Parenting
School Superintendent Carol Johnson yesterday called for a series of steps to meet an anticipated deficit in the school budget for next year. Read more
Geeky Mama reports on a meeting last week of parents of kids at the Irving Middle School, parents of Roslindale elementary students (Roslindale has no K-8 programs) and School Superintendent Carol Johnson. Parents are loving new principal Arthur Unobskey and parents pushed for more extended-day programs.
School Superintendent Carol Johnson last night proposed opening three city-run charter schools as part of the answer to dealing with 14 failing schools across Boston - including English High, which is one of those schools and which is where the School Committee met.
Johnson, however, provided no details on the proposed new schools, such as where they would be. In addition, employees at six unnamed schools will all essentially lose their jobs and then have to reapply for them, she wants to merge two underperforming elementary schools with two better performing schools to create two new K-8 schools - and she wants to start working with existing, non-BPS charter schools on training and other ways to improve education in the city.
The Globe interviews Kelly Young, whose Braving the BPS Lottery has been a great resource for parents in the West Zone (Roslindale, West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain) dealing with the issue of school choice for their pre-schoolers and impending kindergarteners.
The Dorchester Reporter reports on the end of the Dorchester Central campus of Pope John Paul II Academy.
Geeky Mama uses BPS stats to figure out that last year, there were, at best, between 0.76 and 0.81 seats per applicant available for KI (pre-school) classes in West Roxbury, Roslindale and Jamaica Plain:
... The message to BPS – please add more K1 seats, soon.
Wicked Local West Roxbury has the latest on the strife-torn pride of the Parkway, which has now run up $9,000 in legal bills trying get back in the good graces of the national Little League.
Earlier:
Not your father's T-ball: West Roxbury Little League riven by controversy that would make Bud Selig blush.
Channel 4 reports the 7-year-old student at the Quincy School in Chinatown was rushed to nearby Tufts Medical Center this afternoon. The Herald reports he was revived by two school nurses.
Wicked Local Newton reports an atheist student at Newton South High School won the right to make up two tests he failed in an honors literature class because he refused to read the "Bible as literature" passages on which they were based. School officials say they're not pushing religion but using excerpts from the Bible to help students learn "the cultural traditions and allusions found in much of Western literature." Read more
Geeky Mama, who is somehow officially in the Lyndon walk zone despite living 1.8 miles away, implores parents, even of all those above-average kids in West Roxbury, Roslindale and Jamaica Plain, to consider some of the other public schools in the West Zone:
... I really believe that our schools are only as good as we (i.e., teachers, staff, and parents) make them. ...
Mommy on the Floor is faced with that toughest of Boston parenting issues: She's decided to send her child to a public school and that means dealing with the frustrating lottery system for kindergarten. Like a good prospective BPS parent, she's been going on a lot of school tours. And she's noticed something:
... [E]veryone seems to think their kid is gifted. No one asks, "How are you going to help my delayed and troubled child succeed?" The question is always, "How do you handle gifted children?" This question gets repeatedly ask at every single tour.
Last time this happened, after yet another woman asked the principle this, Jen turned to me and said, "Does she mean that kid who just fell out of her chair and onto her ass?" Yep. That's the gifted kid she was talking about. Apparently, we have a whole lot of gifted kids in our zone.
The West Roxbury/Roslindale Bulletin this week details a controversy over the way players are picked in Little League that sounds like Major League Baseball before the Curt Flood decision created free agency:
"What happens is these kids are drafted when they’re six or seven and they become property of that team,” Holden said. "They would go through the minor league system under that team. If the major league team needed them, they could be called up to play on the major league team. If they weren't needed the kid could be stuck in the minors because he's protected by that major league coach."
Read the Bulletin story (1.1M PDF file, posted with permission of the Bulletin).
Somebody's Daughter reports her father's house is right next to the John Marshall School in Dorchester, where an alleged gang member was shot the other night. She says he was confused because he didn't hear anything - no gunfire, no screams, no ambulance. She says she's confused, too, but for a different reason:
... I sat at my son's mini desk in his mini chair and tried to process it all. Shot inside a school? An elementary school? What do these parents tell their babies? How do you explain to your six year old why the media is outside of his school? While most six-year olds grapple with the concept of death, for too many kids, death via violence has become the norm.
So the small place where children can escape the struggle that is their life, get fed regularly, get heat and an education, is now tainted. A crime scene. They'll run around and laugh in a gym that was filled with running and screaming of a different kind merely hours before. ...
Details.
"Turnaround" schools that will face "serious consequences" if they don't shape up:
- William Blackstone Elementary School in the South End
- Paul Dever Elementary School in Dorchester
- Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School in Roxbury
- Elihu Greenwood Elementary School in Hyde Park
- Curtis Guild Elementary School in East Boston
- John P. Holland Elementary School in Dorchester
- John F. Kennedy Elementary School in Jamaica Plain
- William Monroe Trotter Elementary School in Dorchester
- Orchard Gardens K-8 School in Roxbury
- Maurice J. Tobin K-8 School in Roxbury
- Henry Dearborn Middle School in Roxbury
- Harbor Middle School in Dorchester
- The English High School in Jamaica Plain
- Odyssey High School in South Boston
This cannot possibly be true, can it?
Via Sambot.
Geeky Mama takes a look at "student mobility" rates in elementary schools in West Roxbury, Roslindale and Jamaica Plain - she figures that the fewer students move from a school, the happier parents must be with the education their kids are getting. The top two: the Kilmer and the Lyndon. The bottom two: The Ellis and the King.
Geeky Mama visits the Boston Teachers Union pilot school in Jamaica Plain (so for West Zone kids), explains why "there's still work to be done, but it seems they have a decent foundation for a school."
Geeky Mama, in the middle of that pre-lottery school hunt unique to Boston parents, is impressed by the Curley School in Jamaica Plain.
Today's the day when sixth graders across Boston take the ISEE, which will help determine whether they get an invitation to one of the city's three exam schools (it counts for 50% of the decision, with the rest based on their last fifth-grade marks and their first sixth-grade marks). Here, kids - and their parents - wait in line at the West Roxbury Education Complex for check in. They had to show both an acceptance letter for the test and a passport or birth certificate - nobody was going to pull a Curley today.
The Supreme Judicial Court today ruled a judge who participated in cases in which a mother had her first two children removed from her custody was wrong to order her third, newborn daughter immediately taken from her last year. Read more
Rebecca wonders why it's there after her son picks up a copy while they're in line:
... T: Okay, well what about "the sexy (stressing the word "sexy" ) ass workout?
Me: Don't say that word!! (*thinking of a good answer...coming up with nothing....* )
T: Why does a person's butt (again, stressing butt) have to be sexy?!? That's disgusting! See, I told you it's about S-E-X. ...
Boston Police tweet a girl, about 2, and a boy, about 3, were found wandering Crowley Rogers Way in South Boston this morning.
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