I thought Fayette County Schools, curriculum and teachers were pretty good. I thought the purpose of our schools was to provide an academic education. I thought the role of a teacher was to teach. Although the curriculum isn't perfect and some teachers are better than others, I thought Fayette County teachers and parents had a right to be proud. But, I guess I was wrong.

There is a group of very powerful people in our school system who think our schools are ineffective and old-fashioned. They have begun to take away the emphasis on knowledge and high test scores and replace it with an emphasis on social skills, self-esteem, and behavior training.

They have begun to place your children in learning groups called families or tribes, and our kids are taught that they are responsible for each other's work, learning, and correct social behavior.

They want to force our teachers to change the curriculum from teaching knowledge to facilitating hands-on skills and " correct" social views so that your child will acquire the characteristics of a "good citizen" as the primary goal of education.

Sound crazy? Think it won't happen or the school board will stop it? Well, it is crazy, it is happening, and the school board (on a split vote) just appointed the leader of this radical educational reform group as our new school superintendent. His name is John DeCotis. But that's not the worst of it.

These changes began two years ago. Mr. DeCotis and a few other administrators got the school board to fund Susan Kovalik Inc. to provide seminars to our county teachers and staff. Susan Kovalik is a retired elementary school teacher from California who devised a "new" education program called Integrated Thematic Instruction (ITI).

Her program is not new; it is Outcome Based Education (OBE) with a few twists and a new name.

A new name was needed because OBE has too many opponents throughout the country. The ITI model proposes the same radical reforms OBE requires: doing away with a county-approved curriculum, getting rid of tests and grades, getting rid of all academic classes and having students spend the day working in groups on projects, evaluating students by the groups' success and cooperation skills rather than by individual achievement, and the groups will contain students with a minimum three-year age spread. The ITI program contains many more changes, such as abolishing the study of history, but it would take too much space to list them all.

An integral part of making your children "good citizens" comes from the LIFESKILLS part of ITI. Most of our schools have already implemented LIFESKILLS and it all seems so innocent. You walk into the school and you see all the nice words like integrity, patience, cooperation, and caring. Who could have a problem with that?

But, what you don't see or know about is the textbook called " TRIBES" an extremely liberal, humanistic textbook is a behavior modification program designed to make your children conform to " new-age social thinking" You have no idea how much academic time is stolen from children to mold your kids into their version of " good citizens". But, that's not the worst of it.

Last September, my wife and I went to Booth Middle School to verify our daughters' stories of unusual games, psychological testing, and academic time being cut in half. The stories were true; we got involved and started to investigate ITI.

Last fall, we had three meetings that included the person responsible for the county curriculum, Mr. DeCotis.

At our first meeting, he claimed his only knowledge of ITI was the concept of (for example) an English teacher assigning a paper relating to a topic that the history teacher was covering.

We were asked if we knew of any other school doing what Booth was doing, which we didn't, and he assured us he would put a stop to the psychological testing that was taking place.

At our second meeting he assured us he would talk to the principle at Booth about changing the school's Proposed Mission Statement from being about meeting our children's' social and emotional needs and working together as a community to being something more academically oriented.

Our third meeting with Mr. DeCotis included school board member Woody Shelnutt. When Mr. DeCotis was questioned about the ITI program, he again feigned ignorance of ITI by stating that he never went to any of the seminars. He did state that we had to understand that there were a lot of advances in "brain research" in the last five years.

We did come to agreement on one action that the parents at Booth would be fully informed about ITI and should have the right to opt out of the ITI teaching team. The obvious inference was that ITI was only taking place on one team at Booth. That meeting took place in November.

Throughout this process, my wife and I were convinced Mr. DeCotis was a conservative administrator who, like us, was very concerned with all the changes. However, we were concerned that the man responsible for curriculum in the county appeared to know so little about major curriculum changes, unapproved textbooks, and the ITI program.

I spent two months investigating and writing an 11-page research paper detailing the ITI program and the lack of any medical research backing up these wild ideas.

I don't know how Mr. Shelnutt feels, but my wife and I know Mr. DeCotis deceived us.

Mr. DeCotis knew, all along, about ITI and the fact that it was going into all our schools. The new Fayette County Performance Report details the implementation of ITI throughout the county. They're proud that all our teachers are being trained in the new programs and that the staff is "apprised and involved in the latest educational techniques, instruction, and philosophy."

The county report advocates the "hands-on approach" and the " developmental approach to teaching and learning," It states the county staff development program was highlighted by bringing in Susan Kovalik and her ITI model. They want everyone to know that many of our teachers are trained in "Brain Compatible Teaching" methods. But, that isn't the worst of it.

We acquired a booklet Mr. DeCotis wrote describing his views on teachers and education. He states: "What is a quality teacher? Is it someone who is expert in his/her field? Is it someone whose students pass all of his/her courses? The answer to all these questions is NO! A quality teacher is someone who teaches a student enough to develop the characteristics of an educated person."

Unfortunately, like Kovalik's ITI and LIFESKILLS, he doesn't tell you who gets to decide what are the "characteristics of an educated person."

In his booklet, Mr. DeCotis describes his version of the "School of the Future." He advocates getting rid of grades K-12 and having schools organized by programs. He advocates teachers becoming group facilitators who coordinate and evaluate clusters of self-directed and self-taught students. He advocates getting rid of math, English, science, and social studies, and replacing them with individual and group projects and tasks derived from a central theme.

He advocates abolishing traditional testing methods. He advocates group evaluations of projects and skills. He advocates students be subjectively evaluated on their ability to cooperate, how they think, their ability to accomplish a skill, and their ability to access information. He references the "new" research in the field of education and explains "Brain Compatible Learning."

Mr. DeCotis' vision of the school of tomorrow is strikingly similar to the ITI model. He uses the same terminology and advocates many of the same changes. The amazing feature of Mr. DeCotis' pamphlet was that it was published in 1989. But that isn't the worst of it.

The worst of it is that all of these radical reforms are being implemented and the school board was never notified, the parents were never notified, and no parental oversight or review committee was ever formed.

Instead of firing Mr. DeCotis for disregarding the curriculum review process and perverting the entire concept of parental involvement, [school board members] Debbie Condon, Mickey Littlefield, and Greg Powers voted to interview only Mr. DeCotis for our new superintendent and have offered him the job.

There's still time; get involved; voice your opinion.

I offer anyone interested a copy of my 11-page analysis of ITI, and I encourage you to go to your schools and ask to review copies of the ITI Manual and the textbook TRIBES. If needed, we have copies of both of them, as well as Mr. DeCotis' booklet.