Al's Morning Meeting

School districts in Hartford, Conn.; Pueblo, Colo.; South Lake Tahoe, Calif.; and Wickenburg and Yuma, Ariz., are also giving away vehicles this school year.

In most cases, the car or truck is donated by a local dealership, and the prizes typically are awarded through drawings open only to students with good attendance.

So does bribing students with the possibility of winning a car or truck actually get them to think twice about staying home from school? Some educators think so and say their giveaways have boosted attendance. But the evidence is not clear-cut.

Kaytie [Christopherson] -- who has a 4.0 average at Natrona County High [in Wyoming,] Dick Cheney's alma mater -- won her truck last spring, in the school system's first such drawing. She said that was not what motivated her to keep up her attendance; she just didn't want to fall behind.

District attendance officer Gary Somerville said he hopes to raise attendance and also reduce the district's 29-percent dropout rate, which he blames in part on Wyoming's booming gas-and-oil industry.

"These kids can go out and earn $15, $16, $17 an hour swinging a hammer. It's kind of hard to keep them in school past their 16th birthday," he said.

Hartford has been holding a drawing -- for either a car or $10,000 -- for the past six years. Five of those times the winning family chose the money.

"I can't tell you that it's increased attendance," district spokesman Terry D'Italia said. "But what it has done over the years is just kept a focus on it and kept it at the top of kids' minds."

Jack Stafford, associate principal at South Tahoe High School, said attendance increased slightly last year, the first year the school system gave away a car, and is up slightly so far this year. He said changing times call for such incentives.

"My mom had the three-B rule: There'd better be blood, bone or barf, or I was going to school," Stafford said. But "that's not the case now."

We've covered a similar story in Al's Morning Meeting.

In Whittier, Calif., the school system has taken a different route. Attendance is one of the qualifiers for being admitted to the school prom. Too many missed days and you are locked out of the prom. The school is also offering lower-dollar incentives, especially around the holiday season, when parents sometimes pull kids out of classes to dash away for an early vacation.

The Whittier Daily News explains:

From discount prom tickets to $250 gift cards, Pioneer High School officials are pulling out the stops this year to entice students to attend school every day, particularly during the absence-heavy holiday season.

Principal Alex Flores said officials started offering incentives about a month ago, after tracking attendance figures for one week and randomly giving out four iPod Shuffles to students who had not missed a single class that week.

"It blew people away," said Flores. "We didn't tell anyone we were doing it. The kids were surprised. And then they started talking about it. It was an attention-grabber."

Flores, who started at Pioneer High this semester, has begun visiting classrooms to explain the incentives program: Students who do not miss a day of school between Nov. 27 and Dec. 20 will be eligible to win one of 70 gift cards valued between $25 and $250.

"It's kind of a cool reason to come to school," said senior Tina Lam, 17. "And I think it's pretty good that the kids who have a really good reason for missing class can also make it up in Saturday school."

How does the Whittier school pay for the incentives? The school makes money leasing its parking lot to local car dealers for weekend sales.

100,000 Contractors in Iraq

The number of contractors (not counting subcontractors) working in Iraq is getting closer to the size of the American military force there. The number, discovered via a survey conducted by U.S. Central Command, is four times higher than the last estimate supplied by the Pentagon and 10 times larger than the estimated number of contractors who worked in the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This Web site gives a peek into what life is like for some of these contractors.

The Washington Post names contractors with some of the largest forces in Iraq:

• DynCorp International has about 1,500 employees in Iraq, including about 700 helping train the police force.

• Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in the country, most of them providing private security.

• Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest contractors in Iraq, said it does not delineate its workforce by country but that it has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors working in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.

• MPRI, a unit of L-3 Communications, has about 500 employees working on 12 contracts, including providing mentors to the Iraqi Defense Ministry for strategic planning, budgeting and establishing its public affairs office.

• Titan, another L-3 division, has 6,500 linguists in the country.

CBS News reported last week that the Department of Labor says 679 civilians employed by U.S. companies have been killed on the job in Iraq in the 3 1/2 years since since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Here is a partial list of those fatalities -- a list that would help you to localize the story and highlight the danger these civilians face.

See this Reuters story from October on the legal issues related to contractors in Iraq.

PBS's "Frontline" also produced an excellent special on private contractors in Iraq last year.

This is a Web site where people can go to see the jobs available in Iraq. Here is another site called DangerZoneJobs.com.

Broken and Worn-Out Combat Equipment

I wanted to make sure you did not miss this fairly alarming story in The Washington Post:

The Army and Marine Corps have sunk more than 40 percent of their ground combat equipment into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to government data. An estimated $17 billion-plus worth of military equipment is destroyed or worn out each year, blasted by bombs, ground down by desert sand and used up to nine times the rate in times of peace. The gear is piling up at depots such as Anniston, [Ala.], waiting to be repaired.

The depletion of major equipment such as tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and especially helicopters and armored Humvees has left many military units in the United States without adequate training gear, officials say. Partly as a result of the shortages, many U.S. units are rated "unready" to deploy, officials say, raising alarm in Congress and concern among military leaders at a time when Iraq strategy is under review by the White House and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

There are depots with gear awaiting repair around the country. For example:

More than 530 M1 tanks, 220 M88 wreckers and 160 M113 armored personnel carriers are sitting at Anniston. The Red River Army Depot in Texas has 700 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and 450 heavy and medium-weight trucks, while more than 1,000 Humvees are awaiting repair at the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania.

Check locally to see what your local military units are waiting to have fixed.

Santa Stories

Reuters reports:

Santas get sneezed upon up to 10 times a day, fend off children pulling their beards and mop up after children who frequently wet their laps, according to the survey of hundreds of men who work as seasonal Santa Claus characters.

A third of all Santas reported having been wet on by a child, the survey said.

More than 60 percent of Santas said they were sneezed or coughed upon up to 10 times each day, and three-quarters said they have up to 10 children cry while sitting on their laps every day, it said.

Nearly 90 percent of Santas said children pull their beard every day to see if it's real, and nearly half said children try to pull their glasses off every day as well, it said.

Santas can suffer back strain from lifting children, exposure to contagious illnesses and overheating in their heavy Santa suits, said Timothy Connaghan, head of the Santa association.

"There is more to it than just sitting in a chair. There is more to it than just a red suit," said Connaghan, who has worked as a Santa for 38 years. "Children can really put the wear and tear on you." [...]

[The survey] was conducted online by Brand IQ of 339 members of the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas.

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