Levi Draher has received national attention after sharing his near death experience. Click here to view a video of Draher’s talk about the deadly game.

In a New York Times article, 16-year-old Draher Casts Light on a Shadowy Game.

GERONIMO, Tex. – Levi Draher, 16, walked to the front of the Navarro High School gym in early March and picked up the microphone before a hushed audience of fellow teenagers.

“I died and came back,” he said.

Levi was found by his mother last Oct. 28, clinically dead, suspended on a rope he had slung across a bunk-bed frame. He had pushed his neck onto the rope, he told the rapt audience, aiming to achieve a surging rush as his brain was starved and then replenished with blood just before the point of unconsciousness.

The rush is the appeal of the choking game – or space cowboy or cloud nine or any of a dozen other names. In most schools and families it remains a subject of deep shadow and denial, students, parents and health professionals say.

“I did it because it felt good and I didn’t think I’d get caught,” said Levi, a slow-talking, sardonic skateboarder and hockey player from San Antonio. “Do I consider myself a miracle?” asked Levi, who told the students he had played the game three times before his accident. “Yes, I do.”

What happened that October afternoon was that Levi passed out faster than he could react and suffered a heart attack, said his mother, Carrie. His brain was deprived of oxygen for more than three minutes.

Levi’s survival and recovery against the odds – three days in a coma followed by a regimen of antiseizure drugs that he still takes – have made him perhaps the first scared-straight, been-there-and-back spokesman against the choking game. And there is a growing audience for his message…

…But the exact number remains uncertain because there has been little real research, health professionals say, and because medical examiners have been quick in the past to rule suicide. Some adults might also dismiss the game as the slumber party goof it was in years past, when constriction to the point of death was virtually unheard of.

But attitudes are shifting. Some medical examiners and pediatricians are looking at the increased teenage suicide rate from suffocation over the last decade and questioning whether dozens of deaths listed as suicide might in fact have been accidental, the result of a choking game experience gone wrong.

In 2004, according to the most recent figures from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 779 children between ages 10 and 19 committed suicide by suffocation, up from 400 to 450 per year from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, when the numbers began to rise.

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Cnn.com reports that, “nearly 1 in 5 students at two Ivy League schools say they have purposely injured themselves by cutting, burning or other methods, a disturbing phenomenon that psychologists say they are hearing about more often.”

Guidance counselors have been reporting increased numbers of cutting in colleges, high schools and middle schools across the nation.

The latest prevalence estimate comes from an analysis of responses from 2,875 randomly selected male and female undergraduates and graduate students at Cornell and Princeton who completed an Internet-based mental health survey.

Seventeen percent said they had purposely injured themselves; among those, 70 percent had done so multiple times. The estimate is comparable to previous reports on U.S. adolescents and young adults, but slightly higher than studies of high school students in Australia and the United Kingdom.

The study appears in this month’s issue of Pediatrics. Cornell psychologist Janis Whitlock, the study’s main author, also led the Web site research, published in April in Developmental Psychology.

Popular online social networking hub MySpace.com said Monday it will begin displaying public service ads aimed at educating its users, many of them teens, about the dangers posed by sexual predators on the Internet.

MySpace, a division of News Corp., enables computer users to meet any of more than 60 million members. Users put up profiles that are searchable and can include photos of themselves and such details as where they live and what music they like.

But MySpace’s features and popularity with teens has raised concerns with authorities across the nation. There have been scattered accounts of sexual predators targeting minors they met through the site.

Learn more about how to keep teens safe in wake of the online social networking explosion.

The following article by Boston Globe correspondent, Kay Lazar, appeared online March 30.

The question is not whether Christine Logan will head off to college, but rather which passion she will pursue.

The Wakefield teenager became fascinated with forensics after getting hooked on the TV crime show ”CSI” and now thinks law enforcement might be the way to go. But Logan, 16, also is captivated by children — she is the most popular baby sitter on the block — and is considering a teaching career, too.

One factor is certain. Logan, who has dyslexia, will have to navigate a difficult path in her search for the perfect school. But she is determined.

”I don’t think you should limit what you can do because you have a certain disorder,” said Logan, who is an honor-roll student, soccer player, and passionate shoe shopper.

While once it was uncommon to see special-needs students heading off to college, sweeping changes in civil rights laws since the 1970s and more recent medical advances have combined to open the gates of higher education, according to the US Department of Education. Over the past two decades, the percentage of college-bound young adults with disabilities more than doubled nationwide, from 15 percent in 1987 to 32 percent in 2003, the latest data available from the department.

With more disabled students choosing higher education, educators and advocates say they are increasingly facing questions from families about the very different services and sets of rules students face when they enter college. While federal law entitles children with disabilities to a publicly financed education through high school — complete with tutors, evaluations, and additional supports — the laws do not require colleges and other post-secondary schools to provide the same services.

Instead, students are required to take the lead, identifying themselves as disabled, documenting their disabilities, and identifying the services they will need. Then, colleges and vocational schools are required only to provide ”appropriate academic adjustments as necessary” to ensure they do not discriminate on the basis of disability. Some colleges charge extra for some services, such as tutoring.

”Higher education, in general, is considered a privilege,” said Carrie Kutny, enrollment services counselor at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill.

”On the high school level, teachers are required to alter their teaching style in some way to accommodate students with special needs, whereas a college professor is not required to do that.”

Over the past four years, Northern Essex has recorded a 53 percent increase in the number of students with documented disabilities who sought extra help from the Learning Accommodations Center at the college’s Haverhill and Lawrence campuses. The help, including note-takers, classroom aides, and special computer software, is provided at no charge to eligible students.

Claudette Logan is nervous about the prospect of her daughter leaving a system where help is readily available for her dyslexia, especially considering Christine’s recent introduction to the college application process.

Christine, a sophomore at Wakefield High School, took the Preliminary Scholastic Achievement Test in October and did poorly. Under the rules, a student with dyslexia can ask for accommodations, such as having someone read the test out loud and receiving extra time to complete the exam. But the Logans were not aware of that.

Now, they have filed the necessary paperwork for Christine to receive help during future college entrance exams. And they are aggressively seeking information about the application process for special-needs students.

”I don’t know what other kinds of things we may need to file for or do, but I don’t want to wait,” said Claudette Logan.

In Boxford, Lisa Anastos is helping her son, Nicholas, consider his options. Nicholas, 17, a junior at Masconomet Regional High School, has been diagnosed with a nonverbal learning disorder. He has trouble connecting concepts, like relating one event in history with another. He also has a language disorder that makes it difficult for him to remember names.

”I know Nicholas really wants to go to college; he has a real hunger for learning,” Anastos said.

But learning does not come easily for Nicholas. Last fall, he signed up for a driver education course, which met four times a week and covered three chapters weekly. He failed, and signed up again.

”It took studying with him an hour and a half a day, seven days a week, and he passed the darn thing,” Anastos said. ”He is determined. He loves science. He loves history. He knows lots of factual things. His favorite channel is the History Channel.”

Yet a four-year college probably would be overwhelming for Nicholas, Anastos said.

”Even North Shore Community College, with a boatload of courses all at once, I don’t see him doing,” she said. ”I could see him doing one or two courses with a lot of support.”

Right now, the family is awaiting updated neurological tests that may better determine which path Nicholas seeks.

Updated evaluations are important for special-needs students who are considering higher education because most colleges and vocational schools require current documentation of a disability in order for a student to be eligible for accommodations, such as extra time during exams, priority registration, and reduced course loads.

Federal law requires that high schools provide special education students with a kind of blueprint for life after graduation, called transition planning. The law requires the planning to be part of a student’s Individualized Education Program, a key document that spells out annual goals and describes how those goals will be measured.

But special needs students are not the only ones who can struggle with transition planning. Their parents often do, too, specialists say.

Many have worked hard to get an accurate diagnosis and the necessary services for their child, then worked hard for years helping them study through high school.

”There is always that push and pull, to promote the greatest amount of growth but also the greatest amount of independence,” said Debra Bromfield, special-education director at the Masconomet Regional School District in Boxford. ”Our goal in education is to give students all the tools that they need so they can implement them themselves to be successful.”

While special-needs students and their families might be tempted to consider colleges largely based on the services they can provide, specialists say it is a mistake to cast such a narrow net. Their advice is to look at the whole package, including the academics, athletics, extracurricular programs, and special-needs services, because ultimately that will provide a better match.

Consider the experience of Amy O’Dowd, 19, a avid cross-country runner who has dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. She graduated from Masconomet last year. O’Dowd scrutinized the programs and special-needs services at five colleges before settling on New England College in Henniker, N.H., where she receives free tutoring but must pay for extra mentoring services.

Her reason for finally selecting New England College?

”I liked the cross-country program.”

For more information about postsecondary education planning, visit www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/transition.html or the National Center on Secondary Education and Transition at www.ncset.org.

Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com

The nation’s schools, recognized incubators of respiratory diseases among children, are being told to plan for the possibility of an outbreak of bird flu.

Federal health leaders say it is not alarmist or premature for schools to make preparations, such as finding ways to teach kids even if they’ve all been sent home.

School boards and superintendents have gotten used to emergency planning for student violence, terrorism or severe weather. Pandemic preparation, though, is a new one.

They have a lot to think over, top government officials said Tuesday. Read the complete story on CNN.com.

The Washington Post reports that researchers who followed 380 Midwestern children from the ages of 5 to 11 found that those who were chronically rejected by their classmates were more likely to withdraw from school activities and scored lower on standardized tests than their more popular peers.

“We’re talking about kids whose classmates don’t let them sit with them in the cafeteria,” said lead researcher Eric S. Buhs, an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “This is what happens when a whole group demonstrates, ‘We don’t want you around.’ ”

Peer-group rejection, Buhs and his co-authors report in a study funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, starts as early as kindergarten. It appears to affect boys and girls equally. And it often triggers a vicious circle that can cause long-term psychological damage and impair a child’s academic performance.

Exclusion obviously makes it difficult for a child to join group activities, so the victim disengages from school as a way of avoiding further abuse. Withdrawal acts as a “persistent signal to classmates” that rejected children are not members of the group and reinforces the ostracism, noted the researchers, whose study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology. Academic achievement can be hampered by diminished participation in class.

Buhs’ team found that students who were rejected by their peers in kindergarten tended to become children who were chronically rejected in older grades. By fourth grade they scored measurably lower on standardized reading and math tests than their classmates.

“Social isolation is one of the most devastating things you can do to a human being; I don’t care how old you are,” said Rosalind Wiseman, a veteran educator in Washington and the author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” the bestselling book about girls and cliques that became the basis for the movie “Mean Girls.”

According to a story published on CNN.com, about 4,000 students who took the main SAT college entrance exam last October received incorrectly low scores because of problems with the scanning of their answer sheets.

The College Board, which owns the exam, notified college admissions offices of the mistake and provided the proper scores for affected students in a letter received by some Tuesday afternoon. A College Board spokeswoman, Jennifer Topiel, said students would be notified by e-mail Thursday. Affected students will be refunded their fees from that sitting, the letter said.

Topiel said the “vast majority of students” affected received scores that were within 100 points of their correct score on the three-section, 2,400-point test.

Admissions officials, however, said Tuesday some students had been affected by as much as 130 points — forcing schools to scramble to re-evaluate candidates at a time when many are trying to make final decisions.

“For some this means a scholarship adjustment, for some it means admission to a more selective program within the school,” said Jacquelyn Nealon, dean of admissions and financial aid at New York Institute of Technology, where she said between 25 and 50 applicants were affected.

“We’ll pull all those folders tomorrow and reach out to any students,” she said. “For a school that processes tens of thousands of applications, this is major.”

The percentage of public high school seniors passing at least one Advanced Placement test increased in nearly every state last year, but racial gaps remained, the College Board reported Tuesday.

More students took AP exams, more students passed them, and average scores were steady from 2004 to 2005.

“The quality of learning in AP classrooms has remained steady as schools have invited more students to take on the challenge of an AP course,” the College Board said in a statement.

In the nation’s public schools, 14.1 percent of the class of 2005 passed at least one AP test, up from 13.2 percent a year before. In 2000, 10.2 percent of high school seniors passed a test.

The number of students passing at least one test increased by nearly 120,000 from 2000 to 2005. But black students continued to take the exams at lower rates than white students, and their overall scores remained a level behind whites last year.

Nationwide, black students make up 13.4 percent of the student population, but only 6.4 percent of the students taking AP exams. The percentage of white and Latino students taking the tests more closely mirrored their numbers in the classroom. A similar ratio of American Indian students also took the exams.

“Major initiatives are needed to ensure that all students are adequately prepared starting in middle school so that students will have a fair shot at AP success when they reach high school,” College Board President Gaston Caperton said in a statement.

The Advanced Placement Program, which the College Board oversees, offers college level courses in 20 subjects. The most popular subjects are U.S. History, English and calculus.

About 610,000 of the roughly 2.7 million members of the class of 2005 took a total of 1.5 million AP tests. About 380,000 of the students passed at least one test.

Passing an AP exam “is a strong predictor of a student’s ability to persist in college and earn a bachelor’s degree,” according to the College Board’s report.

Forty-four states and the District of Columbia increased the percentage of students passing at least one AP test last year. The percentage of students passing at least one test declined in five states — Florida, Nevada, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Wyoming. It was flat in Louisiana.

New York led the nation with 22.8 percent of its high school seniors passing at least one test. Louisiana was last with 2.5 percent.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

According to an article on MSNBC.com, “the test’s initials stand for “Information and Communication Technology,” and a version is already used by some colleges. The nonprofit Educational Testing Service plans to announce details of a new version that some high school and first- and second-year college students will begin taking this spring.”

The reason for the tests is to determine if students are able to make use of all the information accessible through the web and other technologies. Test-takers may be asked to query a database, compose an e-mail based on their research, or seek information on the Internet and decide how reliable it is.

While there are no students signing up to add more tests to their overcrowded plate, the ICT Literary Assessment is a good concept. It addresses a problem few schools have been able to tackle. For years now, colleges and universities have complained that students are savvy enough to judge materials found online. Whether it is separating fact from fiction, selecting credible sources for research or interpreting data collected, students have struggled technology literacy. The test might equip schools to better teach research methods in these technology-driven days.

A USA TODAY analysis of 620 deaths of four-year college and university students since Jan. 1, 2000, finds that freshmen are uniquely vulnerable. They account for more than one-third of undergraduate deaths in the study, although they are only 24% of the undergraduates at those institutions, according to National Center for Education Statistics data analyzed by the American Council on Education for USA TODAY.

The most common causes of death for college freshmen include:

High school students should be very aware of the consequences of their choices, as well as be alerted to the real dangers of crime, drinking and drug activity, and depression on college campuses. There are resources available for students who need help, but it is the student’s responsibility to take advantage of the resources.

In addition to providing information about college choice, scholarships, financial aid and adjusting to college, make it a priority to promote safety on campus, so that mistakes in judgment do not turn into coming-of-age tragedies.