The innovative teaching methods of Zelienople resident Tracy Devlin have been noticed and rewarded on the state level. She will be judged in competition for a national honor this fall.

Devlin, who teaches at Marshall Middle School in Marshall Township, Allegheny County, has been named the Pennsylvania History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Preserve America. An official of the state Department of Education has described her efforts as bringing history to life in her lesson plans.

Jeff Zeiders, the Education Department official, said Devlin's ability to make a lesson unique for each class is a valuable asset and she has a way of getting her students participating, not just involved.

As a result of being selected as Pennsylvania's top history teacher, Devlin's work will be judged against the work of other top history teachers nationwide for the National Teacher of the Year award.

To be eligible for the competition, a teacher must have taught history for at least three years. More importantly, the teacher must have a deep commitment to teaching American history, show evidence of creativity and imagination in the classroom, as well as close attention to documents, artifacts, historic sites and other primary materials of history.

Through such things as a Civil War re-enactment, Devlin has a knack for providing students with an educational perspective not always available by just studying a textbook.

While she was the state winner in the Teacher of the Year competition, her students are the bigger winners.

The Parent Teacher Organization at Emily Brittain Elementary School didn't launch its effort to help Hurricane Katrina victims in order to win plaudits or awards.Nevertheless, the PTO is worthy of the recognition it is getting from a national PTO magazine, PTO Today, for its efforts at helping Saucier Elementary School in Saucier, Miss., in the aftermath of the weather tragedy.Under the PTO effort, Emily Brittain and other elementary schools in the Butler School District collected so many coats, hats, blankets, and so much other bedding and supplies, that some of the items sent to Saucier were able to be shared with other hard-hit areas."I was afraid to dream," said Joyce Raushenberger, Emily Brittain PTO president, reflecting on the initial days of the project.But any such fears quickly gave way to hard work as the donated items continued to arrive.Butler prides itself on being a caring community, and the Emily Brittain PTO effort was a solid demonstration of that positive attitude.The fact that Raushenberger hopes to continue the campaign next year to support local needy families also speaks well of the PTO's leadership, energy and commitment.

Listing and ranking all the potential terrorism targets in the United States is a daunting task. But someone at the Department of Homeland Security should have checked the lists of potential targets submitted by states before the list made news through a published report based on the department's inspector general.Because nobody apparently reviewed the list with an ounce of common sense, Homeland Security officials have been properly embarrassed by the inclusion of a petting zoo, a yacht repair business, an Amish popcorn factory, a bean festival, a groundhog zoo (in Punxsutawney) and a "beach at the end of a street."All of these made it onto the national list of potential terrorism targets.The National Asset Database (NAD)is made up of submissions of potential targets by the states. Some states apparently understood the difficulty of the job and took the project seriously. But some states appear to have either not understood the project or simply wanted to include as many "assets" as possible to increase their slice of the anti-terror funding pie.In any case, the results of the NAD are absurd.Logic would suggest that New York or California, the two most populous states, would have the most potential targets. But, the NAD report suggests Indiana is the most at risk for terrorist attacks. The NAD lists Indiana as having 8,591 targets — more than twice the number in California.After Indiana, the state with the most potential terrorist targets is Wisconsin. Go figure.And in New York, Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty were not listed as national icons or monuments.The recent federal anti-terrorism grants that cut funding to New York and Washington are all the more suspect in light of Homeland Security's near-useless database of targets.Someone within the Department of Homeland Security should have seen a field of red flags as large as the fields of corn and soybeans that grow in Indiana and Wisconsin.Every state pushes for more federal dollars, but New York, California and the Nation's Capital certainly have reasons to complain about the anti-terrorism funding process.