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Paying respects
The annual Memorial Day program at Waite High School included a tribute to the late Toledo Mayor D. Michael Collins. At left, Collins’ widow, Sandy Drabik Collins with Toledo Police Officers Sandy Ceglarek and Chris Holland. At right, Pat Frazier visits the memorial that includes the name of her brother-in-law Edwin Frazier, who died in World War II. This year marked the 100th anniversary of the Memorial Day tradition at Waite. (Photos courtesy of Kristie Rogers)
Digital divide
Parents warned of Internet risks for kids By Larry Limpf News Editor news@presspublications.com To do his job Scott Frank assumes a variety of identities – from 12-year-old boys to 16-year-old girls and others in between. Frank, a captain with the Wood County Sheriff’s Department and member of the Ohio Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, has logged more than 4,200 hours online, often posing as a child to track the actions of sexual predators. In a two-hour program at Lake High School Wednesday, Frank gave about 30 adults a view of the Internet they rarely see but their children might experience on a daily basis. He described a “surface web” that comprises about 4 percent of what the Internet offers. But he urged parents to become familiar with the “deep web” that comprises the other 96 percent – the part of the Internet often hidden from view and isn’t indexed by search engines. “If you don’t become part of your child’s Internet world, then someone else will take your place,” he said. He drew an audible groan from the parents when he told of single fathers who traffic their own daughters on the web. Some disturbing trends in “elationships” are in place, Frank told the parents.
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If you don’t become part of your child’s Internet world, then someone else will take your place.
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The budget bill pending in the Ohio Senate doesn’t “put the dollars where the kids really are,” Jeff Carpenter, treasurer of the Lake Local School District, told the senate’s education finance subcommittee in recent testimony. He challenged assertions by the Buckeye Association of School Administrators and other educational organizations that in its current form, the bill, which was adopted in the House of Representatives in April, will leave no district with less state funding in Fiscal Year 2016, which starts July 1, than in fiscal 2015. “Even the governor’s proposal is more favorable by far than the house’s version,” Carpenter told The Press. Under the house proposal, Lake schools will receive about $32,866 less in the next fiscal year, he estimates. “The big picture is the loss of tangible personal property taxes plus the fact we are capped at 73 percent of formula,” Carpenter said. The formula funding model weighs a district’s student enrollment figures, average per-pupil tax valuation of a district and what is called the state share index, which measures a district’s median income to calculate its capacity to raise revenues. “You put all those components together in a formula and it ranks all the districts and their capacity to pay,” Carpenter said. “The formula suggested we would be getting a 20 percent and a 19 percent increase in fiscal 14 and 15 respectively. But the state actually only gave us increases of 6 ½ and 6 ½ percent. They capped us – and we weren’t the only district – at that amount. That was equal for us to a loss of $2.8 million. Now they’re going to short us again plus we’ll take another hit from the loss of tangible personal property tax reimbursements.” In his testimony, Carpenter asserted the bill doesn’t make “positive structural
Notably, teen web users are getting to know relative strangers on an emotional level and to some teens those are just as “valid and real as those that exist in person.” This “digital intimacy” is narrowing the number of relationships, resulting in teens giving more of their time to fewer relationships. Also, while they’re online, teens won’t be dismissed based on their appearance. “It feels safer that real life situations,” Frank said. While text messaging may have reached a plateau or even declined among
teens, app messaging has been on the rise. Online predators are typically male, but other than that, Frank said there is no viable ‘predator profile.” His own work has resulted in eight arrests and convictions – all males, including an accountant, a student at Bowling Green State University, and a deputy sheriff. To catch them, he posed as a 14-year-old girl. Predators are both “tech savvy and kids savvy” and will use a grooming process and eventually try to replace a parent in a child’s emotional needs and build their self esteem, Frank said, adding gifts are usually offered during the process. To evade their parents, tech savvy teens will often install more than one browser on their devices and erase the icon from the deskstop. Frank said the biggest gateway to the “deep web” is the Tor browser. According to its website, its software protects users by “bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection…” “From an investigator’s standpoint it’s a nightmare,” Frank said. He advised parents to remind their children many social media profiles are fake.