Another expert in such cruelty is the film's central character, 12-year-old Alex, a gentle middle-school student in Sioux City, Iowa.

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The festival gave Asumi Kikuchi, a 13-year-old middle-school student, an opportunity to get together with three of her best friends, who are now scattered all over Fukushima prefecture.

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The opinions of students, regularly used at institutions of higher education, have been shown to correlate with overall student performance at the middle-school level, said Thomas Kane, a professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied the issue.

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The 20-year-old said he experienced the 2008 quake while a middle school student in Chengdu, but that Saturday was different because of his proximity to the epicenter.

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Instead we need to be doing what an increasing number of schools like another Arizona-based school, the Carpe Diem Collegiate High School and Middle School, are doing and disrupting that flawed paradigm by implementing online learning to create a student-centric system not to increase costs for the community through bond measures or otherwise, as the article reports but to use existing resources to prioritize student learning and achieve great results.

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