Recommendations

Rose Tree Media school board members have begun reviewing the long-awaited facilities study, which outlines more than $16 million worth of repairs, renovations and improvements. Representatives from the Wagner Group of Reading, which was hired in January to produce the 150-page report, told the board the buildings were safe and in good repair. The report makes recommendations for bringing buildings up to fire and building codes as well as suggestions for improving the appearance of the buildings, especially Penncrest High School.

The results were as different as day and night. On Wednesday, Oxford teachers voted at dawn, the school board after sundown, on a state fact-finder's labor contract recommendations. The teachers said yes. The school board, 8-1, said no to terms recommended by the impartial labor expert, Charles Halpin of La Salle University. The teachers' association was "extremely disappointed" by the school board's rejection, Donald Orner, the chief union negotiator, said Thursday.

A conference on African American health problems yesterday recommended dozens of ways to improve health care in Pennsylvania and called for establishing a state agency for minority health issues. Conference leader State Rep. David P. Richardson (D., Phila.) said the goal of the four-day session was to persuade Gov. Casey to provide $3.5 million for the proposed agency. "We have been mostly emotional people who only speak out of emotion. . . . We just speak off the cuff," Richardson told about 40 conference delegates who issued recommendations to be presented to Casey.

HARRISBURG - A group of environmental, labor and liberal-leaning public policy groups said the governor's Marcellus Shale advisory panel didn't go far enough in its recommendations, and released its own report Monday calling for broader protections from gas drilling. Calling themselves the Citizens Marcellus Shale Commission, organizers also countered criticism from one of their former members, Maya K. van Rossum, who on Friday described their final recommendations as watered down to become "politically palatable.

The executive director of the Chester County Intermediate Unit presented at the West Chester Area school board meeting this week alternatives regarding the future of the county's two vocational-technical schools. During the board's monthly meeting Monday, John K. Baillie reported on the recommendations of the Occupational Education Advisory Council, formed to study the reasons for the decline in enrollments at the county's two vo-tech schools. He told the board that the council's recommendations offer alternatives that would help to bolster enrollments and would make the vo-tech school programs eventually pay for themselves.

A much-anticipated report, aimed at settling the stalemated contract negotiations in the Coatesville Area School District, recommends that salaries for the district's 485 teachers be raised by 6 percent or more in each of the next three years. The recommended salary increase is more than double what the Coatesville school board has offered to pay the teachers. The report, completed by the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board, was ordered because of the two sides' inability to reach agreement on a new teachers' contract.

The owners of the Stringfellow Acid Pits and many of the companies that used the hazardous waste dump should pay to clean the area and to stop leakage into nearby water supplies, a court-appointed overseer has ruled. Those recommendations by federal court Special Master Harry V. Peetris will be forwarded to U.S. District Judge James Ideman who will consider their merits, said court spokesman Todd Maiden. Peetris also recommended Tuesday that J.B. Stringfellow Jr., operator of the dump, be held liable for cleanup costs at the 22-acre site near the community of Glen Avon.

A bipartisan subcommittee formed in Winslow to look into the township's controversial practice of selling public land has issued its preliminary report to the Township Committee. The report, released Aug. 9, proposes more stringent guidelines for future sales, including: That no public lands be sold below assessed market value; That any special conditions be reflected in the deeds, That a monitoring system be adopted to ensure that all obligations from a sale are met. The four-member subcommittee was created in March to examine public land sales in the township and to recommend procedural changes or refinements.

EXPERIENCE and common sense ought to spare the city of Philadelphia from ever facing another situation remotely like its confrontation with MOVE 25 years ago. But never say never. Mayor Wilson Goode appointed a commission to investigate the disaster and "make suggestions for future handling of similar situations. " After a nine-month probe, the panel issued a scathing report with 38 recommendations for change in the structure and operation of city government. Kevin Tucker, the recently retired chief of the Secret Service in Philadelphia, took over the Police Department from Gregore Sambor.

HARRISBURG - Gov. Corbett's advisory group on natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale is set to meet in public Friday to recommend ways for dealing with the growing industry - catch is, the public won't necessarily know what it is they are recommending. That is because the governor's much-ballyhooed commission has decided it will not detail the actual recommendations when voting on them, but instead include those that are approved in a report it will send to the governor by the end of next week.

Movies Coming This Week By Steven Rea The Hangover Part III The Wolfpack returns to Las Vegas and then ventures to the staid and sleepy town of Tijuana in the final installment of the guys-gone-wild trilogy. Lots of madness, lots of Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong), and, if the trailers are to be believed, lots of giraffe body parts splattered across the interstate. (Opens Thursday) R Epic Fairies and fierce little warriors, talking snails and a teensy-weensy queen (voiced by Beyoncé)

DISCOVERY Charter School will pull out all the stops today to avoid closure based on what officials term a "billing dispute. " The school in Wynnefield, which has met the federal Adequate Yearly Progress standard the last four years and plans to open a new $14 million school building in September, will rally with students, families and alumni in front of district headquarters before today's School Reform Commission meeting. The SRC will vote on charter-school renewals recommended by the district.

It is not uncommon to wind up with multiple 401(k)s after switching jobs a few times during the course of a career. Companies usually allow employees to leave their money in the plans even after they leave the company, although non-employees are not allowed to make contributions. But many financial advisers say it could be better to combine old company retirement accounts into a single 401(k) offered by a current employer or roll all of the old accounts into an IRA. "We actually see this quite a bit," said Dawna Kopko, a senior investment adviser at PNC Wealth Management, Downtown.

Three of the nine Philadelphia judicial candidates endorsed for the May 21 primary by the Democratic City Committee are "not recommended" by the Philadelphia Bar Association, which made its full set of evaluations public Monday. Out of six Democratic Party endorsements for Common Pleas Court, two failed to achieve the bar's recommendation - Dawn M. Tancredi and former city prison commissioner Leon A. King II. One of the Democrats' three endorsements for Municipal Court, Henry Lewandowski, a lawyer for the electricians union, was also not recommended by the bar. The association gave no specifics explaining its decisions.

GROTON, Conn. - A former submarine commander who faked his death to end an extramarital affair should be honorably discharged from the Navy, a panel of officers recommended Friday after a daylong hearing in which the officer said he accepted "full and total accountability" for his behavior. Cmdr. Michael P. Ward II, a married 43-year-old, sent his mistress in Virginia an e-mail in July posing as a fictitious coworker named Bob and saying Ward had died unexpectedly. Ward was relieved of his duties aboard the USS Pittsburgh in August a week after he'd taken command and has received a letter of reprimand for adultery and other military violations.