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• WASHINGTON (AP) -- A more well-rounded curriculum with less focus on a single test. Higher academic standards and more difficult classwork. Continued cuts to extracurricular and other activities because of the tough economy.
• Education Secretary Arne Duncan says those are some of the changes and challenges that children could notice as they start the new school year.
• Several significant reforms have taken place over the past three years.
• Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core standards, a set of uniform benchmarks for math and reading. Thirty-two states and the district have been granted waivers from important parts of the Bush-era No Child

Left Behind law. Billions in federal dollars have gone out to improve low-performing schools, tie teacher evaluations to student growth and encourage states to expand the number of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run.
• In an interview with The Associated Press, Duncan said he believes students will see the concrete effects of those changes when they head back to class.
• ___

• BILOXI, Miss. (AP) -- Federal housing authorities are auditing the use of more than $650 million in grants designated for an ambitious plan for sewage and water systems across south Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, The Associated Press has learned.
• The money was divided among five south Mississippi counties, with the most, more than $230 million, set aside for the largest, Harrison County. The entire plan is being audited by the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said Robbie Wilbur, spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality. Wilbur's agency hired engineering firms to draft the Gulf Region Water and Wastewater Plan after Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005.
• HUD officials would not comment on whether an audit is being done.

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