Word: orchards
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...Orchard Hills is a neighborhood that seems to be several steps behind the times and half a step ahead of a trailer park. The people who live in this scruffy, working-class section of Wichita are mostly poor. Many of the streets are unpaved, and most of the one-story aluminum-sided cottages look as if they would blow to pieces in a stiff wind. Until three years ago, the local school was in equally sad shape, plagued by some of the lowest grades and worst attendance rates in the city. All of which might seem to qualify Orchard Hills...
Larry Vaughn, superintendent of schools in Wichita, thought otherwise. When a group of business people from New York City came to town in 1994 looking for a site for a privately managed, for-profit public school, Vaughn invited them to consider setting up shop in Orchard Hills. "We figured if their design worked there," Vaughn explains, "it would give us the leverage to go to almost any other school in our district and be successful...
...delivering the Orchard Hills school over to what has come to be called the Edison Project, Vaughn took a wager that only two other school districts in the country were prepared to risk at the time: he recommended that his board sign a contract permitting Edison to hire its own principal and teachers, manage its own budget and teach its own curriculum. In exchange the district would pay Edison about $3,600 a child, roughly the same amount it spends on its other 48,000 students. If Edison educated the children for less money, it could pocket the difference...
...didn't start with the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh. In December 1905, in Caldwell, Idaho, a sagebrush railroad town near Boise, a bomb attached to a garden gate killed the state's former Governor, Frank Steunenberg. Blame for the murder was quickly pinned on traveling "sheep dealer" Harry Orchard, who confessed to being a paid assassin for the Western Federation of Miners, one of the era's most powerful labor unions. The union's highest officials were indicted, and the young Clarence Darrow hired to defend them. The result was a kind of class war in miniature disguised...
Yesterday, the deceased's family returned to their home in Orchard Park, N. Y. A memorial service will be held this weekend; according to Burke-White, Krueger's cousin...