A fiery redhead is making a big difference at a struggling school in Texas. Once full of low-performing students, the school now scores top marks in the state.

Hart Elementary, in northeast Austin, serves a tough group of students from low income, low education households. 90 percent of the students are Hispanic, with English as a second language.

Two years ago, in June 2009, Leslie Dusing arrived at Hart and as principal got rid of 75% of the 114 staff members.

“I’m a mean bitch,” she laughs. “But you can’t teach with crappy teachers.”

“When I got here, there were 4th and 5th graders who had never had a good teacher.”  Unacceptable.

She “encouraged” the bad teachers to resign (one can’t fire teachers in Texas) and hired good ones. Really good ones. She has an eye for spotting them.

Since then, Hart’s test scores have risen meteorically in reading, math, and science, and the school now ranks as one of only two elementary schools in Texas to win the Texas Education Agency Top Quartile Elementary Schools.

The award means Leslie’s teachers will get $4,000 each, and the Principal, Miss Leslie, will get $8,000. These are incentive funds from the AISD REACH program designed to build teacher performance and retention pay.

“The financial reward is welcome of course, but I did it for the kids,” Leslie states emphatically. “And the kids are happy. You should see the difference from last year.”

Leslie’s own life has not been easy. After suffering personal difficulties and financially losing everything she in 1995, Leslie went back and got her teachers ‘s degree and then her Master’s degree in 2000 in order to go into educational administration.

So it’s not surprise this scrapper turned around one of Austin’s toughest schools in two years. Aint no hill for a stepper, as they say….

And Leslie’s kids love her. She keeps birds in her office and and pictures of her horse on her desk. She hugs the kids and jokes with them (she’s bi-lingual). Their response is visible – and now recognized by others.

Photo by Sun Star

Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Jim Light was an easy target for a cowardly thief who attacked him in the hallway of his apartment complex. The suspect then stole his computer, his cell phone, and all the food in his kitchen.  

Light, who is a writer, considered his computer his connection to the world.  Now that it was gone, he didn’t see the point of going on.

Today, Light is back on track, thanks in large part to the compassion of a Hamilton police officer.

Mark Miller could have done the appropriate paper work and called it a day, but after seeing how shattered Light was, he went above and beyond to help alleviate his sadness.

(WATCH the video below, or read the full story at Citynews.com)

As of last week, $24.4 million in corporate aid had been pledged by the U.S. business community for Pakistan flood response efforts.

100 different companies stepped up with aid pledges in response to the historic, devastating floods, according to the Business Civic Leadership Center (BCLC) at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Many of these companies don’t even have significant operations in Pakistan, making the scale of the private sector response even more compelling.

Some firms pledged in-kind contributions. Four companies pledged $1 million or more in cash — The Coca-Cola Company, GE, Microsoft, and P&G.

Companies have the specific resources to address the many specific needs of disasters like the Pakistan floods.  “A lot of this is self-selecting — that is the beauty of the private sector,” said Stephen Jordan the executive director of BCLC. “Individual companies are great at individual things. So a lot of the pharmaceutical companies, a lot of the health care companies are going to focus on the health care issues,” he said.

“The engineering, construction and heavy equipment companies are going to focus on dams, roads and those kind of things.  The financial services companies are going to help say with small business capacity building, (and) micro-finance,” Jordan said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says Pakistan ranks as the third largest recipient of disaster assistance from the business community over the past five years, behind Haiti and China.

For a list of all corporations and their generosity, visit BCLC’s Corporate Aid Tracker.