Cleaning Up In 1998 Memphis City Schools superintendent Gerry House won the Richard R. Green Award from the Council of Great City Schools as the nation’s top educator in urban education. In 1999 Dr. House was named the national Superintendent of the Year by the Association of School Administrators. Both honors were duly reported in the local press. What went unreported, until this week’s report in The Memphis Flyer, was the fact that both awards are sponsored by ServiceMaster, the large corporation that competes for school system maintenance contracts nationwide. In 1993 House pushed, successfully, to give ServiceMaster a $17.5 million maintenance contract for Memphis City Schools, a contract that was recently renewed for another five years. We are not suggesting that there was any quid pro quo between House and ServiceMaster, but it’s certainly a relationship that has proven mutually beneficial. In fact, if you visit the ServiceMaster Web site, you can read glowing testimonials from House about ServiceMaster’s work in the Memphis school system. This acclaim coming — as happily noted by ServiceMaster — from the 1999 Superintendent of the Year, seems a little too cozy for comfort. We think it’s highly inappropriate for a company such as ServiceMaster to be sponsoring such awards in the first place, and equally inappropriate for the winners to be shilling for them. Such mutual back-scratching taints the associations involved, the sponsor, and the winners, with the appearance of a serious conflict of interest. A Violent Sport Athletes are too much with us. We pay them too much money and give them too much publicity. Inevitably they disappoint us. Such was the case this week when an NFL player, linebacker Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens, was charged with murder in Atlanta. Lewis is the second NFL player to be accused of murder in the past two months. On December 14th, Carolina Panthers receiver Rae Carruth was arrested for killing his pregnant girlfriend. Other NFL players have been charged with violent crimes. Former UT star Leonard Little, now a St. Louis Rams linebacker, pled guilty last year to involuntary manslaughter after he ran a red light and killed a woman who was on her way to pick up her children. Denver Broncos wide receiver Rod Smith was arrested Monday on charges of third-degree assault and harassment after an altercation last week with his common-law wife. And Steve Muhammad, an Indianapolis defensive back, was charged with beating his pregnant wife, who died a few days later in an unrelated auto accident. The list goes on. But a new study from APBnews.com indicates that football players as a group are not charged with violent crimes more often than the general population. The NFL, says the study, looks a lot like American society in general. We do not subscribe to the notion that athletes should be held up as role models for the rest of us. But the proliferation of sports stars committing violent acts — even if it is in keeping with national norms — should cause us to ask why. Maybe it is because they have been coddled from junior high through high school and college. In the last few weeks we have seen local high school students holding press conferences to announce where they will play football in college — and reporters showed up! No, athletes should not be held up as role models. Nor should they be placed on a pedestal, from which too often they seem to fall.