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February 8, 2005, Tuesday, BC cycle

HEADLINE: First lady promotes youth initiative, tours school in east Baltimore

BYLINE: By FOSTER KLUG, Associated Press Writer

DATELINE: BALTIMORE

BODY:
First Lady Laura Bush visited an east Baltimore elementary school Tuesday to promote a White House plan to keep children away from sex, drugs and violence. The First Lady also watched a local initiative to teach students how to behave in class.

The visit comes as Baltimore's public school system continues to struggle to reduce a $58 million budget deficit and the city deals with a spate of recent violence, averaging nearly a homicide a day for the first month of the year.

The First Lady's new initiative, which focuses on the development of boys, was mentioned briefly in her husband's State of the Union speech.

"We need to focus on giving young people, especially young men in our cities, better options than apathy, or gangs, or jail," said the president. He has budgeted $150 million over three years in Department of Justice funding for anti-gang efforts.

Mrs. Bush said she hoped new educational programs around the country, including one she saw Tuesday at the George Washington Elementary School, would keep boys away from gangs by showing them "an ideal of manhood that respects life and rejects violence."

Mrs. Bush spent the morning touring the school and watching as Phyllis Davis taught her first-grade class using a program called "The Good Behavior Game," which rewards teamwork and good discipline while teaching students study skills.

She praised teachers at George Washington Elementary who "refuse to let their students become statistics." She said gangs are nearly 90 percent comprised of young men and that boys are at greater risk than girls to be violent in school.

"We have a personal interest in seeing that our students succeed," she said. "We can't afford to not develop good behavior in our students" at an early age.

Davis said her students were eager to show Mrs. Bush how much they'd learned using "The Good Behavior Game."

"They enjoyed her visit, and were excited, but they really work hard every day," Davis said.

Mrs. Bush also praised Dr. Sheppard Kellam, the man who more than 20 years ago helped develop the game that is now used by first-grade students in a dozen Baltimore schools.

Kellam said he had followed the academic and social progress of the first generation of first-graders to use the game in the early 1980s and was shocked to see that they had an 86 percent high school graduation rate.

"Learning how to be a student, you need to be taught," said Kellam, who serves the director of the Center for Integrating Education and Prevention Research in Schools at the American Institutes for Research. "We've been really dramatically impressed with the short-term and long-term results" of the game in teaching students how to behave well in class.

The First Lady's interest in the program, which Kellam hopes to one day implement nationally, won't provide any immediate funding, but "it gives us a national voice," he said. "Her presence brings a great deal of cooperation and political integration between the city, state and federal governments."

State and local politicians and educators - including Gov. Robert Ehrlich, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele and Baltimore City Council President Sheila Dixon - gathered at the school to meet the First Lady, who spent more than an hour with students and teachers before giving a short speech.

"It's absolutely thrilling," said Bonnie Copeland, the CEO of the Baltimore school system, about meeting Mrs. Bush. "She'll be visiting schools throughout the country, and it's just wonderful that she's going to carry a lot of the insights she got here with her."

State Schools Superintendent Nancy Grasmick also said she was pleased with Mrs. Bush's visit, adding that programs like Baltimore's "The Good Behavior Game" will "start popping up around the country. It's something that will help change the behavior of students in a positive way without ignoring academic achievement."