Powe Denied Again by NCAA.............

[Seymore]

Jake, you can't fix stupid !!!

Ignorance can't be fixed is a more accurate statement. Only ignorance can explain your comment about someone with a learning disability.

[Greenhead22]

Well, did you know that over 50% of the kids put in special ed, or that have been diagnosed with some type of learning disability, are normal just like the rest of us. They aren't "special," and they sure as hell don't have a learning disability. They are put into special ed by their parents wanting that $$$ check every month, and the kids go along with it because they receive a free ride straight through school. Over half of my high school's football team are listed as special ed students, but there surely don't have any problems learning the offensive and defensive playbooks. I knew kids that used to brag about it, not having to do crap for schoolwork to graduate from high school. I had a friend who played football for UM years ago with a bad "learning disability." He took normal classes in high school and finished with at least a 3.0, and he also did the same at UM.

It's just like all these parents today that load their kids up with ritalin. There is nothing wrong with the kids, the parents just refuse to discipline them along with the teachers at school , so they get a doc to say, yep they've got ADD and write up a prescription. It's like that southpark episode, we need to come up with some ritalout.

You would not believe the % of my mom's 9th grade classes that are on a 5th grade reading level. Now, is that caused from a learning disability, or by the teachers passing them just to get rid of their problems.

[Seymore]

Dude, don't quote stats to me about learning disabilities. I've lived it both personally and with my daughter.

Perhaps your mother would like to read some of the literature regarding the association method of learning and aphasia written by Dr. Etoile DuBard. I'm sure she would gain a greater understanding of the problem.

Additionally, I am convinced ADD is more a symptom of an underlying learning problem than an actual diagnosis in and of itself. Teachers encourage parents to have their child diagnosed with ADD and placed on medicine so they don't have to deal with something they don't understand.

Public schools also don't want to address the problem because it takes money from their budget to provide an appropriate education. I've had all the dodges thrown at me by teachers and administrators who just want to avoid the problem. I can assure you when I got through with them, they wished I had never come along and would take my kid to some other school.

Read up on it. Then come back and we'll talk.

[Greenhead22]

I've never been around a person that actually had ADD, but I've been around a bunch that faked it though. Once one person who has ADD uses the help the way it's actually supposed to be used, then you've got 10 that come right behind them and use it in the wrong way.

Case in point, I was watching espn earlier with the Adam LeRoche story, first baseman from the Braves. He's had ADD all his life and was just diagnosed. He would daydream out on the field and totally forget the number of outs, covering scenarios, etc. The ADD was diagnosed, and he was given some meds. The meds are banned by MLB, but they allowed his request to take the meds because that's the only one's he can take to help him. Since he started taking the meds, he's been avg .350 and 7-10 homeruns each month because it is helping him concentrate more. Now, I bet we'll start seeing more and more ADD cases coming up so they can take meds to concentrate more on the field and at the plate.

Same goes with Track and Field, zero tolerance policy. They once allowed a couple of women to take prescriptions for narcolepsy and female thyroid problems, which included some major enhancements. Once they did, they started receiving requests from all over the place, thus forcing those 2 women to retire.

[Po Monkey Lounger]

Finally, after Powe has been denied, the CL comes out with a fair article from Powe's perspective in this matter:

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Star recruit pushes on

Powe disputes 'learning disabled' label

By Richard Lake
rlake@clarionledger.com



Joe Ellis/The Clarion-Ledger

Former Wayne County football standout and University of Mississippi recruit Jerrell Powe explains that he learns best when things are laid out clearly for him.



TIMELINE

December 2004: Jerrell Powe caps stellar three-year career at Wayne County High School with nine sacks and 89 tackles in senior season; named first-team All-State by The Clarion-Ledger.
February 2005: Powe signs scholarship papers with Ole Miss.
August 2005: After failing to meet NCAA academic eligibility requirements for freshmen, Powe enrolls at Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, Va., where he plays football.
February 2006: Powe signs scholarship papers with Ole Miss.
May 2006: Powe graduates from Hargrave Military.
Aug. 26: Ole Miss announces the NCAA Initial-Eligibility Clearinghouse did not certify Powe’s eligibility, ruling him ineligible to play at Ole Miss this fall.
Aug. 31: Lafayette County Chancery Court Judge issues temporary restraining order, ordering The University of Mississippi to enroll Powe and place him on athletic scholarship.
Sept. 1:The NCAA, Ole Miss and Powe’s attorneys reach an agreement allowing Powe to enroll as a part-time student, not on scholarship, pending an appeal of his eligibility status.
Sept. 14: NCAA appeals committee rules against Powe; Ole Miss urges him to drop his lawsuit.
Sept. 16: Powe announces he’s withdrawing from school and dropping his lawsuit.



WAYNESBORO — He is a big dumb kid who was pushed through school by football crazies with dollar signs in their eyes despite his failing grades, an inability to read and a learning disability.

Right now, that's what most people think about Jerrell Powe. But Powe says those people are wrong.

There is no doubt about it, Powe is enormous - 6 feet 3 1/2 inches tall and 347 pounds - about the size of a refrigerator, only taller.

But he swears he isn't just some dumb football player.

Despite, he says, what people have read, what the authorities have said and what anyone's instincts say about football players from the sticks, he can read just fine.

"There was a lot of lies in the press saying I couldn't read and write," said Powe, who was shadowed by a Clarion-Ledger reporter and photographer for a day last week. "I never had any problems reading."

To prove it, Powe logged onto the Internet and read aloud with no problem an Associated Press breaking news story, about the Carolina Panthers for the reporter. He wrote a few words - "I love mom" - on a pad of paper, too, just to show he could.

Powe, who turned 19 last month, is the much-heralded high school football player from this blue-collar town who signed to play for the University of Mississippi, only to have his eligibility denied by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Powe has a 2005 certificate of attendance, not a traditional diploma, from his high school.

Everyone in Waynesboro knows Powe. Waynesboro is a town of about 5,000 people - the hub of a county with 21,000 people whose major industry is timber.

The town is a few miles from the Alabama border at the junction of U.S. 84 and U.S. 45.

This is where Powe was born in 1987, the third of four children.

His mom, Shirley, raised them by herself in a small brick house down a country road a few miles outside of town.

At that house, where Powe still lives when he's not staying with his girlfriend, there is a grass lot, the shape and size of a miniature football field.

That grass is where Powe learned.

JUST A REGULAR KID

He never played organized football as a child, "But I always played yard ball with the older guys," he said.

He was just a regular kid, he said, who saw school as neither a curse nor a blessing. It simply existed.

School officials have said Powe began special education classes in the second grade. When he was still in elementary school, Powe said he had some behavioral problems that he didn't want to describe in full.

That led to a label, he said: learning disabled.

Powe said it is not true. He has a problem comprehending what he has read sometimes, but that doesn't mean he's disabled, he said.

True or not, the label stuck. "I never thought he had a learning disability," said his mom, a dietary supervisor at Wayne General Hospital.

Powe said he kept getting grades just good enough to move him forward, but it would not be enough.

A standout football player in junior high, Powe focused more and more on football in high school.

Wayne County High is a place where the football team is so important that the local police cars are painted in its colors: blue and orange.

Coach Marcus Boyles took over the program in 2001, when Powe was a freshman.

The team won the state championship the next year and the year after that. Powe was a big part of winning.

"You knew on Friday night, he's going to come ready to play," Boyles said. "In the big games, he's going to have a good practice beforehand."

He said like any kid, Powe could slack off in practice when he knew the opponent wasn't expected to be all that tough. But still, Boyles said, Powe was the team's leader.

"He was a guy who offenses had to scheme around," Boyles said. "His presence made them change the way they had to play the game."

But slowly, Powe was falling further behind in school.

By the end of Powe's sophomore year - after that first state championship - Powe knew he had to do something or he'd never graduate.

He had dreams of making it big in the National Football League, he said, visions of million-dollar contracts dancing in his head. He was rated as the top high school defensive player in the nation by most recruiters.

It was during this time that he met Shane Barnett, the team's punter, and Shane's dad, Joe.

Joe Barnett is a local businessman, a real estate appraiser with a nice house in town and a pool in the back yard.

He took a liking to Powe from the start, he said.

Powe started hanging out more and more at the Barnett home. He learned to swim in their pool a couple of summers ago.

Barnett loves telling that story.

"Boys," Powe announced to the other young men goofing around in the pool, as Barnett remembers it, "I can swim and I'll show y'all I can swim."

He jumped in, and in a flash he was sitting at the bottom of the pool. "I thought it was over with," said Powe, who'd never been in a pool before.

WORKING HARDER

His buddies had to bulldoze the 350-pound player across the bottom of the pool to the shallow end to get him out; he was just too heavy to lift.

In time, Powe learned to swim.

He and Joe Barnett became close. So close that now, Barnett is like a surrogate father for Powe, both said. Barnett has helped guide Powe through the last two years.

As Powe's future looked bleak, the two, along with Powe's mom, began to focus more on his schoolwork as he entered his junior year of high school.

By his senior year, he was working harder, excelling in correspondence courses with the help of a tutor, but in the end it was not enough.

His tutor, Ginny Crager, said Powe has trouble comprehending what he's read. Powe agreed.

The NCAA on Sept. 14 affirmed an earlier ruling that Powe was ineligible even though he had taken correspondence courses from Brigham Young University and attended the Chatman, Va.-Hargrave Military Academy for a year to try to catch up.

"That's what happens to a lot of young men who are good athletes but are in special education," said Madison County parent Mandy Rogers, who has a Web-based parent advocacy information network called Parents United Together. "They get to that last year. They don't have any credits and can't graduate. ... Someone should have known something. In ninth grade, they should have known what track he was on. If he was in the certificate track, they should have known he's not going to Ole Miss.

"This kid should have gotten academically what he got athletically," Rogers said.

The NCAA won't accept his work from the correspondence courses as legitimate. The organization won't comment on specifics of the case.

CREATING A PLAN

"I was mad," Powe said, though he never lashed out in public and won't start now. "My way of getting back is just not giving up, and just proving them wrong."

So, after much fanfare, including a lawsuit that he still thinks he could have won, if he pursued it, Powe dropped out of Ole Miss after a few days.

He has asked the school to get with the NCAA to help him lay out a plan. What does he need to do, he wants to know, to make himself eligible? He swears he still wants to play for the Rebels. If he can't, there's always junior college or the Canadian Football League.

So now, here Powe sits, trying to stay in playing shape, depending on others to tell him what to do.

Whose fault is that?

"If he was having problems," said his mom, "he should have come to me."

So, it's partly her son's fault, she said.

But it's also partly the school's fault, she said, for not pushing him harder, for not letting her know how serious his problems were.

And, she said, it's also partly her fault for not demanding answers sooner.

Everybody's a little bit at fault, she said.

That's what Boyles, the coach, said, too. "For whatever reason, he fell through the cracks," he said.

"All of us - and I mean me, the school, his mom and Jerrell - are to blame in this situation."


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It appears that Powe's tutor's description of Powe's learning disorder ---a much lower than normal reading comprehension ability --- is the most accurate information about the matter to date ---diagnosed since the second grade. It must have been legit since the ACT accepted it as a basis to award Powe unlimited time in which to take the test, allowing him to improve from a 12 (timed) to an 18(untimed).

And as many stated (including me), Powe can indeed read and write, just not a normal level one would expect from someone his age.

The big issue with the NCAA, apparently, was the correspondence courses Powe took from BYU. Since he took these courses in the exact same time frame that two other approved student athletes took (Keiland Williams and a USC recruit), the NCAA dropped the initial assertion that he completed the courses "too fast", never asserted that the courses were not appropriate (from BYU), and then finally asserted that Powe had "too much help" from his tutor, hanging their hat on the fact that Powe's tutor wrote out many of his answers for him onto the test answer forms ----despite the teacher's sworn statement that she only wrote down the answers Powe provided to her. Without any written guidelines as to these types of situations, and what type of help is allowed or not, there is no doubt that the NCAA is applying very subjective standards for the first time in this case. Most of the time, when the NCAA has cases that do not fit any written rules or guidelines as a basis for denial, they go ahead and approve the student athlete and then later adjust their rules and guidelines to satisfy their concerns. Not in this case. Hopefully, they will at least tell Powe what he needs to do to become eligible for next fall, and will agree in advance that he will be accpepted if he does those things.


IF I were Powe, I would have someone video-tape his taking of those courses, so there would be no dispute or basis for questioning his legitimate completion of those courses. And by all means, he should write out his own responses to questions, whether his hand-writing is pretty or not.

My biggest question in this entire matter is where did his attorneys get the information and diagnosis of dylexia from? His dyslexic condition was asserted by his attorneys publicly, on a regular basis, during this matter, and was asserted in court documents filed in his lawsuit. Powe's tutor claims his learning disorder is a reading comprehension problem, not dyslexia. But, dyslexia is a form of a reading comprehension disorder. There were references by the attorneys of a diagnosis of dyslexia when Powe as a junior in high school. Yet, Powe and his tutor seem to dispute this assertion. Of course, such would be none of the public's business ordinarily. But, in this case, since a very public lawsuit was filed with these types of assertions, any rights to privacy in this regard were waived.

I hope the kid continues his reading classes to improve his comprehension skills. And I hope he achieves his goal of getting into a 4 year college, whether it is Ole Miss or somewhere else. He appears determined to prove many wrong.