Wednesday,  Jan. 08, 2014 • Vol. 16--No. 176 • 39 of 42

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hood, rekindling a decades-old debate about how best the state and homeowners should respond to beach erosion and the increasingly rising waters of the Pacific Ocean.
• Some property owners want to be able to install a seawall or something similar to protect their property. Doing so, scientists say, could lead the sand on the nearby coastline -- including Sunset Beach, home to some of the world's top surfing contests -- to disappear.
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Education and Justice departments seek to end discrimination in school discipline practices

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration is issuing new recommendations on classroom discipline that seek to end the apparent disparities in how students of different races are punished for violating school rules.
• Civil rights advocates have long said that a "school-to-prison" pipeline stems from overly zealous school discipline policies targeting black and Hispanic students that bring them out of school and into the court system.
• Attorney General Eric Holder said the problem often stems from well intentioned "zero-tolerance" policies that too often inject the criminal justice system into the resolution of problems. Zero tolerance policies, a tool that became popular in the 1990s, often spell out uniform and swift punishment for offenses such as truancy, smoking or carrying a weapon. Violators can lose classroom time or become saddled with a criminal record.
• "Ordinary troublemaking can sometimes provoke responses that are overly severe, including out of school suspensions, expulsions and even referral to law enforcement and then you end up with kids that end up in police precincts instead of the principal's office," Holder said.
• In American schools, black students without disabilities were more than three times as likely as whites to be expelled or suspended, according to government civil rights data collection from 2011-2012. Although black students made up 15 percent of students in the data collection, they made up more than a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled.
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