I’ve gotten in a few good interviews with people at charter schools, advocates, and some state legislators.  I’ve got a TON of stuff to cobble together into a few more good posts ont he subject.  And while I’m normally a very fast writer when it comes to dashing off these little screeds of mine, when I’m trying to get sources and facts and quotes straight, I am a tad more deliberate.

I also wrote a condensed (very condensed) version of this series for the St. Paul Legal Ledger, which should be coming out fairly shortly; I’ll keep you posted.

I hope to have the next part of the Charter series out tomorrow; otherwise, Friday.

I’m currently interviewing people from some of the charter schools mentioned in John Fitzgerald’s MN2020 report slagging the financial management of public schools.

While I’m working on that, though, I thought I’d check into the media’s coverage of this “story”.  Remember: MN2020 is a “non-partisan” “progressive” think tank that employs a number of former Twin Cities media figures – partly for their obvious skills, and partly because nobody can get placement from news media people like other news media people.

It’s probably not a surprise that the “progressive” Daily Planet ran the entire report verbatim. I don’t know that MN2020 and the Daily Planet get their money from the same place, but their sources are certainly cousins.

It’s not “Media”, but on the “Parents United for Public Schools” website (PUfPS is an astroturf group that, I’ll bank dimes to dollars, gets its money from the same non-profit trough as MN2020), in a piece slugged “critics can’t answer the reports allegations!”, the author of a piece citing the MN2020 report writes:

Some wondered why we didn’t separate severe findings (called material deficiencies) from less severe findings (called significant deficiencies). We didn’t separate them because significant deficiencies can become material deficiencies, and when they do, the taxpayer loses.

It’s John Fitzgerald, of course, writing about his own report.  And he tries to answer one of the criticisms I, among others, raise; why did he count hundreds of tiny, niggling, piddling infractions (more tomorrow) in the same category as the real, severe problems?:

Significant deficiencies are like a benign melanoma – checking it early can help avoid disastrous problems later. We determined both levels were important enough to note in each school’s tally.

Which would be an honest answer, but for the fact that Fitzgerald did not distinguish between trivial and serious issues when he concluded that Minnesota should abandon charter schools.

EdWeek links the report without any actual fact-checking.

The Saint Paul Public Schools’ blog linked the report, as well as the St. Paul “Network of Education Action Teams“, without comment.

On the other hand, Minnesota Public Radio ran the report’s marquee point – the percentages of schools that had issues – pretty much verbatim.  But reporter Elizabeth Baier also dug beneath the numbers to the real issue (emphasis added):

In a statement, the Minnesota Department of Education said both school districts and charter schools frequently have “findings” in the financial audits they submit to the state. Districts and charter schools are required to submit plans to the Education Department to correct their financial shortcomings, but the department said it’s up to the local school districts and charter school boards to make sure corrective action is taken.

The think tank report follows a 2008 report by the state auditor which also raised questions about financial management at charter schools. In that report, the auditor’s office recommended that charter school board members be required to attend financial management training. It also found that charters were roughly comparable to district schools in terms of financial health.

Er – how’s that?

“Roughly comparable”?

But John Fitzgerald’s report looked at the same findings that the Legislative Auditor looked at and used it to launch a call to shut down schools that had issues!  And yet the Legislative Auditor merely suggested better finance training?

Question, John Fitzgerald: does this mean we should shut down public schools, too?

(KSTP-TV , the Pioneer Press, WCCO, the Winona Daily News, the Worthington Post carried roughly the same report, both of which credited the AP, and included a shorter mention of the Auditor’s actual conclusions).The Duluth News Tribune did the same, but added material related to a Duluth charter which was found to be among the “worst offenders” in the report.

Among bloggers?  “Phoenix Woman” at Mercury Rising dives into the deep end of the “Racism” pool in a comment to her own post (which brought us nothing otherwise but ad-homina against charter school organizer Al Fan and the sense that she thinks charter schools are a conservative phenomenon, just as MN2020 told her they are):

The problem in Minnesota is that a lot of folks got bamboozled, especially in the Native American community, early on about charter schools. That’s why we have so many of the danged things. (It was a school targeting Native American kids whose director just got caught taking $1.4 million from the till.) If there’s a pedagogical equivalent of “greenwashing”, the buying off of the local Native American and African-American communities WRT charter schools is definitely it.

Really?

I’d like to take that question to the parents of Native American students – who have the lowest gradation rates of any ethnic group in the public system, and who are closely involved in the many Native American charter schools around Minnesota – and get their reactions.

Heck, I’d like to get yours.

Tomorrow (or, possibly, Wednesday): A look at the “infractions”.

And here I thought I was going to get a day off.

Well, not a “day off”, so much as a day of behind-the-scenes stuff.  I’m getting hold of charter school representatives and getting their responses to specific allegations in the MN2020 report.

But MN2020 came out with a response to the response that their report has gotten.

And I gotta tell you – it’s as rhetorically target-rich an environment as the original report.

The piece – by John Van Hecke – ends with an invocation of early-20th-century Brit poet Rupert Brooke:

The English poet Rupert Brooke wonderfully expressed Great Britain’s romantic embrace of the unfolding 1913 European war.  “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is forever England…Brooke, despite his poet’s skill, did not write from firsthand combat experience. He served, joining the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve shortly after hostilities commenced. He died in 1915, off Gallipoli, of a septic infection caused by a mosquito bite.

“The Soldier” is a marvelous sonnet. It carries a haunting quality precisely because of Brooke’s wartime death. His contemporaries, the “war poets,” however, quickly abandoned their early romanticism, writing, instead, somber themes of frustration, loss and absurdity.

Like Brooke and an increasingly war weary United Kingdom during WWI, early charter school romanticism is yielding to a larger educational reality. Charter schools are neither as great as their champions suggest nor as horrible as their critics insist.

Right – and I’m not aware of any charter school proponents claiming that charter schools are a panacaea.  They are an effort to bring some level of parental and educational choice to a segement of the population that couldn’t afford the traditional route to such choice, private or parochial schools.

And the fact that they are needed – desperately – in that role is proved by their success in the “market”, especially in the city.

But we’ll get back to that.  Because Van Hecke betrays an essential myopia and conceit next:

The difficult, rewarding business of teaching children must be improved by the charter school movement. If charter schools can’t deliver on their promises, they don’t merit public funds and, most critically, they don’t merit parents’ investment of their children’s futures.

Conceit:  So does MN2020 in its infinite (and self-declared) wisdom think we charter parents haven’t thoroughly considered what merits our investment?  Moreso than the imponderably vast majority of other parents?

Myopia: And if we need to make that decision, cutting loose public funds from institutions that don’t deliver on their promise, then why not take that same standard to public schools?

Let’s take Van Hecke’s piece from the top:

In the week and a half following Minnesota 2020′s report, Checking in on Charter Schools, conservative educational policy advocates attacking us barely paused between breaths.

Didja catch that?  “Conservative educational policy advocates”?

I don’t know who he’s referring to; besides myself, I know charter school advocate Al Fan has spoken out on the MN2020 report (and I’m in the process of interviewing Mr. Fan as I write this).

But does MN2020 believe that supporting charter schools is a “conservative” issue?

Tell it to the parents at Avalon, which both of my kids have attended; I can count maybe one other Republican among the parents there; you could wallpaper the classrooms with the Obama stickers in the parking lot with a few left over.

Is he referring to the parents at Skills for Tomorrow charter, or City Academy, whose parents are largely Afro-American and, if they care about politics at all, statistically vote 90+% DFL?

What exactly is the point to trying to polarize the charter school issue into  a conservative vs. liberal issue?

I was about to write something like “…other than to placate MN2020′s political masters, who want to see charters shown as an inferior product compared to public schools to further their Teachers-Union-driven agenda”, but I thought that might be inflammatory, so I’ll change it to “I’d really like to know, given that the political label doesn’t really match the constituency”.

But OK.  Politicization is one thing.  Trying to drop things down the memory hole is quite another:

Our rather limited financial accountability research scope, examining Minnesota charter school’s public audits, has drawn greater ire than I thought possible. We clearly swatted a hornet’s nest.

We totted auditor flags and concluded that, with four of five charter schools reporting at least one financial irregularity, greater financial oversight and accountability was overdue.

Well, no.  In John Fitzgerald’s original piece, after ”totting” the auditor “flags” (of which much, much more next week), he concluded:

 The state should reconsider its agreements with the 121 charter schools that cannot successfully pass a financial audit. Further, taxpayers should not continue to fund the 50 percent of charter schools that do not resolve financial problems…Schools with finances that have been stunningly mismanaged for years should be cut off from public funds and closed.If charter schools can’t run their schools in a financially competent manner, Minnesota should reconsider whether charter schools are worthy of public funding at all

That was a clear call to shut down the 50% of schools that have had sequential problems with audits (of which much more next week), and to consider abandoning the entire charter school experiement, after declaring these audits to be a dispositive indicator of a school’s financial ethicality.

Read the paragraphs above – the italicized ones – and show me a different interpretation of MN2020′s original conclusion?

Now, if John Van Hecke is saying MN2020 is rolling back from its original point, that’d be fine, but it’d be even better if they were clear about it one way or the other.

We didn’t examine graduation rates, standardized test performance or curriculum.

True.  But in the same series of audits that jump-started MN2020′s “investigation”, the Minnesota Legislative Auditor did.  Oddly, that part of the Auditor’s report didn’t make it into John Fitzgerald’s report.

We’ll touch on that next week, too.

Van Hecke, with emphasis added by me:

We purposefully engaged a touchy public policy issue. While our report raises important questions, the harsh conservative attacks against us, mostly ad hominem, suggest that we’re examining public investments that some conservatives don’t wish examined.

I have to presume Van Hecke is referring to someone else; I have kept my reporting pretty scrupulously factual.  I do know that Van Hecke referred to a series of “ad-homina” in an op-ed by Al Fan in the Winona newspaper this past week.

Again – we’ll examine that  next week as well.

Van Hecke:

I would rather engage strident advocates than indifferent citizens. That being said, let me suggest to anyone contemplating entering this debate, finish your second cup of coffee first. This experience is not for the faint of heart.

Parents?  Especially charter school parents?  All together now:

Either is raising children.  I think we’re up to it.

Conservatives may raise legitimate traditional school system concerns but underfunding public schools only to prove their shortcomings is wrong.

Maybe, maybe not.  It’s not really at issue in this discussion – although inasmuch as charter schools spend less public money per student (counting district levies and bonding) than public schools do, and MN2020 seems not to have deigned to have examined their fiscal accountability, perhaps it should be.

A public school district must serve every enrolled child, sometimes at great expense.  Pedagogical experimenting is as old as learning but innovation is not cheap. Scaling up small or modestly sized systems doesn’t always work. In other words, the best parts of charter school education appear to fundamentally be their smallness.

That, again, is a tangent – but an interesting one.  If the public schools can learn one lesson from charters, perhaps it’s that smaller is better.  The industrial-age mania for consolidating public schools into bigger and bigger buildings (and into fewer and fewer towns in rural America) is as big a mistake as…well, as the past thirty years of education outcomes show it is!

The real question, though, concerns the future of public education. Because charter schools are publicly funded, they remain an educational lightning rod. Public investment accountability pressure will only increase. Consequently, the charter school movement must live up to its rhetoric.

I think we charter parents and supporters would agree wholeheartedly; its our kids we’ve entrusted to them!

But my point – and the point to many of the MN2020 report’s detractors – is that that MN2020 report demands a draconian response to a largely fictional, or at least overblown, problem.

How fictional and overblown?

Check back next week.

My “The Hit Is In” series (Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV) will be returning early next week.  Here’s what’s going on.

1. I’m asking a number of charter schools for comments about specific allegations in the MN2020 report about their schools.  The report includes an appendix listing specific “discrepancies” by school; I am going to get the details about these issues directly from severl the schools involved.  I’ve already spoken with three; it’s getting interesting.
2. I’m going to solicit comment about my questions, the schools’s responses, and impacts to the conclusions drawn, from MN2020.
3. I’m going over the media’s coverage of this report.  I plan on asking some media figures about their coverage, which I’d call “fawning” in most cases, but the National Association of Fawners were embarassed to endorse it.

More, hopefully, on Monday.

Also – MN2020 is taking some flak elsewhere from Fitzgerald’s report.  Their responses, so far?

Just a tad peevish.

By attacking Minnesota 2020 in this fashion, Charter School Partners [the group behind the links above] is making excuses for poor performance.

We’ll be going over what “poor performance” means next week.  Stay tuned.

Incompetence.

It’s a big word which, when aimed at someone working in their chosen, professional field, is a big, ugly rhetorical cudgel.

Basic rules of human behavior – tact, the Golden Rule, karma – bid one to use it sparingly; it should only be used when truly needed.

Last week, we took an initial look at John Fitzgerald’s pro-forma hit piece on Charter Schools.  In part II, I noted that Fitzgerald’s piece cherry-picked its territory, focusing on financials and ignoring the real reason charter schools exist – to provide parents a choice when public schools fail (as they are, more and more) and give students a better education.

But what about the look at the financials?

———-

Before we dig into Fitzgerald’s piece, let’s take a walk through a typical charter school. Via my kids, I’ve been involved with three of them, by the way; via friends and their children, five more.

Check out the building.  It’s a rental; charter schools don’t get to float bonds to build buildings.  In the inner city, it’s usually cheap office space;  the four blocks around University and Fairview in Saint Paul are home to three or four of them in ragtag old office/light industrial spaces; Skills for Tomorrow caters to inner-city parents; Avalon (featured in an MPR report a while ago) is a non-traditional program; a new German Immersion school started downstairs from Avalon this past year.  All have fanatically loyal parents.  Other charters are tucked into cheap space all over the place; the H’mong Charter is in a long-abandoned fitness club; one focusing on kids with big emotional problems is stuffed into an annex to a public health clinic on Arcade; an environmental charter and an online charter for the disabled are neighbors in old offices on Energy Park; Yinghua Chinese Immersion school is in an old office on Pierce Butler.  None of them stand out like a typical high school, designed as they are for the glorification of the school board that commissioned them; all of them are “cost-effective” at best.

Walk in the door.  There might be an Admin Assistant; he or she may or may not be getting paid (parent volunteers fill the role, often as not), or at a bigger school handles the full range of administrative scutwork, from the school’s logistics, administrative support, office management, fielding admissions calls, giving tests, serving as a de-facto school nurse…you name it.

Ask to see the Principal.  At a public school you’d have a choice; my kids’ last public elementary had a principal, a vice-principal who handled discipline and transportation issues, another that handled academics, plus a full-time secretary.  Our charter will have one principal, maybe; it might be an on-site principal, who is usually splitting time between principal-ing and teaching; others work for the sponsoring organizations, and so are busy fundraising (because the tax allotment never covers everything that’s needed) and administering.

Wanna talk to admissions?  Leave a message.  “Admissions” is often as not a teacher who’s covering the job in addition to teaching classes and running extracurriculars; at bigger schools, the receptionist/office managewr/Radar O’Reilly might hand out forms and file applications.  Teachers rotate through all kinds of jobs, depending on their expertise or luck of the draw, from managing computer networks to running the library to handling paperwork.

There are some specialists; special ed teachers (since they take public money, they need to handle special ed at some level or another) are common; “curriculum specialists”, less so.

Every other adult in the building is a teacher, or an adult who’s volunteering to tutor, lead activities, or lend their own expertise to a class.  Sometimes, one of them is an accountant, but that’d be a rarity.

Compare this to any public school you’ve seen.  Forget about comparing it with the headquarters building of a big school district like Saint Paul’s monolithic castle at 360 Colborne, six stories crammed with administrators, bureaucrats, meeting rooms, and people who do everything that school districts need and some things they don’t; logistics, planners, the school board and its staff, accountants, bookkeepers, public relations specialists, union and government  relations staff, lawyers, curriculum wonks, a Superintendent and a bevy of assistant superintendents and their support staffs – indeed, people who do everything but teach classes; you’ll find nary a student in that building during the work day.

A charter school is “chartered” to a sponsoring organization by the city’s school board; it is, in essence, a three year contract to perform a service, teaching kids.  It might be an organization with a social mission as diverse as the H’Mong, Afrocentric, Moslem or pseudo-Catholic groups that run schools; it might be a  university Education department, like Hamline and Concordia Universities, which run charter schools almost like labs; it could be groups with an educational concept they want to further, as different as Nova (based on the classics) and Skills for Tomorrow (focusing on educating inner city kids).  What they have in common is that “teaching kids” is the thing that the school, and the limited staff it can afford once it pays its other bills, focuses on.

You’ll scour the state’s charters schools long and hard to find a full-time accountant among ‘em.

———-

So I read through Fitzgerald’s piece to find the “incompetence” he cites not merely for individual schools, but for the charter school movement in general.

Remember; the marquee points in his relase were:

• 83 percent were found to have at least one financial irregularity in their audit – five years earlier, that figure was 73 percent;

• 51 percent of those schools with problems identified on their 2007 financial audits had the same problems identified on their 2008 audits, according to the MDE;

• 29 percent did not respond to a request for board minutes – five years earlier, that figure was 33 percent;

• 55 percent were found to have “limited segregation of duties,” a requirement that ensures no single charter school official has control of the school’s funds;

• 26 percent didn’t have proper collateral for deposit insurance, a requirement that ensures the charter school can pay its bills.

But what do these individual allegations really mean?

We’ll go through that tomorrow.

(Part I, Part II and Part IV of this series)

In 1961, communist East Germany faced a crisis.  The West had stiffened its spine against communism.  The East Germans (and their Russian handlers) faced a dire threat across the nation’s open borders.  So they built a fence and, through the middle of the divided capitol in Berlin, a big wall, reinforced with barbed wire, mines, dogs and machine guns.

Not to keep western invaders out, of course; it was to keep East Germans, Czechs and Poles in.  It wasn’t NATO tanks they were worried about; it was the immense efflux of the Eastern bloc’s most motivated, talented, useful people across the border to freedom.

Public schools, especially (but far from exclusively) in the major cities, are failing.  Graduation rates in Saint Paul are under 50%; it’s far worse among black and hispanic students.  And the parents of those students are responding by leaving the districts.  Due to Minnesota’s school choice rules, parents can sent their kids to other public districts, to private schools, or to charter  schools.  Over an eighth of Saint Paul parents have decamped from the public system; it’s “worse” in Minneapolis.

And like the East Germans, the Minnesota education establishment knows that it needs to stanch the bleeding before it bleeds completely dry.
The left – especially the big institutional left, the DFL, and its handlers, the teachers union – hate charter schools.  The schools are generally non-union, of course.  Beyond that, due to the 1991 law that established the charter system, the state money that would  go to the student at a public school follows the student to the charter school.

In the MN2020 hit piece on charter schools yesterday (subtitled “An Examination of Charter School Finances”, John Fitzgerald wrote:

Unlike private schools, charter schools are funded by taxpayer dollars. While traditional public schools get roughly $9,500 per-student from the state, charter schools get $10,500 for each student from the state. State officials say charter schools deserve more taxpayer money because they can’t ask local taxpayers for additional taxes to operate their schools or for bonds to build school buildings the way traditional districts can.

Fitzgerald breezes past this like it’s immaterial – presumably (I’ll put words in his mouth) to leave the reader with the impression that charter schools are over-funded compared to the public schools.

But local bonding funding more than makes up the purported differences in spending:

Statewide  – $9,063 per student

During the 2008-09 school year, Minnesota school districts will receive an average of $9,063 per student in general education revenue from state and local sources.

State funding per student will average of $8,182.

Referenda revenue per student will average $881.

Minneapolis (District 1.2) – $11,692 per student

During the 2008-09 school year, Minneapolis will receive $11,692 per student in general education revenue from state and local sources, compared with a statewide average of $9,063.

State funding is $10,797 per student, compared to a statewide average of $8,182.

Referenda revenue total $895 per student, compared to a state average of $881.

St. Paul (District 625) – $10,809 per student

During the 2008-09 school year, St. Paul will receive $10,809 per student in general education revenue from state and local sources, compared with a statewide average of $9,063.

State funding is $10,039 per student, compared to a statewide average of $8,182.

Referenda revenue totals $770 per student, compared to a state average of $881.

Remember to add 8% – the government inflation rate – to these numbers, which are from last year.

And then remember that charter schools need to pay for a whole lot of things – rent, for starters – out of their per-student allotment that the public schools largely don’t.Fitzgerald next moves on to “accountability”.

A major component of the 1991 charter school legislation allows the taxpayer dollars to follow the student: if a student leaves a traditional school and enrolls in a charter school, the per-student money leaves the public system and is allocated to the charter school.

Although charter schools receive taxpayer funds, they are not subject to the same checks and balances taxpayers have the right to expect. Traditional schools are governed by elected school boards. Taxpayers who disagree with the way their money is being spent need only go to the school board meeting and voice their concern. Ultimately, voters can exercise their rights and vote school board members off the body.

I’ve spent a solid day trying to figure out how to even address the myopia in this statement.

“They need only to go voice their concern?”  To whom?  To the very body that is causing the problem.  Who, especially in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, were put into office by local party machines and the teachers unions whose entire goal is to maintain the status quo.

And it’s true; the taxpayer can  “exercise their rights” to mount a big election campaign (at the appointed time in the election cycle), put their lives on hold, raise millions of dollars, and butt heads with the most entrenched establishment anywhere in Minnesota  politics. And, pretty much inevitably, fail.

As, indeed, people who are revolted by the way taxpayers money is being spent in the Cities today are failing, and even falling behind; the one Republican member of the Saint Paul school board (indeed, the sole elected Republican anywhere in Saint Paul) is leaving.

So what’s the alternative?

Go to a private school (with its attendant costs).  Or go to a school in another district (which is good if you can manage the transportation to and from the district; transportation funds do not follow the student, which is fine unless you are the one of the families most affected by the attempt to gut charter schoos, the working poor in the city.  And which, let’s not forget, is a function of the “Open Enrollment” law that will be the Educational-Industrial Complex’ next target when they kill off charter schools)…

…or go to a charter school.  Where, if you don’t like how things are being run, you can express your dissatisfaction by leaving.  By depriving the school of your kid’s share of the state money.

You can’t get more accountable than that – if by “accountable” you mean “to parents”.

Oh, and there’s one other way:

There is no such remedy for taxpayers concerned about the financial dealings fo charter schools. Their boards are not publically elected and taxpayers have no say in how their money is spent.

This is, of course, balderdash.  Many charter schools have boards, elected from among the school’s sponsors, staff and, lest we forget, parents.  These boards are immediately responsible to the school’s parents about everything, immediately.

And for those that don’t?  As Fitzgerald’s report itself notes, the Minnesota Department of Education itself administers the financial affairs of charter schools!

I mentioned this to a couple of different supporters of the current public school system.  “But taxpayers as a whole don’t get a say in how their tax money is spent at a charter school!”

I reeled with responses:

Your input as a voter ends at your district!  If you’re a voter in Marshall, your disgust with how your tax money is being spent in Minneapolis will fall on deaf electoral ears, except…via the Minnesota Department of Education.  Same as with charter schools!

Charter schools aren’t the only bodies that accept public money without publicly-elected boards; every non-profit that accept tax dollars has a board that is privately elected. Do I get a say in how, say, Minnesota Public Radio spends my tax dollars?  Do I get a vote on their board, just because they’re spending my money?  Hell, I don’t even get a vote for pledging to them!  No, my only say on MPR’s funding – or the funding of any non-profit that accepts tax dollars – is the same as the Marshall voters’ say over Minneapolis’ school spending, or over John Fitzgerald’s say over my kids’ charter school’s spending; via the legislature, which controls the Department of Education.  Which is frustratingly indirect, although not nearly so indirect as, say, being a conservative trying to change the composition of the Saint Paul School Board.

“But MPR isn’t a school!”  True.  But Fitzgerald’s article wasn’t about “education”, per se; you’ll find only the most oblique references to the actual business schools conduct, “educating” kids, anywhere in the article.  It’s about financial governance, compliance and accountability with taxpayer money.  And none of those differs in any but the most picayune details between charter schools and, say, a social service non-profit with a state contract (which also have spotty records), or an HMO (which are non-profits in Minnesota, and have even dicier records).   And if you want to bring the fact that a charter is a school into the mix, then it’s patently misleading to compare charters’ performance at financial management with public schools (not that any of them can manage money; they don’t have to follow the same rules), to say nothing of the differences in educational service and achievement that are the justification for charter schools in the first place.

There’s a reason for that, naturally.

But while Fitzgerald’s piece didn’t touch on education, it did talk a lot about financial management.

More on that on Monday.

UPDATE: I had to re-do this post; MN2020′s code interacts badly with a “feature” in WordPress that made it basically impossible to fix it without copying the whole thing into Notepad to scrub the invisible formatting and re-pasteing it into WordPress.

So the comments are lost.  Sorry about that.

(Part I, Part III and Part IV of this series)