BLUNT WORDS: DON'T BECOME `SCUZ BUCKET'

DELTA -- Missouri Secretary of State Roy Blunt has had fair warning: oppose a 200-day Missouri school year or Delta fourth-grader Kelly Moore will tell everyone he is a "low-down scuz bucket."

"I told him, `Just don't vote on it,'" Kelly said Wednesday at his school, Delta Elementary. "It may be good ... but I want my summer off."

Kelly, the 10-year-old son of Yonetta and Alvin Moore of Chaffee Route 2 recently sent his warning to Blunt in a short, one-page letter. Immediately after giving Blunt his warning, he closed the letter by writing, "Your friend, Kelly Moore."

Accompanying the letter was a petition that Kelly circulated in opposition to the 200-day school year. It carries the names of about 50 other students at the school. The students range in age from 7 to 11, Kelly said.

Gov. John Ashcroft has proposed the 200-day school year, a 26-day increase over the current 174. Kelly wrote Blunt, however, because Blunt was the only state official for whom he had an address, said Kelly's teacher, Coann Below.

As secretary of state, Blunt couldn't vote for or against such a proposal; that would be a job for the state legislature when and if the proposal takes the form of a bill. But Kelly got his point across and a letter back from Blunt.

"I was not surprised to learn of your objections to five more weeks of school," Blunt responded in a letter, dated March 6. He also thanked Kelly for the letter and petition and said it was always helpful to let public officials know how one feels about issues.

Wednesday afternoon, Blunt called the letter and petition an "enterprising" act.

"I thought it was a fun approach," Blunt said from Jefferson City, the state capital. "Actually adults often say the same things in their letters, they just say it more subtly."

Missouri history is taught in fourth grade, said Delta Elementary Principal Pat Dooley. Below said the students are taught about the branches of government and how the public makes its wishes known to elected officials by writing letters, lobbying and making telephone calls.

Below said she had encouraged her students to discuss the proposed 200-day school year with their parents and have their parents write letters in support or opposition to Ashcroft.

"You can imagine how outraged the children are at 200 school days, an extra 26. Kelly was a little more outraged than the rest and he took it upon himself to write a letter," she said.

She knew Kelly had gathered the names for the petition, she said, but she figured Kelly wouldn't follow through by mailing it off.

Kelly said he had gotten close to everyone on the school's playground to sign the petition. A student who signed the petition, second-grader Natalie Tharp, 8, said she didn't want 200 days of school because school is hard enough already.

There was some information Wednesday that suggested that the petition had been slightly though probably innocently padded. Dooley said one student had signed his two parents' names along with his own.

At another point, the name of a former student at the school appears on the list. "They thought, `Well, we'll put his name down too,'" said Dooley.

As of late Wednesday morning Kelly was in the process of writing Blunt a second letter. In that letter, Kelly said, he was asking Blunt to be his pen pal.

Likewise, Kelly said he planned to write a letter to an even higher office that of President George Bush.

"Ryan Livingston (a classmate) wrote the president and he got a book back," he said.