News & Views

Buying A Home In A Good School District Doesn't Guarantee Your Child Will Be Allowed To Attend the Local Public School

On the Dr. Phil Board there was one poster that insisted that parents should send their kids to public schools and stated over and over, that she and her husband had sacrificed in order to buy a home in a high-end part of town with a terrific public school system, and that's what other parents should do. I wonder how she would feel, if her school district decided that in order to ease over crowding her child would be sent to a school in a less desirable part of town? In Ocean Springs residents who chose the location of their home based on the school district it was in may be faced with that dilemma.

The enrollment at Magnolia Park Elementary has boomed over the last few years, and consequently, two other K-4 schools, Oak Park and Pecan Park, have extra room.Magnolia Park, on the eastern end of town where the city's population has spiked in recent years, has over 800 students. Pecan Park and Oak Park elementary schools have enrollments of 537 and 487, respectively. The plan to offset Magnolia's surging enrollment would redraw the lines on a city map that determine where residents send their children. Based on where a student lives, some students now at Magnolia would be transferred to the other two schools.

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Breast Feeding & High IQ's

What, then, is the bottom line when it comes to breast-feeding and intelligence? More than a dozen studies have shown that breast-fed children get higher scores on mental tests. This association is probably due to a host of factors, including genetics of moms who breast-feed, their close physical and emotional contact with their infants, how they interact with and raise their children, the home environment and, possibly, some inherent characteristics of the chemical composition of breast milk. And for all moms, including those fighting for the right to breast-feed in public without being hassled, the truth remains, "It's almost always better to breast-feed, without exception, even though we don't know all the answers to all the questions we have about its impact," said Brenda Snyder, breast-feeding coordinator for the Illinois Department of Human Services.