Word: florida
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nation's public schools, which these days stress cooperation over competition among their students, will take a giant step closer to the open marketplace this week when Florida's legislature approves the country's first statewide voucher system. It's an idea that in one form or another may be coming to states such as Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania -- and proponents are waiting to see if it will stand up to federal scrutiny. "State courts have upheld the idea of using vouchers in parochial schools," notes TIME's Adam Cohen, "but when it gets to the Supreme Court...
Vouchers may be the next big thing in American education. Thousands of students in Cleveland and Milwaukee, Wis., are using tax dollars to attend private schools, and Florida is poised to adopt the nation's first statewide program. Texas, New Mexico and Pennsylvania may follow. In New York City, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is thinking of introducing vouchers, though his schools' chancellor has threatened to resign if the mayor does. Privately funded voucher programs have sprung up in an additional 39 cities, and this week the largest such program in the U.S., founded by Wal-Mart scion John Walton and financier...
Like most college towns, Gainesville, Fla., home to the University of Florida, is an eco-conscious place. But even here, motivating youngsters to police the environment can be as hard as getting them to help out with the dishes after dinner. Sometimes it takes a kid to inspire other kids to care--a kid like Will Vinson, 12, whose aluminum-can-recycling crusade lit a fire under the city's next generation. Since he was a nine-year-old fourth-grader at Littlewood Elementary School, Will has united classmates, teachers, recycling firms and other local companies...
...Westwood, Will, a student senator, has turned much of his attention to Florida's successful youth antismoking campaign, but he's stayed close to the recycling operation he started. Whenever he travels to Atlanta to see his grandparents, who don't recycle, he bags up their cans and hauls them back to his bins and crushers in Gainesville, but not before he tries to see an Atlanta Braves game. Will is a big baseball fan, and he would just love to keep Gainesville's schoolyards as green and clean as the field his idols play...
...provides perfect support and in some cases lends the music a tenacity that Petty's lilting whine, for all its mouthy charm doesn't. Echo, in the end, is the product of a band that knows itself well and is determined to remain the same group of free-willed, Florida-cool rockers they've always been. They may no longer be learning to fly, but they still won't back down...