CONTRIBUTORS

MELISSA LUDTKE, who was the lead reporter on this week's cover story, has no children of her own, but she knows plenty about the politics of children's issues. She has written extensively about kids and families since the mid-1980s, starting with a stint as a full-time TIME correspondent in Los Angeles. Moving to Boston, she reported, among other things, a 1988 cover story titled "Through the Eyes of Children." She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1991, and has just completed a yearlong Prudential Fellowship in Children and the News at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She is also an active participant in Boston's Big Sister program. Ludtke spends about four hours a week with her 12-year-old "little sister," Andrea Powell, visiting museums, seeing movies, going swimming and Rollerblading. Says Ludtke: "I want her to see that adults really do care about what happens to her."

MARGOT HORNBLOWER, a TIME national correspondent based in Los Angeles, likes to work on stories that put a human face on great social issues, such as crime, gambling and immigration. But as the mother of two high school students, she has a special interest in education; in recent months she has reported on the charter school movement and the controversy over bilingual curriculums. In this week's issue she writes about a new full-service approach to public schooling called CoZi. Visiting Bowling Park and Sycamore Hills, two schools profiled in her story, Hornblower was struck by their can-do spirit. "No one was talking about grades," she says, "only about helping children any way they could."

RICHARD WOODBURY, TIME's Denver bureau chief, flew to Bozeman, Montana, last week to report on the mysterious parasite that is killing off the Rocky Mountain West's famous wild rainbow trout. In the past two years, Woodbury has ranged all over the Rockies--from New Mexico to Wyoming--documenting life in what is now called the New West but which Woodbury remembers less grandly from reporting a 1980 cover story about the region's last big boom. "The difference now is that every facet of the growth explosion is much larger," he says. "The mountain states are choking on their popularity." Case in point: the parasite's spread in Colorado, a crisis brought on, in part, by the stocking of trout streams to satisfy the hordes of anglers.

OLIVIA RISS PEEBLES, 7, who drew the headline lettering for our cover and our inside story, may be TIME's youngest contributor. A second-grader at St. Luke's School in New York City, Olivia began painting as a toddler. "I like to make my own pictures, not copy them, because that makes them really mine," she says. Art is just one of her passions. Among the others: her Abyssinian cat Horatio, cooking pizza and cakes, swimming, modern dance and rock 'n' roll. "I go crazy for the Beatles," says Olivia. "I feel free as a bird when I dance to their songs."