Student Body

Barack Obama's advisers know that winning in Pennsylvania requires shrinking Hillary Clinton's wide lead among "Casey Democrats," working-class whites who were fond of their former Gov Robert Casey. The themes both Obama and Clinton aired out in Ohio to attract those voters, such as attacking NAFTA and decrying lapses in health-care coverage, undoubtedly will resurface in the coming weeks. But there's one more issue affecting these voters that the candidates haven't aired. And it's Hillary-proof.

Construction noise is loud and constant these days on Laurel Road in Stratford Borough. A four-building, 23-acre site, dating to 1844, is getting a half-million dollar makeover, thanks to the Stratford Classical Christian Academy. The academy purchased the property, once a sawmill, maternity hospital and later the Stratford Military Academy, in August from its most recent owner, the Camden County YWCA. It sought to accommodate an enrollment outgrowing its home at nearby Stratford Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Down the hall from the cafeteria and away from the gym, schools are deploying one of the latest weapons in the fight against childhood obesity - mandated measurements of body mass index. On a recent afternoon, seventh graders at Robert K. Shafer Middle School in Bensalem waited as school nurse Kathleen McLaughlin recorded their heights and weights, the first step in tabulating BMIs. Each child's score, an indicator of body fat, will be mailed home in letters some have dubbed "obesity report cards.

Authorities may have finally found 19-year-old freshman John Fiocco Jr., whose disappearance last month shook the College of New Jersey's suburban Trenton campus and gripped the region. But yesterday's discovery was hardly cause for celebration. Exactly a month after the Gloucester County teen vanished from his dormitory, investigators combing a Bucks County landfill found a body. Television helicopters caught on tape the ominous scene at the sprawling Tullytown dump: white-suited officials loading a body bag into a coroner's van. The New Jersey State Police, the agency heading the investigation, would not confirm that human remains had been discovered.

Many young Pennsylvania students will be learning their BMIs this year along with their ABCs. The ritual of checking into the nurse's office to be weighed and measured will have a new twist as most of the state's elementary school students are evaluated for the first time using a growth screening tool called Body Mass Index. The school nurse will still record that a fourth-grade girl stands 4 feet, 5 inches and weighs 77 pounds, but will also use those numbers to compute the child's BMI and plot them on a growth chart for her age and gender.

Police yesterday said they had found the CD player that Pennsauken native Sarah Fox was carrying when she left her Manhattan apartment to go running and never returned. A police lieutenant discovered the player late Thursday about 100 feet from where the body of Fox, 21, was found Tuesday in Inwood Hill Park on the northern tip of Manhattan. She had been strangled. "We're checking the CD player for any kind of evidence it may yield," said Paul Browne, deputy commissioner for public information for the New York Police Department.

The news of three teenagers in Oaklyn being charged in an attempted carjacking and murder plot reminded me of what Thoreau said about people leading lives of quiet desperation. Perhaps that was their state of mind. Some of their peers claim that the teens were victims of bullying. Because I am a teacher, such revelations do not surprise me. We witness students who are bullied every day. Some victims react immediately with violence; others let the anger build. Preventing bullying is ideal.

The student body at the University of Pennsylvania looked rather homogeneous during my time as an undergraduate in the Eisenhower era, when we worshiped the twin gods of caution and conformity. I honestly can't recall a class with any Asian students, nor do I remember more than a handful of African American classmates in that rarified Ivy League Class of 1960. So it was with more than passing interest that I recently headed to Barnes & Noble's Marlton store for one of its Cappuccino Academy evenings.

St. Joseph's University has growing pains. And university officials are eyeing a potential remedy right next door - the 31-acre campus of Episcopal Academy. The neighboring institutions have begun informal talks about the university purchasing Episcopal's Lower Merion campus, which lies between City Avenue and Latches Lane, adjacent to St. Joseph's. Episcopal is in a position to sell because of its surprise purchase last summer of 110 acres in Newtown Township, Delaware County.

In their purple pleated skirts and their tops with LIONS across the front, the cheerleaders gathered outside the gym on a Friday afternoon, tying purple ribbons in their hair, applying lip gloss, and stretching their legs. The first pep rally of the year at Cherry Hill High School West would start in 10 minutes. As the school band tuned up and students started pouring into the gym, the cheerleaders moved inside. Some dropped into splits on the floor; others practiced jumps, touching their toes in midair.