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St. Mary Community Action Agency is one of seven Louisiana organizations that received a total of $700,000 from the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in connect with the Ready Start Community Networks program.
The St. Mary Community Action Agency/Head Start Program CEO and Head Start Administrator, Almetra J. Franklin said the program will greatly enhance early childhood education in St. Mary Parish through the utilization of various strategies.
“Our top priority is to provide the very best quality childcare and education services for all of our children and families," Franklin said in a news release.
The recipients will pilot new strategies to increase access to and improve the quality of publicly funded early childhood care and education. The action follows legislation passed in 2018 that allowed BESE to create and fund the pilot programs.
St. Mary CAA’s pilot program will focus on developing governance structures and assessing local demand for early care and education. Also, teachers will receive resources and training aimed at improving classroom quality.
The Louisiana Legislature, in 2012, passed Act 3, which created early childhood community networks that encompassed Head Starts, local school systems, and early childcare centers, in an effort to unify a system of early childhood care and education. The networks grew from 13 in 2013 to 65 currently. St. Mary CAA has been the lead agency for the St. Mary Parish Network since 2015.
The cornerstone of this new program is to allow local communities to enhance families and children’s early childhood care and education needs, because they understand those needs better.
Franklin agrees. “Our teachers are in the trenches,” She said. They understand how to best prepare children for Kindergarten and beyond.”

Four new high speed patrol boats manufactured by shipbuilder Metal Shark have entered service with the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard on the island of Aruba, the company said in a news release.
The vessels were commissioned into service with a ceremony Jan. 23 at Station Aruba in the district of Savaneta on Aruba’s southeast coast. Among those present were officials from the Aruban government, the Dutch Ministry of Defense, the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard and Metal Shark, as well as local and regional media outlets.
The new Metal Shark patrol boats were acquired by the Dutch Ministry of Defense to bolster its capabilities across the Caribbean. In all, the coast guard will operate 12 Metal Sharks in the territorial waters of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, St. Eustatius, St. Maarten,and Saba.
Designed in-house by Metal Shark and built at the company’s Jeanerette production facility, the new 38-foot Defiant-class welded aluminum monohull patrol boats are powered by twin Cummins Marine QSB6.7 diesel engines coupled with counter-rotating dual-prop stern drives.
The vessels reach top speeds in excess of 45 knots.
A fully enclosed pilothouse shields the crew from the elements, while Metal Shark’s signature “Pillarless Glass” pilothouse arrangement assures unimpeded visibility. Navigation electronics includes Raymarine radar, GPS, and multifunction display, and a FLIR thermal-imaging system for night operations. Composite armor panels provide ballistic crew protection, Shockwave Corbin shock-mitigating seating has been provided for a crew of six, and anti-fatigue floor covering has been employed in the pilothouse and the belowdecks crew spaces. For extended patrols at sea, accommodations include an enclosed head compartment, galley and v-berth.
“With the acquisition of these four state-of-the-art high-performance patrol boats, the Dutch Caribbean Coast Guard has significantly increased its capabilities in Aruba,” said Josh Stickles, Metal Shark’s vice president of marketing, who was in Aruba for the commissioning ceremony. “Joining the four identical Metal Sharks delivered to neighboring Curaçao last year, these vessels will strengthen the DCCG’s presence across the region.”
“This delivery represents the latest result of our multiyear collaboration with the Dutch Ministry of Defense and end users in Curaçao, Aruba, and St. Maarten, which will soon receive its own fleet of four Metal Shark patrol boats,” explained Henry Irizarry, Metal Shark’s vice president of international business development. “Our globally proven 38 Defiant patrol boat platform has been fully optimized to meet the DCCG’s requirements for performance, durability, and crew safety in open-ocean conditions across the Caribbean.”
The final four vessels built for the DCCG are currently en route to St. Maarten and will enter service following activation and crew instruction by a Metal Shark training team.
“Metal Shark continues to expand its international presence with vessels now in military and commercial service in over 50 countries,” said Mr. Irizarry. “With our diverse range of globally proven platforms and our ability to custom tailor vessels to suit even the most demanding mission requirements, operators worldwide continue to choose Metal Shark.”
Metal Shark is a diversified shipbuilder specializing in the design and efficient high quality construction of welded aluminum and steel vessels from 16’ to over 300’ for defense, law enforcement, and commercial operators. Key customers include the United States Coast Guard, Navy, Air Force, Army, foreign militaries, law enforcement agencies, fire departments, passenger vessel operators, pilot associations, towboat operators, and other clients worldwide. With three fully self-contained shipbuilding facilities in Alabama and Louisiana spanning over 75 total acres, Metal Shark’s 500+ employees produce over 200 vessels per year with a proud and proven track record of high quality, on-time deliveries. www.metalsharkboats.com

Submitted Photo
Central Catholic Elementary fifth-grader Emmy Robison, left, has read 4 million words and classmate Lucy Kincade 3 million words so far this school year. After reading each book, the students are tested through the Accelerated Reader Program on classroom or library computers verifying their accomplishment

At the heart of Apple’s shocking FaceTime bug, which allowed just about anyone to turn an iPhone into a live microphone, stands a 14-year-old boy who stumbled upon the eavesdropping flaw more than a week before Apple took action.
“The thing that surprised me the most was that this glitch happened in the first place,” said Grant Thompson, a high school freshman in Tucson, Arizona. “I’m only 14 and I found it by accident, instead of the people at Apple that get paid to find glitches.”
Not only that, but Grant and his mom said they spent a week unsuccessfully trying to get Apple to do something about the bug in its FaceTime group-chatting feature.
“It took nine days for us to get a response,” he said. “My mom contacted them almost every single day through email, calling, faxing.” Of the fax, he jokes, “I’m not even sure what that is. It’s probably older than I am.”
This eavesdropping scare is over now that Apple has disabled group chats, but the problem could dog the company for much longer. New York state officials have opened a consumer rights investigation. Others are raising questions about how long it took Apple to address the bug.
In a statement Friday, Apple thanked the Thompsons as it announced that it has identified a fix and will release it this week. FaceTime group chatting will resume then.
Grant, a straight-A student who plays basketball, does community volunteering and enjoys the video game “Fortnite,” was calling friends to play the game on a Saturday night, Jan. 19, when he discovered the flaw.
“If a 14-year-old kid discovered it, I wonder how many other people discovered it,” said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer with the security firm Veracode.
Apple hasn’t said whether it has records that could answer that question.
Friday’s statement said Apple’s engineers worked quickly once it got the details needed to reproduce the bug. Although Apple didn’t acknowledge a delay, the company said it was “committed to improving the process by which we receive and escalate these reports, in order to get them to the right people as fast as possible.”
The company — at first widely praised for its swift response — could come under increased scrutiny as regulators seek to learn more about the vulnerability.
New York Attorney General Letitia James and Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that they’re investigating “Apple’s failure to warn consumers about the FaceTime bug and slow response to addressing the issue.”
They said the bug jeopardized the privacy of New York consumers by allowing callers to activate another person’s microphone remotely even before the person has accepted or rejected the call. James said her office’s review will include a “thorough investigation into Apple’s response.”
Last October, Apple introduced the 32-person video conferencing feature for iPhones, iPads and Macs. With the bug, a FaceTime group-chat user calling another Apple device could hear audio — even if the receiver didn’t accept the call. The bug was triggered when callers turn a regular FaceTime call into a group chat, making FaceTime think the receiver had accepted the chat.
In Grant’s case, he had just gotten his Xbox ready and called to invite a friend, Nathan, to play “Fortnite” with him online.
“You can swipe up and add another person, so I added another friend of mine, Diego, to see if he also wanted to play,” he said. “But as soon as I added Diego, it forced Nathan to respond.”
They were shocked at first, then tried to repeat the bug and it happened every time, he said. His mother, Michele Thompson, said she started trying to reach Apple the next day.
“They could have tested it within two minutes, realized it was true and brought it up the chain at Apple,” said Thompson, who works as an attorney. “There needs to be a better process for the average citizen to report things like this. And a timelier response.”
She eventually reached someone who advised that she could register as a software developer to submit the bug. Such reports can sometimes lead to “bug bounties” so that those who discover a flaw can get a financial reward. The family hoped Grant could receive such an award, or at least some credit, for his discovery.
“Every day he would ask me, ‘Did we hear from Apple yet?’ she said.
The family tried reaching Apple through multiple channels. They left comments on Twitter, one of them directed to CEO Tim Cook, and uploaded a video to walk Apple engineers through the problem. But it wasn’t until a tech blog reported the flaw earlier this week — leading many people to experiment with the spying bug themselves — that Apple took the unusual measure of temporarily shutting down the group-chat feature.
Apple has declined to say when it learned about the problem. The company also wouldn’t say if it has logs that could show if anyone took advantage of the bug before it became publicly known this week. The company reached out to the Thompson family on Tuesday offering to give some public credit for their efforts, according to an email Michele Thompson shared with The Associated Press.
“It would be cool to just have Apple say thanks to me,” Grant Thompson said before Friday’s announcement from Apple. “And of course, the bug bounty, that would be pretty awesome to get, but as long as we got rid of this pretty groundbreaking bug, and Apple said thank you, that would be pretty cool.”