HERE IS A STORY OUT OF CONNECTICUT that confirms the efforts to reestablish schools in Iraq.

In the regular course of his life, Grasso is a fifth-year teacher of special education for eighth grade students at the Region 17 school, and an assistant football coach for Haddam-Killingworth High School's team...

But, today, and every day since January, he has been Army Sgt. Tom Grasso, serving with an Army Reserve civil affairs unit in Iraq...

...(H)e maintains regular contact with his family, and with his students through letters that are read aloud by Furey-Wagner at school assemblies.

The principal task of Grasso's unit is the reopening of Baghdad schools that have been damaged, in some cases, by bombing, but all of them devastated by looters. The rapacious looting that Baghdad has experienced has stripped its schools of "desks, fixtures, everything on the walls," Furey-Wagner says. "Imagine the worst building you can. This doesn't compare."

The looting extended even to the most basic of school supplies, creating a great need that Denna Stachelek, Grasso's wife, mentioned one day to his Haddam-Killingworth colleagues.

This prompted the school's staff and students to organize a campaign to fill that need - much as they had done for schools in Afghanistan, Furey-Wagner recalled. The schools are in dire need of pencils, paper, scissors, tape, markers, crayons, rulers, glue, composition books - all the simple tools that enable student learning.

The rest is here.