much of that state's basic education needs. Last year, that income tax raised for the state's general fund, from which school systems are funded.

And finally, changing the way Florida uses its lottery revenues is hardly a new idea. Gov. Lawton Chiles for two consecutive years asked the Legislature to restore general revenue funding for education and use lottery dollars as they were intended as enhancements. Politics and other funding priorities kept the Legislature from adopting this initiative. However, he succeeded in changing the distribution process, so that lottery revenues are sent directly to each county to determine their use.

Much has been said and written by those who, like myself, desire greater funding for Florida's education system. But misrepresenting the facts benefits no one, particularly those who should be the focus of our efforts: Florida's schoolchildren. Marcia Mann is secretary of the Florida Lottery, earned more than $6- billion in voluntary revenue for Florida's prekindergarten programs, public schools, community colleges and state universities. No other lottery in the nation has ever raised so much in such short time 7's years. Without the lottery, every Florida household could expect to pay about $212.50 in higher taxes each year to support education.

Second, state funding to Florida's public schools has increased each year since the lottery began. Today the state spends about 24 percent more for each pupil in Florida's public schools than in 1988. While total funding has increased, the percentage of general revenue devoted to education has indeed dropped as prison and health care costs climbed. But this decline was at the helm when the Florida Lottery began and somehow failed to ensure an equally marketable formula for education revenues here. Ironically, one of the three lauded components of Georgia's lottery prekindergarten funding is modeled directly after the Florida Lottery's own prekindergarten program.

About 25,000 economically disadvantaged 3- and 4-year-olds are enrolled every year in a highly successful prekindergarten program funded entirely by lottery dollars. This program exists in every Florida county. Third, your article stated that lottery sales have leveled off. However, in the fiscal year that ended June Women from 1D Maxwell from 1D one to force change at this Southern institution because, paradoxically, she is too much of a Southerner herself. Publicly, she may condemn Citadel's cadets, but she admires them.

She understands them. And in her own way, she is one of them. Just as the cadets boast of being able to withstand pain and of being gentlemen, Faulkner brags that she, too, is tough, that she is a lady. "I don't believe in everything that the South used to believe in the Old she said on an ABC Network news program. "But I still believe in Southern hospitality, a Southern gentleman and a Southern belle.

A true Southern woman will not cry in public because that is not what she is taught. It's an emotion that you feel only when you're by yourself." Yes, Faulkner wanted to become a part of the Citadel, but she also was reluctant to destroy a part of Southern tradition that, no matter how distasteful, has been integral to her life. to a fierce and unshakable advocacy of their past." If Faulkner had read on, Conroy would have told her more about Charleston and the Citadel: "It is a city distorted by its own self-worship. I do not believe there is another city like it on earth, nor do I believe there is another college like the Institute. Nor can I imagine the Institute in any other city.

The school has adopted many of the odd, quirky mannerisms of Charleston itself, an osmotic, subterranean effect, and each has shaped the other, magnified the other's flaws, reinforced the other's strengths." Above all, Faulkner knew full well that she was injecting feminism into an environment that would reject it. She was trashing the South's myth of white womanhood. Historian Anne Goodwyn Jones of the University of Florida writes: "Southern men have toasted and celebrated Southern womanhood since the South began to think of itself as a region, probably before the American Revolution. The lady, with her grace and hospitality, seemed the flower of a uniquely Southern civilization, the embodiment of all it prized most deeply." In the South, men still believe that men go to war to protect women not the other way around. This tradition will die hard, and those who intend to follow Shannon Faulkner should be aware of that fact.

Men here still join the military to find or prove their manhood, their honor. They attend the Citadel to become the "Whole Man," a man re-created in a world that does not have women. Col. Bill Gordon, a history professor at the Citadel and a Vietnam veteran, said recently that Southern men his cadets, too are "more comfortable with a myth than a flesh-and-blood woman." Perhaps Gordon is right. And perhaps Faulkner has changed the Citadel forever.

Perhaps a woman may yet wear the Citadel ring, becoming part of the "brotherhood" and the school's vaunted "network." Perhaps now is the time for such a change. But Faulkner was not the1 black problem. The first black student was admitted in 1966. And his life was hell. Other blacks who followed experienced as much or more pain.

Pat Conroy, a Citadel graduate, captured the brutal hazing of black cadets in his 1967 novel The Lords of Discipline. Today, 124 black cadets study there, and only two blacks are full-time members of the faculty and staff. Shannon Faulkner is a woman, a victim of Southern traditions. Unlike blacks, however, she is a willing victim. She is a daughter of the South, born and reared among the young men who are the cadets at the Citadel.

She knowingly took a battering ram to all that she loves. If she could not see the pitfalls awaiting her, she should have at least read the part of The Lords of Discipline where Conroy writes that to walk in the old section of Charleston at night "is to step into the bloodstream of a history extravagantly lived by a people born U.S. history. The Ku Klux Klan was conceived; lynchings increased. In St.

Petersburg, where black and white children once had learned their letters in the same classroom, segregation took over the school system. "Black women had a lot of issues," Flemming said. "Black women were not selfish; they recognized that their men were being discriminated against as well." Still, black women were organized. One group worked with the NAACP to further women's rights. Others held regional meetings.

It's just that whatever they did was done separately from white women. Florida's white women knew that uniting with their black sisters "would have been the kiss of death" for the movement, said Doris Weatherford, author of American Women's History from A to Z. "(Suffrage) wouldn't have passed in Florida if they'd gotten involved." Florida never did approve women's suffrage, at least not when it mattered. Repeated attempts by women to pass a state constitutional amendment failed. Twenty-three Florida cities did grant women a ballot in municipal elections, including Clearwater, Dunedin, Pass-a-Grille, St.

Petersburg, Tampa and Tarpon Springs. Soldiers from ID Animal from 1D were humiliated at being governed by their former slaves. "There's a kind of ugly side to the suffrage movement," said University of South Florida history professor Ray Arsen-ault. "Women were so desperate that they would try anything to win over the male power structure to get this vote. It was one victim using another victim." Between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the turn of the century, conservative Southern Democrats set about reaffirming their supremacy, Arsenault said.

Jim Crow laws sprouted up, segregation grew and lynchings spread. "In context, that's where the suffrage movement emerges full-blown," Arsenault said. The National American Woman Suffrage Association formed in 1890, led by Susan B. Anthony. Emerging groups in the South sought connections with NAWSA, and many came in with platforms denouncing suffrage for black women.

The Northerners accepted them. "When the suffragettes went South, in exchange for the support of white Southern males, they sang the company song with reference to white supremacy," said Gregory Padgett, a history professor at Eck-erd College in St. Petersburg. Although Anthony, a former abolitionist, was known for her opposition to racism, she often remained silent in the face of Southern demands. She once asked Frederick Douglass not to attend a convention in Georgia, drawing criticism from fellow suffragist Ida B.

Wells, a black journalist. Anthony wrote to Wells: "I did not want anything to get in the way of bringing the Southern white women into our suffrage association." The brush-off went further. Anthony told Wells that she would not support black women who wanted to form their own NAWSA chapters. White women almost completely dismissed their black sisters, says Sheila Flemming, head of social sciences at at Bethune-Cookman College. "When you talk suffrage, you're really limiting it to white women," Flemming said.

"They were selfish or myopic in their quest, to choose to deal with their own problem of gender issues." 6.4 in Pakistan and 6 in Nigeria, all epicenters of conflict. By contrast the United States rate is 1.9, Canada 1.7. "Rapid population growth isn't the cause of conflict, but it certainly exacerbates it," says Victoria Mar-kell, vice president of Population Action International, which promotes family planning overseas. A problem without solution? Hardly. Meet Pierre Sanon, a lanky 39-year-old Haitian who fathered nine children before he experienced a blinding insight and ended his reproductive activities with a vasectomy.

Now, thanks to an infusion of U.S. aid that came with last year's invasion, he works as a family planning agent for the Foundation for Reproductive Health and Family Education, a Haitian non-profit organization known by its French acronym, FOS-REP. Armed with a convert's evangelical zeal and a worn canvas shoulder bag full of diagrams and samples, Pierre pulls on stout rubber boots and heads off to save his country. He shoulders through the crowds up a garbage-strewn street in Port-au-Prince and finds his first target. She is Louise L'Guerdie, a 27-year-old mother of six.

Two of her children are dead, victims of disease in this slum called Mambo Sasa. Like millions of other Haitian women, Louise is drowning under pressures she cannot control. Although she can barely afford to feed her children, let alone send them to school, children are her future, her support in old age. She knows that disease will take two or three infants, so she'll have more for insurance. In this male-dominated society, she will have children to keep her husband.

And in the hopeless squalor of Mambo Sasa, sex provides a momentary reminder of human warmth, a fleeting reprieve from desperation. Pierre attacks. "If you limit the number of children you have, you can take care of each one better, they will have a better chance of growing up healthy," he says. Brandishing his samples and diagrams, he presses home his point: "I can help." As many as 400 women a day crowd into FOSREP's family planning clinic here, one of several opened early this year by its energetic director, Dr. Fritz Moises.

With a one-year, $234,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, Moises hired three doctors, six nurses and 25 educators like Pierre to serve 27,000 clients. His recent proposal to open four more neighborhood clinics was rejected by the USAID for lack of funds. That enrages Haitians who see family planning as their only hope: the United States spent half a billion dollars to install a new government, but is unwilling to invest a few million to help solve the underlying problem. "The problem of Haiti is not a political problem," says family planning nurse Mona Israel.

"The problem of Haiti is 7-million people. It is a population problem." Nowhouse News Service This supports laws regulating the way farm animals are kept, transported and killed. But what is "needless?" If the world insists on eating large quantities of today's foods as cheaply as it does now, industrialized farming is at present the only option. Every day Americans slaughter 25-million chickens and Europe consumes 340-million eggs. To satisfy those appetites in a way that affords the animals anything like, a natural life would make chicken and omelettes dearer.

A Swedish company has developed a truck that provides cattle with ample food, water, space and cool air on their long journeys across Europe: cost, $200,000. Is that reasonable? If farmers lose jobs and poor people eat less meat, are those prices worth paying? So long as people remain as divided as they are on these points, the answers must remain a matter of personal conscience. Governments should act only when consensus is broad and firm; for the moment, the moral price of eating meat or wearing fur is for individuals to weigh. One thing more, however. It is all very well to say that individuals must wrestle with their consciences but only if their consciences are awake and informed.

Industrial society, alas, hides animals' suffering. Few people would themselves keep a hen in a shoe box for her egg-laying life; but practically everyone will eat packaged "farm fresh" eggs from battery hens. A right-minded regime for animals ought to help to pierce the veil of ignorance about what happens to them, and yet leave the questions of conscience mainly in the realm of individual choice. This is beginning to happen. In Britain, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is pioneering "Freedom Food," a program begun last year with two super market firms.

Farm operations that meet the society's guidelines for humane farming (no battery cages, for instance) can use the "Freedom Food" logo and many consumers, it turns out, will pay more for food so marked. The scheme is policed by the RSPCA and paid for. by participating farmers. It has many advantages. It keeps standard-setting in respected private hands; it cooperates with farmers instead of coercing them; and it imposes no uniform standards where there is no consensus.

Above all, it tells consumers that there is a moral choice to be made. In Britain, Freedom Food is a small effort, but its way of approaching the problem voluntary and morally educative rather than coercive and morally dictatorial points the way. Economist Newspaper Ltd. of Sen. Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Such short-sighted actions, Wirth says, are a hangover from Cold War days when the causes of conflict seemed ideological and the solutions military. But it's not just a Republican-controlled Congress that's at fault. Most of the U.S. national security apparatus, including the State Department and its foreign aid arm, the Agency for International Development, "were framed and developed for the Cold War," Wirth says. "It's said that generals always fight the last war, and I guess diplomats also tend to focus on the last crisis." In Haiti, as elsewhere in the developing world, the problem is not only overpopulation but overcrowding that magnifies the effects of uneven global distribution of food, water and economic development.

Global production of wheat and rice increased each year during the 1960s and 1970s as farmers used more fertilizer and irrigated more arid land. But since 1982, each year's total harvest has declined as fertilizer use reached its maximum effectiveness, according to the private Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute. That decline falls particularly hard on Haiti, where the swelling population has stripped the land of all but 2 percent of its trees, resulting in erosion carrying off much of its topsoil. Grain harvests in Haiti today are a third smaller than in the mid-1970s. Today, most of the world's water from rivers and underground aquifers is used to irrigate farmland, and in some places, such as India's Punjab region, over-used water tables are already falling six feet a year.

In much of the Third World, water supplies can either supply growing populations with drinking water or irrigate farmland but not both, the Worldwatch Institute, a private research organization, has concluded. Similarly, the world's fish catch, which grew 400 percent over the past 40 years, is no longer rising: all 17 major fishing areas are now being fished at or beyond capacity, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization. Other ominous trends are converging as well. Swelling populations in the Third World are producing record numbers of young people. Almost half of today's Africans, for instance, are 15 or younger.

They compete for increasingly scarce jobs. The World Bank reports that global employment is growing only half as fast as the world's information-age economy. It is not squatters in Cairo who are getting work. Where these trends converge, they are ripping apart family structures and social conventions, igniting disputes into violent conflict. Haiti's fertility rate of somewhat more than 6 children per woman compares to 6.9 in Rwanda, 8.9 in Angola, poses an agreed account of human rights, which is something the world does not have.

On one view of rights, to be sure, it necessarily follows that animals have none. Some philosophers argue that rights exist only within a social contract, as part of an exchange of duties and entitlements. Therefore, animals cannot have rights. However, this is only one account, and by no means an uncontested one. It denies rights not only to animals but also to some people for instance, to infants, the mentally incompetent and future generations.

The point is this: Without agreement on the rights of people, arguing about the rights of animals is fruitless. It polarizes the discussion at the outset. It invites you to think that animals should be treated either with the consideration humans extend to other humans, or with no consideration. This is a false choice. Better to start with a more fundamental question: Is the way we treat animals a moral issue? Many deny it.

Arguing from the view that humans are different from animals in every relevant respect, extremists of this kind think that animals lie outside the area of ethical choice. Regard for the suffering of animals is seen as a mistake a sentimental displacement of feeling. This view, which holds that torturing a chimpanzee is morally equivalent to chopping wood, may seem bravely "logical." In fact it is simply shallow: the muddled center is right to reject it. The most elementary form of moral reasoning is to weigh others' interests against one's own. This in turn requires sympathy and imagination: without which there is no capacity for moral thought.

To see an animal in pain is enough, for most, to engage sympathy. When that happens, it is not a mistake: It is mankind's instinct for moral reasoning in action. But where does this lead? First, to the view that a conscientious disregard for the suffering of animals is not merely ugly but wrong. Quite possibly, one day, to a conviction that our treatment of animals is outrageous. Historically, man has expanded the reach of his ethical calculations, first beyond family, later beyond religion, race and nation.

To bring other species more fully into the range of those decisions may seem unthinkable to moderate opinion now. One day, it may seem no more than "civilized" behavior requires. Today there is no such clarity, nor any prospect of it tonly a befuddled consensus in many rich countries that "needless" suffering by animals should be avoided. Poll taxes and literacy tests kept black women from the ballot boxes. Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment.

It was formally added to the Constitution on Aug. 26, 1920. Even as white women stepped up to cast their first votes, poll taxes and literacy tests kept black women from the ballot boxes. "From a black woman's perspective, the 19th Amendment didn't mean a lot," Flemming said. In an editorial headlined in a Wood Pile," the Tampa Tribune wondered why white women were harassed while registering to vote while "not one negro woman of Tampa had been embarrassed or hurt by having cheap fun poked at her." Another editorial reassured white women they would not have to stand in voting lines with black women, as lines would be segregated.

In St. Petersburg, after it was decided that black women were registering too quickly, Democrats began a house-to-house campaign to register white women. In 1920, just after local women had won municipal suffrage, the St. Petersburg Daily Times called for white-only primaries, arguing that full privileges for black voters "gives too much opportunity for political manipulation." The reality of the times makes it easy to see why women winning the right to vote was something less than pure. "It was a dilemma for white women," said Flemming of Bethune-Cookman.

"In some ways, white women were almost chattel themselves." So were these women, who trounced their black sisters, heroes? "They had the courage to stand up to white men and say 'We aren't taking this anymore, we want the right to Flemming said. "White women in the suffragette movement did move us closer to democracy." Race also was used against the suffrage movement. In 1919, Florida's U.S. senators, Duncan U. Fletcher and Park Trammell, argued in Congress that women's suffrage would give more political power to blacks.

Fletcher said the 19th Amendment would enfranchise 2-million black women and compound the error made when black men were given the vote with the 15th Amendment. Said Trammell: "I am opposed to any proposition which would possibly invite greater and more extensive participation in our election on the part of the negro population." As white men and white women debated whose position most would benefit the white race, where were the black women in the South? It was, after all, their votes at the center of the controversy. "For African-American women, suffrage was not a primary bone of contention. Racism was," said Padgett, who specializes in Reconstruction and the civil rights movement. The first two decades in the 20th century were among the most racially divisive time in.