Lead Story
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In April and again in June, a parent of two players on the baseball team at Bellaire High School in Bellaire, Texas, requested that the school provide him with the statistics it compiled for the team’s 2007 season, but the school district refused, arguing that the stats were protected under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. When in July U.S. education department officials said this wasn’t so, the district promised it would release the stats promptly, but a month later the parent still hadn’t seen any. And in July the Washington Post recounted the case of Bryan Hilferty of Alexandria, Virginia, a lieutenant colonel in the army and an occasional umpire at his son’s Little League games, who contacted a local league office this summer in hopes of obtaining an official rule book. A league official informed him that in part to avoid litigation the league makes its rules available only on a need-to-know basis, and Hilferty (who, it so happens, has clearance to see military secrets for his work at the Pentagon) didn’t qualify for access.
Government in Action
New ones: Verle Dills, 60, was arrested in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in July and charged with multiple counts of indecent exposure; according to a police spokesperson, officers searching Dills’s garage found film and video footage of him “engaged in masturbation and sex acts with traffic signs near his home.” Also in July, 45-year-old Jeff Doland of Uniontown, Ohio, was arrested in Florida following a chat-room sting operation. State and federal agents said Doland had described an interest in “dunking,” or holding people’s heads underwater until they lose consciousness, then letting them up (he reportedly said he especially “liked watching the bubbles”); he allegedly traveled to Miami believing he’d arranged to pay a woman there $550 for the opportunity to dunk her 9- and 12-year-old daughters.
The Classic Middle Name
