April 6, 2008 - April 12, 2008 Archives

Are no-tolerance sexual harassment policies for elementary students acceptable?

Ask the mother of Randy Castro, a first-grade student at a school in Woodbridge, Va., who has a disciplinary record that includes sexual harassment. She’ll tell you, “No.”

That’s because her son’s principal called the police after the six-year-old spanked a female classmate at recess, The Washington Post reported last week.

Castro’s mother said the incident did not warrant such drastic measures and contacted The Post to share her son’s story and draw attention to her district’s harsh policies. She fears her son’s record has already affected the way he is being disciplined.

“Kids can be exploratory in behavior, they can mimic what they see on TV,” Ted Feinberg, assistant director of the National Association of School Psychologists told The Post.

But when does “exploratory behavior” among peers merit more than a stern talking-to?

The Post did some investigating and discovered that Virginia suspended 255 elementary school students last year for “offensive sexual touching or ‘improper physical contact against a student.’”

Experts recommend teaching students the difference between “good touch” and “bad touch” and only severely reprimanding students when their actions reflect other inappropriate behavior.

How strict are your district’s sexual harassment policies? How many students under 12 in your district are being disciplined for something that could be part of their development? And, what are your policies regarding police intervention?

Exploring these questions could not only prevent your schools from the embarrassment of an unflattering story in a national newspaper, but also keep them from unfairly punishing kids for simply being kids.

Stacey Hollenbeck, spring intern

What a game! In the closing minutes of the NCAA Men’s Basketball finals, Stanford edged Davidson College while thousands cheered and….

Not the game you watched last night? Well, it might have been if you were rating the teams’ graduation rates, not their basketball prowess. The analysis of the 64 tournament teams was done by Education Sector and noted recently in a Washington Post opinion piece by Ted Mitchell and Jonathan Schorr, chief executive and partner, respectively, for NewSchools Venture Fund.

Every year we do something like this: We lament the dismal graduation rates of big-time college athletes (and African-American athletes, in particular) then sit back and shamelessly enjoy the game. That’s bad enough. But, as Mitchell and Schorr note in their column, it’s not just athletes who are having trouble graduating, and the problem doesn’t start in college.

According to a study by America’s Promise Alliance, just 53 percent of African-American students are even completing high school. Look the overall gradation rates in some urban school systems -- Cleveland, 34 percent; Detroit, 25 percent -- and the statistics are even more alarming.

We know that dropping out of school is a process, an accumulation of failures that begins long before a student decides to leave school. And while the problem may be most acute in the urban areas mentioned above, no district -- urban, rural, or suburban -- is exempt.

At NSBA’s 68th National Conference in Orlando last week, I facilitated a roundtable discussion about this very issue, how to help those whom ASBJ has called “Children at Risk.” We had representatives from large and small districts, from places like Broward County, Fla., Seattle Wash., Dubuque, Iowa, and Rochester, N.Y. In future blogs I’ll share their concerns and some of the solutions we discussed to perhaps the biggest problem facing education today.

Lawrence Hardy, Senior Editor

There’s some new evidence that all the efforts to cajole kids into trading chips and candy for carrot sticks and yogurt really do work.

A widely publicized new study shows that school-based nutrition programs in Philadelphia helped many of their students avoid obesity and make better food choices.

The schools that implemented a broad-based plan to cut back on high-sugar and high-fat foods, coupled with nutrition education, found that fewer students became overweight. In the end, about 7 percent of students who’d taken part in the program had significant weight problems, compared to about 15 percent of students at the schools in the control group.

The study’s lead author, Gary D. Foster, called the findings “a dramatic effect,” although he acknowledged that there were still too many overweight children. The study was published this week in the April edition of Pediatrics. The researchers followed about 1,400 students, grades four through six, in 10 Philadelphia schools for two years. More than half the students were eligible for free or reduced-priced lunches.

First, the schools replaced sodas with milk, juice, or water, and eliminated candy. Strict limits were set on the fat and sugar content of foods, and snack portions were downsized. The students were given rewards, such as raffle tickets for prizes, for choosing healthy options and were encouraged to exercise. And students and teachers spent many hours learning about nutrition and better habits.

While this report highlights the obesity problem and need for school-based interventions, any school dietician will attest to another looming problem: Food is getting more expensive, particularly the fresh fruits and veggies and whole grains that are staples of a nutrition program.

If your district is looking to increase its nutritional offerings or just better manage its food services division, stay tuned for ASBJ’s June issue, which will examine these and other issues facing school cafeterias.

Joetta Sack-Min, Associate Editor

Linda Ríos es muy amigable. Sonríe todo el tiempo. Es alta y bonita.

So who is this Linda, you ask?

Linda, a 16-year-old student in San Antonio, Texas, is the main character in El sueño de Linda, a book written by Tiffany Haney for first-year learners of Spanish. The book is published by Teacher’s Discovery.

And I’m trying to read the darned thing.

I’m not sure how much Spanish I’m learning with this exercise. But I am discovering just how hard it is to master another language.

I’m also gaining a greater appreciation for the immense challenges facing millions of English language learners (ELLs) struggling in our nation’s schools.

These are challenges that school boards ignore at our nation’s peril. In 2000, there were 2 million ELL students; today, there are 5 million. By 2025, one in four students will come from homes where English is not the primary language.

How well will our schools be prepared to educate them? That’s hard to say. Today, the nation’s public schools are doing great things in teaching these students English and raising their academic performance. Yet, the challenges are huge, so the achievement gap of these students remains disturbing—as does their dropout rate.

I wish I had some brilliant advice to give the nation’s school boards. I know they must deal with limited resources, shortages of bilingual teachers, and a host of mandates that also demand their attention.

But I also know that schools are struggling today to serve ELL students—and that doesn’t bode well for their ability to handle greater numbers in the years ahead.

Yet, they must. If America’s schools fall short, our nation will have a growing population that’s linguistically, culturally, and politically isolated. And that’s not a healthy situation for a robust democracy.

So all I can do is offer a reminder that the issue needs your attention. School boards need to look harder at the needs of ELL students. And state and federal lawmakers need to pony up the resources to help local schools meet these needs.

In short, using my modest understanding of Spanish: El futuro está viniendo.

Del Stover, Senior Editor

I recently celebrated a birthday and while it was not a momentous one in my opinion, my friends apparently thought different. At the end of a string of late nights, I thought, I’m too old for this.

I wasn’t half wrong. According to a new study, my revelry was tame stuff compared to what 21-year-olds consider a rite of passage these days. University of Missouri researchers surveyed roughly 2,500 college students about the “21 at 21” or “power hour” drinking ritual, where the 21-year-olds head to a bar at midnight and drink 21 shots as fast as possible.

Researchers followed the students for four years, the length of their college stay, and found 34 percent of men and 24 percent of women consumed 21 or more drinks when they turned 21. Extrapolating from that data, researchers determined half of the men and more than a third of women who imbibed, held blood alcohol levels of 0.26 or higher, the amount where choking on vomit and serious injury can occur.

Rhode Island, North Dakota, Michigan, Texas, California, and New Mexico have reported deaths from these alcohol benders in the last five years. Lawmakers in Texas and North Dakota have proposed regulating when 21-year-olds can begin drinking.

One promising study of 316 students showed the group who received information about how alcohol affected blood alcohols and the rest of the body had blood alcohol level that were 25 percent than those who didn’t receive the Web-based interactive tool.

Naomi Dillon, Senior Editor