Articles in the School Climate category

Do you see your invisible homeless children?

0609asbjcvrIf you didn’t know better, you’d think the cars and trucks parked outside South Potomac Church in Waldorf, Md., one weekday night meant there was some kind of church social going on. Actually, it was something quite different — the last evening of Safe Nights, Charles County’s seasonal shelter program for the homeless.

I was at the church off a busy state highway in this Washington, D.C., exurb to do a story on how the Charles County Public Schools are helping homeless students and their families.

I’d talked to school officials at length. Now I had to find homeless students, which isn’t necessarily easy. Safe Nights rotates between various churches throughout colder months, and finding out where it was this particular week was harder than you might think.

Sometime in the 1960s, when I was in either high school or middle school, I read a book for an American history class called The Other America, by Michael Harrington, about poverty in the United States. It made a big impression on me, and one of the things the author said that has stuck with me all these years is that poverty is “invisible.” The poor are, by nature, separated from the mainstream, both physically, to be sure, and in other ways as well.

You could say the same about families that are homeless. Driving the 45 miles from my office to Waldorf, past sprawling shopping centers and endless subdivisions, I wondered, “Is there really a story here? If I have to drive this far just to find a homeless student, how big a deal is this?”

It is a big deal; we just don’t see it. Once inside South Potomac Church, I found a small, cordial community of about 50 people. Adults talking softly, sharing an evening meal. Children playing, laughing, drawing pictures, and running among the cots set up in the church hall. And, to be sure, it really did have the kind of warm atmosphere of a church social — albeit one with a backdrop of shared hardship.

Read my story, and you’ll meet two members of that community, Adrian Barbour and his 8-year-old son, son, Dubois, who goes to a Charles County Elementary School, where his father meets him every day for lunch when he’s not out on a job interview. They are remarkably accepting of their current predicament, but hope it will be temporary.

“We’re just trying to get to ‘next,’” Barbour told me. “We’re not asking for that much.”

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

Kathleen Vail|May 26th, 2009|Categories: Homeless People, Leading Source, School Climate, Student Achievement, Wellness|

Homeless children — then and now

0603cover

Six years ago, I wrote a story about homeless children in the June issue of ASBJ. I visited a city I love, New Orleans, to interview children and their parents, as well as school administrators, on the challenges of educating children without permanent addresses.

In those pre-Katrina days, the intractable poverty of children was crushing the New Orleans school system.  Homelessness was just one symptom of that poverty. I was hoping to find examples of student who were stigmatized by living in shelters.

Instead, the children I spoke with were happy to be in the shelter, where they received regular meals, tutoring sessions, and counseling. Their parents were getting treatment for their drug and alcohol abuse problems and their mental health issues. 

Many of the children didn’t want to leave the shelter when their time was up, wondering if they were again facing hunger and uncertainty.

In 2003, when I wrote that piece, the number of homeless families was on the rise, with the high cost of housing being one of the factors. This year, those numbers are growing again,  as more middle-class families are being hurt by the mortgage crisis and rising unemployment.

This month, my colleagues Naomi Dillon and Lawrence Hardy take a look at how schools are working to keep homelss children on track academically and emotionally. Their articles are online and free to nonsubscribers for a limited time.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor

Kathleen Vail|May 22nd, 2009|Categories: Homeless People, Leading Source, School Climate, Student Achievement, Wellness|

Daily Education Headlines

LAUSD parents urged to demand more control of schools
Los Angeles Times, May 11
Risk-taking charter school operator Steve Barr is launching an effort through which parents would wrest political control of the L.A. school system from unions, school bureaucrats and other entrenched interests. The plan is for parents to form chapters all over town and improve schools using the growing leverage of the charter school movement.
More
School violence drops, but bullying, thefts persist
Washington Post, May 11
Even though spasms of intense violence erupt on campuses occasionally and linger in the social consciousness, violence at schools across the country has been decreasing for a number of years.
More

Texas district may give students week off for passing tests
Dallas Morning News, May 11
High school students in Mesquite, Texas who pass state assessments and their classes could skip the last week of school next year while their peers get intensive academic help under a plan expected to be approved by the school board.
More

Nevada district to eliminate administrative jobs to save $1.1 million
Las Vegas Sun, May 11
The Clark County school district expects to save $1.1 million a year from an administrative reorganization that shrinks five regional districts into four and eliminates another office.
More

California budget crisis threatens high school sports
San Francisco Chronicle, May 10
The state budget crisis has prompted school districts to contemplate painful cuts to sports programs–including the possibility of eliminating athletics entirely–and forced them into frenzied fund-raising.
More

Fertile N.Y.C. job market dries up overnight for new teachers
New York Times, May 10
As a result of efforts to cut costs and avoid teacher layoffs, New York City principals may only fill vacancies with internal candidates for the 2009-10 school year, leaving new graduates and aspiring teachers from programs like Teach for America and the city’s Teaching Fellows scrambling for jobs.
More

For more news, go to School Board News Today.

Joetta Sack-Min|May 11th, 2009|Categories: Athletics, Budgeting, Governance, Leading Source, School Climate, School Reform, School Security, Teachers|

Bullying: Zero indifference

When I heard the news, I remember thinking,  ”No, don’t do that. You don’t have to do that. It’s not your fault. Lots of people screwed up, didn’t see it coming. You may not see it now, but you have a lot to live for….”

The story of 41-year-old acting CEO of the mortgage colossus Freddie Mac, who hung himself last month over the collapse of his enterprise, really hit me hard. He had a family, including a young daughter. He had choices, even if he couldn’t seem them through the fog of overwork and depression that had consumed him. “Just walk away from the mortgage business,” I would have told him. “Let it go and do something else.”

About that same time, I received an e-mail from the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) about another suicide. This one was of a Massachusetts middle school student who hung himself after being taunted and bullied over his supposed sexual orientation. A similar incident happened with a Georgia boy. The students “didn’t identify as gay,” GLSEN said. But, of course, it makes no difference. No child — gay or straight — should have to endure that kind of abuse.

(more…)

Kathleen Vail|May 5th, 2009|Categories: Diversity, Governance, Leading Source, School Climate, School Security, Wellness|

The myths of Columbine

“Was there a culture of bullying at Columbine?”

As soon as I asked the question, I knew it was stupid. And inappropriate.

I was interviewing Frank DeAngelis, the principal of Columbine High School. Here I was, talking to a man who ran toward the gunfire in the hallway outside his office, who led a group of girls to safety outside the building. I was asking a man who could have died that day, who put himself in jeopardy to save others, about bullying at his high school.

If the Columbine shootings brought more attention to the problem of bullying, then great – we should all be doing more to deal with and prevent it. But bullying didn’t cause the Columbine shootings and bullying prevention programs wouldn’t have stopped them.

The story of the bullied victims out for revenge against their tormentors took hold early after the tragedy. It gave the shooters a motive, and that helped us make sense of the horror and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

However, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were not bullied. In his new book, Columbine, David Cullen writes that the shooters weren’t even targeting particular students, athletes, or Christians. They wanted to kill everyone. Columbine was, in fact, a failed bombing. They planted explosive devices in the building and also in the parking lot, hoping also to kill the police, parents, and journalists arriving on the scene.

Psychological of the two killers that have come out over the past decade suggest that Eric Harris was a psychopath – a charming liar with a deep contempt for just about everyone. Dylan Klebold was troubled and depressed – a vulnerable teen egged on by his older friend.

A culture of bullying, however heinous, does not lead to boys carefully plotting and carrying out the destruction of their high school, hoping for the highest body count imaginable. It does not lead them to purchase weapons and stockpile pipe bombs and other explosives in the bedrooms of their affluent suburban homes.

What could have prevented Columbine? Maybe nothing. But we can try to prevent another one like it by learning what really happened.

To read more about the stories of Frank DeAngelis and other school administrators who lived through the Columbine tragedy, go to American School Board Journal. In addition to article, we’ve also posted an hour-long webinar featuring the Jefferson County School District leadership team.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor

Kathleen Vail|April 21st, 2009|Categories: Budgeting, Governance, Leading Source, School Climate, Student Achievement|

Respecting, but not playing into gender differences in school

Discussions about differences between men and women in education have been botched on several occasions, like when former president of Harvard University Lawrence Summers suggested that innate differences keep women out of math and science fields.

Despite public slip-ups like that one, disparities in the academic experiences of girls and boys are worthy of conversation. Not because there are any fundamental differences in mental capacity or academic inclination, but because students often look to their same-sex peers for cues on social behavior, which can affect how they learn.

Many schools have noticed that boys tend to read less because they see it as a “girly” activity, while girls sometimes feel pressure to be more reserved than their male classmates.

At Waters Middle School in Delaware, administrators held a boys’ book conference, complete with Darth Vader and University of Delaware football players, to show male students the benefits of reading. In Alaska’s Anchorage School District, officials held a math experience conference for girls, with 18 women demonstrating the professional opportunities in math- and science-related fields.

But conferences alone won’t eliminate the pressure students feel on a daily basis to stand in line with their same-sex peers. It is important for teachers to discourage sexist comments in the classroom and allow all students to feel equally challenged and represented.

The Kansas National Education Association has a quick list of ways for teachers to avoid gender bias that can make children feel more relaxed in a learning environment.

Having more male members of Parent Teacher Associations can’t hurt, either, a Chicago Tribune article noted recently. While it may be more worthwhile to spend stimulus dollars to amend divisions of race and class in American school districts, allowing children to feel comfortable in their own skin as they prepare for tomorrow’s challenges is a priceless endeavor.

Christian Kloc, Spring intern

Naomi Dillon|March 4th, 2009|Categories: Leading Source, School Climate|Tags: , , , |

Rethinking how we deal with hard-to-manage kids

My son sits next to a boy who has been suspended twice this school year, and it’s only February. Suspended two times — in the fifth grade. Both times were for fighting, once on the school bus and once on the playground.  According to my son, his classmate is OK to be around most of the time, but when he gets angry, he lashes out.

I’m not an educator or a counselor, but even I can see that the boy has poor impulse control, and all the suspensions in the world won’t solve that problem.  And from what my son says, he is also struggling academically, and days spent away from the classroom certainly isn’t going to make that situation improve.

I thought about this boy when I interviewed author Ross Greene. He says millions of students are suspended every year. “There’s an unbelievable number of detentions and expulsions, all pointing in a clear but sad direction: We don’t understand our kids. We continue to apply interventions that don’t serve them well.”

Greene wrote The Explosive Child about children who, as he says, lack the skills to “behave adaptively.” If they could control their impulses, they would. But they can’t.  And our system of rewards and punishments isn’t effective. The threat of punishment or the punishment itself doesn’t work with kids who simply aren’t thinking ahead about the consequences, period.

Greene just published a second book, Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them. It is aimed at helping school administrator and teachers deal with hard-to-manage students.

Greene’s answer is a technique called collaborative problem-solving, and it’s being tested in several school districts around the country. It involves having both the child and the adult lay their concerns out and having both sides brainstorm for solutions. It’s not an easy process, Greene says, but it’s certainly preferrable to the cycle of punishment and suspensions that many troubled kids go through.

I wonder how a boy who has been suspended twice in the fifth grade must feel about school and the adults around him.  I wonder about his chances making it through to the 12th grade.  If we’re serious about keeping students in school, Greene’s ideas deserve a chance.

Read my whole interview with Greene here.

Kathleen Vail, Managing Editor

Kathleen Vail|February 5th, 2009|Categories: Dropout Prevention, Leading Source, School Climate, Wellness|
Page 8 of 8« First...«45678