Alert: August 20 is Lemonade Freedom Day!

Even kids' Lemonade stands have felt the impact of restrictive regulations. As a general rebellion against non-sensical over-regulation, a group of people have declared Saturday, August 20, to be Lemonade Freedom Day ... and are urging kids all over the U.S. to sell lemonade that day.

If you go to the website (www.lemonadefreedom.org), you will see a map with pins in it denoting locations that have regulations that control lemonade stands ... typically vendor permits or health inspections. (One of them is Appleton.) It also includes guidance for you to follow if someone tries to shut down your lemonade stand.

On August 20th, pledge to buy a lemonade from every kid with a stand that you see!!

PS: Appleton's event, according to the website: Appleton hosts an Old Car Show every year near Lydia Coenen's house. The nine-year-old and her friend have been selling lemonade and cookies to passersby for the last several years. This year, they were shut down by police. Vendors inside the car show didn’t appreciate the competition, so they convinced the city council to ban concession sales within a certain radius of the Old Car Show, putting young Lydia and her friend out of business.

Some more data:

• The cost of FEDERAL REGULATIONS is estimated at $1.8 trillion.

• The FEDERAL spending budget for the year ending in September will be $3.8 trillion, of which $1.5 trillion will be deficit.

• STATE/LOCAL government spending will total $1.6 trillion.

• The U.S. GDP will be about $15 trillion.

So ...

• The deficit will be increased by $1.5 trillion, making total U.S. debt about $15 trillion, equal to the GDP.

• Federal spending will be just over 25% of GDP ... the tipping point for countries that aren't resilient to economic shocks.

• Total government spending (federal/state/local) will be $5.4 trillion, or 36% of GDP. Regulations add 12% more.

Famous Last Words ...

"I DID IT M-Y-Y-Y-Y WAY!"

The Alabama Theatre, Myrtle Beach.

Recently, we vacationed in Myrtle Beach and happened upon the Alabama Theatre for a three-hour variety extravaganza. It featured a hilarious comedian whose style was understated country. Among his contributions:
• Things haven’t been so great with the recession and all, so we’re changing the name of the Alabama to the Al-Obama, so that we can apply for stimulus funds to keep our high quality offering featuring world-class entertainers serving our audiences ... at a loss.
• Be careful wandering around our theater building. It’s fairly old, and hasn’t had the benefits that newer buildings have since the government decided it would protect us from stupid people.
• That Pelosi woman. What’s with her? She tells us we need to pass the health reform bill so we can find out what’s in it?
• His recent divorce? We kept arguing about the same things, time and again ... like that commode seat up or down bit? I told her that if it’s causing a problem, we should get rid of it. So, I took the seat off and threw it out. She's a quick learner. She decided I was causing a problem and got rid of me.
• Taco Bell. I’m worried about Taco Bell. I don’t think they’re doing so well, and I’m worried that the government will take them over. Can you imagine Taco Bell run by the government? Taco Bell has a challenge making a good burrito itself. Can you imagine what a government-made burrito would taste like?

School Specialty CEO on Education Trends ...

Recently, Dave Vander Zanden, CEO of School Specialty, Appleton, told a St. Norbert CEO Breakfast & Strategy audience these points about the U.S. educational process that are important to School Specialty’s strategies:
• The U.S. educational system is very slow to adopt new ideas, especially technologically-based ones.
• His company’s objective: To help educators engage and inspire students to learn. Increasingly, the initiatives focus on “accelerated learning” techniques. Slowly, he said, textbooks are on their way out as a primary learning resource.
• With only 20% of students going on to post-secondary education, the emphasis of learning must be on “the path to adulthood.”

Our Future Workforce: Kids

At a meeting recently of the Bay Area Community Council, we heard some eye-opening statistics about the importance of Birth-to-5 education from Sue Vincent, exec. dir. of Encompass child care and head of Start Smart:
• Brain (i.e., learning) development has to be actively nurtured beginning at birth ... or it’s very likely development will be stunted and never catch up later on! If a child’s vocabulary is “behind” at age 3, it will be behind in First Grade ... and will most likely still be behind at 11th grade. The U.S. ranks 21st in developed countries in supporting this development. “According to literacy expert Andrew Biemiller, ‘Vocabulary at age 3 predicts first grade reading success; first grade vocabulary predicts 11th grade reading level.’”
Some stats:
• By Age 3, children of parents on welfare have a vocabulary foundation of about 500 words, of working class parents, 700 words, and of college-educated parents, 1200 words. Reading to your child matters!
• By Age 5, a child’s brain reaches 85% of its adult weight, developing 700 neural synapses (the connections that help learning) every second.
• Of 50 children who have trouble reading in first grade, 44 of them still have trouble in fourth grade.
• Children who are chronically hungry (think at risk schools, students using the federal free breakfast/free lunch funding) are more likely to be in special ed, to repeat a grade, to get into fights, and to have lower test scores. It can cost up to four times as much to educate a child who doesn’t have enough to eat compared to one who does.
• “Researchers ... found that ‘extra talk’ -- where parents ask questions and use a large vocabulary to elaborate and extend what children are doing or saying -- is strongly connected to emotional and social growth, and creates a positive relationships with the child. The richness of language children are exposed to appears to be a cornerstone of emotional, social and intellectual development.” (Hart & Risley)

Some other learnings:
From Green Bay School Superintendent Greg Maass:
• He wrote his graduate thesis on leadership. Today, he is “strongly challenging our accountability measures within schools. I am now looking for better leadership capability at the school principal level. There’s a difference between being a good administrator and a leader. We need to develop and emphasize the latter more.”
• He’s gone to a “professional learning communications” model, where teachers meet regularly with their grade and/or specialty peers, share results, share practices, and make changes.

From NWTC CEO Jeff Rafn:
• A quarter of his 43,000 students come from each of these age brackets: 18-25, 26-35, 36-50, and 51+. Very surprising. A much older skewing “student’ body than suspected.
• Only 17% of jobs today require only a high school education. Fully 83% require learning beyond high school.
• NWTC”s English Language Learning program supports over 39 different languages this year.

How many bones do you have?

An adult has fewer bones than a baby. We start off life with 350 bones, but because bones fuse together during growth, we end up with only 206 as adults.
Taking care of your bones takes more than calcium. You need to perform weight-bearing exercises (not just elliptical or cycling) and an alkaline-rich diet full of vegetables and fruits. Avoid sodas and sugars, which rob your bones of calcium. You've only got 206, so take care of them.