As promised in my column today, some photos I snapped at Veterans Day parade in Wilkes-Barre Sunday

The Allan Bellas corruption scandal unfolded like a bad piece of origami. The chairman of the Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority announces that Executive Director Bellas said he would resign because he was "in trouble" in the federal probe .... days pass, and Bellas doesn't resign ... the board suspends Bellas when no charges were leveled .... the next night,  Bellas doesn't come to the Wyoming Valley West School Board meeting (where he is board president) ... No one, in audience or on the school board, mention him during the meeting .... a day later, he agrees to plead guilty to accepting a bribe for work on the LCRDA ... WVW board members take turns noting the charges aren't for anything related to the district.

One of the quirkiest aspects of this, for me, arose from what happened after Wednesday's WVW board meeting. Bellas had been suspended at LCRDA the night before, and would be charged the day after. During that limbo, the only new news about him came when he didn't show up at the WVW meeting. Yet sometimes nothing is still something. I was posting a short story on-line noting his absence before the meeting was even over, and it was a short meeting.

Local news stations showed up, a rare occasion at school board session, and since no one said a word about Bellas during the meeting, they started pointing the cameras afterward at Superintendent Chuck Suppon and any board member willing to talk. All of course, said they knew nothing.

But Board Member James Fender went a step further, saying he found it interesting that so many media types should descend on the WVW middle school auditorium when nothing had happened.

He was right, of course. Nothing had happened. And even when Bellas' plea agreement was made public Thursday, Fender was still technically right. Bellas had been charged, but not for anything related to the district.  Of course, this probe has grown vast and stunningly open-ended, so there's no guarantee WVW - or any other school board - will stay untainted.

There's an old story told to writers about a person in an apartment trying to sleep. He hears a shoe drop on the floor in the unit above him. Suddenly, he can't sleep. He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The problem with this probe is that, so far, there's always another shoe ...

Wyoming Valley West School Board President Allan Bellas has signed an agreement to plead guilty to accepting money in exchange for helping a developer get a tax break through the Luzerne County Redevelopment Authority, where Bellas served as executive director until he was suspended Tuesday. Two big questions: Who did he help? And did the corruption involve the school board?

The federal paperwork, as usual, does not specify the party or parties involved outside of Bellas and the LCDRA. Being an ongoing probe, this is routine, presumably to keep others under investigation from knowing too much. The only mention of the school board is in the plea agreement, where he must resign within 10 days of entering the plea.

The paperwork does mention that the tax break in question, officially known as Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) - was granted for property in a township. I could find no mention of WVW granting a TIF in a township in the past four or five years in our records, and the board members I talked to so far could not remember any TIFs for township projects (I'm still working the story, of course). The School Board rarely seemed to consider property tax break programs in my time covering it, though I didn't make a thorough search to confirm that yet.

A lot more details will be in tomorrows paper as reporters (including myself) dig. The fate of Bellas' school board seat is of particular interest, since he is on the ballot for re-election unopposed on both tickets. But at this moment it seems worth giving a bit of testimony from my personal experience.

Bellas may turn out to be a crook of epic proportions or a man snared by a brief lapse of conscience. He may end up shifting his stance and somehow walking away from this with a clean record. All he has done is agree to plead, he has not pleaded. And as we saw with disgraced judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, a plea agreement can get derailed in a variety of ways.

But I give Bellas this much: From the bleacher seats, his performance on the school board always seemed straighforward and helpful. It is an unpaid postion, yet he came to meetings with a substantial bit of information at his fingertips regarding his post as chairman of the buildings and grounds committee, which suggested he put a good bit of time into his board responsibilities. There were times he seemed to know more than the actual buildings and grounds supervisor.

As board president, he never stonewalled a question and was always quick to fork over addtional information after meetings.

I'm not condoning what he allegedly did, I'm not saying his apparent corruption didn't extend to actions on the board. That remains to be seen. But at least when it came to public interaction and information, his board performance met any reasonable expectations, and exceeded the performance of others I've seen on school boards over the years.

Meant to post this last week but, well, I was off and out of town most of it.

These are photos from the introductory meeting Oct. 2 of more than 100 students participating in  a NASA Endeavour program sponsored by the Luzerne Intermediate Unit and run by Wyoming Valley West Middle School Science Teacher Phil Pack. Pack has been a big proponent of the program for more than a decade, and was glad to see it reborn after a funding drought had let it fade locally.

The kids crammed into the third floor conference room of the LIU Kingston building, and after introductions and explanations of what they will be doing over the next few months (working on three separate projects in the hopes of winning prizes that could include a trip to a NASA facility), Pack had them do a little hands-on experiment. He gave each group (up to six) a plastic flex straw, tin foil, some construction paper and a small piece of foam sheet, along with glue and tape. Then each team built a rocket to be launched with a can of compressed air (shown in the first pic).

Alas, other than getting to see their creations in test flights, as seen here, the eighth-graders never saw their creations in competition, conducted in a separate room and measured by a band of teachers. It was amusing to see the many designs. I tried to get pics of all the entries, but probably missed a few.

The basic rule: The more wing, the shorter the flight. Which, if the kids had been given Web computers and five minutes to do some research, they probably would have seen. I found this site in a matter of seconds.

The bigger winged vehicles often looped and arced (one quite eloquently), but did not glide well. Many were front heavy and fell quickly into nose dives, proving the importance of finding the center of balance. The straight ones with little or no wing usually shot 4 meters or more across the room (winners - it was a tie - went six meters and change).

My favorite, as far as creative thought goes, probably was the second from the left in the fourth picture. Note a tiny ball of aluminum foil next to the straw. That was the rocket. They hoped it would shoot like a bullet (or like a pea). It barely went two meters, if that. The problem: Not a tight enough seal between the foil and the straw, so a lot of air pressure was lost  before it left the straw.

it was an enjoyable exercise to watch, and a reminder that the education beat goes beyond budgets and test scores.

The Effete Corps of Impudent Snobs Generation? The Numb and Dumbers generation? The Rioting Mobs Generation?

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education includes one of the best pieces (available for a fee, if you don't have a subscription) I've seen on the odd social habit of labeling generations. Eric Hoover gives a wry, thorough and I think well balanced overview of what has become almost a mania, and he accompanies it with a list of generation labels collected over the years by C.  Arthur Sandeen, former vice president for student affairs at the U. of Florida (1973-99). I won't reproduce the lengthy article, but I can't resist talking that list on at the end of this entry. It includes the labels mentioned in the first graph, though doesn't give any context to who used them for which generations.

Hoover offers the evergreen examples of historic complaints about kids. "Children nowadays are tyrants" allegedly came from Socrates. College students were "indulged, petted and uncontrolled at home ... with an undisciplined mind, and an uncultivated heart, yet with exalted ideas of personal dignity, and a scowling contempt for lawful authority," according to a Davidson College professor in 1855. And Einstein once said "the number of young people who genuinely thirst after truth and Justice is small."

The bulk of the modern debate launches from the 2000 book by Neil Howe and William Strauss titled "Millenials rising: the Next Great Generation," which argued teens these days are just about everything nice you could want: optimistic, engaged, pleasant, confident. Of course, Hoover notes, as others have, that those judgments came from "a hodgepodge of anecdotes, statistics, and pop cultural references," and a survey of a s600 high school senior in Fairfax County, a very wealthy neighborhood.

My favorite bit from Howe, as cited by Hoover, is a report Howe wrote for Ford Motor Company on what kind of cars "Millenials" will drive. "Millennials want to do big things ... Even when driving back and forth to community college in a Focus … their future will be anything but mundane."

Hoover then injects himself briefly. "When this thirtysomething reporter makes an offhand observation, (Howe) remarks, "That's such an Xer thing to say." He means Generation X, whose members hail from 1961 to 1981, according to his time line. Because they tend to be skeptical, hardened pragmatists, he says, they have trouble seeing what's so great about today's kids. For emphasis, he pauses, then says of Millennials, "They are so special."

I haven't read Howe's work, so I can't give a fair opinion. But I have read of it, and it sounds a bit overblown. Hoover cites several skeptics of varying degrees, from former Millenial believers like Palmer H. Muntz, director of admissions and an enrollment-management consultant at Lincoln Christian University, in Illinois Muntz notes the idea had appeal but real life experience showed the current crop of students to have more similarities that distinctions from prior groups.

You can't just take one stamp and put it on this generation," Hoover quotes Muntz. "But it sure was nice when I thought I could."

Hoover also cites harder critics like Mark Bauerlein, author of "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future," a book I did read. I thought Bauerlein used some of the same tactics to make his points that he criticized others for using in making theirs (Specifically, he seemed to narrowly interpret limited data, or cherry pick data presented at times). But he made strong points in arguing digital, social computer network era is actually prolonging childhood and letting teens defer adulthood into their thirties by creating an insular world through their ipods and facebook pages.

There is much more in Hoover's article. The truth, I suspect, is -- as usual -- that simple labels can't cover millions of diverse people. For starters, there is the arguably arbitrary decision to set cut off dates for defining a generation (Howe sets "Millenials" at those born between 1982 and 2004. So ... what?  If you were born in 81 and your brother was born in 82 he's part of the great new generation and your a skeptical, hardened "Xer" destined to never comprehend your sibling's brilliance?

Then there's the reality that you can walk into any high school or college classroom and see duds sitting next to geniuses, slackers next to rabid Type A's, and students who respond the way they did when I was in college (late 1970s) next to those who clearly are in a league of their own while embracing a radically different world.

The digital age almost certainly will change the world in ways unlike any evolution we've seen so far in recorded history, but it most probably those changes will be diffuse and more unpredictable than gurus like Howe claim, with frequent steps backward as we adjust to having everything at our fingertips.

Reality does not match the simple notion of one label fits all, for any generation.

The generation label list:

The Lost Generation; Joe College; The Rioting Mobs; The Grinders; The Veterans; The Beat Generation; The Uncommitted; The Disaffiliated; The Underachievers; The Silent Generation; The Me Generation; The Collegiates; The Vocationals; The Nonconformists; The Disengaged Generation; The Shopping Mall Generation; The Organization Kid; Generation X; Generation Y;
Generation O; The Draft Dodgers; The Digital Generation; Effete Corps of Impudent Snobs; The Bums; The Young Radicals; The Pampered Generation; The Searchers; The Hip-Hop Generation; The Sandwich Generation; The Echo Boomers; The Tidal Wavers;
The Woodstock Generation; The 13th Generation; The Boomers; The Slackers; The Numb and Dumbers; The Ritalin Generation; The Twentysomething Generation; The Millennials; Gen Next; The Consumers; Generation Jones; The YouTube Generation;
The Rock the Vote Generation; The Baby Boomers; The Whiners; The MTV Generation; The Dot-Com Generation; The War Babies;
The Third Wave Feminists; The Greatest Generation

About the Author

A West Hazleton native, I worked as a service technician repairing electronic mailing and shipping systems, a bike shop owner and an Emergency Medical Technician (among other jobs) before landing a reporter job at the Times Leader Hazleton Bureau in 1995. I started by covering primarily politics in Hazleton City and outlying municipalities, eventually became "social issues" team leader in the Wilkes-Barre office with the accent on education, and headed the Hazleton Bureau for a spell before returning to full-time reporting, my preferred position. I'm an avid cyclist and rode across the country in 1990, a trip of more than 5,000 miles from New Jersey to Seattle and down the coast to San Francisco. Years in the Boy Scouts made me a life long backpacker and camper, and I've yet to find a better way to enjoy the quiet lure of winter snow than cross country skiing.

Mark also writes a regular blog for timesleader.com.

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