The costs associated with the autism epidemic are often hard to quantify. No dollar amount can be broadly ascribed to the personal, familial and social costs that will be extracted by the generation of disabled kids America has produced since the Reagan Revolution of the early 1980s. No one claims to know for sure how many of them there are, let alone what they cost.

But 30 years worth of data recorded in annual "Special Education Statistical Reports" from the Indiana Department of Education (DoE) offer some hints. And when the State Board of Education approves the 2009-2010 Report on Feb. 2, 2010, it will mark the 32d year in a row that special ed funding has risen in Indiana.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels said I-69 is on the fast track to be completed by 2012.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels says the first three sections will be completed three years ahead of schedule.

The governor says all of this could be done within the interstate's $700 million budget. -- Evansville's WFIE, Channel 14. Oct. 23, 2009

Fallen leaves crunch beneath the steps of 20-plus sixth graders as they run about with clipboards in hand behind Edgewood Primary School. Carroll Ritter watches the miniature scientists, equipped with tape measurers and calculators, in their quests to determine the diameters and circumferences of surrounding trees.

"Yes, I knew it!" exclaims a boy, pumping a reddened fist into the air when his math comes out correctly. Within the next 30 minutes, each student's calculations will prove a familiar mathematical concept: pi = 3.14.

"Today's exercise is a practical use of math with hands-on outdoor experience," says Ritter, the environmental education coordinator at Sycamore Land Trust (SLT). "A lot of subjects can be taught using the outdoors. It's fun, it's practical, and it's real world."

High-cost, unregulated private student loans are just one example of why we need a strong Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Indiana's Democratic Senator Evan Bayh sits on the Senate Banking Committee and is a key vote to create a robust new watchdog that would keep an eye on the loan market for students and set strong rules for fairer private student loan marketing and terms.

As someone who will graduate with about $70,000 in private loan debt from IU Bloomington, I urge the senator to create the CFPA.

We've been told since we were young that a college degree is the key to our future. Now that I've been in college for a few years, I also understand how society benefits from our education. We are challenged to form a vision for impacting the world, and we get the training and tools necessary to do it.

More than 480 high school students from around the United States learned about Islam during the IU High School Journalism Institute Summer Workshop in July. Zakariah D. Love, a member of the Bloomington Islamic Center, called it "a good opportunity for the students to create knowledge about Islam interactively, rather than to receive it from the media."

The Summer Workshop challenges students' viewpoints and enables them to have the chance to meet a variety of people from different perspectives and to approach and interview them, said Institute Director Teresa A. White, a full-time lecturer at the IU School of Journalism. "We want to instruct and improve journalistic and publication staff skills and give our students the opportunity to be more knowledgeable, professional and open-minded."

To help achieve this goal on the topic of Islam, students wrote feature stories, straight news stories or editorials about a lecture presented by IU professor Faiz Rahman, president of the Islamic Center in Bloomington. They also interviewed members of the Bloomington Islamic Center.

The following letter was written by Rebecca Riall, a former board member of the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center, which dissolved after the resignation of all members. Riall resigned to protest IU’s lack of attention to the interests of American Natives.

I am writing to tell you why the First Nations Educational and Cultural Center (FNECC) Board is dissolving and to share with you my challenge to IU to include American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians in diversity policies.

In the remainder of this letter, I speak only for myself, not my former fellow board members.

The FNECC board fought for the establishment of an American Indian/Alaska Native/Native Hawaiian student center and has, on a volunteer basis, organized the FNECC's programming, represented IU to American Indian communities and provided student support services since 2006.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Board of IUB American Indian Center Quits After Lockout; American Indian Students Seek Equitable Treatment Within IU's Office of Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs and Plan Independent Community Center

It may be that my generation was the last allowed outside. Born in 1964, the final year of the baby boom, mine was the ultimate generation whose parents either didn’t care about, or were blissfully ignorant of, the real-world’s dangers.

As a 6 year old, I broke my first bone on a jungle-gym that today would violate every tenet of the Geneva conventions. Sharp, metal and covered in rust, it was a geodesic monolith, buried in the school playground, lacerating every kid who dared climb upon it.

Which was all of us.

For my seventh Christmas, my parents bought me a backyard trampoline. As far as I could tell, its purpose was no higher than that of a personal abattoir. Replete with exposed bolts and a brace of jagged springs, the trampoline daily extracted pounds of bloody flesh from both myself and every other kid in the neighborhood.

Latino students and others who are learning English may get left out of a proposed law that aims to close achievement gaps and other disparities between Indiana students of different backgrounds.

HB 1107, authored by Rep. Greg Porter (D-Indianapolis), would require the Indiana Department of Education to establish standards for teacher training programs in "cultural competency," or the ability to understanding how a student's background can affect learning style.

Sallyann Murphey did not plan on being a teacher. With a degree in politics and modern history, she started her career as a journalist and producer for the BBC. In 1991, she and her family moved to a farm in Brown County. Murphey enrolled her daughter in Harmony School, and her career changed direction.

She questioned her daughter's social studies curriculum and brought her concerns to the school. But instead of being brushed off, she was invited to teach her own class. Seven years later, she finds herself both teaching at Harmony School and working as an advocate on behalf of the school and its mission.

Murphey is passionate about Harmony School's practices. She believes in the school's mission and works to create other schools around the country that accept and support its ideas.