Gerald Ott of Ankeny was a high school English teacher and for 30 years a school improvement consultant for the Iowa State Education Association.

Earlier this month, the Kansas City Star’s editors wrote about White Kansas City-area high school students who were racially taunting Black players on an opposing basketball team.

In the same week, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights levied serious changes against the Ottumwa, Iowa school district (as per numerous newspaper accounts). Following release of the OCR’s report, the Ottumwa Courier’s editors took the superintendent to task, saying he has “skirted the harsh realities of what happened.” The realities of racial abuse are clearly enumerated in the OCR report, which is online (and reproduced at the bottom of this post).

The agency’s findings are grave and require the school district to take extensive steps of remediation.

The video above was shot at a meeting at the Canteen Lunch in the Alley, a diner whose specialty is a “loose meat” sandwich and a scrumptious assortment of pies, in Ottumwa, Iowa. Senator Dodd talked with people there for about an hour, answering questions on military spending, health care, the war in Iraq, and transparency in government. In the clip above he talks about President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby and how this administration’s actions have damaged the rule of law. You can watch the whole talk in the Canteen Lunch on Ustream.tv.

Allow me to geek out for a moment…

The live feed from Ottumwa was broadcast on a wee little mobile broadband card. I was only getting one bar of service in the Canteen, in part because though the restaurant has been around since 1936 and is a historic landmark, a number of years back a parking garage was constructed around (and above) it and now it’s effectively a couple stories underground. Nonetheless, we were able to stream live and allow people from all over the country to see a conversation between Senator Dodd and Iowa caucus goers over lunch. We were able to leverage technologies to make an offline campaign stop become an online event for anyone to watch (first live, now recorded).

What’s even more cool is that I’ve now cut and uploaded the video above to YouTube while riding in the River to River Tour bus from Ottumwa towards Des Moines. And now I’m about to hit publish on a blog post telling you all about it.

This is one of those moments where what we’re able to do with new media technologies to make this presidential campaign fully transparent catches up with me and I just have to say: Wow.

See it all on D-TV