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Written by Katie Gilbert
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Monday, 04 January 2010 |
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Walking into Dan Anderson’s third period philosophy class, the first things one might notice are the rock music playing or the kids sitting in the windowsills “just chillin' with friends.” These things may stand out but they won’t tell you anything about the man who conducts the class. Mr. Anderson stands tall and directs the conversation in a friendly manner, joining in on the jokes, discussion, and stories along with his students. He is like any other teacher at Grant, and any other person for that matter, only he is more open about his past–more specifically with his former drug problem: a story that he shared with all his students in an “end-of-the-year lecture.”
It is a lecture he usually reserves for his students, but was willing to share with the Grantonian for this issue. “It starts off like any other lecture,” says former student of Anderson’s, Willow Carver. Anderson sits at his desk, feet up, and tells the story of his past drug addiction to his students.
He says the he started “using” when he was about thirteen, but it wasn’t until Anderson was a senior in high school that he realized he had problem. It began with drinking, but this later morphed into other forms of substance abuse. “I would stop one substance and pick up another,” says Anderson.
Today this would seem like a big deal, but back then, substance abuse wasn’t conceived as a huge issue, especially within Anderson’s family, who had various substance abuse issues as well. “It was normal,” said Anderson. “It was a different culture in the seventies,” he explained, “people didn’t really understand how bad things were. Nobody really cared and there was no public discourse about the dangers like today.” People in his family were “using” as well, but Anderson was “the most out of control.”
These are the kind of things he illustrates for his students during his end of the year lecture. Yet he also describes the point where he was able to break his addiction. “I was able to stop and [think] a lot about who I was and where I was, said Anderson. “I asked myself is this really the kind of human being I want to be. Do I want to be a person who needs substances to be satisfied with their life? I stopped [using] because I got tired of feeling weak.”
Anderson repeats this lecture every year and yet is still able to evoke strong emotional responses from his students; even provoking some of them to follow his example and turn their own lives around as well. This is a fact that humbles Anderson. “It makes me feel like I don’t really deserve the good things I have in my life. It makes me feel lucky, and…I’m just a really lucky guy,” said Anderson, hesitating slightly to think back on the matter.
In an interview with Anderson it was apparent that giving this speech is commonplace for him, yet it seems impossible that it would stop affecting him, as well, to be so open with such a large audience. It doesn’t seem like an easy task, but to Anderson that matter is apparently overlooked because he is committed to helping students with addictions, to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
When he started working at Grant, Anderson supervised a drug and alcohol program that worked with kids to help them graduate. He then became a teacher where he was able to talk openly with all of his students about these issues.
“Anderson lays down his story, making jokes, keeping it amusing, until the end of the lecture, that is,” explained Carver, his former student. “He keeps it pretty humorous,” she described, “but by the end of it a bunch people teared up.”
Anderson’s end-of-the-year lecture is important to many students. It gives them a chance to hear real life experiences from someone they can respect and it gives him a chance to be brave, open, and honest with his students. This is important, explained Anderson. “You’ve got to be honest if you’re dealing with kids. If you’re not being honest with them, you’ll run into all sorts of problems.” |
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Written by Rosa Inocencio Smith
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Monday, 04 January 2010 |
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Note: The Grantonian began writing and reporting this article with full permission to print the subject’s name. However, after discussing the matter with his family, he asked that his name be withheld shortly before the story went to press.
This story could begin in any number of places. But the telling of it starts 12 years ago, with the day a 6-year-old boy went snowboarding for the first time and broke his toe. His mother, a skier like the rest of the family, worried that after hurting himself, her son would never try snowboarding again. But she underestimated him. As soon as the broken toe healed, he went back to the mountain, pursuing what was to become one of his favorite activities: one that he now describes as “a natural high.”
That first day snowboarding is now the boy’s favorite memory, and there’s a lot that the story could say about him. It could say he’s tenacious, courageous, persevering. Or it could say that he’s willing to take risks. It could show how much he’s determined not to let an element of danger keep him from something he enjoys. He’s 18 now and a senior at Grant. Sober, he seems like a friendly, likable guy, described by the people who know him as “nice,” “funny,” and “easy to talk to.” He has a relaxed way of speaking and a way of downplaying his own problems that makes everything seem easy to fix—everything, that is, except for his drinking. Over the past two years, in spite of concern from his family and friends, warnings from police, and meetings with Alcoholics Anonymous, he has seen alcohol become more and more a part of his life. Now, he faces the challenging question of how to control it.
He was born in Portland in 1991, adopted at birth and brought up in the Grant neighborhood, in a house close by the school where he has lived all his life. He remembers spending most of his time with his mom as a child; his father, he says, was often busy at work. Things changed in his sophomore year, the year he was 16. That was the year he got drunk for the first time, at a party the day before Halloween. It was the year his adoptive father, worried (says the son) that the boy was going to be a failure, began trying to redirect his son’s life. But the stricter his father’s rules, the more the boy rebelled. Near the end of his sophomore year, he and a few of his friends were arrested for the vandalism of Grant High School and 52 cars. It’s his worst memory—the first time he was arrested, the only time he faced the possibility of a sentence. The first time he saw his mother cry.
Before he started getting in trouble, the boy thought he could open his own snowboard business someday. He could study business in college and turn one of his favorite pastimes into a lifelong career. Now, he says, he can’t do that anymore—at least, not the way he wanted to, and not the way he planned. His grades, which have suffered ever since he started drinking, will limit his opportunity to get into a four-year college. His first arrest, which could have been expunged on his 18th birthday if not for his alcohol-related police contact, will stay on his record for another five years. He was upset when he first learned about this, but now he’s accepted it and says he doesn’t really care. When asked what he wants to be “when he grows up,” he raises an eyebrow and answers, “I just don’t want to be in jail. Or dead.” After a moment he adds, as a kind of explanation, “I don’t really have any dreams anymore.”
He says this offhandedly, and a little apologetically, as if his listeners are the ones who might be hurt by it.
*
In the beginning, the boy didn’t think his drinking was a big deal. He figured drugs and alcohol were a normal part of high school, just something to do while hanging out with friends. Even now, the first reason he can think of for his drinking is that “drinking is fun.” “I don’t know,” he says. “You always have a good time. Everyone’s happy, there’s no drama—you don’t have to worry about anything.”
It’s a vision that contrasts markedly with some of the other scenes he describes. He can remember three occasions when he became so drunk that he passed out or stopped breathing. Once, his dad came home and found the boy lying in the street; after bringing him inside, he had to keep waking him up so he could breathe. The boy is startlingly nonchalant about his experiences; he shrugs, for example, over the memory of a night when, with vomit clogging his nose and mouth, he passed out while at a party with his friends. They carried him outside, laid him, unconscious, in the back of a truck, and went back to the party. “They got me somewhere safe,” he says now. “I didn’t want to ruin their night.”
Over the summer before his senior year, even as he started to attend AA meetings, the boy’s drinking got to the point where he expected to get drunk every weekend. In addition, he started doing drugs—“to feel better about myself,” he says. He spent all his money, lost his parents’ trust, gave himself a police record with several trips to the detox room. On August 6, two days after his 18th birthday, he was arrested for drunkenness and held in detox for five and a half hours, “listen[ing] to the bums tell their stories.” It was five o’clock in the morning by the time he was allowed to walk home. He’d had 14 shots of Everclear, a brand of liquor so strong that at 95 percent alcohol, it can’t be distilled any further. “People just kept handing me drinks,” he explains with a shrug and a shake of his head. “And I just kept drinking them.”
*
To Breanna Wise, the only one of the boy’s friends who ever tells him not to drink, this kind of behavior is alcoholism. “When he’s just hanging out with his friends, he just drinks,” she explains. “He feels he has to drink, and he doesn’t know when he’s had too much.”
Wise has five uncles who have died as a result of substance abuse, and helping her friend stop drinking is very important to her. Knowing the outcomes of alcoholism, she says it’s hard to see him going through what her uncles did. It worries her. It scares her to see him acting unpredictable and unable to control himself. She tells a story of one night when the boy got drunk, when she had to “sit there and make sure he didn’t, like, jump out of the car.” Bluntly, she states the severity of his situation: “If someone wasn’t there to help him and watch him, he’d probably die.”
“She thinks I’m ruining my life,” the boy says of Wise. He, on the other hand, thinks she’s sure to be successful in life, and he admits that her advice about his drinking is probably right. She’s helped him with it in the past. Sitting near her at the computers during their shared sixth-period study hall, he swears he didn’t drink during the time last May when the two of them were a couple. “She wouldn’t let me,” he says, and then he offers another explanation. “At that point I didn’t really need anything else to make me happy.”
That happiness ended, however, with a story the boy lists along with his police record as one of the things he regrets: One night, he went out with Wise, got drunk, and started messing around with another girl. After that, he and Wise broke up.
That summer, the boy started drinking more than ever.
*
It’s hard to tell how the boy really feels about his drinking. With all the contradictory statements he makes, it sounds sometimes like even he doesn’t really know. He recognizes that his drinking is a problem, but seems in no hurry to stop. He worries about friends passing out and getting into drugs, but doesn’t extend the concern to himself, or respect the concern of the friends who try to help him. More than once he’s made promises—to Wise, or to his teacher that he won’t drink over a particular weekend. More than once, he has broken his promise.
For four months now, he’s been going to group meetings sponsored by Alcoholics Anonymous, which he describes as “fun…just a bunch of kids with the same situation.” But he doesn’t think the meetings, which his parole officer recommended and his dad made him attend under threat of being sent to live in California, are helping him much. For one thing, unless he’s going to be given a drug test, he lies when they ask him how long he’s been sober—it’s what everyone told him to do on his first day. Besides, “All it did was get me more friends that help me do the things I do.” Though he has made some friends who he knows are clean—friends he can call up any time he doesn’t feel like drinking—he hasn’t hung out with any of them in a while. The other friends he’s made are people to go out drinking with. It’s as if getting help has made the problem worse.
He doesn’t say for sure whether he wants the AA meetings to help him, but he thinks they probably should—as long as he’s going there, they should be doing something. It isn’t hard to imagine how the meeting leaders might counter: if AA isn’t curing this young man, it’s because he isn’t trying to cure himself.
Still, the situation is more complicated than that. Drinking remains a big part of the boy’s social life, and he feels that “if I stop, I won’t have any friends, ’cause that’s what they’ll do.” If he didn’t drink, he says he’d have to hang around his house all the time; meanwhile, there seem to be drugs and alcohol everywhere he goes. Last Halloween, having promised to stay sober, he went to a party where there wasn’t going to be any alcohol. But there was, and he drank it. The next weekend, he found himself at another party with people doing speed in the back room. He told his friends to leave, because hard drugs would ruin the fun, but at the next party they went to, there were people doing cocaine. He finally ended up at a third party, playing “beer pong” with cups of beer lined up on a ping-pong table.
*
The boy claims he never feels any physical effects from not having alcohol. He insists he doesn’t need it—and maybe he doesn’t. Instead, what he seems to need more than anything is connection—the connection he has with the people around him, the connection he feels whenever he drinks. It’s a way of having fun with the people he knows. It’s a history he shares with his “tight and funny” birth dad, who the boy says used to be just like him in high school, and who he now says he wants to be like when he’s older. Even more, it’s a way of trying to forget about the people and things that he’s lost: friends who have gone out of his life or given up on him, and football, which is out of the question after a knee injury sustained in an accident while he was drunk. Now, he says, he often drinks “just to make myself feel better.” He’s never tried any other way.
Even being told not to drink can prove that people care about him—like the girl, who says that “a lot of his friends have just given up on him. I don’t want to be just like everyone else.”
“I just want someone to show me that they’re there for me,” the boy says.
And although he reproaches the girl for not talking to him or texting him, she says that the fact that he does have someone “there for him” is exactly what she wants him to remember. She says people need support to stop drinking, and she promises that he has hers. She thinks he’s beginning to think about his actions more. He might be on his way to getting his life back under control.
Meanwhile, the boy says he wants to stop drinking. But he also says he can stop whenever he wants to, and he hasn’t done it yet. He still has to choose his loyalties and the risks he’ll be willing to take. If he lets his drinking go further, he risks his grades, his reputation, his future, even his life. If he stops, he risks losing his friends—and though some might say they don’t sound like much to lose, they represent the only life he knows.
So go back 12 years to the boy’s favorite memory. Go back to the day he decided, at 6, that the fear of another broken bone couldn’t stop him. What kind of pain is he willing to risk now? What, today, is he willing to be brave about?
“If I’m with my friends and they’re [drinking],” he says, “I’m not going to say no.”
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Written by Rosa Smith
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Friday, 30 October 2009 |
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Of all the things a school program could not have enough of—funding, supplies, class space, even teachers—you’d never expect to see a shortage of boys. But at Grant, the choir classes are experiencing exactly that.
The all-male Harmonaires choir has always been a small class, but this year its members number only 11—far fewer people than the class has room for. And in the 84-person A Cappella choir, the 30 male singers are outnumbered almost two to one by female voices.
“The sopranos basically overpower the whole choir,” says Luisa Tonga, a member of A Cappella.
In another elective class—Art History, for example—having more girls than boys might not be such a problem. But in choral music, balance is important. Choir director Katy Wagner-West compares a choir with too many sopranos to a cake with too much frosting and nothing to hold it up. Bass tones provide a foundation for the music, and when the different vocal sections aren’t in balance, the song takes on a sound that it wasn’t meant to have. As junior Caleb Taylor puts it, “It sounds nice, but it doesn’t sound right.”
The smaller the group, the greater the problem, according to Taylor’s fellow A Cappella member Zac Festner. When singing with only a few other people, “you don’t want to be heard because you don’t want to sound off.” Mistakes are much more noticeable, and singers, feeling self-conscious, sing quietly to blend in with other voices—meaning their sound, already less than that of the other vocal groups, is even harder to hear.
Festner, who tried out for A Cappella “to gain more confidence with my voice,” has experienced this often during class; and with so few people in Harmonaires, the problem is unlikely to resolve itself in the next couple of years. As the introductory, non-audition choir for boys, Harmonaires (like Choralaires for girls) is a starting point for future members of both A Cappella and Royal Blues. Fewer boys in Harmonaires this year could mean even fewer boys in the audition choirs next year.
Why aren’t guys signing up for choir? According to Wagner-West, the fact that “it’s harder to recruit guys” is “an age-old concern for choir teachers.” Contrary to common beliefs about boys’ and girls’ behavior in other subject areas, Wagner-West has observed that in choir, girls are “a little more outgoing and ready to put themselves out there.” Self-confidence, or perhaps just familiarity with vocal music, is definitely an issue—when asked why they wouldn’t consider being involved in choir, many students respond at once with “I can’t sing.” Not having friends in the program can deter people from participating. So can commitment to other activities, such as sports, and other classes held during the same period; Tonga observes that “the few guys we have in choir are the really committed ones.” Some people just don’t like the songs. Festner and Taylor think Harmonaires in particular suffers from lack of advertising, and Taylor, who sings in both A Cappella and Harmonaires, says he’s heard all kinds of reasons for not joining the latter class. One reason in particular upsets him: “Everyone shows up at Grant thinking they can instantly get into the Royal Blues. When they find out they can’t, they just give up. They don’t even look for other options.”
One might worry that dwindling numbers could eventually mean a disappearance of the choir classes altogether. But vice-principal Kim Patterson doesn’t see that happening. “I definitely think we have enough kids interested in choir [to sustain the program],” she says. Even so, choir is one elective that isn’t in very high demand. This year, with very limited space in most other elective classes, Patterson says she could have placed around 40 or 50 students in choir. But most people weren’t interested. The question, then, as Patterson proposes, is “How do we … create a culture where people will want to take that class?”
One answer is recruiting from middle schools. Wagner-West believes one reason fewer guys are signing up for choir in high school is the lack of vocal music programs in the lower grades. “It’s hard to get people to sing,” she remarks, when they haven’t had any experience with it. To get middle-schoolers interested in choir, she brings her Royal Blues on tour to schools to “talk it up,” describing college opportunities, Grant’s prestigious program, and the opportunity to make new friends and try something new.
Another option on the table is opening Harmonaires and Choralaires to middle school students who could come at the beginning or end of the day, as is done with band and with math and science courses. “A good way to build a program—whether it’s football or science [or choir]—is to grow it up through the younger grades,” explains Patterson, who made this suggestion to help solve.
Leadership also plays an important role. Wagner-West has noticed that “the guys that do put themselves out there end up becoming the leaders,” helping the others feel comfortable singing out. She contends that no one should worry about feeling comfortable in choir in any case: although they are “a really close-knit group,” the choir community is “incredibly welcoming.”
“Choir becomes a family,” she says with a smile.
For now, though, she still faces the question of how to help that family grow.
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Written by Katie Gilbert and Maya Allen
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Friday, 30 October 2009 |
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*This story relies heavily on anonymous sources, and names in quotes have been changed. All sources were independently verified, following Grantonian editorial protocol.
The matter was brought to her attention three years ago. Susan Stautz, a Spanish teacher at Portland Community College (PCC), encountered a particularly serious case of plagiarism involving two of her students. The two, a boy and a girl, were involved in an abusive relationship at the hands of the boy.
Stautz explains that, according to the male student’s upbringing and beliefs, “Women are supposed to obey men automatically.” He was accustomed to this assumption and because of this wasn’t used to be being denied a demand. In this case it was a demand for a plagiarized assignment.
The woman in this situation was subjected to verbal abuse, which eventually became physical. Eventually she was forced to file a restraining order and switch schools. “She had to basically escape from the relationship,” says Stautz.
This particular incident occurred three years ago as a conflict rooted in cultural differences. However, girls are willingly complying with plagiarism demands from male students in a similar way at Grant.
One senior, “Samantha,” has been, in her words, “helping” a group of boys since her junior year at Grant. It started with tutoring members of the men’s basketball team “until they started getting overwhelmed,” she says. “I’m the team mom for them, so when they needed help with homework, I was there,” explains Samantha.
Still, she continues to help these boys. Why? Because “they’re the only thing I have ‘till I get out of here,” she says. She explained that until she graduates, sports are “[her] life. That’s what I’m known for. That’s all I’ll ever be known for.”
Interestingly, the boys are often willing, even strategizing, to get girls to cheat for them in school. “Michael” describes his three-step method: First, express how hard the particular class is to the girl and imply you need a lot of help. Next, get them to offer help, but make it seem like it’s only going to happen once. Finally, repeat the process until it becomes a pattern.
Michael describes the routine without hesitating: “They know, low-key, this is not going to be the last time they do the work for me,” he says nonchalantly.
What Michael describes is plagiarism, and according to a US News and World Reports survey taken in 2008, 98% of high school students partake in it. Eighty percent of these students are classified as “high achieving,” and 51 % of students, including Michael, “[do] not believing cheating [is] wrong.”
“I don’t think it’s wrong because it’s not like I’m forcing them,” Michael justifies. “They offer and take the initiative after I persuade them a little bit, so why not?”
Teachers and staff understand where these opinions are coming from, but they don’t agree with such practices.
“Plagiarism has been around for a long time,” says Stautz, who once taught at Grant herself. She explains that it is because students are thinking in the short term and not the long term. She also explains that this particular issue, girls doing work for boys, is widespread.
Plagiarism certainly is not limited to Grant. A Portland State University football player describes a similar process to the one outlined by Michael. Bribing girls to do homework for him has become common practice.
“When I first joined the football team, all the junior and senior football players told me that even the prettiest girls weren’t worth my time. They said playing football means I have to maintain good grades, so the best bet is to find smart girls who will do their part in helping you get your work done.”
However, the boys don’t seem to realize the risks involved. Says the PSU athlete, “I don’t think I’m going to get caught. How will they catch me? It’s all in fine print, and typed on the computer.” He defiantly concludes that “Yes I’m going to continue to do it, and yes I do know the consequences. But when you have a lot of work… it’s kind of hard doing it all by myself.”
Grant head football coach and counselor Diallo Lewis expresses disappointment in these boys for two reasons: “One, that they wouldn’t show the commitment of doing the work themselves and two, that they would take advantage of someone like that.”
Other teachers and staff at Grant struggle over this issue as well. They grasp for solutions in the same way Lewis has tried to grasp the ethics of the conflict. History teacher Donald Gavitte explains that “if the laws aren’t respected, people won’t follow them,” and that “[plagiarism] has to be caught before it even starts.” Gavitte believes that rooting out plagiarism is difficult. Although teachers have a lot on their plates, “one has to know the capacity of their students. That’s part of being a teacher.”
Vice Principal Brian Chatard agrees that this is a difficult matter. Chatard, as well as Stautz, explained that there are measures teachers can take against plagiarism. Involving students in assignments such as speeches and exams that require their personal opinions, or creating assignments that require a lot of in-class work are only some of the ideas they came up with.
“There are multiple ways for [students] to demonstrate they know the material,” says Chatard. He explains that it helps “not to just assign a whole bunch of assignments you can copy off someone else.” Stautz also indicates that there is need for teachers to promote good behavior in class to help combat plagiarism. She said “when you promote good behavior you get better results than when you just punish bad behavior.”
The student planner addresses the consequences of plagiarism by punishing involved parties with zeros on the assignment or failing the class. But how is a perpetrator who isn’t enrolled in, or never taken the class, punished? The punishment for the boys here is clear, but what about the girls?
“I remember when we first got the policy,” comments Strautz, who co-wrote the GHS plagiarism policy along with teacher Therese Cooper and others. She said that it’s not fair “for the person who didn’t write the paper to passively allow for it” and to not carry any responsibility. She, as well as others, also expresses that what these girls are doing is unfair to themselves as well the boys. “It’s symptomatic of you not standing up for yourself.”
Many believe that the girls involved only do it because of issues of self-esteem, a desire for acceptance, or attention. Regarding participating females, Gavitte states that “not only are they plagiarizing but… they can’t feel very highly of themselves if they’re doing this. It’s like cheating without getting any of the benefits and all the risk. It’s crazy.”
The self-proclaimed “team mom,” Samantha, argues that she does it to help them graduate and participate in sports at the same time. “It might screw them,” she admits, and “It’s a risk, but it’s risk we’re willing to take.” She just wants the boys to be able to graduate.
“Christopher” (a classmate of Samantha) believes she is forgetting herself in the grand scheme of her actions however. He reported that he tried to talk to her during class about this, saying she could do better in school by focusing on her own work, but to no avail. He explained that “she thinks their being able to play is the most important thing “more important than anything else.”
Samantha confesses that her own grades slip as a result of all the work she does for others, but explained that the team “is awesome and [she] really just enjoys watching them play.” She knows she is smart but she continues to put these boys in front of her own education nonetheless.
Lewis, maybe most of all, was impassioned by this answer. “She’s not helping them; she’s only hindering them and getting in the way of their success. I would want to find out what the real reason behind it is. Is it that she wants attention from these guys, acceptance from his peer group, or what?”
“It is an issue of self esteem, said Stautz in response. I think, unfortunately, it is still true today that girls are afraid to be smart.” Gavitte agreed, pointing out that this whole issue is “like a form of abuse [and] shows that women have come a long way,” yet, “they are still putting themselves into subservient roles.”
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Written by Ally Bray
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Friday, 30 October 2009 |
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You cross the street, into a neighborhood from which your parents have repeatedly told you to stay away; or you're on your way to a friend's house, but as far as your parents are concerned, you are getting coffee from the Starbucks outside Fred Meyer. Now imagine the same situation plus the new Verizon-Vodafone "Family Locator." This service, which is an evolution of Verizon Wireless old "Chaperone" plan, allows parents to track their children using the global positioning system (GPS) built into all cellphones. Family Locator sends parents alerts via their cellphones or computers on schedules they themselves have determined telling them exactly where their family members are, including a detailed, interactive map and step-by-step driving instructions which will take them straight to their children's coordinates. Until recently, Verizon Wireless "Chaperone" service was limited to use on the LG Electronic's Migo phone, but the Family Locator expansion, introduced in September, is now compatible with a number of phones, including the LG "enV" TOUCH, Motorola Rival, and Samsung Alias 2. Sign-up with Family Locator has been streamlined into an entirely online process, meaning long calls to customer services or multiple visits to the Verizon Wireless store have both been eliminated. Verizon Wireless has given the service a makeover as well, introducing new features, such as scheduled updates listing the nearest address of a child's location, and improving upon old characteristics of Chaperone, giving the old map a new 3-D, bird's-eye-view presentation. The service costs $9.99 per month for each phone being tracked, and includes unlimited messaging and data usage, according to the Verizon Wireless website. "[It's] way over the top," says junior Katelyn Hart, a member of the Verizon Wireless network. "If you trust your kid enough to go out and have a cell phone, you should probably trust them to be good." Trust is certainly an issue when it comes to family tracking plans, which are offered by Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextell, and AT&T. Parents are not the only ones capable of utilizing the service: jealous boyfriends, girlfriends, or spouses can take full advantage of the opportunity to closely track the whereabouts of their significant others, and things can quickly slide into awkward ground. In 2000, the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to consider a new set of privacy rules that take into account advances in geographic location information. In October of 2007, New York Times journalist Laura M. Holson investigated the upswing in the use of GPS as a means of locating friends and family. In her article, "These Phones Can Find You," Holson makes the point that "If GPS made it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder to hide." In order for Family Locator to be applicable, The “Locator” and “Locatee” phones must both be under the same account. If an employee has a work phone paid for by his boss, the latter has the ability to track the phone. The same applies for parents who pay for their children’s phone service, spouses on a joint plan, and so on. While junior Katelyn Hart doesn't foresee her own parents considering the service, she thinks it is likely that there will be high school parents who take advantage of it. "If your kid is really out of control, [it makes sense] to use it." If you would like to share your opinion on the new Verizon Family Locator, feel free to contact the Grantonian at
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