School Science News for Kids

Sometimes I think that Ohio will never get ahead of the curve when it comes to integrating technology into our K-12 education system. Instead of being open to the millions of ways technology can become an integral part of education, we seem to find news ways to compartmentalize and truncate the use of technology in some of the least productive ways.

The Winchester News-Gazette reports that Mississinawa Valley students will be able to make-up two “calamity days” using online instruction.

Mississinawa Valley students start school on Tuesday, Aug. 31. Their schedule includes two days less than other Ohio students because of a pilot program to use electronic (computerized) instruction on two “calamity” (bad weather) days.

Superintendent Lisa Wendel said, “We believe face-to-face instruction is best, and electronic instruction should be used only when face-to-face is not possible.”

MV”s 2010-2011 calendar calls for 176 student attendance days, which is two less that the state’s official requirement. If bad weather closes school for at least two days, the pilot program for electronic instruction will be activated.

Local teachers have worked over the summer to develop those electronic lessons or calamity days. The Darke County Educational Service Center has provided teaching training for MV’s pilot program.

Bad weather closed MV Schools for nine days last year. Darke County Superintendent Mike Gray wondered, “Why can’t we do electronic instruction instead of missing school?”

Wendel made a formal plan and took the idea to State Representative Jim Zehringer, who had the plan put into legislative language. The bill is now in the Ohio House Education Committee. Wendel also submitted the pilot program to the Ohio Department of Education, and that approval is almost finished.

On the first two days that bad weather closes schools, the electronic instruction plan will be implemented. Students who have access to the Internet at home will have be able to work on their lessons that day. All students, including those who don’t have computer access, will have two weeks after school resumes to complete the lessons.

Ohio schools have traditionally had five calamity days, but the state legislature reduced that number to three for the upcoming year. Wendel said the bill now in the House committee allows up to five days for electronic instruction. If the bill does not pass by the end of the year, the calamity (no school) days go back to five.

Don’t misunderstand me, I like the idea of using technology to make up missed instructional time. What I don’t like is limiting technology to such narrow uses.

Why should technology-based instruction be relegated to calamity days? Why should districts and schools need permission to use technology to expand access and improve productivity every day?

It can come as no surprise that Ohio is one of minority of states that does not operate a statewide online school.

, and Laura Hampson

WELLINGTON — Clutching supply lists with specifications rivaling a military defense contract and clamoring for dress code-approved clothing, parents are using the statewide sales tax holiday to stretch their back-to-school dollar.

Today is the second day of tax-free shopping for office supplies that cost $10 or less. Clothes, books and shoes at $50 or less are also tax-free until midnight Sunday. The tax break was put on hold for two years because of budget constraints, but some retailers pushed hard to have it return this year.

Parents shopping for their children Friday said that while the break on the 6.5 percent tax is helpful, discounts offered by retailers are often better deals.

First offered in 1998, the holiday has lasted as many as 10 days. It was widely popular among consumers and retailers, who said it helped spur sales and save shoppers money.

“When a tax-free holiday happens, it can be like a weekend near Christmas. It can be that busy,” said Frank Wilison, JCPenney store manager at The Mall at Wellington Green. He said the store beefs up its uniform selection for tax holidays.

Michelle Machazek of West Palm Beach said she waited until this weekend to buy uniforms at JC­Penney for her son, 10-year-old Joseph Rex. She said that while the tax break helps, she also waited for the deep sales stores offer just before school starts.

Looking for dress code-approved shorts at the store, Christine Kelly of Lake Worth and her daughter, Hannah, 12, braved the crowd Friday. She said she waited until the tax break to buy clothes and shoes. “It’s a great deal to wait. Unfortunately you’re stuck in line, but patience is a virtue,” Kelly said.

Melisa Dowling of Lake Worth said her friends didn’t want to shop during the tax holiday because of crowds. She said she went to the mall anyway for the tax break and the sales. However, the holiday doesn’t entice her to buy more than usual for her son Logan, 4, and daughter Madison, 8, she said.

Prices are a little cheaper during the tax-free weekend, said Rhonda DeCastro of Boca Raton, who waited until Friday to buy clothes for her stepdaughter, Alexandra, 12. De­Castro said the savings don’t add up to much for supplies, but it does make a big difference on clothes.

Roxanna Rossi of Royal Palm Beach said she would spend a couple of hundred dollars on gear for her three children. While shopping at Office Depot in Royal Palm Beach on Friday, she said her biggest purchase would be graphing calculators for higher-level math. They cost about $100 but are not tax-free, since the holiday is for office supplies that are $10 or less.

Angela Christian of The Acreage said the tax holiday would be better if it were longer because often middle and high school students do not know what they need until classes start. She bought supplies she knew her three children would need at Target in Royal Palm Beach on Friday, but said she’d have to come back.

Scattered air-conditioning outages at two of the largest city high schools required quick fixes Monday as the school year opened to temperatures that reached 97 by early afternoon.

At the new $24.1 million Riverwood Elementary in Cordova, the air was cool and charged as 800 children found their places in classrooms furnished with computers, Wi-Fi and gleaming hallways.

“They let me enter the building July 12. There was still a lot to do then,” said Rita White, Riverwood principal, in the running shoes and crew socks she intends to wear the rest of the year.

The perimeter of the first-floor hallway is 1,500 feet, which she has already measured with a pedometer and plugged into her workout routine.

The student body speaks 12 languages, including African dialects, Chinese and Japanese.

“This the model,” Supt. Kriner Cash said. “This is what we want for all Memphis City Schools.”

School buses ran into the usual first-day issues, said Terry Lovan, president and business manager of the Teamsters Local 984.

“All the buses were late getting back, due to changes in routes and traffic,” Lovan said. “This is not the best week to be starting something when it’s Elvis week and you have a bunch of tourists out there who don’t know which way to turn.”

At least the buses were cool. Under a new contract, the district received more than 300 new, air-conditioned vehicles this summer.

Elsewhere, air conditioning was working sporadically at Whitehaven High and not at all in the central wing at White Station High, where computer foul-ups meant two systems couldn’t interface.

The schools are among the largest high schools in the city. Students were shuffled to other classrooms and makeshift quarters in the auditorium.

“Fifty classrooms did have heat issues,” said district spokesman Staci Franklin. “That’s 50 classrooms out of 7,000 total classrooms.”

Crews were on the scene early, and the problems were under control by the time the day ended, she said.

Keith Williams, president of the Memphis Education Association, says district administrators changed schedules in July, allowing more flexibility in the 90-minute block-schedule format it adopted last year.

“Principals are given great latitude,” he said. “Some classes are blocked and some are not.”

Cash adopted block scheduling last year to give students a chance to take more classes, and at the same time, make up classes they failed without getting behind.

Under last year’s model, students earn eight credits a year or 32 for their high school careers, nine credits more than the state requires for graduation. But the change set off a firestorm among teachers because the extra classes took away their daily preparation period.

Cash felt the heat all last year; in April, he announced a modification that returned the daily prep time.

But, “Some teachers have been told because they have prep period every day, they may be doing some lunch duty,” Williams said.

At Riverwood, the mood was serene as Cash greeted students and shook hands on a tour guided by White.

In October, the principal will be honored in Washington as a National Distinguished Principal, one of only two in Tennessee, largely for improving school culture.

“When I started at Egypt Elementary in 1998, we had 11,000 discipline referrals. Last year, we had less than 200,” she said.

– Jane Roberts: 529-2512

Rebecca Panter (left) and Jasmyn Wright, who moved from out of state to teach at Evans Elementary School, set up for the first day of class.

First-year Memphis City Schools teacher Jasmyn Wright, 21, grew up in South New Jersey, studied a semester in Africa and graduated a semester early from Spelman College with a 3.7 GPA.

She’s OK with Monday, the first day of classes; the thought of Tuesday makes her hands sweat.

“I’m extremely nervous. … I’m nervous for the other days after Monday.”

Understandable. By Tuesday, when the introductions are over and the desks assigned and filled, Wright will be in charge of the progress 20 third-graders make toward their eventual lives in a global economy.

Their test scores will become her résumé and the basis of her paycheck. While nothing in the homes they come from or the streets outside them has changed, their outcomes must.

“Now, it’s starting to be physical; it’s tangible,” Wright said, looking over the debris of unpacked boxes and walls still sticky with last year’s tape in her classroom at Evans Elementary.

One of 100 new Teach for America teachers at MCS, bringing the district’s total to 150, Wright arrives at a time of unprecedented opportunity — as well as pressure — at the Memphis system.

She and hundreds of other hires moved here over the summer in part because Memphis in the last year has received more federal and philanthropic support for schools than any city in the nation.

Memphis was one of four recipients of $290 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve teacher effectiveness last fall.

Memphis will receive $90 million over seven years. Only Hillsborough County Public Schools in Tampa received more.

On top of the Gates grant and the $68 million that will flow to Memphis as a result of Tennessee’s winning $500 million in Race to the Top stimulus dollars for innovation, the city schools also received nearly $600,000 last week in federal money to improve the quality of its principals.

“Yes, the funding is coming in,” said Jon Schnur, founder of New Leaders for New Schools. “But there is also the recognition that not all the places that get the investment will emerge.”

For Memphis to move from pockets of success — White Station High and Richland Elementary, for instance — to a city of excellent schools will take enormous effort, he said.

“The outcome is not inevitable. With hard work, Memphis has a shot to be at the forefront of education reform.”

The windfall, coupled with what educators and politicians call “an unprecedented aligning of the stars” — new laws tying teacher evaluations to test scores, union buy-in, bipartisan unity and a president determined to reward innovation in education — makes the start of the school year a rare moment for public education in Memphis.

“Other than people being envious, Memphis has a tremendous opportunity to put in place some of the reforms a lot of districts are talking about,” said Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The acid test? “Look for changes in the rates teachers earn tenure; look at teacher dismissal rates, retention rates and what happens to effective teachers.”

Nationally, economists say the quality of the current teacher workforce looks like a bell curve: 15 percent are highly effective; 15 percent are ineffective and the rest are in the middle.

At Evans, Wright has no idea who will be assigned to her class. But she does know that many students at the school on Cottonwood near Perkins will speak Spanish and Vietnamese as their first language. Another percentage will be special education children, which law mandates must be educated with their age peers.

If she succeeds in moving the bar — giving her students more than one year’s academic gain per year — she may be eligible for a bonus in her first year.

With Gates’ help, the strongest teachers in Memphis, Wright included, can expect to earn close to six-figure salaries, the best way reformers know to apply marketplace principles to education.

Meantime, the district is also working on exit strategies for the less-talented and ways to make tenure more difficult.

About 93 percent get tenure, which until now has been considered a “pass-through” for those who last three years.

“It’s very clear that, come fall, principals will make harder decisions about non-renewal of teachers,” said Supt. Kriner Cash.

“I don’t expect a huge difference, but I do expect change.”

Starting this year, Memphis teachers can expect more frequent observations by a team of their subject/grade peers and the school principal.

A new teacher evaluation format will be tested in 15-25 schools, based on input from the Memphis Education Association and a task force of teachers. Dozens of envoys (students and teachers trained in ways to change school culture) will fan out in the city’s middle schools, hoping to tamp down the violence and destructive behavior that sociologists tie to poverty, negative neighborhoods and the culture of failure.

“It takes a bold vision to be the first to say ‘we’ll try it,’” said Walsh.

“But you can’t get that much money and not have people watching carefully.”

Cash feels the tension. “When steering a big ocean liner, it’s the hidden icebergs that keep you up at night,” he said.

Evans Elementary is a good example. The school did not not make the progress last year required by federal No Child Left Behind rules.

But for three years, its teachers have earned A’s for imparting more than a year’s worth of knowledge to their students.

“By the time we get them to fifth grade, they are off the charts,” said Evans principal Cynthia Alexander.

The measure is called value-added and is based on the the trajectory of students’ previous test scores.

Reformers say value-added is the fairest way to judge teachers because it shows how much they advance learning.

In Tennessee, a third of teachers and principals get less than one year’s gain in the classroom.

Unless they make progress, the climate is shaping up to remove them.

Gates has been clear that the money will stop if the district does not meet its goals.

MEA president Keith Williams says district administrators spent much of the summer fighting to keep eight of the most severely under-performing schools out of state control.

“Had that happened, we would have stood to lose 300 teachers and 6,000 students,” he said, gutting the spirit of the Gates work.

Two weeks ago when district officials met in Seattle to discuss progress with the Gates foundation, much of the talk centered on getting public buy-in, Williams said.

Nancy Coffee, president of The Leadership Academy, says the public is beginning to understand the magnitude of the attention.

“The piece they need to understand even more is we also have the accountability measures in place with Race to the Top and Gates.”

One measure of awareness may be contributions to the MCS Foundation.

To date, $14.7 million has been pledged since spring, when Memphis philanthropists got on board. The goal is $21.3 million by the end of the year

“People are thinking, yes, we dare to hope,” Coffee said. … “I think there is a sense that now may be the moment.”

Stephen Cochran says he did his homework before deciding to teach in Palm Beach County this year: The 20-year veteran math teacher from the San Francisco Bay area scoured websites to read articles about the curriculum controversy that disrupted the school system.

“I feel like I’m coming in right after the hurricane has been cleared up,” said Cochran, who relocated to South Florida and was recently hired to teach at Spanish River High in Boca Raton. “I imagine if I started last year I would have been questioning myself the whole way. Now the storm has passed.”

For about 400 new county teachers, upbeat orientation activities on Monday included suggestions from recent award-winning teachers, and talk of “new beginnings” both for these educators and the district. Classes start on Aug. 17.

Yet the recruits arrive at a time when the county Classroom Teachers Association is at war with the school district over money for salaries – there have been no raises for two years. In additions, educators and parents remain bitter over last year’s botched academic initiatives that forced teachers to follow scripted lessons and testing schedules.

But in a cheery address in the auditorium of Santaluces High School, union President Robert Dow – appearing robust from his recent cancer recovery – declared, “teaching is the best job in the world.”

Schools Superintendent Art Johnson used a video graphic to show the new teachers that the district has received an A rating from the state for the past six years.

“You are joining a very successful team,” he said . He praised the system’s more than 12,000 teachers for the ranking that is the best for urban districts in Florida.

For the past decade, the District 7 seat on the Palm Beach County School Board has been held by Debra Robinson.

But Thomas Hawkins, a teacher at S.D. Spady Elementary in Delray Beach, and William Abrams, an unemployed social studies teacher from Lake Worth, hope to change that.

The nonpartisan contest is open to all voters in District 7, which covers coastal communities from Riviera Beach to Delray Beach.

Of the two challengers, Hawkins has run an aggressive campaign, attending most candidate forums and promising, among other things, that he would start a weekly blog to keep parents and teachers informed and visit one school every week.

Hawkins also believes his experience working as a teacher – he’s taught math and science – and as a county school district administrator will make him a strong board member. As an administrator, Hawkins helped evaluate the effectiveness of educational programs for schools that failed to meet goals for “adequate yearly progress” under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

“I have a much better understanding of education and educational programs than any of the current board members do,” Hawkins said.

Abrams, who taught civics at Lantana Middle School for nine weeks and taught infirm students at Hospital Homebound School in West Palm Beach for two years, is a third-generation teacher.

But Abrams said he can have more impact outside the classroom than in it.

“My skills set is better suited for the school board,” Abrams said. “I have a different viewpoint, problem-solving skills and I’m able to listen to people’s problems.”

At 30, Abrams would be the board’s youngest member. But he said his youth and lack of experience aren’t a factor.

“I never really thought about it,” he said. “I think it gives me a bit of an advantage. I won’t have the same boring education ideas.”

Robinson, a physician at the Department of Veterans Affairs in West Palm Beach, said she decided to run for another term because her work on the board isn’t complete. Robinson, who has endorsements from Riviera Beach Mayor Thomas Masters and several city council members, has long fought to close the academic achievement gap between black and white students.

Robinson said she’s concerned that too much change on the board will hurt the district.

“I’m afraid the pendulum will swing too fast and too far,” she said. “We need to find some balance.”

As for the Jeffrey Hernandez debacle, Robinson was the lone board member who voted against Hernandez being hired as the district’s chief academic officer. Hernandez was eventually removed from that position – though he kept the title and salary – and was assigned to work with low-performing schools. He’s no longer with the school district.

Robinson said she remains in favor of step increases, which are automatic raises based on years of experience. Robinson was one of three board members who in 2004 voted against Superintendent Art Johnson’s plan to eliminate step increases.

Abrams said one of his top priorities would be to return step increases. Although the district has said it can’t afford them right now, Abrams said he would advocate reducing the amount of money the district spends on new textbooks and use that money for step increases.

“Students don’t need new books every four years,” Abrams said. “There aren’t many changes in elementary and middle school math.”

Hawkins, who has been co-endorsed by the county’s teachers’ union along with Robinson, also favors step raises and said that “teachers’ pay in Palm Beach County should match that of other urban districts.”

According to campaign finance reports, Robinson has raised $15,205, while Hawkins has netted $3,625 and Abrams has amassed $3,300.

Both challengers said they would make sure the board communicates better with parents and teachers. Last year, Johnson attempted to implement a rigid new curriculum crafted by Hernandez without soliciting much community input.

“You don’t surprise your employees with huge changes,” Hawkins said. “The major problem with this board is that it didn’t communicate with the people who elected them. We should start a bi-weekly or monthly newsletter to keep everybody up to date.”

Abrams, who has no endorsements, said Johnson may work better with a new board.

“With new opinions and new blood, maybe it will change the way he does his job,” Abrams said.