Schools absorb good, bad news

Some can crow about MSA, others must buckle down

Tuesday, July 27, 2010
By GRETCHEN PHILLIPS
Staff writer
Maryland Independent

While six of 29 elementary and middle schools missed state progress goals, school officials remain confident that students are making improvements.

Tuesday, the Maryland State Department of Education released results for the Maryland School Assessment, a test given to students in grades three through eight in math and reading to satisfy requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Students and school systems strive to achieve set standards on the state tests in order to test proficient or better; the percentages of students in each grade who must test at the proficient level to meet the standards for each school rise each year.

Read more HERE

Children's Health in the National Spotlight

American School Board Journal
By Naomi Dillon

The much-publicized planting of the White House vegetable garden in spring 2009 was the first sign of something big to come.

Not since World War II and Eleanor Roosevelt had crops of produce appeared on the presidential lawn. Besides First Lady Michelle Obama, the groundbreaking ceremony featured recently appointed Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a proponent of sustainable living, and two dozen fifth-graders from a nearby elementary school who would tend and harvest the 1,100-square foot plot sprinkled with 55 varieties of vegetables, herbs, berries, honeycombs, and bees.

By February, Obama had turned her passion into a Cabinet-level cause, unveiling Let’s Move!, a White House initiative that calls on everyone, from parents to policymakers, to make the health of future generations a priority.

Every week since then, it seems like a new group, program, or campaign is being waged in the fight against childhood obesity. PepsiCo recently announced it would stop selling sugar-laden drinks in primary and secondary schools worldwide by 2012. And the new Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation -- a consortium of nearly 80 U.S. retailers, food manufacturers, and nonprofits pledging to reduce 1.5 trillion calories from Americans’ annual food consumption by 2015 -- was set to release a nutrition and exercise curriculum for elementary schools at press time.

Read more HERE

Report: Head Lice Is No Reason to Keep Kids Out of School

By Alice Park
Monday, July 26, 2010
Time.com

They are miniscule, measuring at most 2 mm to 3 mm long, yet few things induce more panic or fear among parents than head lice. But while an infestation of head lice on a child can be uncomfortable, the critters do not pose enough of a contagious hazard to justify the strict policies that many schools use to keep infected children out of class, according to a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

In the clinical report, released by the journal Pediatrics on Monday, the AAP updates its 2002 guidelines for the treatment of lice infestation. The pediatricians group once again urges schools to abandon their strict no-nits policies, which require children to be free of nits, the empty casings left behind by lice once they hatch from their eggs, before they may return to school. Both the AAP and the National Association of School Nurses have long discouraged this policy because it is not proven to lower overall infestation rates and puts children who miss class at a disadvantage...

Read more HERE.

Tasers in School

This serves as follow-up to a previous post. There is a list of article links below involving tasers and their use in schools. Please review them and give me your thoughts. Officers, including the Juvenile Resource Officers in the schools, currently are armed with tasers. There is NOT a policy in place either with the Charles County Sheriff's Office or the Charles County Board of Education regarding the use of tasers on school grounds.

My opinion....if a juvenile warrants being tased and they aren't on school grounds, they will be tased. Are officers supposed to stop them and ask their age before tasing them? Some of these "juveniles" are bigger than I am.

• November 18, 2004 - http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2004/081104tasersinschools.htm
• January 13, 2006 - http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/local&id=3806891
• January 14, 2010 - www.chicagonow.com/.../should-cops-taser-kids-in-school.html
• February 7, 2007 - http://pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn020707.htm
• March 13, 2010 - www.timesnews.net/article.php?id=9021323
• March 23, 2010 - http://jacksonville.com/news/georgia/2010-03-23/story/glynn-county-school-board-rejects-taser-proposal
• April 29, 2010 - www.charlotteobserver.com/.../deputy-uses-taser-on-teen-at-school.html
• June 11, 2010 - http://www.myfoxorlando.com/dpp/news/orange_news/061110girl-shot-with-taser-during-school-fight
• OVERALL - http://www.schoolsecurity.org/trends/tasers.html

19 File to run for Board of Education

Let me know if you have ever heard of any of these people before. Some are complete strangers. Quite a few have come before the board for one thing or another and haven't gotten their way and are now running. Others are just...you've go to be kidding me :)

Jennifer Abell (incumbent)
Douglas Bonaro (anyone know this guy; Never heard of him before)
Patricia Bowie
Maura Cook (incumbent)
Barbara Cooksey-Feeney (Anyone know her; never heard of her before)
Paul Donato
Michael Green
Robert Harlan
Jason Henry Sr. (anyone know this guy; Never heard of him before)
Blaine Lessard (sounds familiar but can't place him)
Mike Lukas
Narain Mathur
Monifa Tarjamo
Shanetta Oliver (Anyone know her; never heard of her before)
Pamela Pederson (incumbent)
Sue Richards (Anyone know her; never heard of her before)
Donald Wade (incumbent) (I can't believe he is doing this)
Michael Wilson (anyone know this guy; Never heard of him before)
Roberta Wise (incumbent)

What to name the new high school? Weigh in before August.

A committee was comprised of county residents, staff, and students to review the submitted suggestions. The committee came before the board on June 28, 2010 and presented their unanimous top three suggestions in no particular order.

• Zekiah
• St. Charles
• Lagrange Point

Other suggestions submitted to the committee are listed below...

• Awossi
• Free State
• Freedom
• Greenway
• High Tech
• Orion
• Perihelion
• Piney Branch
• Piney Forest
• Piney
• Piney Tech
• The Stem

The Board unanimously decided that the new high school should be named after a location not a person and therefore the following submissions would be mute.

• Kris Romeo Bishundat
• Jane Bowie
• Cox/Williams
• Dr. John H. Cox
• Vicki A. Daniels
• George Calvert
• Robert A Heier
• Roy S. Johnson
• Walter Melvin "Johnny" Johnson
• Peter Welford Kendrick
• Lord Calvert
• Willie McCool
• Eleanor G. Robey
• Clarence T. Rodgers
• Robert D. Stetham
• Vietnam Veterans Suggestions (8 names submitted)

Two suggestions were submitted to the committee but were disqualified because they did not follow board policy stating that if a school is to be named after a person, the person must be deceased for five or more years.

• James E. Richmond
• Cecil Marshall

The Board will be voting on the name at the August Board Meeting. Please respond with your vote.