Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 17 August 2000 — Page 4

The Muncie Times, August 17, 2000, page 4

continued from page 1 Suding said, “I think it was a very productive meeting. People had a chance to voice their opinions. I think people were able to talk about the issues and their feelings on those issues.” No new meetings have been scheduled since then. Supt. John said district officials, including some board members, are expected to be at Yorktown High School on opening day to meet with minority students as well as the general student population to deliver a zero tolerance message. “We want to assure them (students) that we will not tolerate the kind of behavior that in the past has led people being called names and racial slurs. That will not be tolerated. We want our students to be sensitive to

other students. “We want the minority students to know that if anyone calls them names they should come and see us and tell us about it. We feel that this, plus our meeting with Dr. Payne, should help us chart how to go forward.” John said the Mount Pleasant District had also contacted the Equity Assistance Center, part of the U. S. Department of Education, to see if there were any external grants or funds for diversity and sensitivity training speakers or workshops. When he contacted the center’s Michigan regional office, he was advised to contact Payne. John said he will wait for the results of the meeting with Payne before deciding whether to enlist additional assistance from former Muncie Community Schools Supt. Dr. Sam

Abram, who was Muncie’s first African American school chief. John said he had talked informally with Abram, whom he described as a friend. The Yorktown racial imbroglio was triggered when early in July student Harry Pickett complained that he had been subjected to racial innuendoes, epithets, harassment and the use of the “N” word in what he felt was a hostile ethnic environment. After his parents, Randy and Teresa Moore, became involved in the case, it developed a life of its own. The Indiana Civil Rights Commission has become involved. The Muncie chapter of the NAACP met with school officials and offered to help resolve the problem. Moore, an Indiana American Water Co. operations manager, and his family in 1999 moved

from Terre Haute, Ind., to Yorktown in 1999. They were so disappointed about how their children, Harry and daughter Amber, had been treated by the Yorktown schools that they broached the idea of having the teens transfer to Muncie schools. That would cost $3,500 per child per year, not including transportation and related issues. The Moores wanted the school corporation to pay the $7,000 tuition fees. However, district officials said they wanted to see the Moore children and the other minority in Yorktown continue to attend district schools. Although district officials said they had been unaware of similar racial incidents in Yorktown, one family said it had raised those issues several times in the late 1990s. Sally J. Shewman

said her son, Ryan, who is biracial, had been mistreated his days on the varsity basketball team. She said the coach had used “inappropriate behavior and language” against players. She said the coach had engaged in “name calling” and had mocked teens on the team, without being penalized by the school even after his behavior was brought to the attention of his ostensible bosses. Shewman and her husband, Royce A., had, over the years, written letters to former Mount Pleasant Township School Corp. Supt. Dr. Larry Loveall, Yorktown High School Principal Jim Suding and the Indiana Civil Rights Commission pointing out problems within the school district, without getting any satisfaction.

Regular exercise keeps blood vessels from clogging, study

DALLAS—The blood vessels of older athletes behave like those of people half their age, according to a new study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers studied sedentary individuals and athletes, young and old. The athletes were longdistance runners, cyclists and triathletes, who combined running, cycling and swimming. Both groups of young people, sedentary and athletic, average 27 years of age. The average ages for the older groups were 63 for the sedentary participants and 66 for the athletes. The study found that the older athletes’ blood

vessels functioned as well as those of the participants in either of the two younger groups. “This study demonstrates that regular physical activity can protect aging blood vessels,” says the study’s lead author, Stefano Taddei, M.D., an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Pisa in Italy. “Long-term exercise protects the inner lining of the blood vessels from age-related changes and makes them behave more like those of a young person,” he says. And it may not take a triathlon to reap benefits, Taddei says. A study by the Honolulu Heart Program published in Circulation last year showed that regularly

walking more than 1.5 miles a day reduced heart disease risk in older individuals. “You do not need to be an athlete to get these beneficial effects from exercise,” he says. “Aerobic activity 5 days a week—rather than intensive training—might just do the trick.” Blood vessels need to be able to expand to accommodate increases in blood flow. A protective layer of cells, called the endothelium, forms the inner lining of blood vessels and produces substances that help the vessels expand, or dilate. In healthy blood vessels, the endothelium produces a substance called nitric oxide that helps the vessels dilate when the

heart needs more blood. Nitric oxide also protects the vessel walls from developing atherosclerosis—the buildup of fatty substances that thicken the arteries and block blood flow—and thrombosis, the formation of blood clots that can block small or narrowed vessels and cause heart attacks, explains Taddei. Aging can cause alterations in the endothelium, he says, making older individuals more prone to the atherosclerosis and thrombosis. Previous studies have linked aging to problems in endothelium responsiveness and have shown that exercise can make the endothelium dilate more efficiently, even

for patients with chronic heart failure, says Taddei. Taddei’s team studied 12 young and 12 older sedentary subjects and compared them to 11 young athletes and 14 older athletes. The researchers gave the study subjects a substance called acetylcholine, which causes the blood vessels to dilate if the endothelium is producing nitric oxide properly. The young subjects, whether sedentary or active, had a similar strong response to acetylcholine and their vessels dilated. Among the older participants, athletes showed greater blood vessel dilation than the sedentary group.