Parenting

The Boston Fire Department reports EMTs managed to extricate the child's foot around 2:50 p.m. and provide treatment.

Earlier:
The last time a child got stuck at Aquarium.

The Globe details how School Superintendent Carol Johnson did nothing after then O'Bryant co-headmaster Rodney Peterson pleaded guilty to domestic violence and applied for a new job in Memphis - and may have promised to keep that up as long as news didn't leak out (which it did). But the kicker to the whole thing is in the very last two paragraphs:

He is now looking for work, and a School Department spokesman said that if he applied for another job in Boston, he might return.

“The superintendent believes he has great potential as a school leader, so she wouldn’t rule it out,” said Boston school spokesman Matthew Wilder.

The Frog Pond wading pool will officially open on Friday at 11 a.m.

The celebration will feature a special visit from official mascot Frog Pond Freddie, entertainment, arts and crafts activities, Fuel Up to Play 60 program activities featuring Hood Milk, face painting, ReadBoston book giveaways, and activities and giveaways from media sponsor Mix 104.1. Children of all ages are eligible to enter a summer raffle for a chance to win great prizes.

An outraged South Ender wonders why dog owners refuse to go to the neighborhood dog park instead of befouling Blackstone Square:

Leash enforcement. Now. I've counted 18 dogs running unleashed. One has just mounted and began mating with another, both too far from their owners for it to be broken up before my 6 year old nephew asked me what was going on. This is madness. The fountain is a filthy dog bath, and the stench of poop is in the air no matter which bench you sit on.

The Supreme Judicial Court today overturned the involuntary-manslaughter conviction of a Milford woman who didn't seek medical help when giving birth to a baby in the breech position at home.

The state's highest court ruled the state failed to prove the baby would have been born alive or could have been saved even if Alissa Pugh had sought help and that the judge also erred by "imposing a criminal law duty on a woman in childbirth to seek medical assistance." The court added:

UPDATE: The Globe reports Peterson has resigned his O'Bryant position.

Rodney Peterson, co-headmaster of the John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, was a finalist to become principal of a Memphis middle school, but withdrew his name after a Memphis TV station reported he was on probation on a domestic-violence charge in Boston.

The Suffolk County District Attorney's office confirmed this morning that Peterson was charged with one count of domestic assault and battery in Dorchester District Court on June 20 of last year and that he admitted to facts sufficient for a finding of guilty on Aug. 18. His case was continued for a probationary period of one year, during which he must complete a certified batterer's intervention program, the DA's office says.

A student at Boston Latin School was recently diagnosed with tuberculosis and a small number of students and teachers who had been in close contact with him or her will be tested next week.

Headmaster Lynne Mooney Teta informed students about the case today:

TB is both a curable and preventable disease. TB is not transmitted by brief contact (such as passing in the hall or in the cafeteria) and exposure to a person who is sick does not usually result in infection. The student who has TB is being treated with medicine and will not return to school until it is safe for that student to return.

TB spreads through the air, but many hours of contact with someone who has active TB are usually needed for this to happen. A small number of Boston Latin School students and faculty who fall into this group will be TB tested by the [Boston Public Health Commission] next week. ...

The BPHC is not concerned that anyone else is ill. The testing is a precaution. I know that we are in good hands.

About 60 Boston residents a year are diagnosed with TB, according to BPHC statistics.

NorthEndWaterfront.com reports on a steaming controversy that pits dog owners vs. parents and other residents fed up with mounds of dog "caca" on neighborhood playing fields.

When a man with a large dark brown dog and a blond woman with a small white dog came 3 feat from shortstop, I said to them, "You can't have your dog off the lease and doing caca on the baseball fields.

The man replied IN FRONT OF THE CHILDREN, "You're the guy who gave me a hard time before, F**k you, lick my ass". You're not even from the neighborhood”.

The Swellesley Report posts a copy of the speech one teacher gave at graduation this year.

Nancy Bloom writes she was scheduled to be fired on June 1 in an annual ritual at her Hyde Park charter school. Instead, she quit May 31, tired of working 10-hour days for lower wages than her BPS counterparts, the mistrust by administrators, the weeks of dread leading up to June 1:

At least public schools and their unions have transparent guidelines for tenure and enough respect to let teachers know they won't be rehired for the next school year by March or earlier. June 1 is late to jump into the teacher hiring season. I suspect the administration keeps it a secret to the bitter end because they don't trust us to keep working hard. They are suspicious and we are paranoid. It's part of my school's culture.

Molly Bench alerts us to this Craigslist posting from Brookline:

Our soon-to-be turning 9 year old daughter wants a butler for her birthday. We are trying to indulge her. She imagines a butler is man she can boss around. He would also be well dressed and have a British accent (or at least a faux British accent).

We're looking for someone who is either a legit Butler or willing to play the role of one for 2-4 hours. We need you on the afternoon of either Sunday June 3rd or Tuesday afternoon June 5th.

You should be professional and playful. Obviously the idea is for her to have some fun with this, but we'll make sure her requests are respectful/appropriate. Interested? If so, please let me know if you are available for which day(s) and a brief description of how you can you can pull this off. I'd like a reference or two, as well. Thanks!

School Superintendent Carol Johnson has released details of plans to ensure more students get to school on time in the coming school year.

For starters, BPS has already started mapping out bus routes for the fall, rather than waiting until later in the summer. BPS blamed new routing software for a busing crisis that saw hundreds of students getting to school seriously late, if their buses showed up at all.

Part of the planning process will involve making sure drivers actually have enough time to get from one stop to the next.

Also, transportation staff underwent customer-service training, more operators will be brought on in peak hours to actually talk to parents wondering where their kids are and the whole system has been tied into the Mayor's Hotline call-tracking system.

Also, BPS has declared June as BPS Bus Driver Appreciation Month. Parents and students will be asked to write letters of appreciation to their bus drivers, who work for a contractor named First Student. BPS will soon ask for bids to run its buses when First Student's contract expires next year.

Brian D'Amico reports a five-year-old was taken to the hospital in bad shape after being hit by a car outside 34 Whitten St. shortly before noon.

Mission Hill teddy bear explains the problems with moving Mission Hill K-8.

BPS officials are scheduled to explain a proposed $21-million school relocation plan to a skeptical City Council committee at a hearing that starts at 11 a.m. in the council's fifth-floor chambers in City Hall.

Under the proposal, two high schools, including New Mission High School, would be moved to the closed Hyde Park High School - for which state officials are now withholding renovation funds because the money was supposed to be spent only for schools that are open and Fenway High School would be moved into the building that now houses New Mission and the Mission Hill K-8 School, which would be moved into the mold-infested Agassiz School, along with a new high school BPS is opening in the fall.

Petition to Mayor Menino and Superintendent Johnson asking they keep the Mission Hill K-8 School where it is rather than moving it to the old Agassiz School in Jamaica Plain.

Boston Police report a Mascot Street youngster started up his mother's car and put it in revers this morning - causing it to roll across the street and slam into a neighbor's house:

Officers noted serious damage to both the rear body of the motor vehicle and the porch. The vehicle had struck the house with such force that it had appeared to cause structural damage to the foundation of the home. ... Officers spoke to the owner of the home who stated that he was inside his home when he heard a loud crash. The home owner further states that when he went outside to investigate the noise, he observed a car crashed into his porch and a young boy running away from the scene.

The boy appeared uninjured but was taken to Boston Medical Center as a precaution, police say.

The Patriot Ledger rips the covers off a Quincy controversy: The local iParty sells party favors in the shape of male genitalia. The paper was tipped off by an outraged mother:

"Dora the Explorer balloons do not belong in the same store as dancing penises."

The Patriot Ledger dispatched a reporter, who confirmed that bachelorette-party accoutrements are, indeed, openly displayed on a shelf and noted that "at least one couple with a preteen daughter walked past the bachelorette shelf." The paper did not note if EMTs or counselors had to be dispatched to the scene to deal with the traumatized young lass.

The scandal reached all the way to City Hall, where the city clerk could not be reached for comment.

The barrage of news about bodily fluids continues, this time via a report on NorthEndWaterfront.com about an incident this past Friday at the playground at Christopher Columbus Park, two hours after a father called 911 to report homeless men sleeping in the playground equipment and blood everywhere:

The playground area was teeming with children and mothers. I walked around the equipment and to my horror, at the back side, 2 of the tunnels were smeared with blood, there was a large puddle of urine and feces under the equipment. A little boy was just about to crawl through the tunnel. I yelled at him to stop and then told everyone they had to leave. I waited for the clean up crew, keeping everyone out of the area.

The park department's initial response: Send out a worker with some water and a pine-scented solution.

City Councilor Matt O'Malley (Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury) says a top BPS official is telling the new headmaster and parents at the Margarita Muniz Academy it will only spend a year at the old Agassiz School and then be moved somewhere else.

Parent Imperfect attended one of those hearings BPS held to solicit parent input on school assignment, came away concluding BPS already has a basic plan in place (more and smaller zones), based on the questions the facilitators asked. He also discusses a similar, smaller session held by City Councilor and Maybe Possible Mayoral Candidate John Connolly, who raised the question of whether "empowered" (i.e., middle and upper middle class, mainly white) parents are better able to play the current assignment game.

Boston Police report a 16-year-old student at the Codman Academy Charter School suffered an unspecified "life-threatening injury" around 3:30 p.m. and died at Children's Hospital. His death is a "non-homicide," police say, adding responding emergency workers found him in "cardiac arrest."

The Globe reports BPS is scrambling to find more seats for the unexpectedly large number of kids whose parents applied for a seat for the coming school year.

Meanwhile, Cambridge officials face their own crisis: One kindergarten now has too many well off English-speaking kids.

Boston Police report that when basement windows along High and Green streets in Charlestown started getting broken on a regular basis, officers quickly identified a group of tweens as the culprits - thanks to vigilant members of the neighborhood crime watch.

The following evening [March 11] a concerned neighbor immediately called police after spotting the individuals believed to be responsible for the vandalism the day before. Officers responded and spoke with a group of young males ages 10-13. Officers brought the kids home to their parents and had a discussion about some of the recent incidents of vandalism.

The area has not had another act of vandalism since that time.

After reading this Globe article, I had to know: Had she ever tried swallowing an entire spoonful of cinnamon?

No, she said, but she'd heard of a couple of kids who had.

Phew. Her mother and I are the lucky ones. Because as Ben Jackson reminds us, "cinnamon is the gateway for nutmeg."

But a parent's work is never done. R. Hookup warns us: "All the cool kids do rosemary."

CommonHealth reports on one Wellesley teen's battle with what turned out to be endometriosis; one specialist, who like others misdiagnosed the problem, told her she'd just have to bear the pain.