The Jim Bakker Show

Bomb classes and gun counts: trauma of Mosul children under Islamic State

schoolchildren heading for schools after registering and receiving school bags

By Girish Gupta

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Schools in the east of the Iraqi city of Mosul are seeking to return to a semblance of normality after two years under Islamic State rule when they were either shuttered or forced to teach a martial curriculum that included lessons in bombmaking.

Around 40,000 students – most of whom have been kept at home by their parents since the militants captured Mosul in 2014 – will attend around 70 schools in the coming weeks after the buildings have been checked for unexploded bombs.

U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have retaken most eastern districts of the city and are preparing to push into the western part of Mosul, the largest city held by Islamic State across its self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Teachers and parents told Reuters about the jihadists’ brand of education received by those children who have attended school over the past two years, including many children of militants. This included chemistry lessons on bombmaking and maths classes devoted to tallying up weapons caches, they said.

“In math, my six-year-old son was counting rifles. In other classes, he was being taught about suicide bombing,” said Mishwan Yunis, a 41-year-old water ministry worker whose son attends Kufa Boys’ School.

“He lost two very important years of his life. He should have been in the third grade; now he goes back to first.”

The northern city is coming back to life with markets and shops reopening and people selling once-prohibited goods such as cigarettes openly on the streets yet the damage of battle is everywhere – and fighting rages just a few kilometers away.

At Kufa Boys’ School, children run around the concrete yard wearing new bright blue school bags provided by UNICEF, in the shadow of neighboring buildings reduced to rubble.

One schoolyard in the area has been turned into a cemetery covered with dozens of freshly dug graves.

Yet a return to normality will not be easy for children, who bears the scars of living in the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Iraq and the bitter battle for the city since late last year when Iraqi forces launched the biggest ground operation in the country since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.

They could face psychological hurdles, as might their teachers, many of who told Reuters they had been threatened with being hung from their schools’ walls if they did not continue teaching under Islamic State.

“Our role is bigger now than it was two or three years ago because you need to deal with the children’s psychological state before you can teach them,” said Omar Khudor Ali, headteacher of nearby Badayel Boys’ School.

“For us to do this we need better coordination between the teachers themselves and the entire education system.”

“I need to make them forget Islamic State and be free again,” said a teacher at the adjacent Badayel Girls’ School who asked that her name not be revealed for fear of retaliation by Islamic State, fighting Iraqi forces across a nearby river.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

Iraqi judo coach saved his black belt when Islamic State stormed Mosul club

Displaced Iraqi boys leave a tent school set by United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) at Hassan Sham camp, east of Mosul, Iraq

y Ulf Laessing

GOGJALI, Iraq (Reuters) – His black belt and membership card were all that Iraqi judo coach Ali Mahmoud managed to save when Islamic State stormed his club in Mosul, turning the gym into an arms training camp for fighters.

A veteran judoka practising the modern martial art since the age of five, Mahmoud saw his career as coach ending when the militants banned judo as “un-Islamic” after they seized Iraq’s the city in June 2014.

As the 39-year-old arrived one night at his Karama club in the Samah district to train for a tournament in Georgia, the fighters seized the gym.

“Daesh (Islamic State) accused me of training police and soldiers to fight them,” said Mahmoud, who has fled the city since Iraqi forces launched a campaign in October to retake it.

“They saw me as enemy,” he said, showing his membership card from the Iraqi judo federation licensing him as coach in the northern city. He once won a national championship in his age group in 2012, he said.

To keep in shape Mahmoud tried discreetly exercising in public parks at night but gave up after a patrol of the Hisbah — the militants’ religious police enforcing their extreme rules such as flogging people caught smoking — stopped him.

“I was only doing simple workouts but they warned me to stop, saying what I was doing was wrong,” he said, standing at a market in the Gogjali suburb where he fled with his family when fighting reached his neighborhood.

“With one of my sons I was working out sometimes at home but I never invited anyone as it was too dangerous,” said Mahmoud who lost contact with his former judo mates during the two and a half years of Islamic State control.

“Some got killed, others fled,” he said. “Daesh (later) destroyed the club, looted everything.”

His account could not be verified as Samah remains a battle zone but several residents said Mosul sports clubs closed under Islamic State which seized such facilities to give young people weapons training.

Most youth gave up any activity — even street soccer — as parents fearing trouble kept them indoors. There were some limited exercises at schools run by Islamic State by many parents pulled them out worried they got brainwashed.

“I removed my four children from school after one year as they got trained in weapons and were taught wrong ideas,” said Walid Ahmed, a teacher. “So they stayed at home all the time.”

To get teenagers back to education and sports the United Nations has set up tent schools in camps for displaced people — dozens were dancing and singing at the Khazir camp east of Mosul.

“Daesh taught us things at school like counting bullets they were holding in their hands,” said Ahmed’s veiled daughter Marwa.

(Reporting by Ulf Laessing; Editing by Jermey Gaunt)

Iraqi children dump Islamic State’s books of violence

Students attend classes after the city was recaptured from the Islamic State militants in Qayyara, Iraq,

By Isabel Coles

QAYYARA, Iraq (Reuters) – The school walls have a fresh coat of paint and classrooms are crammed, but it will take longer to undo the damage done to thousands of Iraqi children who lived under Islamic State for more than two years.

Although the school term began officially in September, only this week have pupils in the northern town of Qayyara been re-issued with standard Iraqi textbooks, which the militants replaced with their own in an attempt to brainwash a generation.

Islamic State was driven from the town three months ago in the early stages of a campaign to recapture the city of Mosul, which lies about 60 km (40 miles) to north and is now under assault by Iraqi security forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition.

As Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate is eroded, a clearer picture is emerging of the group’s project and the enduring mark left on those who lived through it.

“We are happy to be back at school,” said eight-year-old Iman, who like most of her classmates stopped attending classes after Islamic State took control. “They wanted us to come but we didn’t want to because we don’t know how to study in their language, the language of violence.”

When the militants overran the area in the summer of 2014, they allowed schools to run as normal, local people said. But later they banned subjects they considered un-Islamic such as geography, history and civic education, and used boys’ schools as a recruiting ground.

The following school year, beginning in 2015, Islamic State imposed an entirely new curriculum to inculcate children with their ideology. Maths exercises were expressed in terms of weapons and ammunition: “one bullet plus two bullets equals how many bullets?”.

Students attend classes after the city was recaptured from the Islamic State militants in Qayyara, Iraq, November 17, 2016. REUTERS/Ari Jalal/File Photo

At that point, most parents stopped sending their children to school, and many pupils who were old enough to make up their minds left voluntarily.

As a result, most children have been set back by two grades, and since some teachers have been displaced by the violence, there is only one teacher for roughly every 80 pupils at the girls’ school in Qayyara.

“They have forgotten their lessons… Now we are reminding them,” said their teacher Maha Nadhem Kadhem, pacing around the classroom, in which four girls are squeezed onto each bench made for two. “We don’t want them to be illiterate and ignorant.”

The headmistress, who asked to remain unnamed, said Islamic State’s vice squad known as the Hisba had made regular visits to the school to ensure compliance with the group’s strict dress code for women and girls.

Others such as Farouq Mahjoub, the assistant headmaster of a secondary school for boys in Qayyara, said he had been threatened with death unless he turned up to work, even though no pupils came to class by the end.

“The biggest impact is on children,” said Mahjoub, whose school was hit by an airstrike several months ago. “Children are malleable; you can change their opinion and beliefs quickly.”

Mahjoub said children behaved more aggressively than before, and that the games they play now are violent, estimating it would take no less than five years to reverse the damage, even if a plan to rehabilitate them was put into effect.

Missing from the classroom in the girls’ school are dozens of pupils whose male relatives were associated with Islamic State and are no longer welcome in Qayyara. Mahjoub said around 10 of his own students had joined the militants.

Students attend classes after the city was recaptured from the Islamic State militants in Qayyara, Iraq, November 17, 2016. REUTERS/Ari Jalal/File Photo

Behind the school are the remains of a car bomb that has yet to be removed and the sky is dark with smoke from oil wells the militants set ablaze, making it hard to breathe and turning sheep black.

On a nearby street, a group of boys coughing from the smoke described what they had seen under Islamic State, including the bodies of its opponents strung up in public places as an example to others.

Dancing and singing the same Iraqi patriotic songs blaring from passing military convoys, 11-year-old Thamer paused to describe how a local Islamic State member called Abu Suleiman had been lynched after Iraqi forces recaptured the town.

The man’s brain and heart spilled out of his body, said Thamer in a high-pitched voice: “They took revenge on him,” he said. “It was right. We were happy.”

(editing by David Stamp)

Hurricane Matthew closes schools for thousands of Haiti’s children

By Makini Brice

LES CAYES, Haiti (Reuters) – As Haiti cleans up the destruction wrought by Hurricane Matthew, which killed more than 1,000 people and destroyed thousands of homes, the storm has also disrupted the education of many school children in the country.

School has resumed for students in many parts of Haiti that escaped the worst of Matthew’s wrath, but an estimated 100,000 children are missing class after their schools were either reduced to rubble or converted to makeshift shelters.

In battered Les Cayes in southwest Haiti, many whose homes were blown away by Matthew remain holed up in Dumarsais Estime National School, meaning children were unable to resume class.

Bernadette Saint-Louis, a 38-year-old hawker of bananas and beans, said she came to the shelter with her four children as the storm approached.

Like her, many who lost everything to the hurricane had little if any money to send their children to school – and little option when nearby schools had been knocked down.

“Only God knows what I will do for them,” she said. “I have nothing to live on.”

While the capital, Port-au-Prince, sustained little lasting damage from the hurricane, the damage to schools along Haiti’s southern coast has raised questions about how to resume the school year in the area.

At least 300 schools in the region were destroyed or were being used as shelters, meaning over 100,000 children were missing class, UNICEF said.

Education in Haiti is a political hot-button issue ahead of a looming presidential election, which has been delayed again by the storm. Virtually every major presidential candidate has promised to expand access to schooling.

At the start of the school year in September, amid persistently high unemployment, inflation and stagnant economic growth, the cost of school fees, books and uniforms was a major topic in local media for weeks.

Interim President Jocelerme Privert cited the damage to schools in an interview on Tuesday. “We must find a way to make them functional,” he said.

That is also the hope of Haitian school director Jean-Emmanuel Pierre-Louis. Shortly after the storm passed over the area, he stood in the remains of his office in the Centre of Classical Training College of Port Salut.

The damage was severe. The private school, which had been built on the side of the mountain where teachers and students had views of green, rolling hills, no longer had a roof and chunks of its walls were now rubble scattered across the floor.

Pierre-Louis pointed to a periodic table of elements, all that was left of the chemistry lab. Files of some of the 350 students had been laid out to dry on surfaces under the sun.

Salvaged benches sat stacked outside. The remains of some classrooms were too precarious to venture into.

Pierre-Louis’ home was destroyed by the hurricane, as were those of family members and students.

“What will we do with the students if the state and the international community does not intervene?” he asked.

(Editing by Simon Gardner and Peter Cooney)

U.S. network of Turkish cleric facing pressure as those at home seek help

U.S. based cleric Fethullah Gulen at his home in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania

By Julia Harte and Matt Spetalnick

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A network of more than 150 U.S. charter schools linked to followers of Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Muslim cleric the Turkish government blames for instigating July’s failed coup, has come under growing financial and legal strain, according to school officials, current and former members of Gulen’s movement, and public records reviewed by Reuters.

The publicly financed schools, a key source of jobs and business opportunities for U.S. members of Gulen’s global movement, have sharply slowed their expansion in recent years, public records show.

The slowdown comes amid a series of government probes in more than a dozen states into allegations ranging from misuse of taxpayer funds to visa fraud. The investigations launched by state and federal officials have not resulted in criminal charges or directly implicated Gulen, whose name is not on any of the charter schools. The increased pressure on the schools also comes as the Turkish government is cracking down on Gulen supporters at home and presses hard for Gulen’s extradition.

Just three new schools were opened each in 2015 and this year to date, down from a peak of 23 new schools in 2010, according to a Reuters review of the public records of 153 charter schools and their management companies around the country.

The decline runs counter to the steady growth over the past six years of all U.S. charter schools, which receive taxpayer funds but are exempt from some rules that govern traditional state-run public schools.

At the same time, 15 schools have been closed or transferred to owners with no connection to Gulen’s movement since 2010. In at least 11 of those cases — including in Georgia, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio – the management firms or individual schools themselves had faced official investigations, Reuters found.

“Since these investigations and pressures from media coverage have been going on, the schools are much more, maybe five times more careful, in terms of their finances, how they hire contractors,” said Hakan Berberoglu, acting executive director of the Illinois-based Niagara Foundation, which aims to promote the inter-faith dialogue espoused by Gulen, its honorary president.

“They are much more careful in how they expand,” he told Reuters.

Berberoglu said that the schools are not officially affiliated with Gulen and are not centrally controlled by anyone.

In another sign of a slowdown, the number of visa applications the schools submitted for guest workers from Turkey and other countries declined to 360 last year from more than 1,000 in 2010, immigration records show. The trend reflects a desire by the schools linked to Gulen followers to avoid further government scrutiny, according to current and former members of the movement.

In the wake of the failed coup, Ankara’s attorneys in the United States have stepped up an aggressive campaign to try to persuade local, state and federal authorities to open new inquiries and discredit the charter schools and other U.S. operations linked to Gulen.

Asked about signs that the movement is under stress in the United States, Alp Aslandogan, Gulen’s spokesman, said: “We are not worried about that.”

Many Gulen supporters in Turkey are now looking to their U.S.-based brethren for material support and safe haven, according to current and former members of the movement.

“It’s been my job to save people, to help people who want to come over here,” said one U.S.-based Turkish businessman, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of his efforts to assist would-be immigrants.

The reclusive imam Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, denies involvement in the coup attempt.

BASE OF BUSINESS

Gulen’s global movement – known as “Hizmet”, which means “service” in Turkish – seeks to spread what his supporters say is the charismatic preacher’s moderate brand of Islam, which promotes Western-style education, free markets and inter-faith communication.

The United States has become the Gulen movement’s most important base of business operations outside Turkey except for Germany, according to independent experts on the movement.

In addition to the schools, followers run a loosely affiliated collection of businesses, civic associations and charities. Some Turkish-American-owned contractors who do business with the schools have been targeted in state and federal investigations over allegations they received preferential treatment, according to current and former members and legal documents.

Berberoglu said the schools have hired and done business with members of the movement because they can be relied on as trustworthy and capable.

“You want these schools to be successful, you need to depend on people that you know,” he said.

Groups linked to the Gulen movement, including several whose directors have also led charter schools, have sponsored hundreds of U.S. congressional trips to Turkey and nearby countries in the past eight years, according to congressional records. But such trips have mostly halted since 2015 when the Justice Department launched a criminal probe of possible irregularities in funding sources for some of the travels.

Aslandogan acknowledged that some of the schools were started by Gulen “sympathizers.” He added that the movement led by the 77-year-old cleric exerts no central control, and some followers say his role is strictly inspirational.

The school network has put down deep roots in the United States over the past nearly two decades with administrators deftly navigating the public funding process.

A series of bond sales have totaled $683 million since 2006, according to data collected by Reuters. Bond sales by four of the school chains alone in 2014 – the latest annual data available for this niche – accounted for 6 percent of the entire tax-exempt U.S. charter school bond market that year.

LEGAL ACTIONS

U.S. lawyers for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan say they suspect the schools are a front that generates $500 million annually that is funneled from Gulen’s movement for subversive activities against the Turkish state, such as bribing officials. The attorneys do not provide specifics on how they believe this is done.

Aslandogan, Gulen’s spokesman, dismissed the accusations as “false” and unsubstantiated, describing it as part of a vendetta against “movement participants” outside of Turkey.

In at least one instance – a Texas case – the Turkish government’s post-coup accusations against a large school chain have prompted renewed scrutiny.

The Texas Education Agency said in late July they were reviewing a complaint filed by the Turkish government’s legal team of alleged fiscal improprieties by Harmony Public Schools, a Houston-based firm that runs 48 charter schools.

In the complaint, lawyers for the Turkish government accused Harmony of misusing $18 million in public funds, funneling money to Gulen’s organization and also of discriminatory employment practices. No decision on whether to open a formal investigation has yet been announced

Soner Tarim, one of Harmony’s founders, denied any wrongdoing and said there was no “underlying conspiracy” in running the non-profit schools.

“The purpose was really to create math and science expertise,” Tarim told Reuters.

Tarim acknowledged, however, that his company has been squeezed by having to spend more on legal fees and public relations. “So it has some effect on our resources,” he said, “but not our reputation.”

(Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan, Kouichi Shirayanagi, Stephanie Kelly and Daniel Bases. Editing by Stuart Grudgings)

Are U.S. public schools prepared for an emergency?

By Lisa Rapaport

(Reuters Health) – More than a fifth U.S. school districts lack comprehensive plans to respond to natural disasters, epidemic diseases or other emergencies, a new report finds.

While almost 80 percent of school districts nationwide have plans to help students and staff with special needs during an emergency situation, only about 68 percent have protocols to reunite children with their families after disaster strikes, according to the report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Roughly 69 percent of school districts have procedures set up to cope with pandemic influenza or other infectious disease outbreaks and to offer mental health support to students, faculty and staff after a crisis, the report also found.

“Schools have direct contact with approximately 95 percent of America’s children between 5 and 17 years of age, for about six hours a day, and are active partners in infectious disease prevention and control and in the unfolding of any emergency event such as floods or hurricanes,” said lead report author Brenda Silverman of the CDC.

“Because children are separated from their caregivers while attending school, school preparedness plans need to reflect children’s unique needs with an emphasis on family reunification,” Silverman added by email.

To assess emergency preparedness, CDC researchers examined 2012 survey data on health policies and practices at about 700 school districts nationwide.

Respondents were asked whether the school district required schools to have a comprehensive plan in place to address four specific topics: family reunification, infectious disease outbreaks, provisions for people with special needs and mental health care after a crisis.

On all fronts, urban school districts were more likely to require plans than their rural counterparts.

Overall, districts in the Midwest were less likely to require schools to include specific topics in their crisis preparedness plans than districts in the Northeast and South.

Districts were less likely to coordinate emergency plans with families than with local law enforcement and emergency service providers, the report found.

About 43 percent of districts nationwide collaborated with families to develop preparedness, response and recovery plans.

Almost 95 percent of districts partnered with law enforcement, however, and 92 percent coordinated with fire officials.

While about 83 percent of districts coordinated with local emergency medical service providers, just 41 percent collaborated with a local hospital and 66 percent partnered with the local health department.

One limitation of the report is that the survey included “yes or no” responses that didn’t leave room for districts to explain the relevance of certain topics in their preparedness plans or identify areas for improvement, the authors note.

In addition, because the survey is only done every six years, it’s possible that the data from 2012 doesn’t reflect current practices or policies.

Still, the findings suggest that at least some school children may be vulnerable in an emergency, said Dr. Laura Faherty, a pediatrics researcher at RAND Corporation in Boston who wasn’t involved in the report.

“Schools are where kids spend the majority of their day, but they don’t exist in isolation,” Faherty said by email. “Coordination among health departments, healthcare settings, law enforcement, first responders, mental health and social services agencies, as well as families, is critical to making sure children are as safe as possible.”

The results of poor planning can be dire, said Dr. Daniel B. Fagbuyi, a researcher at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who wasn’t involved in the report.

“When schools aren’t fully prepared for a disaster life altering consequences may occur including increased morbidity and mortality,” Fagbuyi said by email. “Conversely, disaster preparedness activities at the school and in collaboration with community and parents fosters confidence, community resilience and can save lives.”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2cmM426 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, online September 16, 2016.

Out-of-control California wildfire grows, forces schools to close

Firefighters prepare hose lines to attempt to hold a road during the Pilot Fire near Silverwood Lake in San Bernardino county near Hesperia, California, U.S.

By Dan Whitcomb

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A wildfire burning out of control in mountains and foothills east of Los Angeles mushroomed more than 50 percent overnight, forcing authorities to order three school districts to cancel classes due to heavy smoke and dangerous conditions.

More than 900 firefighters were battling the so-called Pilot Fire, which has charred some 7,500 acres of bone-dry tinder and brush in the San Bernardino Mountains since it broke out around noon on Sunday.

“We feel it is in the best interest of safety that we keep our students and staff at home,” the Silver Valley Unified School District, which oversees nine schools in Mojave Desert, said in a statement on its website.

Also closing campuses on Tuesday were the Apple Valley and Hesperia school districts in those high desert communities some 90 miles east of Los Angeles.

More than 5,000 homes were under evacuation orders from the Pilot Fire, a highway and several roads were closed and smoke advisories were issued for the Mojave Desert area, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire).

No homes had been destroyed but Cal Fire said the blaze was only 6 percent contained as of Tuesday morning.

Some 400 miles to the north, the famed Highway 1 along the California coast was reopened to residents, one day after authorities were forced to close it in both directions due to the threat from the Soberanes Fire.

That blaze, which erupted on July 22, has already blackened 67,000 acres in the Big Sur area, destroying 57 homes and 11 outbuildings.

A bulldozer operator died on July 26 when his tractor rolled over as he helped property owners battle the flames, the sixth wildfire fatality in California this year.

Authorities have traced origins of the blaze to an illegal campfire left unattended in a state park about a mile from Highway 1. No arrests have been made so far.

As of Monday, more than 4,800 firefighters battling the flames had cut containment lines around 50 percent of its perimeter.

Firefighters are making gradual progress against the blaze as wildfire season in the western United States reaches its traditional peak, intensified by prolonged drought and extreme summer heat across California.

The conflagration is one of 35 major wildfires that have charred half a million acres in 12 states, mostly in the West, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by David Gregorio)

Iraq’s war children face void without world’s help: UNICEF country chief

UNICEF Iraq Representative Peter Hawkins speaks with media at a school for displaced people who fled from Mosul, in Nahrawan district, southeast of Baghdad, Iraq December 16, 2015. Picture taken December 16, 2015. REUTERS/Ahmed Saad

By Tom Esslemont

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A generation of children face the bleak prospect of going without an education unless the Iraqi government, its allies and aid agencies rebuild communities torn apart by years of war, a senior U.N. children’s agency official said on Friday.

Peter Hawkins, UNICEF representative in Iraq, said recent fighting between government forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, and Islamic State fighters, had cut off thousands of children from school and healthcare.

“We are faced with a whole generation losing its way and losing prospects for a healthy future,” said Hawkins in an interview.

Government institutions, faced with financial deficit, are collapsing leaving them dependent on U.N. agencies to provide schools and teacher training, following more than a decade of sectarian violence, Hawkins said during a visit to London.

“What is needed is a cash injection through central government so that we can see it building the systems required for an economic turnover,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Conflict has worsened the situation across Iraq, with an estimated 4.7 million children – about a third of all children in the country – in need of assistance, the U.N. agency said in a report last month.

Mass movements of people forced from their homes by fighting in areas like Ramadi and Falluja, west of the capital, Baghdad, put one in five Iraqi children at risk of death, injury, sexual violence, abduction and recruitment into fighting, the report said.

UNICEF said earlier this year that at least 20,000 children in Falluja faced the risk of forced recruitment into fighting and separation from their families.

“A big problem is the lack of schools, with a lack of investment in recent years meaning the systems have all but collapsed,” Hawkins said.

CHILD RECRUITMENT

Thousands of civilians across much of western Iraq’s rugged Anbar province have been driven from their homes into the searing desert heat in the last two years, as a tide of Islamic State fighters took control of key towns and cities.

Despite losing considerable ground on the battlefield, a massive suicide bombing in Baghdad’s central shopping district of Karrada last weekend showed Islamic State remains capable of causing major loss of life.

In Anbar, where fighting has ruined scores of residential areas, many of the people displaced by the militants were now “in limbo”, waiting in displacement centers, Hawkins said.

Nearly one in five schools in Iraq is out of use due to conflict. Since 2014 the U.N. has verified 135 attacks on educational facilities and personnel, with nearly 800 facilities taken over as shelters for the displaced, UNICEF data shows.

But Hawkins said he expected thousands of families to soon return home and rebuild their lives.

In Ramadi, where government forces retook control last December, UNICEF will help the ministry of education reestablish schools, provide catch-up lessons and teacher training over the summer after it had been “flattened” by fighting, Hawkins said.

The veteran aid worker, who has also worked in Angola, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Pakistan, said his “biggest fear” was that children could get caught up in a battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s biggest northern city still held by the militants.

Protection of children must be part of a military strategy to retake Mosul, said Hawkins.

Pressures on UNICEF’s $170 million annual budget for 2016-17, which Hawkins said was short by $100 million, were hampering its ability to reach all those affected and may mean some child protection programmes are abandoned, he said.

(Reporting By Tom Esslemont, Editing by Ros; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org)

Oil boom goes bust, Oklahoma protects drillers, squeezes schools

A Newcastle Public Schools bus is seen parked in Newcastle, Oklahoma April 6, 2016. The Newcastle schools are planning to reduce the school week to four days next year as a result of a nearly $1 million budget cut. REUTERS/

By Luc Cohen and Joshua Schneyer

NEWCASTLE, Okla. (Reuters) – After intense lobbying, Oklahoma’s oilmen scored a victory two years ago. State lawmakers voted to keep in place some of lowest taxes on oil and gas production in the United States – a break worth $470 million in fiscal year 2015 alone.

The state’s schools haven’t been so fortunate. In Newcastle, 23 miles from the capital of Oklahoma City, John Cerny recently learned that the school attended by his five-year-old granddaughter, Adelynn, will open just four days a week next year. The Bridge Creek school district will slash spending because of a projected $1.3 billion state budget shortfall next year.

Beth Lawton teaches first grade at Broadmoore Elementary in Moore, a city of 59,000 bordering the capital. In April, she and several colleagues were told their contracts won’t be renewed because of funding cuts. Broadmoore’s class sizes are expected to rise next year as a result.

“I think our lawmakers have failed us, and I don’t understand how little they value education,” Lawton said.

Oklahoma’s school-funding crisis is part of the pain inflicted by falling oil prices on energy-rich states across America that rely on natural-resources taxes to pay their governments’ bills. But the crisis in Oklahoma is especially dire, exacerbated by a legacy of large tax breaks bestowed upon oil companies.

Before the recent 60 percent decline in oil prices, a drilling bonanza minted millionaires and billionaires in Oklahoma. The boom turned sleepy Oklahoma City into a thriving hub for drillers like Devon Energy, Chesapeake Energy and Continental Resources – the troika that lobbied hardest for the tax-break extension. The rebuilt downtown hosts top notch dining, hotels, arts venues, and a top NBA basketball team.

But as private oil wealth created these emblems of prosperity, public services have come under severe strain. In contrast to other energy states, Oklahoma didn’t fill state coffers during flush years.

Oklahoma taxed new oil and gas production from its prolific horizontal wells – the big money-makers of the fracking industry – at rates as low as 1 percent throughout the shale boom. In North Dakota’s giant Bakken oilfield, the going rate was 11.5 percent.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY?

The state actually began cutting back on funding for Oklahoma school children before the bust, and education funding is likely to contract much further, said Ryan Owens, a co-director at the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration, a professional association of educators.

“Oil was $100 a barrel, and we still had less money per student,” Owens said. “We had an opportunity and we missed it.”

Shale regions are hurting across the country. Since 2014, the U.S. energy industry has shed more than 100,000 jobs. But during the drilling spree of 2008 to 2014, oil-rich states like North Dakota and Texas saw a sharp rise in oil-and-gas tax revenue and salted away a chunk of it for education. Over the same period, Oklahoma’s oil and gas production tax revenue slid 32 percent, in spite of soaring oil prices and a doubling of oil output.

“The state legislature can’t help when oil and natural gas falls,” said David Morrow, the Bridge Creek schools superintendent. “What has got the state of Oklahoma, in my opinion, is everything we gave away.”

Oklahoma lawmakers voted on Thursday to eliminate a separate subsidy for the worst-performing wells in order to help plug the budget gap. While barely utilized during the boom years, the cost of that tax credit grew to more than $130 million in 2015, as sinking prices made more wells unprofitable.

Overall, Oklahoma’s $3 billion education budget has been cut by $58 million since January. Though next year’s funding remains uncertain, the state’s projected 18 percent budget deficit has schools preparing for the worst.

Across the state, at least 100 Oklahoma school districts are considering shorter weeks or school years, and 1,000 school jobs are at risk, according to the Cooperative Council.

A SMILING BOY

Among the hardship measures being implemented, according to recent school surveys: bigger class sizes, teacher pay cuts and hiring freezes, cutbacks in arts, athletics and foreign language instruction, fewer offerings for special needs and gifted students, and a moratorium on field trips.

The Oklahoma oil industry is publicizing the role energy taxes play in helping fund schools. In March, a poster in the lobby of driller Continental Resources’ headquarters featured a smiling boy and read, “Oklahoma oil & gas produces my education.”

Kristin Thomas, a spokeswoman for Continental, said the industry and its employees are the state’s largest bloc of taxpayers, while drillers pay billions more in royalties to landowners. She said tax breaks for other industries, such as wind energy, have hurt education funding.

“We don’t have a revenue problem in Oklahoma,” Thomas said. “We have a spending problem.”

The wind industry received tax credits and exemptions worth $306 million from 2004 to 2015, the Oklahoma Tax Commission said. State revenue data reviewed by Reuters show the horizontal-drilling tax breaks topped $1 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2015 alone.

Oklahoma’s education spending per pupil fell by 24 percent between 2008 and 2016, the biggest drop in the country, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington D.C. group that tracks budget and tax issues on behalf of low-income people.

In North Dakota, where recent budget cuts have been less severe, spending per pupil grew 26 percent over the same period, the biggest gain in the country.

Tax revenue on oil production helped North Dakota stash away more than $3.2 billion in an investment fund, in addition to $614 million set aside exclusively for schools. In Oklahoma, Governor Mary Fallin recently used the state’s $300 million rainy day fund for a $50 million “one-time fix” for public schools. Fallin declined an interview request. A spokesman said the tax breaks were created by her predecessors.

A large portion of the tax on oil and gas production is funneled into Oklahoma’s General Revenue Fund, which provides schools with around half their funding. Many school districts also receive oil-production tax money directly, based on output in their counties.

“HAPPY TO KEEP THIS AT ZERO”

In 1994, Oklahoma began taxing new output from horizontal wells at just 1 percent, compared to 7 percent for conventional vertical wells. When the so-called incentive rates were first enacted, they were meant to be temporary support for what was then a nascent drilling technology.

Horizontal wells have bores that extend lengthwise into reservoirs of oil and gas trapped in porous shale rock. The fossil fuels are typically unleashed by the process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking – blasting the rock with a mixture of water and chemicals. Horizontal fracking wells have become central to the recent shale oil and gas boom in Oklahoma and around the United States.

Over the years, Oklahoma’s lawmakers repeatedly extended the tax breaks on horizontal wells, even as the technology became common and far more productive, oil prices rose and output surged.

State tax regimes are often complex. In Oklahoma, horizontal wells were taxed at a discounted rate in their first years but subject to the nominal 7 percent rate after several years of production. The incentive rates were set to expire in 2015, a scenario that would have made all wells subject to 7 percent taxes through their lifespan.

But the biggest drillers were keen to protect the reprieve from the higher rates: Horizontal wells often pump out their bounty quickly, generating their highest production by far during their first few years.

So in 2014, the three big drillers made a lobbying push for lawmakers to make permanent the favorable tax treatment on early production.

They had to fend off warnings about falling state energy tax revenues from critics of the breaks, such as Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser.

Kaiser, whose interests include drilling, banking and philanthropy, urged lawmakers to let the tax breaks expire as planned. The benefits mainly went to out-of-state shareholders in oil companies, he told them, while ordinary Oklahomans paid the price through underfunded public services.

Some lawmakers agreed. Mark McCullough was one of the few House Republicans to oppose extending the incentive. Horizontal drilling technology “is now very mature and widely used,” he said during the 2014 debate. “Is it really an incentive anymore? Or are we now getting into something else?”

BIG BREAK

Today, McCullough says, it’s clear that the enduring tax breaks were disastrous for state revenues, but a majority of lawmakers were quick to side with drillers during the boom.

“Oil and gas has a ton of weight, and by darn they wanted their credit,” McCullough told Reuters. “By golly they got their credit.”

To help win over lawmakers, Devon hosted dozens of them in its Oklahoma City skyscraper before the 2014 floor vote. The company had several talking points, according to state legislator Pat Ownbey, who attended the meeting. Among them: Higher taxes would only hurt state revenue, by prompting frackers to abandon Oklahoma for other states.

“While some may think that raising taxes on the oil and gas industry could provide additional funding for education, drilling less wells in the state will end up decreasing total revenue traditionally designated for education in the long-run,” Devon wrote in a later public statement.

On April 29, 2014, three weeks before lawmakers voted to extend tax breaks, Fallin and Oklahoma’s finance secretary, Preston Doerflinger, held a private meeting at the governor’s mansion with Devon’s chairman and the chief executives of Chesapeake and Continental. The topic was oil production taxes, Doerflinger’s spokesman said.

Those same companies were hoping for a 2 percent tax rate on horizontal wells for their first four years in operation, according to local media reports.

The following month, a 2-to-1 majority of Oklahoma lawmakers voted to tax all horizontal and vertical wells at 2 percent for the first three years of production. That’s when horizontal wells yield the most oil – and the most potential tax. After three years, output from a typical horizontal oil well in the state has declined by 86 to 89 percent from peak levels, according to industry consultant Drillinginfo.

Drillers cheered the outcome, which was similar to their own proposal. For the first time, the vote would make the tax breaks permanent. Though it lifted the tax burden from 1 percent to 2 percent during a well’s early years, oil companies were now guaranteed some of the most driller-friendly rates in the country.

Chesapeake declined to comment for this story. Devon referred Reuters to an industry trade group, the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association.

“I PAY MY TAXES”

Its president, Mike Terry, said the low production taxes kept Oklahoma competitive and have helped make it “the most resilient in the nation at weathering the downturn in oil prices.” The number of rigs exploring for oil and gas in Oklahoma has fallen by 59 percent since late 2014, compared with a decline of 66 percent nationwide, he said.

The legislative record shows that oil companies found a sympathetic audience at the capitol.

“I find it odd that we’re thinking about castigating our number one industry instead of getting down and thanking them,” state representative Leslie Osborn said during a legislative debate before the vote. “I would have been happy to keep this at zero percent.”

Osborn’s district includes Oklahoma City, which in March announced plans to lay off 208 teachers and in April said it would fire 92 school administrators. The steps will save about $13 million a year.

Osborn didn’t respond to requests for comment about the school cuts.

Over Oklahoma’s boom period, energy production tax revenues fell instead of rising. The opposite happened in North Dakota and Texas, which saw big increases in revenue. In 2014, Oklahoma’s take was $860 million, down from a $1.3 billion peak in 2008.

That’s partly because over time, more and more of Oklahoma’s production came from horizontal wells, taxed at the far lower rate.

To be sure, lower natural gas prices also explain part of Oklahoma’s revenue crunch. Between 2008 and 2014, gas prices fell by around 50 percent, even as oil prices frequently topped the $100 a barrel mark.

Still, the tax breaks alone cost Oklahoma around $800 million over the same period, according to the Oklahoma Policy Institute, a Tulsa think tank that draws some of its funding from Kaiser.

Driller tax breaks have taken a toll in some other states. Louisiana exempts horizontal wells from tax for up to two years if drilling costs aren’t recouped first. The state’s Legislative Auditor said the breaks cost $1.1 billion from 2010 to 2014. But Louisiana hasn’t cut school funding as sharply as Oklahoma has. Per pupil spending is down 1.4 percent since 2008.

In Inola, Oklahoma, 30 miles east of Tulsa, 37-year-old machinist Jack Foster has four young sons enrolled in public school, where four-day weeks are already in effect. The family is unhappy about the cost cuts, and has to make alternative plans for the boys once a week.

“I pay my taxes,” said Foster. “I want my kids to have a good education.”

(Edited by Michael Williams)

Virginia School District Closes Over Backlash from Islamic Homework Assignment

Schools in one Virginia county were closed Friday after a controversial homework assignment, in which students were reportedly asked to copy the Islamic statement of faith, drew backlash.

In a statement posted on the Augusta County Public Schools website, the district announced that schools would be closed Friday after “parental objections to the World Geography curriculum and ensuing related media coverage” spurred a bombardment of phone calls and emails.

The district said those messages “significantly increased in volume” Thursday and they were concerned about their “tone and content.” The district made the decision to close the schools “out of an abundance of caution,” though said there was “no specific threat of harm to students.”

The district didn’t offer details about what specific assignment prompted the backlash, but multiple media outlets reported that students at Riverheads High School were asked to practice drawing calligraphy by copying down the shahada, which is the Islamic statement of faith.

CNN published a copy of the assignment, which notes calligraphy’s importance in Islam. It shows the shahada written in Arabic calligraphy and instructs students to copy it into a box. “This should give you an idea of the artistic complexity of calligraphy,” the assignment reads.

One of the most common objections to the assignment is that the shahada, when translated into English, reads “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.”

The News-Leader, a Virginia newspaper, reported that more than 100 people “met in fury” over the assignment, and some parents had called for the teacher who gave it to be fired. But the state Department of Education and the district’s superintendent both reviewed the assignment and determined it wasn’t a violation of students’ rights, and deemed it in line with state standards.

As of Friday afternoon, 2,500 members had joined a Facebook group to support the teacher. Still, some parents weren’t happy about the message the students were asked to copy.

“I will not have my children sit under a woman who indoctrinates them with the Islam religion when I am a Christian, and I’m going to stand behind Christ,” Kimberly Herndon told Virginia television station WHSV. The news station identified her as a parent of a Riverheads student.

The News-Leader reported that the teacher didn’t come up with the assignment, but rather pulled it out of a workbook about world religions. The newspaper also reported that students had learned about other religions in the teacher’s class, including Christianity and Judaism.

In its website posting, Augusta County Public Schools said “no lesson was designed to promote a viewpoint or change any student’s religious belief.” School officials said that their students will keep learning about world religions, which is required by state education officials, but a new, non-religious calligraphy sample will be used in future homework assignments about Islam.

Before making the decision to close, the district said it increased police presence at its schools.

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