Friends:
Below is an excerpt from Nicholas Kristof's column from today's New York Times. It returns to a family in Yamhill County, where he grew up. Kristof believes that "modest interventions" might have saved the children in this family but when he lists possible interventions it simply doesn't occur to him that doing a better job of gifted eduation in rural Oregon communities might also have made a difference. This was a child who could have gone to college with a full ride scholarship instead of to prison if he had had more support from his school district ----before-- he dropped out.
Margaret
Who Killed Keylan Knapp?
My childhood friend has joined America抯 揹eaths of despair.�
"...
Keylan was very bright, and he was promoted three grades in math class at Yamhill Grade School, so that as a fifth grader he studied math with the eighth graders, his feet swinging without reaching the floor, and he still outperformed most of the older children.
Yet he dropped out of high school, like all the Knapp kids, and they then all struggled in a changing job market. Good union jobs like their dad抯 were disappearing, and each of the children self-medicated with drugs and alcohol.
The State of Oregon spent hundreds of thousands of dollars prosecuting and incarcerating Keylan (and later his only son as well), but I wonder if modest interventions might have put him on a sounder path: early childhood education, counseling, job training, drug treatment...."
