Monday, February 24, 2003

Snow Dominates School News

The U.S. east coast is digging (and melting) out from last week's snowstorms. Two Washington Post columns pertain to snow closings. The Post's Theola Labbe discusses making up days and getting kids back up to speed in Schools Try To Recover From Long Interruption. S. Mitra Kalita tells of one teacher who kept school in session during a week-long school closing via optional internet classes in Web Classroom Keeps Snowed-In Fourth-Graders Connected.

As schools in the east prepare to reopen, midwestern schools may be closed today due to another snowstorm moving across the nation. Although this snowstorm should only drop up to 5" of new snow, it goes over varying amounts that fell over the weekend. Rural school systems across the country face the difficult choice of whether or not to run their buses over icy and/or snowy rural roads that are often difficult to negotiate in good weather.

PBS Series Returns

I received a press release last week from Marilyn Weiner, executive producer for Journey To Planet Earth, who wrote to say that the series will begin its second season on Wednesday, March 26, 2003, 8:00 to 9:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) with the episode, "On the Brink." "The PBS program is the only primetime television series that deals exclusively with the most critical environmental, political, economic and social issues of the 21st century."

School Trips Canceled

The Associated Press's Charles Sheehan writes of canceled school trips due to the increased terrorist warning level in Schools Consider War in Student Trips.

LA Looks for Drug Ed Alternatives

The Los Angeles Unified School District is testing several new drug education/drug awareness programs in its elementary schools this year. In Schools Seek New Message Against Drugs, Los Angeles Times writer Stephanie Stassel tells that Los Angeles has shifted some of its DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) officers back to the street with those remaining serving LA middle schools. The coordinator of the district's health education programs, Rona Cole, notes that with the absence of DARE officers from the elementary schools, classroom teachers are supposed to pick up the drug education instruction in health classes. Cole commented, "I don't know if that's happening in every school." She stated that since health education isn't on any state assessment test, some teachers may not be covering the subject in regular lessons.

More Free Lunch Concerns

We'd reported here in January the concerns of some school systems that the Bush Administration's new requirement that poor families complete various paperwork to "to prove they need the free lunches" will result in some children not receiving the benefits to which they are entitled. A Chicago Tribune column from Friday, Some fear U.S. will spoil free lunches, echoes those concerns. Tribune writer Tracy Dell'Angela says Illinois school officials fear the tightened eligibility standards " could force large numbers of low-income children out of a program."

Devotion for February 23-March 1, 2003

Zach Wood's weekly devotional for this week is Fresh Daily Love. Zach also maintains an archive of previous devotionals.

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Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Just a few quick links today, as the snowplows have done their work, and I have to go back to school:-)!

The Baltimore Sun's John E. McIntyre takes a look at some books on education currently making the rounds. Get past the column title The plight of U.S. education: Read all about it - and weep and McIntyre makes some good observations on education today via the books he reviews. He winds it up by saying, "There it is. In education, we get what we pay for. Sometimes it's what we ask for, sometimes what we deserve."

Jane Gross writes in The New York Times about a wealthy school district in "hard times" in In Gilded Schools, Scrimping Lessons. Gross tells of "Briarcliff Manor, a cozy village with a median household income of $147,393" facing state cuts in education funding. It's an interesting read.

Josh Rogers writes of ergonomic and other concerns for students involved in the Maine Laptop Initiative in The good, the bad, and the laptops.

The Washington Post's Jay Mathews writes in this week's Class Struggle column, Programs for Tots Vie for Funds, Support, of the Zero to Three movement to aid early brain development.

iBooks for Two More School Districts

A posting on the Macintosh News Network, Students to use iBooks in Schaumburg schools, relates the Schaumburg (IL) Township Elementary District 54 school board has approved a project "to give every student in grades four, five and six an Apple iBook laptop to use during the school year." See District 54 students to get laptops for further details.

The posting also includes news that teachers at Newton North High School (MA) may each receive a new iBook plus training, along with the purchase of 30 multimedia carts to be used throughout the school. Also see Limited tech upgrade is mulled.

Thursday, February 27, 2003

New from SchwabLearning.org

This week the SchwabLearning.org site follows up on last week's new column, Understanding Bullying and Its Impact on Kids with Learning Differences, with What Parents Can Do About Childhood Bullying. Also new on the site this week is Poor Reading Skills Drive New Federal Initiatives.

Pertinent Columns

A number of pertinent columns appearing recently on the web are certainly worthy of a link. Unfortunately, time is short this week, so I'll just pass the links along without highlights or summaries.

• Gates gives $31 million for schools
• Paige Releases Principles for Reauthorizing Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)
• A Closer--if One-Sided--Look at Teacher Unions

Friday, February 28, 2003

Mr. Rogers

He touched the hearts and minds of many generations. See the New York Times obituary, Fred Rogers, Host of 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,' Dies at 74.

More School Funding Problems in Ohio

For much of the two years Educators' News has been in publication, it has carried columns about the long-running court battle in Ohio over school funding. Each time the Ohio Supreme Court seems to have put the issue to rest, some new wrinkle appears and they're off and at it again! This time around, it's "Governor Bob Taft's proposal to cut state aid." The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Damian Guevara tells of several districts contemplating court action in 5 more districts may join fight to block school cuts.

In a September 9, 2001, posting, I commented on Ohio's funding battles. Not much seems to have changed.

If you're a regular reader of Educators' News, you've read (and read and read and read) of the continuing saga of litigation over the state of Ohio's funding of public education. The ten year legal struggle for parity in funding between "have" and "have not" school districts seemed to be over with a decision, however unusual, from the Ohio Supreme Court on September 6. That was the case until the parties involved all agreed on a "$1.24 billion a year estimate to fix the existing school-funding system."

 

The Cleveland Plain Dealer yesterday reported that the state of Ohio, despite Governor Bob Taft's previous statement of, "Our goal is to comply with the order," has asked the Ohio Supreme Court "to reconsider its ruling in the school funding lawsuit - an attempt to shave about $800 million from the $1.24 billion a year price tag."

 

Hmm...now we're beginning to understand why all those school districts sued the state over and over for ten years!

New York Funding Problems

Bob Herbert writes in Hijacking the Future in The New York Times:

After pretending for more than a year that the State of New York was not experiencing a fiscal meltdown, Gov. George Pataki is now waging an unconscionable budget war against the public schools, which in many parts of the state were already in desperate trouble.

 

The governor, never a champion of public education, is attempting to shift much of his budget-balancing load to the backpacks of the state's schoolchildren in the form of cuts that would bring serious hardship to classrooms from Staten Island to Buffalo.

And in California...Funding Problems

Cuts to Budget May Cost 1,166 Teaching Jobs

Choice Program To Result in Resegregation of Schools?

The St. Petersburg Times' Thomas C. Tobin reports on another difficult potential side effect of No Child Left Behind in Will choice segregate schools?

Another System to Switch to Dells?

Last week, Low End Mac columnist and educator Jeff Adkins posted an Open Letter to the Board of Education on Single Platform Computing. Jeff diplomatically made a good case for his school system, or any other, staying with a dual platform policy on computers. An article that appeared Wednesday on the ContraCosta.com, Antioch classrooms may switch over to PCs, shed a bit more light on the issue. Deputy Superintendent of Business Services Jerry Macy was to propose a phase-out of Macs at a Wednesday evening school board meeting.